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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#731

Post by EduardLev »

phamilton wrote: post #332

In my degree (Comp Eng) we overlapped with the Comp Sci program a fair amount. Comp Sci was part of the college of mathematics and Comp Eng was part of the college of engineering, which were on opposite sides of campus and organizationally were very separate. The cultures could not have been any more different. The engineering labs were loud, full of collaboration and discussion. The professors would sometimes find o…

Was looking for this! I’m a Chemical Engineering grad who’s in a Computer Science masters program currently. Comparing the two, the collaboration in my engineering classes far surpasses anything that’s occurred in my CS classes. Almost everything we did in Engineering would have been considered “cheating” in CS. In retrospect, I definitely learned more than I would have from the collaboration and environment in undergrad.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#732

Post by briandear »

grp000 wrote: post #396
derevaunseraun wrote: post #355

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…

This is an issue that makes me feel conflicted in the case where there are already a lot of people cheating. If there's already a lot of people cheating, it doesn't make practical sense not to cheat, you're really just putting yourself at a big unfair disadvantage, and making an inefficient use of energy that could be used else where. It's unethical to join in the cheating, but a situation like that feels like there'…

The best solution is to report the cheating and have some F’ing integrity. Cheating or tolerating cheating is never ok. Full stop.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#733

Post by baud147258 »

qsort wrote: post #729
nicolas_t wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it? I have experienced good tests and bad tests. I studied in France, tests were open book with no multiple choice questions, only problems to solve. This approach scales badly and is a lot of work for the professor grading but it measures knowledge. The problems were long, had few questions besides describing the problem and maybe a few questi…

I don't know if it's popular in France, but another very simple idea that eliminates cheating entirely is oral exams. They're still done a lot in Italy. I once literally inverted a binary tree on a whiteboard :)

I was a student in France and during the two years of high schools I had a bunch of blackboard exams and yeah, you kinda have to learn the material. Of course it also helps to be confortable in such situations, but we had enough of them to get trained in that

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#734

Post by scotty79 »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #538

As a Spanish professor, it's interesting to read this because it highlights various cultural differences. - Here, it is always assumed that many students (maybe 50%?) will cheat if they believe they can do so without being caught. When the pandemic hit and we moved to online testing, basic anti-cheat measures like shuffling the order of questions in a test or not allowing going back to previous questions were taken f…

> It's shocking to me that this professor is surprised that cheating happened under these conditions.

I think it's a bit of laziness and religious mentality. In US it is believed, I think, that making the rules, framing them in language of morality and harshly punishing the ones that don't obey them is as good as understanding and solving the actual problem.

Holy word, sin, punishment.

And when enough money is involved you my go light on punishment which is beneficial for enforcers and provides outlet for people who otherwise would bring down this system and replace it with something more reasonable. There's so much gray area everywhere under the overt strictness of the rules.

This mentality is visible in so many systems in the US.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#735

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#736

Post by ratww »

qsort wrote: post #729
nicolas_t wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it? I have experienced good tests and bad tests. I studied in France, tests were open book with no multiple choice questions, only problems to solve. This approach scales badly and is a lot of work for the professor grading but it measures knowledge. The problems were long, had few questions besides describing the problem and maybe a few questi…

I don't know if it's popular in France, but another very simple idea that eliminates cheating entirely is oral exams. They're still done a lot in Italy. I once literally inverted a binary tree on a whiteboard :)

IMO oral exams and open-ended answers are the kinda things that really work better for their intended purpose, and everyone knows. But people still prefer multiple-choice because "they scale". The goal isn't simply measuring knowledge, it's doing so in an acceptable/shitty way, with (edit) limited resources.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#737

Post by barnabee »

jules wrote: post #685
advael wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My position on this has been pretty controversial when I've shared it before, but I still think it's correct: Measuring knowledge at scale is futile, harmful, and pointless. The fact that a lot of society has been arranged around the fiction that this is a feasible endeavor does not mean it has borne out in practice, and prioritizing assessment in this way has been gradually hollowing out most forms of pedagogy of th…

What you are saying is not at all controversial, but it is incomplete, which is probably why you have received pushback in the past. Criticising the existing system is easy. Giving an alternative is harder. Implementing that alternative and showing that it's actually better on some metric is MUCH harder than that. But you have not even given an alternative!

The alternative is to treat higher learning like any other experience in life or on your CV/resume: you do it, you tell people you did it, then you either convince them that doing it imparted something useful on you or you don’t.

As someone who’s hired plenty of people, exams and grades do not help one bit with the process and you shouldn’t pay any attention to them.

The only good use of exams I see see is as a potential entry gate, administered by the place you’re trying to impress, to get onto a course, be considered for a job, or be given a license to do something. As exit gates they’re just noise.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#738

Post by golergka »

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…

> HOW do you measure knowledge?

This question has no meaning unless you specify what the goal of the measurement is. There are two main options.

1. Measurement as part of education process — for the sake of both teacher and the student.

2. Measurement as part of external qualifications — for the people who would later use the credentials achieved in measurement to accept you to higher education and to extend job offers.

Most of the problems with different measurement strategies happens because people conflate the two.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#739

Post by DannyBee »

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.

Assume for a second that your goal is to teach knowledge, as you say.

How are you telling whether you are successful at that? Even if you do not care about the personal individual achievement level (or whatever) of the students, you still need to be able to measure to understand where you are successfully teaching, and not, so that you can change/improve/etc teaching.

As the comment you replied to said, you can't just wish these problems away, and they are not easy things.

The overall thing is not a problem, they are systems. They can't be "solved" through simplistic answers

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#740

Post by dahfizz »

qsort wrote: post #729
nicolas_t wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it? I have experienced good tests and bad tests. I studied in France, tests were open book with no multiple choice questions, only problems to solve. This approach scales badly and is a lot of work for the professor grading but it measures knowledge. The problems were long, had few questions besides describing the problem and maybe a few questi…

I don't know if it's popular in France, but another very simple idea that eliminates cheating entirely is oral exams. They're still done a lot in Italy. I once literally inverted a binary tree on a whiteboard :)

HN is very much opposed to whiteboard interviews. I can't see this being a popular alternative.
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