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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#811

The animated GIFs are really distracting and detract from the writing. I eventually deleted them from the parts I hadn't yet read. I have to say that Crump was incredibly forgiving and put in a lot of extra effort. I don't think anyone I've been taught by would have gone to this much trouble.

I had to do the same. Infuriating practice. What happened to Firefox stopping playback of .gifs when you press Esc?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#812
post #754

Many years ago I was a visiting part-time lecturer (a.k.a. lowest of the low). I was given the syllabus summary from the prospectus, and then had to write a syllabus; prepare teaching material; write tests/exams; and mark submissions. The institution was far from elite; they used to send staff on recruitment drivs in faraway places, because (a) overseas students get to come th this country when otherwise they wouldn'…

Meanwhile graduates from these institutions lament how employers only want A-list schools

Which is amusing since students from those A-list schools are also cheating.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#813

Cheating is the natural result of an exclusive funnel for entry into the middle class. This has been going on for decades in Asia (which is why Chinese students cheat so much), and now America is finally here as well. Academics like to wax poetic about how students are "only cheating themselves" and "losing out on the educational opportunities", but the reality is much more mercenary and down-to-earth: Either you pas…

Call me an elitist but this is where I like the French "Grandes Ecoles" system: - public educations gets you a 2 year intensive training leading up to a competitive exam with one branch towards engineering schools and one branch towards business schools - the competitive exam is the real deal, and it's not really "cheatable": you get your chair in a room with ample space for a few days, a few hours/day on row, and a guy in each room monitoring the exam, no cellphones, until you have taken all subjects - the results allow you in one or more schools, and of course accessing the really best schools implies outstanding level in the exam - ... and indeed, after that, you get the sesame and no-one cares if you chest while in school, actually nobody cares about your grades there, just that you get the diploma ...

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#814
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 backgroun…

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

It doesn't, a good programmer is self evident to good peers.

And schooling isn't the only way to get there. I know plenty of academically educated CS grads that aren't a great programmer not because they didn't do well in school (I have no way of knowing but I assume they did well), but because they lacked curiosity and interest into programming.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#817
post #810

This thread, more than any I have read on Hacker News shows the greatest variation of opinion, and the least ability for us to have common agreement upon terms, normative behaviours, standards of judgement or goals. Sadly, education really is a mess. I think it reflects the schisms within wider society. After 30 years in and out of "academia" I am exasperated and despondent at the state of affairs and what I consider…

Kids cheating seems to be an universal behavior, it happens in very different educational systems (US, Europe, Eastern Europe). I remember when I was a student, cheating didn't seem that much of a crime, to me, or to my peers. We mostly understood that if you cheat you might (or not) have problems later because you just basically wasted time in that course. So it was an assumed risk. It feels to me that the fight aga…

> It feels to me that the fight against cheating is basically fighting against (kids) human nature.

Yes you're absolutely right. Wars on symptomatic abstractions like "drugs", "terrorism" and "poverty" are always failures and become ad-hominem, as wars on addicts, wars of terror, and wars against the poor.

As surely as thieving loaves of bread is a response to starvation, cheating is just another symptom - as you say, a naturally human response - to an unjust and impossible circumstances. That doesn't make it "right", but the context at least offers us some understanding.

People will stop seeing "selfishly gaming the system" as acceptable social behaviour once our systems resume serving the fullest interests of the people instead of trying to control, manipulate and limit them to the benefit of the few.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#818
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…

No post body was provided.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#819

So I think the teacher missed the main point of his own essay: "The argument was that chat groups have become indispensable tools for students taking courses online during the pandemic. The essay detailed all of the useful info passed around in chats. I totally agreed with this point....Their strategy was to leave the chat before every quiz and midterm so that they couldn’t be there for the cheating. Then they rejoin…

I don't think your interpretation is supported: it's not that the course was "too hard" without cheating, the cheating began at the outset.

From the author:

"The argument was that chat groups have become indispensable tools for students taking courses online during the pandemic...I totally agreed with this point"

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#820
post #729

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 had an electrical engineering final as an in person oral exam. One question. One hour to solve on whiteboard. It was a hard class to begin with and I got a hard question. I did well, but definitely expected to fail.
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