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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#551

Post by passivate »

hnarn wrote: post #525

Threads 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…

>These are very hard questions, and it’s frustrating to read the phrase “we need to fix the system” because yes, obviously we do, but agreeing that things are bad isn’t the hard part, and probably input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more.

I don't agree that the system is broken (broken to me is something that is completely unusable, and we must stop using immediately). The progress we've made as a global civilization is to be credited to the way human knowledge is captured, distributed and taught by us as a species. And certainly formal schooling is a big part of that. And so, I'd rather view the situation as us being on a path of continuous improvement - where everything, including education can be improved.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#552

Post by atoav »

tomerv wrote: post #543

I 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 mid…

He was curious how far rhis would go, and enjoying this undercover cop thing a little too much.

A course should tell you what works and what doesn't early on, just like a good computer game. If people go down the wrong path early on, it means early on something failed.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#553

Post by bruce511 »

zb1plus wrote: post #498

I have never understood why college professors / college classes are so uninnovative and have such an antagonistic approach to teaching/education. The entire grade culture at universities should be abolished in lieu of an evaluation system that is more reflective of the traits and skills that matter in industry and research environments. In CS programs geared towards helping graduates careers in industry, we should b…

You are completely right, the testing /score system is a terrible proxy for understanding and knowledge.

It's also completely unfixable because the solutions you propose (which are obvious) don't scale.

To understand this you only have to look at education through history. A long time ago college education was for a very tiny (well connected) section of society. Conceptually think of it as the aristocracy keeping themselves on top. Teaching staff ratio is high - small classes, lots of attention.

Naturally education slowly opens to the masses. (GI Bill etc). So now there's a scaling problem. Much lower staff ratio, and a need to improve productivity. Think multiple choice, not essays. Lecturers don't know the names (never mind abilities) of Individual students.

Your suggestion is both good, but impractical. There aren't enough people qualified to teach the way you have in mind, and even if there were the student could not afford them.

We can offer a college education for the masses, we can give every college student an indepth real "education", but we can't do both.

Although interestingly the _student_ who approaches a course with zeal, and engages teachers in every possible opportunity, will get the most out of the experience. In other words today the quality of the education rests on the student, not the teacher.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#554

Post by hnarn »

paskozdilar wrote: post #544
hnarn wrote: post #525

Threads 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 oversimplificatio…

Again, it’s so easy to criticize, point out the “problem” and then offer no solution.

The “knowledge factory” exists for a reason. The way our society is constructed, we need structured specialization (pick a course), verification (you’re OK) and rating (you’re the top 5%) — because our entire society expects these things to work and be available.

It sounds like the only difference in your example is that these things exist but are not centrally verified to be identical, because apparently diplomas themselves are the problem.

People need to be able to improve, be excluded when incompetent and rewarded when excellent, because that is how our society works in all other aspects, and the one thing that will always be true about an educational system is that it will mirror society: and if it doesn’t currently it will in a few decades.

You cannot suggest fundamental changes to an educational system without more or less advocating a revolution in society. No wonder most complaints stop at the problem and never continue to proposed solutions.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#555

Post by Psychlist »

faeriechangling wrote: post #477
gmd63 wrote: post #401

It makes me sad that so many engineers seem to think cheating is a just and or good solution. Cheating is objectively bad system design (for society, we're designing our society with daily actions every day), as it rewards people without integrity who want the easy way out. Sure, you can blame the system for encouraging incentives that reward cheating, and there are benefits to thinking like a cheater to identify gap…

I'm very jaded. I see students who are experts in cramming a set of material, vomiting out the answers, and doing this repeatedly for every exam. I see other students who are experts in cheating without getting caught. It's hard for me to see a distinction between these two groups in practice since they're both committed to passing the exam rather than learning anything, but one is apparently imbued with honour since…

Some stuff you just have to drill until it makes sense. Ordinary differential equations was a bit notorious when I studied. Most people took 50-100 hours of drill before they could solve them reasonably competently (enough to get an A). For me it was that and some of the control theory stuff that to this day still seems like a dark art.

Other stuff once you understand it the exams are straightforward, if tedious. Antenna design was like that for me, I'd solve it geometrically in my head then work out which transforms and equations matched my solution. Other people just ground that stuff out along with all the rest. I hope no-one was twisted enough that ODE's made sense...

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#557

Post by hnarn »

passivate wrote: post #551
hnarn wrote: post #525

Threads 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…

>These are very hard questions, and it’s frustrating to read the phrase “we need to fix the system” because yes, obviously we do, but agreeing that things are bad isn’t the hard part, and probably input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more. I don't agree that the system is broken (broken to me…

My opinion is that the educational system in most industrialized countries today rewards the wrong things and that the quality of education suffers to allow an easier time of mass-grading and classifying.

Whether this means it’s “broken” or not is of course completely subjective because it depends on what you think the educational system should be doing in the first place.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#558

Post by c-fe »

grahamm wrote: post #556

Probably get burnt for this but too many animated gifs.

I had the same problem, I really struggled to focus on the article with all the gifs. They reminded me of the ads that im not seeing because of my adblocker. I wish I could easily block gifs in Safari

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#559

Post by spacecadet_ »

Haven't read the entire post yet, but must say that this was the page that finally made me look into how a webpage works so I could hide the gifs to read the actual content in peace. Why would anyone, much less a cognitive psychologist, think it's a good idea to take a fairly long piece of text and then liberally shower it with attention-grabbing moving images? Must be Twitter brain.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#560

Post by user8139471 »

secretsatan wrote: post #407

As i was reading this, i kinda thought, the teacher could have jumped in sooner? As they waited longer and longer, more students would see the cheaters getting away with it, it would be harder not to join in. They’re chastising the students for not reporting it, but then, it seemed to take a while for the teacher to do it as well

You have to be certain beyond any reasonable doubt for each case of cheating. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to document that.
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