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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#611

Post by radu_floricica »

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…

> So what’s the solution then? 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.

Well, yes, but at some point we look at the system, see human beings spend over a decade of very precious years doing just that, and not really getting over a decade's worth of benefits.

If we just want to incrementally improve things then definitely we should let specialists have the most weight. But listening to educators will absolutely never lead to major reforms or (god forbid!) reducing the years spent in the system.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#612

Post by DeathArrow »

One of the teachers at my University realized that people were cheating just by looking at the graph of marks. Because the marks did not follow a gaussian distribution, it was pretty clear that cheating was implied. No need to spy on Whatsapp and run scripts for months.

They were pretty severe at the institution level about cheating. All Batchelor and Masters thesis are run through multiple fraud detecting software.

People were forced to do a mandatory Academic Integrity course for one semester and they had to sign legal papers in which they assumed the obligation to respect certain rules.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#613

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

c3534l wrote: post #325

I've never understood people's attitudes towards cheating, which is perhaps why its so prevalent. People cheat at sports all the time and people just sort of accept it. When people cheat in school, we just kind of go "well, yeah, kids do that, I guess we'll give you a few warnings first." If someone is caught cheating how do I know they didn't cheat in previous classes, but got away with it? Do you really want to go…

> When people cheat in school, we just kind of go "well, yeah, kids do that, I guess we'll give you a few warnings first."

I guess it differs. Here a student caught cheating is expelled for 6 months and have their student grants withdrawn.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#614

Post by imtringued »

jl2718 wrote: post #170

I taught two courses to undergrad CS students at Stanford. I think about half of students cheated on problem sets and tests. The answers were all way too uniform and done without correction. In the first course, there was a student who definitely didn’t cheat and was objectively horrible at all tasks assigned, consuming a frustratingly large portion of my grading time. This student ended up with a massively impressiv…

It sounds like they were occupied with something that isn't college.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#615

Post by DeathArrow »

This will only get worse as new generations are taught to demand immediate satisfaction and to abhore having to work for results. They think they deserve anything for the simple fact they exist and desire it.

Replacing scientists with political activists and learning with political activism in Universities just magnified this phenomenon.

This will make the people with knowledge and ability and desire to do work 100x more precious.

And the markets are rewarding the hard work and knowledge, not anything else.

I am trying to instill in my small kids the desire to learn and the ability to work. It will be a hard fight because I will sometimes have to fight against school, politics and the current norms of some parts of the society. But my duty as a parent is to try to prepare them for the future, to make them winners.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#616

Post by rurban »

I could also talk a lot like this how my students tried to cheat, and how I detected it. 20 years ago.

I had to write special programs to detect written cheats. The online cheating during the written exam was easy to detect, the offline not so. But having written this program helped a lot, and I told nobody the details.

In the end the cheaters were the minority. But if you allow it to spread, 90% will start cheating. The broken windows theory.

PS: And I still talk a lot to my professor colleagues, who are still teaching at university. They told me that COVID was a total cheating desaster. Everyone cheated, everyone. It was impossible to do proper exams at the end of the course. They are all extremely frustated.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#618

Post by vxNsr »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #492

My sister works with an institution that gives professional development and certification courses for financial institutions. Being the heavily regulated industry that it is, and that fact that in some places you can't sell mortgages unless your staff are certified, you can imagine the exams are scrutinized for any cheating. Anyway, last month, some ditzy 20-something banker posted up on TikTok her scheme to cheat on…

It’s so odd to see people expose themselves on Tiktok like that. It’s very clearly a public forum, I don’t use it but based on all the videos that have been shared with me off-platform I assume there isn’t even a way to set privacy settings, so all videos are all public.

And yet people regularly share things they’ve recorded themselves that they are then embarrassed by or claim they’re being doxxed when the video gets shared widely. Why would you publicly state that you’re gonna cheat? Why would you publicly state that you’re gonna break the law? Why would you publicly record and share yourself breaking the law? Using an app made by a regime that sees privacy as an inconvenience.

100% of Tiktok users are not anonymous to Tiktok, which means with a simple subpoena are not anonymous to anyone.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#619

Post by wildmanx »

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…

> This comment is saying "No one else here knows as much about this as I do", and little else.

No, it's not. Not at all.

But your comment is saying "How dare you suggest that we listen to experts? We all should have a say!". And that's the problem the gp post is pointing out. Do you argue like that with your doctor before surgery? With your lawyer before they defend you in court? With a chef before they cook a meal you ordered in a restaurant? No? Then why is education any different and suddenly everybody claims to know how it should work..

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#620

Post by DeathArrow »

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 never gave a fuck about grades. For some courses I had below average marks, for others I was the best.

I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work and how I can solve problems and how, beginning with one ideea I can extend it or come up with an entirely different idea.

And I know I will get downvoted for saying this, but for me, programming without having a solid understanding of CS background and how computers work it would make me just a code monkey, able just to do what I saw in tutorials and copy pasting SO answers without understanding them. Which can be fine, lower level work is ok and highly needed. But wouldn't make me as good as someone who knows his stuff from a to z.

I hate it when I hear someone considering himself a programmer after he modified a WordPress theme or did a 3 weeks boot camp.

Why should this field be hold to much lower standards than medicine, physics, math, chemistry?

I never heard someone bragging that he is a doctor after watching YouTube videos, which happens often with writing and architecting software.

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