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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#531

Post by tsimionescu »

donkeybeer wrote: post #404
carls wrote: post #230

I recently took a CS class at Stanford with an interesting policy on cheating. While cheating almost certainly happened during the course, at the end of the quarter the course staff made a public post allowing any student who cheated to make a private message to the staff admitting they've done so. If a student admitted to cheating, while they would face academic disciplinary action (i.e. receiving a failing or low g…

The results of checking against existing and other test takers solutions must be taken with a strong human judgment. Programming problems such as would be asked in tests are essentially like mathematical formulas/algorithms, and there isn't much variation in how a given formula or algorithm can be implemented.

I don't think these techniques are often applied to problems in tests - there are other, simpler ways of catching cheaters there.

They are much more likely to be applied to homework assignments, where the opportunity for copying is large, but the chance of two students producing the exact same >500-1000 line program is slim to none. Perhaps once in a while a critical function will be copied and no one will realize or similarities in a trivial function will be unnecessarily flagged, but this will be relatively rare and quickly discovered in manual review.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#532

Post by anonymoushn »

pvg wrote: post #30
necovek wrote: post #3

Quite a read, indeed. As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others. Perhaps that's why I didn't care? Another thing is that college is voluntary, and everyone takes the courses for some perceived gain. If it's just a diploma with high GPA, I let them be. T…

Another thing is that college is voluntary You voluntarily agree to abide by the academic integrity rules. If you don't want to do that, you can voluntarily go to a different institution with different rules and standards. The goal of the place is learning not pointscoring and cheating undermines that.

college is voluntary like taxes are voluntary

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#533

Post by painchoc »

I am lucky to have found this Debian package https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/similarity-tester (source https://dickgrune.com/Programs/similarity_tester/ ) to help me detect plagiarism in my students's C++ code. The tool is perfect as it gives side by side comparison of codes to help see if there's a really an issue. Usually, it is easy to confirm by spotting specific constructions or even the positions of punctuation in code. I have found something for Python though.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#534

Post by anonymoushn »

texaslonghorn5 wrote: post #441
paulpauper wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they got into Stanford, which confers above average intelligence and also bestows connections, so that probably helped. Interesting stories.

What do you mean by "confers above average intelligence?"

They become more intelligent when they receive the admission letter.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#535

Post by ascorbic »

jl2718 wrote: post #170

I taught two courses to undergrad CS students at Stanford. I think about half of students cheated on problem sets and tests. The answers were all way too uniform and done without correction. In the first course, there was a student who definitely didn’t cheat and was objectively horrible at all tasks assigned, consuming a frustratingly large portion of my grading time. This student ended up with a massively impressiv…

That you should leave your cheating until you've left education because there are fewer checks, people are more credulous and the rewards are greater?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#536

Post by bowsamic »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #38
nr2x wrote: post #5

Exams are the mark of a lazy instructor who doesn’t want to design appropriately challenging assignments, as the author says: “I hadn’t fully prepped the class”.

IIRC, in European universities, university courses tend to be much more heavily exam-weighted than American ones. I've heard of classes whose grades were nothing but exams.

When I did Physics in the UK, all of my non-labs modules were 100% exam

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#537

Post by fsckboy »

derevaunseraun wrote: post #437
Cd00d wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people cheat, it screws up the fairness I think it's strange to think cheaters are anything other than selfish. To make an altruistic appeal seems misguided.

I can imagine some people cheating not out of selfishness but just to get by. In the case of a curved class (which has its own set of ethical dilemmas), if nobody cheats then people will be OK on average. But because some people decide to cheat, it screws up the dynamic. This isn't going to convince anyone in particular who wants to cheat, that wasn't really my intention

what's the ethical dilemma of a grade curve? your grade reflects how well you learned.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#538

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

As a Spanish professor, it's interesting to read this because it highlights various cultural differences.

- Here, it is always assumed that many students (maybe 50%?) will cheat if they believe they can do so without being caught. When the pandemic hit and we moved to online testing, basic anti-cheat measures like shuffling the order of questions in a test or not allowing going back to previous questions were taken from the get go, it's considered obvious here that you need to do that (just like, in an on-site multiple-choice test, you have to either have several shuffled versions of the test, or enough distance between students that they can't see each other's test, or really good surveillance). It's shocking to me that this professor is surprised that cheating happened under these conditions.

- On the other hand, while cheating students are failed and/or otherwise penalized when caught, we would never penalize, or even scold, a student for not snitching. Snitching on your classmates is almost universally considered a bad thing to do here, and we would never demand that students do that, not only due to the fear of retaliation mentioned in the post, because... it's just not right, they're your classmates!

- When I myself was a student (also here in Spain), I had a professor who spent some time in an American university and used to talk enthusiastically about how in America they had a very strict academic integrity culture and cheating just didn't happen at all. No students would even think about it, because it would be a dishonor, they would be deeply ashamed if they got caught and no one would want to talk to them anymore, or something like that. While this professor was a good guy and I'm sure he really believed what he was saying, I never really believed it. Accounts like this confirm I was right. I think he probably saw there this attitude of not accepting as a given that cheating will just happen when possible, similarly to the post author, and confused his American colleagues' thoughts with reality. I often wonder how many professors in America live in this bubble where cheating does not exist if you don't see it, and whether it's just naiveté or hypocrisy.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#539

Post by user8139471 »

StillBored wrote: post #236

Anyway, I don't see anything in the article about what the academic office said when he turned all those reports in. I'm really curious, these kinds of situations tend to make national news when some prof brings a large number of students up on academic honor code violations. (ex: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/08/20/least-100-nav... ) I'm firmly of the opinion that the negatives of group study out weight t…

> I'm fairly certain there is a fair bit of 3rd parties basically doing assignments/taking tests these days for students.

I can confirm this.

Personally, I have seen as high as 10 %, but those numbers were heavily skewed towards students who could only speak Chinese. Not sure what was up with them.

I do not teach anymore, but I have heard that the situation became much worse in the last few years.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#540

Post by chii »

derac wrote: post #465
grp000 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an issue that makes me feel conflicted in the case where there are already a lot of people cheating. If there's already a lot of people cheating, it doesn't make practical sense not to cheat, you're really just putting yourself at a big unfair disadvantage, and making an inefficient use of energy that could be used else where. It's unethical to join in the cheating, but a situation like that feels like there'…

option B, report the cheating

I think this is the right move, but only if you can do it without being known (at least, by the group).
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