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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#571

Post by zigzag312 »

Best tests I had were the ones you could bring your notes or even any book to. The questions were structured in a way, that you had to know and understand the topic quite well to be able to answer/solve them in time. You couldn't just copy answers from the material you brought it with you, but you could use it as a reference to help you solve problems, like you use references in real life to find solutions to problems. If you didn't know the topic well, you didn't stand a chance to complete the test in time.

The tests I respected the least, were the ones were you were required to write down memorized definitions. I mean why? In this day and age I can google any definition on my phone in few seconds. I can also memorize definition of some rule without properly understanding it. That's not useful. Give me a task to solve that requires me to truly understand that rule.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#573

Post by paskozdilar »

hnarn wrote: post #554
paskozdilar wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thing…

> 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.

Yes, exactly.

You are using a diploma as an indicator of knowledge, and you have a diploma-giving machine (university) that gives the diploma to anyone that can pass a test. People cheat the test in order to get the diploma. It will always happen, no matter how intricate you make your tests, because you cannot automate knowledge verification.

It isn't a "problem" - it's an "impossibility". And it's one impossibility software companies have gradually started dealing with - most don't care about diplomas anymore, because the correlation between knowledge and having a diploma gets lesser and lesser the more diplomas are printed artificially.

So, that is a pretty good solution, too. Remove diplomas altogether, and let employers measure knowledge in a way they seem fit. They will have responsibility for the mistakes of an employee, so it makes sense that they make the criteria. That way, educational institutions will have to make their education useful in the real world, or their reputation will crumble.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#574

Post by hnarn »

hooande wrote: post #568
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…

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…

I said no such thing. I never even claimed to be a teacher (which I am not).

What I said was that we should listen to people who are active in the field for proposed solutions to problems we face. I also never said I was active in the field, in fact I said quite the opposite.

I really don’t understand why your comment is so confrontational. I never claimed to have the answers to all problems in all educational systems across the globe, I only suggested that if you want to resolve them you probably shouldn’t do it by having an open discussion involving only programmers (or any other non-pedagogical group of people for that matter).

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#575

Post by jimbob45 »

pugets wrote: post #16
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”.

What appropriately challenging cheat-proof calculus assignment could you give to a classroom of 100 undergrads? As soon as those questions leave the classroom, they will be passed around in group chats. That’s why exams remain relevant. If a student averages 95% on their assignments, but shows up to the exam and can’t solve ∫sin x dx like they had supposedly done a hundred times on their own, then they’re probably ch…

For one of my physics classes, it was like 10% HW, 10% class participation quizzes, 30% lab, 50% exams. The HW was optional (and your exam scores would replace your HW scores if you so chose) but the HW pretty closely followed the exam. The class participation quiz points were fully awarded as long as you showed up every day to lecture. The labs weren't skippable or cheatable because everyone had different measurements and you had to document every step of the way. The exams were personalized 1-10 such that you'd never be sitting next to anyone who had your same exam (and the questions were never recycled). Two pages of notes allowed on every exam.

Apart from some high-tech cheating, I'd say it was a reasonably cheat-proof class. I don't know how applicable that model is to calculus though.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#576

Post by user8139471 »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #383

Now that‘s some stunning sadism Mr. Crump. Watching them run to their doom, letting them collect further violations, investing absurd amounts of time into punishing them. Has R ever been used for something more nefarious? If a class can be passed by this kind of cheating, it‘s a shit class, simple as that. Classes need to be designed with the knowledge in mind, that the modern student is a highly social, cooperative…

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#577

Post by hnarn »

learner1234 wrote: post #570
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…

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.

> why do we need to "measure knowledge"?

Because knowledge is currency. It opens doors to privilege and status in society. It also ensures incompetent people are not put into positions where they can do harm.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#578

Post by leokennis »

kubafu wrote: post #373

> If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself. — Immanuel Kant

I think it’s pretty widely established that, as far as raising children goes and the “infractions” are minor (throwing with toys, screaming), the correct strategy is to reward good behavior and ignore (as in: not acknowledge or react to) bad behavior.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#579

Post by Rastonbury »

hooande wrote: post #568
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…

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…

Is this what you really got from that comment? The implicit point is that the better you want to assess knowledge the less scalable it is, eg. giving oral/one-to-one interview style assessments to university students is not feasible even if it is a better knowledge assessment.

Therefore, saying "fix the system" isn't helpful, everyone knows some fixing needs to be done but not how or even if they do, don't have the power to. Look at problems like poverty, housing supply, climate change, I can look at all these and say the system is broken

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#580

Post by DeWilde »

shp0ngle wrote: post #413
alexb_ wrote: post #287

I think a lot of people here are missing the root cause of why students cheat. College for the longest time has not had anything to do with learning for the VAST majority of students. You go to college because you have to have a degree to get a job. And you have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job. College is not about actually learning anything - it's a purely monetary investment, where you go into debt t…

Given your cynical take, it’s in the school interest to prevent cheating; if everyone cheats and the word gets around, nobody will take that school seriously anymore.

I'm not sure how it is for other industries, but for computer sciences nobody takes schools seriously anymore.

Your knowledge and skill level is the most important thing they will evaluate you for, for the three SW jobs that I've gotten nobody asked me for my college degree let alone my grades, including a FAANG-type company.

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