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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#831

Post by fuball63 »

I'm a new computer science professor coming from "industry" (as the academics call it) and can confirm that cheating is rampant. I've also noticed that it is an arms race you'll never win; cheaters will always find a way to cheat, and you can try to subvert them as best you can but will eventually end up harming legitimate students, which is unacceptable.

What I wish existed was an independent board exam that students had to take for employment. Many professions have this, from medical professionals, accountants, engineers, and the trades. My thought is this would disincentivize cheating and encourage deep learning at the university level, while offloading the cost of cheat detection and enforcement to a board, whose job is to solely evaluate if someone is capable of entering the workforce. A separation of concerns.

Another reason for board exams: when I was working, I was asked to do a bunch of flimsy engineering to satisfy management. It would be nice if I could respond "If I do this, I could lose my license, so no." Just like if someone asked a carpenter to build a house not up to code, or a dentist told the hygienist to do shoddy work to improve throughput.

If anyone knows anything about this, I'd love to chat, because its something I've been thinking about for a long time and I hope there's a good reason why it doesn't exist.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#832

Post by seoaeu »

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 :)

All students in a class cannot take an oral exam simultaneously. This means that either:

* everyone gets the same questions meaning later students can cheat by asking earlier students what was on the test, or

* everyone gets different questions meaning much more effort to design the exam and big risks that some students will get easier questions and others will get harder questions

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#833

Post by reactjavascript »

My university had a strict anti-cheating policy in the CS program. It was written very broadly. As a disadvantaged student, first in my family to attend college, I needed to graduate more than anything else in the world. The policy forbade discussing assignments or solutions with other students. The end result is I was terrified of socializing with any other CS students. I wonder how much I missed out on due to sheer terror and high stakes.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#834

Post by nmlt »

fuball63 wrote: post #831

I'm a new computer science professor coming from "industry" (as the academics call it) and can confirm that cheating is rampant. I've also noticed that it is an arms race you'll never win; cheaters will always find a way to cheat, and you can try to subvert them as best you can but will eventually end up harming legitimate students, which is unacceptable. What I wish existed was an independent board exam that student…

That sounds really cool. I’d say the only reason that something like that doesn’t exist is that nobody has created it yet.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#835

Post by lifeisstillgood »

fuball63 wrote: post #831

I'm a new computer science professor coming from "industry" (as the academics call it) and can confirm that cheating is rampant. I've also noticed that it is an arms race you'll never win; cheaters will always find a way to cheat, and you can try to subvert them as best you can but will eventually end up harming legitimate students, which is unacceptable. What I wish existed was an independent board exam that student…

I think that software is a form of literacy.

So my axiom takes me to "we can test if you can read or write, but beyond that, there are an infinite ways to write about star crossed lovers, so just greping for Romeo and Juliet is it going to work"

Then again there must be incentive to cheat at bar exams.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#836

Post by midhhhthrow »

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 it in the first place?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#837

Post by trashtester »

nabla9 wrote: post #608
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 peo…

As a Norwegian who lived in Finland for a year, it struck me that the parents I met actually CARED what the kids learn in school, instead of just treating school as daycare for older kids.

This, combined with the possiblity for good teachers to gain respect in their communities, is what makes Finnish schools more effective learning environment than Norwegian schools, I think. Not salaries, some specific methodology, etc.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#838

Post by EvgeniyZh »

starky wrote: post #488
EvgeniyZh wrote: post #458

I'm sure same thing happens (or at least happened) in every other course. I'll go as far as to say that any assignment performed not in controlled environment will mean that student work all available sources, including other students. One solution is make HW an evidence of effort, not knowledge. That's what happens in many courses in my uni: HW are some 10-30% of final grade and average is very high. Students share…

I had a prof during university that had a really good method to get people to engage. You would be assigned a reading, and then complete the quiz as an individual for a small portion of your grade, and then do the exact quiz again in a team of about 5-6 people worth a much greater amount of your grade. Lectures would then have particular focus on topics that students had trouble with on the quiz. Assignments were des…

> Using this as a method to reduce cheating disturbs me. The goal shouldn't be that students have to make their homework a full time job, imagine is someone was taking 7 courses all with assignments like that.

To be fair it's the largest assignment of the semester for that course (compilation theory). The assignment structure per course is more or less fixed, so people know what awaits them in the semester and try not to take courses with large overlapping assignments. Then again, I think almost nobody does it from scratch (and it still takes people tons of time), but rather use "references".

And you know, studying is kinda your fulltime job when you're a student.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#839

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

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…

> Snitching on your classmates is almost universally considered a bad thing to do here, and we would never demand that students do that, not only due to the fear of retaliation mentioned in the post, because... it's just not right, they're your classmates!

Why exactly is it "not right"?

I agree that the student should be compelled to police their peers. Both because everyone should be allowed to decide for themselves if they want to take the risk reprisals, and also because it may create perverse incentives.

But I don't accept that it's "not right". College is a golden opportunity for young people to participate in building the kind of society they want to spend the rest of their lives living in. Do they want one where corruption and other injustices are exposed in the open, or one where they are swept under the rug and allowed to perpetuate themselves?

A quick cheat or bribe for a shortcut to meet your goal feels good when you can get away with it, but how will it feel down the line when you're the one who have fallen victim and nobody will speak on your behalf? Because this is the precedent you're setting for your students here.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#840

Post by sircastor »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #826

The most disturbing thing of all is that they just let the threats of reprisals slide like that. They can do what they want about the cheaters, but the students making the threats should have faced immediate expulsion. It's the worst kind of corruption, because all other forms of corruption hinges on everyone staying silent and playing along. Anyone who espouses the "snitches get stitches" attitude needs to be social…

From the article, those threats were Sent to the school’s judicial review:

> If it has a crying face emoji does it mean the threats weren’t serious? I don’t know, wasn’t going to take any chances.

> I won’t repeat the email exchange with the student who had to be contacted by judicial affairs.

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