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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#851

Post by willio58 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #620
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 backgroun…

I think you’re over-estimating the difficulty of the average programming job. The simple fact is we have great frameworks to work off of and building things from scratch is a waste of time and money for most business applications. Wordpress is a great jumping off point for like 75% of businesses. If you know how to write some custom theme code I’d call you a programmer. Doesn’t mean you’ll get a job in system-level design, but you’ll be able to pull a paycheck and sustain your life (and potentially support others). What exactly is wrong with that?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#852

Post by abecedarius »

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!

You don't need more of an alternative to stop digging the hole deeper (subsidizing the problem, hard-requiring degrees awarded by the problem, etc.).

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#853

Post by tomohawk »

An honest person will do the right thing, even if they think there is no chance of being caught. A dishonest person only acts honestly when they think they will be caught. Since there are not too many honest people, our only hope against the corruption of dishonesty is to police and punish dishonesty so more people will at least act honestly.

But then, there is another thing.

Being able to get a degree has become a gate for many jobs. Adding additional courses that are not needed for those jobs may sound good, but it really just prevents some people from getting jobs they could do, but for the inappropriate gate.

Example: adding a mandatory advanced algebra course to a nursing program.

You might argue that a math course helps with abstract reasoning, but you'd be wrong. Passing a math course demonstrates an ability to do a specific kind of abstract reasoning. There is zero benefit for a nurse to be able to do advanced algebra, but many schools now require it. The result is that many people who would be great nurses cannot be a nurse unless they cheat to pass the algebra class. Faced with that decision, do you cheat, or just give up on your dream to be a nurse?

It may be hard for many HNers to comprehend this, but an inability to do advanced math is a thing. For some people, no amount of effort will lead to an understanding of the subject. It's just too abstract. These same people have plenty of other abilities, and are good at many jobs.

Can you blame a student for cheating on such a course, that everyone knows they'll never need to do the job they're going for?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#854

Post by Firmwarrior »

sparrc wrote: post #502
Fiahil wrote: post #472

Ah cheating ! I did a year abroad in California when I was studying computer science and I remember there was a huge difference between cheating there and cheating in my French school. In the later, we were given harder exercises and asked to deliver a working program with some constraints. This program is then tested and graded by a CI and examined by TAs. Usually TAs would get a cheating report for reused bits of c…

What school in CA was giving multiple choice assignments in a CS class? What you describe in France is exactly how my classes in the US were (at UW Seattle) ~15 years ago.

I went to UW Seattle ~15 years ago, and some of the CS classes there were a fucking joke

I got a 2.7 in my CS classes because I had perfect scores on the tests and homework, but the teacher decided to make a huge percentage of your grade consist of quizzes about random factoids from the book that had literally nothing to do with computer science. (Literally: "What color was the elephant on page 12?") The book cost like $200, so I decided to just study from other books and the lectures and eat the loss of GPA

Man, I wish I could remember that professor's name so I could send him some hate mail..

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#855

Post by ItsMonkk »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #657
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 is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue. You DON'T measure knowledge. You should measure the satisfaction of the students. Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning. > maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyon…

This speaks to the heart of the issue to me.

Personally I always loved STEM topics, and would go out of my way to learn about them. This ended poorly for me in school, as I ended up being incredibly bored in the STEM classes, as they were filled with content I already knew. Then the other topics I didn't love, and largely did not like to experience them. So in the end my satisfaction was miserable, and I dropped out of 7th grade.

Eventually I got a GED and went to college for CS, but it was that time in-between those two that even allowed that to happen. I needed time to explore the world, find what I wanted to know, and figure out how school can help me get there.

As someone on the other end of the hiring table now, I don't even care about knowledge. Knowledge tells me how far you've got. I don't care how far you've got, I want to know how quickly you pick up the material based on the job I'm hiring for. I care about acceleration. While the two can be correlated, it's not precise. There's not a single hiring test that I can do to figure out someone's acceleration. What I do know, that testing the farthest on some topic as a metric, like leetcode does, it's going to fail every single jack of all trades programmer.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#856

Post by trashtester »

derac wrote: post #465
grp000 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

option B, report the cheating

Option C, help the others students that cheat, let them copy your work, or even help them directly with the work. (Especially for things like home exercises, if not actual exams).

After you graduate, you will have a network of friends that consider you a super-smart, trustworthy, loyal and friendly person.

Chances are, you will learn more than the rest, and end up with a high GPA. And some of the lost opportunity to socialize in bars and clubs, and build networks that way, will be compensated by the relationships with people you helped.

Btw, this same behavior can still work once you're in a job. If you get a reputation as someone who can provide help when people are stuck in some difficult problem, and not shaming them for it to their boss, that tends to reflect positively back to you over time.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#857

Post by passivate »

hnarn wrote: post #557
passivate wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These are very hard questions, and it’s frustrating to read the phrase “we need to fix the system” because yes, obviously we do, but agreeing that things are bad isn’t the hard part, and probably input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more. I don't agree that the system is broken (broken to me…

My opinion is that the educational system in most industrialized countries today rewards the wrong things and that the quality of education suffers to allow an easier time of mass-grading and classifying. Whether this means it’s “broken” or not is of course completely subjective because it depends on what you think the educational system should be doing in the first place.

>completely subjective because it depends on what you think the educational system should be doing in the first place.

Yup, you nailed it. That is the crux of the argument. I think it also leads into the meta discussion of what it means to be a "productive member of society" and how education fits into that philosophy. Why should one be forced by society at-large to be educated, or productive, or anything at all? :)

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#858

Post by tomohawk »

Honestly, if academic institutions don't get serious about cheating, at what point does industry stop paying any attention to whether you have a degree or not? What's the point of even requiring a degree for anything when there is a very large chance the degree holder is just a good cheater?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#859

Post by colejohnson66 »

jandrese wrote: post #499
alexb_ wrote: post #287

I think a lot of people here are missing the root cause of why students cheat. College for the longest time has not had anything to do with learning for the VAST majority of students. You go to college because you have to have a degree to get a job. And you have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job. College is not about actually learning anything - it's a purely monetary investment, where you go into debt t…

You wouldn't cheat because once you are out in the real world supposedly applying the knowledge that you learned in college it is going to be really obvious to your boss and coworkers that you don't know what you are doing. Everybody expects the fresh college grads to be fairly green, but you can really tell when someone has no clue about even the basic principals of their job, the one they supposedly have a degree i…

You’d think cheaters would consider the issues they’ll experience down the line, but the fact that FizzBuzz even exists and works at all proves they don’t.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#860

Post by Gtex555 »

We cheat on our partners , will cheat on taxes if we can. The only effective way to stop humans cheating is punishment as a deterrent. We cheat because we are smart, get the same result for less work and even if the cheating takes the same amount of work as studying at least it was your decision. I don't get how this teacher or OP is so surprised that students would cheat. Most of us don't want to be in school, its just a necessary evil to get that all important paper. These students are completely rational and just got unlucky.
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