Would things like this still occur if a person's educational history data were treated like their medical data under HIPAA? It is the cleanest proposal I have seen for decoupling education from careerist motivations.
My students cheated... a lot
861–870 of 1001 posts
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#862Ah 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.
UC Santa Cruz for example
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#863Threads 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 feel that school is criminal and I deeply resent how my childhood was spent due to school. So I'm going to opine on it.
Well they do oddly resemble prisons for kids... In both function and appearance often.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#864This 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…
Yes - it's similar to the situation in high school where there are kids who want to learn and kids who disrupt the class because they're lazy/not motivated/have issues/want attention. Automated teaching and testing with social sharing automate that dynamic. There's less attention seeking, but much more passive aggressive subversion. But that's not the scariest thing. The scary thing is that if it's a STEM field these…
I really appreciate this comment, especially the bit about how automation amplifies culture - that's something I've felt for a long time but you've stated it eloquently.
Schools want to churn out more students, industry wants more fresh grads. Online quizzes/assignments (which are vulnerable to cheating) and Leetcode screener questions (which are just a little better than rote memorization) are how schools and industry react to scaling issues.
I feel like everyone would have better outcomes if we could somehow be satisfied with less growth.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#865OK. This is a long slog, but I skimmed and got the gist. There must be a technical solution to the cheating problem. Many years ago I taught an intro to programming course. For the grading I built a randomized online test - students would have one hour to answer a number of programming questions using a terminal in the computer lab, and would get their grade as the test progressed with the final grade after the last…
Heh, I wonder if the quizzes just shuffled the questions between students, how many would get it wrong because their option A) was other people's option B)
No. It wasn't like that. I built software that would generate unique completely random test questions. The software would eval() the students response and would give 100% if correct, 0 if not.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#866I 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…
And this is why tech companies stopped giving a shit about undergraduate degrees back in the 90s at the latest. There’s literally no signal to be had. None of the above is meant to deny the benefits of getting into the ivy league self-dealing club.
This is false, 99% of engineers at top software companies have a degree and a lot have masters or Phds (especially those doing more specialized work)
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#867We 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 j…
I think 75% students cheating is definitely surprising, and probably caused by a culture of rampant cheating at this institution (only a guess though).
> Most of us don't want to be in school, its just a necessary evil to get that all important paper
I get what you mean, and had a similar sentiment during my years at university. I deeply regret this now though. I could have transitioned to a studies I‘m more interested in, or dropped out after the Bachelor‘s and started earning money earlier.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#868This is a bizarre post. The author is disconnected from reality. When cheating is easy, and especially if the grades are curved, non-cheaters are harshly punished. The author intentionally created such an environment and is surprised cheating is going on. The only possible solution I can see is that the majority of the grade is derived from non-online exams held under strict conditions: * IDs are checked * Randomized…
I like your line of discussion so I will add some more thoughts regarding the author’s need for self-reflection. I have recently graduated so may provide some perspective:
* They read comments about their teaching, and shrugged it off as “a vocal minority”. I cannot guarantee it’s the case, but it’s not a “minority” it’s most likely the median opinion that most students are too shy to share. And then the online course evals are sent out the last week of the semester and most don’t care anymore to share what they really think.
* The author made no discussion of the add/drop deadline which is usually around Midterm 2. If I was a student not cheating but in the group chat and realized the professor was running a sting operation (instead of reporting cheaters when they discovered them?) I would probably be inclined to drop.
* The Author explains their love of R analysis, then gives no data or statistics on students who were in the chat and still did well on Midterm 2 (still learned material).
* I prefer the weekly quizzes that are basically homework, with free discussion / question compiling on google docs, but then have very strict exams. To claim something is “open notes” but then also that discussing the questions afterwords is cheating seems silly.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#869Anyway, I don't see anything in the article about what the academic office said when he turned all those reports in. I'm really curious, these kinds of situations tend to make national news when some prof brings a large number of students up on academic honor code violations. (ex: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/08/20/least-100-nav... ) I'm firmly of the opinion that the negatives of group study out weight t…
> I'm fairly certain there is a fair bit of 3rd parties basically doing assignments/taking tests these days for students. I can confirm this. Personally, I have seen as high as 10 %, but those numbers were heavily skewed towards students who could only speak Chinese. Not sure what was up with them. I do not teach anymore, but I have heard that the situation became much worse in the last few years.
The tuition rates paid by foreign governments on behalf of some International students is astronomical and hard to be ethical about.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#870I'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…
This solution just moves the problem from colleges/universities to a “board”, but doesn’t solve it.
People would still cheat on the hypothetical licensing exam.
Licensing also would add friction in changing jobs, immigration policies, thereby hampering general mobility of workers. More paperwork and bureaucracy would develop.
A company’s interview process is currently where someone’s declared skills are put to the test, which although imperfect, provides the filtering mechanism you’re looking for.