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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#601

Post by andrewflnr »

stale2002 wrote: post #390
andrewflnr wrote: post #205

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…

Your moralizing and virtue signalling is missing the point. Cheating, or academic integrity, or "over collaboration" is not a binary action that evil students take, and good student don't. Instead, cheating is a culture, and institution. And looking at it, in this way, provides a much more helpful framework for solving it, than overmoralizing it, and simply calling cheaters bad. The reality is, that how much students…

"Clear guidelines" or standards were not the issue here. They were directly copying answers from each other. There is no chance anyone honestly thought this was ok. That goes triple for the ones plagiarizing their apology letters.

And as I said in my other reply, letting "culture" grow up is part of the problem that lack of punishment creates, and was never a true excuse at all. They knew.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#602

Post by a1371 »

This... was hard to read for me. I am not the type who jumps on the bandwagon of "schools are dead" but I had to pause here:

> This was the first time when 75% of the class was cheating way beyond the pale for half a semester

I know people who are on school for immigration reasons. Specially with computer science, there is so much nonsense that sometimes people must work through. This doesn't mean they don't have integrity.

The author says they sympathize with students. But do they really? Making the students write a humiliating "academic integrity essay" is not engagement. It's forcing someone to smile and then boasting that they have a good time.

I am forever grateful for my bachelor's. Not because they thought us a lot, actually the opposite. I happened to be in a unique situation in which course work was practically non-existent.

It was marvelous! As a 19 year old I was just learning to have adult social experiences and the school really allowed me to do that. The classes were not about pass or fail. They were about being in an environment and finding what's interesting within it. I know it sounds like this sort of thing will create terrible candidates for FAANG, and maybe so (not in our case), but perhaps it could also avoid the need to question the integrity of a teenager.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#603

Post by Havoc »

>I messaged the student that they had plagiarized the assignment from a website. I sent the link. They immediately wrote back and said I had the wrong link and that they copied it from a different website.

Plagerizing an ethics violation apology letter...to a lecturer who is clearly on a mission. At that stage just fail them.

Clearly they have neither ethics nor intelligence going for them so that spot in higher education is best taken up by a more deserving member of society.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#604

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

Scramblejams wrote: post #9
necovek wrote: post #3

Quite 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 agree with your opinion on curves (which aren't even a thing where I'm from), but cheating matters even in the absence of curves.

If GPA is a factor to achieve certain jobs, positions, grants, PhD programs, etc. (which it obviously is, to varying extents depending on countries, but AFAIK it always is) then someone who is inflating their GPA via cheating can basically "steal" your job/PhD/etc., curve or not.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#605

Post by renlo »

leokennis wrote: post #578
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.

These are college students (ie, legal adults), not children. This professor went way too easy on them, he should have failed them, especially the person who plagiarized the “repentance essay”. If I’d had taken the course I’d not be happy knowing I’d done everything the right way and those who cheated still ended up with an A+ (he mentioned this happened). If anything it would make me lose trust in my education.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#606

Post by hyperman1 »

I see cheating more as a symptom for the inability to plan. People get a week, and start 5 hours before delivery time. At that point, only cheating or cramming is goung to save you. He might have shifted the balance, but the underlying problem is still there.

So there is a failure in at least the rich, western world:. We can't teach enough children to plan for a week or more. Anyone an idea how to deal with this?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#608

Post by nabla9 »

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…

> Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.

Finland topped Pisa rankings many years, because we 1) listen teachers and have good academic pedagogical research, and 2) teachers are highly educated and reasonably well paid, meaning that the job is attractive to competent people.

Then politicians started to think big and read all the hype papers from think tanks about digitization and how the young are digital natives. Let's give them computers and they learn by themselves and ... we started slipping. Still OK, but slipping. It turns out that computers are not magic. Having all the information accessible is not a pedagogical solution.

ps. Chinese studied Finnish school system and imported some of the best policies in Shanghai and it worked. Some lessons work across widely different cultures.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#610

Post by pchangr »

quijoteuniv wrote: post #597

I think there is a fundamental error in the teacher behaviour. If a student cheat in a physical class, would they wait until the end of the examn/semester or call it out unmediately? Why did he let it go on and on? With the change of paradigm with remote learning it has been a lot of grey areas, and students principles have been tested. On the teachers side they seem to focus too much in «how clever» they are they ca…

I think the primary goal of a teacher is for their students to learn. The teacher understood this and look for way to discourage the cheating as a second priority and went on the “engaging material” creation first. Removing the behavior by removing the incentive.

As my HS profesor used to say.. “Locks were created to prevent honest people from stealing, thieves will just break whatever lock they find.”

The goal is not to discourage cheating by punishment but rather to understand the incentives and address them.

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