The whole capitalist system is broken. Not only the teaching part. Our world is ridiculously fucked up and we can count the days till it will collapse.
My students cheated... a lot
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#562Probably get burnt for this but too many animated gifs.
agree with you, i hid them all with a simple ublock origin filter: `.gif|$domain=crumplab.com,image`
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#563Threads 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…
>> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?
This is what makes the problem intractable. Measuring knowledge takes time, lots of time, by a skilled person. That does not scale.
Since we need (want) scale we necessarily have to use (ever weaker) proxies for measurement. And if there's one thing we do know, you get exactly what you measure for.
Hence, the system is not broken - it's working exactly as intended. It's not "fixable" because there's nothing to fix (at this scale.)
Real learning happens either because a) the student is soaking up everything they possibly can using every resource offered or B) they've left college and are fortunate enough to be in a workplace where there are more knows than know-nots, and they take every opportunity to soak it in like a sponge.
College does not prepare people for the working world (and never will). It is operating exactly as it is designed to do.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#564I 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.
There is a lot of syntactic variation possible, both for formula and algorithms. Even for something as simple as quicksort there is enough natural variation for a class of 30 maybe even 100 (if no references can be used).
Anything more complex and even with references it should be unique.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#565Most of the comments seems to be about the impact of cheating on the class or how the system is broken and how it should be fixed. Fact of the matter is, most cheating pays off. In my experience a prof or teacher will rarely go so far as been described in this story.
I took a massive gamble on my high school finals to not only cheat but to steal thousands of tests and exams via malware that I wrote over the course of a year. Its been 10 years since that happened, and reading this I might do a story of how I stole 1 terabyte of data in my final year, and passed all my exams.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#566Not speaking to how to address cheating, but I found this interesting: > The content can be things like my old exams that someone uploaded without my permission But later... > And, sometimes as a professor who has access to online plagiarism tools like turnitin or safe-assign, you just want better tools. So students submitting "your" content (it was produced as part of employment, so it's almost certainly not actuall…
This was one of the reasons why the use of such tools was strictly prohibited at my former university.
Another argument given was: even if you only have to *think* about using such a tool you are already in a situation where good scientific practices is no longer guaranteed. In other words: if you/the students would have followed all rules of good scientific practise right from the beginning, you would never need to use such a tool. But I guess if you are the developer of such a tool or work in that area of research, you probably see things differently...
Also; how many different ways are there to explain rules on scientific practices within 150 word? How much similarities would you expect from O(100) different students - even if they write independently? - I'm not sure if that is taken into account in such tools. On a different scale: when piping e.g. a typical PhD thesis though such a tool, the first introductory paragraphs will always have red flags (simply because that topic was already introduced 10000 times and everyone read more or less the same introductory textbooks). The important part - the main part of the thesis - of course should be unique (but if the supervisor/examist/committee is not able to "detect" this in their own, well...). Of course literally copy&paste an introduction is still not okay. But -as the blogger also said- this can easily detected by issuing a simple yawhoogle search in case the text already reads suspicious (e.g. if the style of writing varies a lot between paragraphs etc).
So yes, I'd agree that the use of such tools is relatively limited when it comes to "real" scientific works but in this particular case it was quite neat to see how easily you can use it to atomatise the collection of evidences if you have a large class of students...
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#567Threads 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…
>> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it? This is what makes the problem intractable. Measuring knowledge takes time, lots of time, by a skilled person. That does not scale. Since we need (want) scale we necessarily have to use (ever weaker) proxies for measurement. And if there's one thing we do know, you get exactly what you measure for. Hence, the system is not broken - it's wo…
So, the Leibniz argument? Our current system for educating citizens of all ages is already the best it can be, and any change or even reflection upon it is a waste of time.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#568Threads 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…
This comment is saying "No one else here knows as much about this as I do", and little else.
Your only concrete solution, produced by your years of study, seems to be "shut up and listen to educators". Well what are they saying?? How do we fix the problem of cheating and the other issues associated with measuring learning through testing?
If you have so much specialized knowledge about the problem, what does it tell you about how to fix it?
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it? This is what makes the problem intractable. Measuring knowledge takes time, lots of time, by a skilled person. That does not scale. Since we need (want) scale we necessarily have to use (ever weaker) proxies for measurement. And if there's one thing we do know, you get exactly what you measure for. Hence, the system is not broken - it's wo…
So, the Leibniz argument? Our current system for educating citizens of all ages is already the best it can be, and any change or even reflection upon it is a waste of time.
You can't educate someone who is not ready to be educated. Those that get the most out of college are those that put the most in. This was true 1000 years ago, and is true now.
Yes, this system is the best [1] because access is open to all (which it wasn't). So those that want to go, can, and those who want to learn, can.
What probably needs to change is the understanding of what college is for. It's not to give you an education, it is to give you the opportunity for you to take an education for yourself.
[1] for some definition of best. Not all schools are created equal, nor all subjects, scale is in play here as well.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#570Threads 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…
why do we need to "measure knowledge"? school should be to teach knowlege. Measuring is not our problem. It is the problem of the employers. Test the teachers not the students. We only need to make sure the teachers are of good quality, not the students.