My students cheated... a lot

>imo this is why people shouldn't cheat. If nobody cheats, the grades might on average be lower but once the class is curved or assignments are dropped it will be a fair indicator of where everyone is at.

An excellent example of the prisoner's dilemma.

As someone who went to a mid-tier state university for computer engineering in undergrad, I kinda disagree. The classes were not going to push into great depth on the topics. But there was plenty of opportunity to push myself beyond the classes, like doing independent study or research with professors.

To stay engaged with a lot of interesting material I would have otherwise forgotten after college or at that time I didn't fully grasp, and because "teaching" actually teaches you the most (close second after "applying"/"creating"), I'm a private tutor as a sideline and as such get an honorabe mention by the OP:

>Or, students can hire people to do their assignments (cough, help them with their homework as a legit tutor).

I totally get his point about moral integrity from a bird's eye view: cheating, plagiarizing and any fraudulent behavior especially in a academic setting has immense destructive repercussions by affecting the credibility of whole fields and with it all the academic careers around it and must be stopped/discouraged at the outset. OPs perspective:

>Let’s start with me, I’ll be the category. I have prior experience with pre-pandemic academic integrity violations. There’s no time for a prequel. But let’s say I’ve been called an obsessive plagiarism detective. Plagiarism really irks me. It irks me so bad I wrote my own R package to detect plagiarism.

My radical approach to that was early on to stay clear of any form institutionalized teaching despite some lucrative job offerings.

Of course a lot of students contacting me are looking for a quick fix, outright asking me to solve their assignments or in some cases ready to pay me royally for just being available online on their exam. The amount of effort, thought and resources put into "cheating", "finding easy ways" ... is vastly and comically disproportionate to the simple tasks given to them. As an entry point to conversation, now, I really enjoy hearing those stories and every student has unique tales to offer.

Because I encourage my students to be brutally honest about their learning progression without fear of shame, judgment etc. in this light they get at least a chance to realize that ultimatley in the long run "cheating" is first and foremost a disservice to themselves and once it is internalized it is difficult to get rid of (paraphrasing: you yourself are the easiest person to fool). But instead of moralizing at this point (mea culpa ...) I actually offer them ways to transform and invest some of their habitual cheating impulse/energy into actual wit[0](deep entrenched into the culture). This part is tricky and highly dependent on their current level of understanding, attention span and motiviation. Basically I trick them into math tricks (i.e. "novel ways" to solving/reframing problems) finetuned to their response this ideally evolves to a ping-pong game, even if it is just say 5min out of 45min, we are now actually gaining momentum ;)

There is no way I could pull that off in front of a class of more than 5 people and I have to be picky because some really are highly resistant to open themselves up for learning and prefer to find "easier ways": memorizing, cheating ...

Given the circumstances, incentives, set up of the tests/exams and the teacher himself being able to be in the group, I mean with a bit of game-theoretical reasoning: the undertow of cheating is pretty irresistible. This makes up for a great story with second chances, human motivations and insights about our current state of affair regarding the educational system.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster

I can tell you that almost every teacher who is not burnt out, does care about how we measure knowledge, mainly because they have to. The big difficulty is that there are two roles for teachers, on one hand you are a mentor and supposed to impart knowledge onto your students (the teaching part). On the other hand you are a gatekeeper, you are supposed to check that the thresholds for some qualification are met. Now if we had an ideal way to measure knowledge those two roles would not really be in conflict with ech other, but because we don't teachers have the difficult job of trying to teach a subject and at the same time find a good way to see if the students actually learnt what the were supposed to. All that with a limited amount of time that is available.

I've thought engineering licensure found a reasonable balance.

Everyone has to pass the two certifying exams for their discipline, but there are multiple paths for assuming somebody has acquired the knowledge for the exam, ranging from years of industry work to passing standardized tests to having a college engineering degree.