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My students cheated... a lot
541–550 of 1001 posts
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#542Earlier 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
In the best case, you get nothing. Most probably half of the students turn against you. And possibly the teacher himself takes revenge on you for snitching. Some teachers are of the opinion that “snitches get stitches”, often as a way to cope with their own lack of teaching, and sometimes they see it as a good life lesson for the student.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#543I had to stop in the middle of the article due to all the annoying animations.
But something that stood out to me is this:
> For consequences, I came up with a three strikes and you are out rule.
and then
> I wasn’t ready to inform them about what was going on until I had processed all of the facts, so I just pressed on with the lectures. My goal was to have all of the forms filled out and emailed before the next midterm. I tried as hard as I could. But, I couldn’t get it done. I had to give the next midterm, and I knew that probably meant a bunch more cheating.
So basically, this professor know about "low-impact cheating" (cheating in quizzes, where "[t]he quizzes were low stakes"), but instead of saying anything just kept pushing forward.
I wonder if anyone even told those students up front in clear terms that sharing answers on the quizzes was not allowed. In school we're often told to co-operate in assignment. Where is the line between an assignment and a quiz?
Just letting the whole group slide gradually into cheating territory is a lose-lose strategy.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#544Threads like these are always frustrating, because as usual people (programmers in this case) freely air their opinions on how schools are broken with phrases like “we need to fix the system”. As someone who studied pedagogy for years and quit due to an immense frustration with exactly this — how broken the system is — I would encourage you to entertain the thought that maybe, you as a person who is almost in all cas…
I don't think the problem is that complicated - you just can't measure knowledge with a process (or a machine). Only a human can approximate another human's level of understanding.
Trying to create a knowledge factory seems to me a pipe dream. All cheating comes from trying to force learning into a rigid mechanical box.
Solution? My opinion - remove colleges, bring back guilds.
Of course, this is an oversimplification, but the moment you remove the need to print out diplomas, everything does become simpler. The "measuring understanding mechanically at scale" is the hardest problem.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was taking an upper level marine biology course - the tests were VERY difficult, but they were take-home, do them at your leisure. I was cool with it. But walked into a coffee shop one day and found 75% of the class sharing answers and cheating anyway.
It seems very funny to me as a programmer, that what university calls "cheating" and threatens consequences, the industry calls "consulting with your colleagues" and encourages.
I'd rather say that the equivalent of what the industry calls "consulting with your colleagues" is more a "study session" than an exam (be it take-home).
This is when you learn things, and everyone brings something to the table.
I'd say the equivalent of an exam is a job interview. When the other party wants to see what the individual knows.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#546in my differential equations class no one could understand the prof...most everyone cheated
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#547Quite 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…
I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others. Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters, and the grades matter for your future. I know in the program I attended I was up against a fair few who were taking cognition enhancing drugs, others who had exam copies from prior years to help them prep, and a lot of people who copied each others’ homework. It was…
I always share the exams I set (and the solutions) with my students. Inhace necer understood the idea that keeping them “secret” is somehow useful.
Yes, writing a new exam each time is a bore but I prefer my students learning my style rather yhan not.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#548It strikes me as odd that the very qualities that we value in engineers (efficiency, outside the box thinking, finding solutions that make the most of the constraints of existing systems) are the ones we detest in engineering students. This is even more true for jobs that are meant to exploit inefficiencies in existing systems, such as entrepreneurs.
If you're using that as an argument for why cheating should be allowed, you're missing the key part of what what education is supposed to be about: understanding the fundamentals well enough that you can think of of the box and find solutions without relying on someone to always be there. Would you really want to work with a software developer who doesn't understand how functions, loops, etc work?
I have, it was pretty awful. At one stage I did a 3-4 week mad panic crunch to fix a system where he managed to hide the problems until it was almost too late. He was the "reverse talent" sort of person, prone to coming up with insane solutions that took more effort to unwind than it would have taken to write it in the first place. But only 20% of the time, so we'd often be left with 80% usable-but-bad code, and 20% WTF code. The crunch was me re-writing everything except the user interface.
Apart from that one incident when I copped it, mostly I felt bad for my team leader who had to babysit the guy all day every day. After the incident above it was changed from "supervise experienced guy" to "babysit".
That company really struggled because they were using a niche language to solve a very niche problem. It was the right language for the problem, but it was very hard to find developers who had used it, let alone who were good at it to the point of being useful in their first year with us. So throwing out Captain Useless took a couple of years.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#549This happened to me in undergrad with an autograded class. I remember soloing the class and thinking that the assignments were super hard. They would post grade averages for assignments and I was doing worse than usual. I remember a TA posting about cheating being an issue. They even released a graph of anonymized student repositories with edges indicating a detected instance of cheating Turned out that a HUGE cohort…
> it screws up the class curve This is your problem right here. There is no rational argument for grading people on a class curve. That just makes the class a lottery and incentivises sabotaging for others to get an upper hand yourself.
If you want to compare grades across semesters you have to either keep the difficulty of the tests constant or adjust the grades to compensate for how difficult the tests were relative to previous semesters.
BTW, I don't know if it's a named fallacy, but saying "there's no rational argument for X" is not a good argument against X. You can't prove a negative so you cannot know if there is not a rational argument for X.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#550Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was taking an upper level marine biology course - the tests were VERY difficult, but they were take-home, do them at your leisure. I was cool with it. But walked into a coffee shop one day and found 75% of the class sharing answers and cheating anyway.
It seems very funny to me as a programmer, that what university calls "cheating" and threatens consequences, the industry calls "consulting with your colleagues" and encourages.
There is an enormous difference between the people "consulting with colleagues" and the people openly cheating. When I was doing my engineering degree there were always groups of students who would go over assignments together, see if their answers matched up, and then look through the textbooks and course materials together to see which person was right. That's consulting.
There were also people who would pay someone else to do the assignments, and then upload PDFs of completed assignments to a private chat. World of difference.