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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#891

Post by bckr »

styren wrote: post #876
nonrandomstring wrote: post #661

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…

I've personally never witnessed any cheating, heard any friends or students even allude to doing so, I never cheated myself and I can't even comprehend how you would cheat at most of the coursework I did in uni in Sweden. Sure you could copy your friends code, but you still had to present it to a TA who would certainly get suspicious if you couldn't answer to what you had written. Ditto for exams and essays/reports.…

What was the average number of students in your classes, and the average number of TAs?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#892

Post by Planktonne »

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…

> You should measure the satisfaction of the students.

It's very easy to make satisfying and engaging teaching. It's a lot harder to make that valuable.

If we focus on student satisfaction rather than understanding, we're failing them.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#893

Post by codefreeordie »

nicolas_t wrote: post #718
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? 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…

Why is it a foregone assumption that the important attribute of education is "measuring knowledge"?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#894

Post by peoplefromibiza »

Planktonne wrote: post #892
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You should measure the satisfaction of the students. It's very easy to make satisfying and engaging teaching. It's a lot harder to make that valuable. If we focus on student satisfaction rather than understanding, we're failing them.

> If we focus on student satisfaction rather than understanding, we're failing them.

while making them unsatisfied gives them a lot of motivation to understand.

Anyway, satisfaction is about the product: the product is education.

The product is not entertainment.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#895

Post by codefreeordie »

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…

It is perhaps unreasonable for the purveyor of a critical service to demand that they be the only one who is allowed to understand or validate the quality of the service on offer, and to insist that the customer is too naive to be permitted a viewpoint.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#896

Post by peoplefromibiza »

srveale wrote: post #871
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics, we should look at places where the system is proven to work and copy it: see Finland. I did an education degree, and come from a family of educators. Every educator and academic I've talked to (I can't remember an exception) wanted our system to be more like Finland's. The people pushing back against changes in that direction were not teachers, but politic…

> And you wouldn't tell a doctor how to do their job, even if you had spent years as a patient

That's not correlated: doctors ask patient how do they feel all the time.

If they don't feel well, they try to adjust the prescription and/or the therapy.

Don't like the word satisfaction?

Replace it with "listen to feedback from your customers".

Maybe it's gonna ring a bell.

disclaimer: most of my family members work or have worked in health care.

> That because they are necessary by law, their professional opinion is negligible?

The point is that they do not run the education system, they are employees of the education system

And should act like that.

Meaning that they have proper channels already in place to file their complains. Including protected rights like the right to go on strike.

If they want to govern it, they better step up their career and try with politics or with manager roles.

So that teachers can complain about them, their choices and how much of a better job they would do if they were in their position.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#897

Post by bckr »

scotty79 wrote: post #723
Scramblejams wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others. Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters, and the grades matter for your future. I know in the program I attended I was up against a fair few who were taking cognition enhancing drugs, others who had exam copies from prior years to help them prep, and a lot of people who copied each others’ homework. It was…

> sharing a curve It's beyond me why is this even allowed. Are you grading results of your educational effort or are you organizing a beauty pageant? Not grading on a curve should be part of academic integrity standards.

In my experience it's to help more people pass. If the natural distribution has 70% as the average, no curve is applied. Above-average outliers (the occasional 100% scores) would be removed from the calculation.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#898

Post by Planktonne »

j45 wrote: post #770
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…

A minor critique and support for what you are saying. The experts of pedagogy (academics and teachers) are rarely digitally literate (they can’t use technology in any competent, engaging or engaging enough way) enough compared to their students. This line was crossed about 15 years ago with most institutions still digitally functioning like they are in 2005. Some neat studies out there about this. Profs are smart and…

> Pedagogy is a red flag word. People who use it incorrectly often discount themselves pretty quickly. Pedagogy is about how children learn, it has less relevance in higher education, which is more about learning how to learn. Andragogy is how adults learn and I invite anyone to see how often that word is used.

The original root of "pedagogy" relates to children, but I still have a lot more time for someone who uses that industry-standard term than I do for anyone preaching 'andragogy'. It's a niche, culturally-bound and assumption-based theory with little research to actually support any of its claims.

Despite the grandiose name, 'andragogy' is just another 'learning styles' or 'growth mindset' - it's pop psychology designed to sell training courses.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#899

Post by overgard »

xpe wrote: post #881
overgard wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Students are just as much a part of the system as teachers, so I don't think this elitism about who can have an opinion is helpful. I think there are a few constructive things that can be done. One is allowing curious students to design their own academic career (with guidance and supervision). I think students usually cheat because they think the course work is irrelevant to their future lives. Sure people need to b…

> Students are just as much a part of the system as teachers, so I don't think this elitism about who can have an opinion is helpful. Of course everyone can have an opinion! But are these truly likely to contribute to solving the problem? Of course not. Some people are more likely to have the experience and skills to comprehend and advocate for better solutions. Yes, I tend to support democratic forms of government o…

Well, in the private world its customer feedback. Sure you dont use their ideas neccessarily, but if, as in this case, 75% of your customers find your product bad then expecting people already part of the system to make radical changes sounds foolish. Theyll just list why it cant change. I admire this teachers cleverness getting his students to pass, but the reality is that it was so big a problem that the system can only be vastly broken and I dont expect people too involved to fix it
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