581–590 of 1001 posts
This 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…
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.
Despite this teacher's miraculous extraction of some character growth from a handful of the cheaters, I still think he should have just failed all of them as soon as he had an airtight case against them. There is no moral or practical justification for tolerating cheaters. They make a mockery of honest students and the higher education as a whole. They're a menace to the society into which they're released with a sta…
I get where you're coming from, but I tend to lean more towards the teacher's approach. The big problem in this class was that there was a culture of cheating -- it was the norm, and anyone who joined the WhatsApp group was automatically pulled into it. I imagine many of the students who did cheat would not have done so if it didn't fall into their lap like that. That's not to say that it's justified or right. Of cou…
Ed: not that "it was easy" is anywhere near an excuse. Not letting yourself be pulled into something you 100% know is wrong is one of the most basic forms of moral self-restraint. If you can't handle that in its most black-and-white form, to say nothing of the gray areas you'll encounter anywhere less sheltered than a college classroom, you can still take the consequences right in the face and no one should feel the slightest pity, much less make excuses.
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…
>> 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…
If a test is already graded on partial credit, which in the field of engineering at least most are, then it's no harder to grade than an equivalent test that has less but longer questions.
This obviously doesn't translate for multiple choice tests where there is no partial credit but at least in engineering those don't really exist outside of first year and maybe one or two second year classes. And honestly, every intuition tells me that those classes that I remembered doing no-partial-credit multiple choice should not be doing so in the first place.
Maths classes like algebra, precalc, calculus, statistics, and linear algebra should by no means be using no-partial-credit exams. That defeats the entire purpose of the classes as those classes are to teach techniques rather than any particular raw knowledge.
Same for the introductory hard sciences like chemistry and physics.
And for the ability to handle those more "bespoke" exams, we really need to be asking the question of why certain students are taking certain classes. Many programs have you take a class knowing that only maybe 30% of that will be relevant to your degree.
Instead of funneling all the students through a standard "maths education" class, maybe courses would be better suited by offering an "X degree's maths 1-3" or even simply breaking up maths classes into smaller semesters where you are scheduled to go to teacher X for this specific field up to week A, then teacher Y for this other unrelated maths field up to week B, and teacher Z until the end of the semester. In-major classes need not do this but general pre-req classes could benefit by being shorted and split up through the semester into succinct fields of knowledge so that maths or physics departments aren't being unnecessarily burdened by students who will never once apply the knowledge possibly learned in that class.
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The solution to testing students in a way that they can't cheat is to simply design tests that require students to apply their knowledge as if in the real world. No artificial handicaps and at most checks should be made for obviously plagiarized solutions. If that's not a viable testing mechanism, it's probably worth asking why and considering reworking the course or program.
The solution to students not wanting to absorb knowledge is to stop forcing students to learn topics & techniques they'll never use because maybe some X---------------
Edit: I forgot to include it but this is largely based on my experiences not necessarily just on my own as a student but as a tutor for countless peers and juniors during my time at university, and as a student academics officer directly responsible for monitoring and supporting the academic success of ~300 students for an organisation I was part of. This largely mirrors discussions I've had with teaching staff and it always seems to boil down to "the administration isn't willing to support this" or some other reason based on misplaced incentives at an administrative and operational level (such as researchers being forced to teach courses and refusing to do anything above or often even just at the bare minimum for the courses they are teaching).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Most 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…
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…
Earlier 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…
In the case of testing, it very much can scale. Tests need to be based on long form questions that test comprehensive knowledge. Open book, Open notes, and hell even open-collaboration up to some limit. If a test is already graded on partial credit, which in the field of engineering at least most are, then it's no harder to grade than an equivalent test that has less but longer questions. This obviously doesn't trans…
Coursework is already along these lines, no?
> The solution to testing students in a way that they can't cheat is to simply design tests that require students to apply their knowledge as if in the real world.
How would this apply to a course in real analysis, say?
University education generally isn't intended to be vocational.
My anecdote: 1. Tell students that the remote exam is open book. Everything is allowed EXCEPT for any communication between students. Moreover, there is a Zoom breakout room for discussing specific questions with ME. 2. Exam starts. 3. Students move to that breakout room to exchange solutions.
While you were in that room? Did you put a stop to that?
Earlier 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.