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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#901

Post by DeathArrow »

gjm11 wrote: post #727
DeathArrow wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 know I will get downvoted for saying this I doubt it, but I downvoted you for saying that . No comment anywhere has ever been improved by adding "I know I will get downvoted for saying this, but". Please don't do it.

Thank you for your comment. It is highly valuable to me.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#902

Post by efitz »

I wish we would replace our current post-secondary education system with apprenticeships.

Apprenticeships could combine some classroom instruction with some actual doing.

Now you remove most of the incentive for cheating- the classroom stuff is directly relevant to you because you’re going to have to use it shortly, maybe today. It’s no longer the grade that’s important; it’s the knowledge.

The benefit of actually learning the material becomes immediate and concrete. Tthere won’t be any opportunity for cheating when you’re in front of people actually expecting you to do the thing; you either can or you can’t. And your livelihood now depends on it.

The university system is hopelessly busted in so many ways. There is no way to fix it. But there are other ways to get knowledgeable, productive professionals.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#903

Post by Avamander »

derevaunseraun wrote: post #355

This 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…

> This happened to me in undergrad with an autograded class.

I had a entirely autograded class on my first year at uni, it was awful. Immense amount of tests each week that were so basic yet so picky about the input, you lost points for no good reason and it frustrated me so much.

Ended up making a browser extension that parsed the tests, calculated answer probabilities based on previously completed tests that had similar questions. Unless the teachers were willing to hide the final score, it figured out the correct answer to each and every question.

It ended with a large majority of the class using the extension during the final exam, they couldn't really prove anything and nobody got caught. The next year the amount of tests was reduced and the exam was on paper (I'm sorry undergrads).

I don't feel bad about it, the lecturer abused our time and resources asymmetrically, listening to feedback was years overdue. It doesn't always boil down to "omg cheating bad"

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#904

Post by tester89 »

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…

> 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. […]

It really is a cultural difference. Spain and the UK have ticket barriers for their public transport, while Germany and Switzerland don’t, preferring to rely on random controls.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#905

Post by bckr »

MadWombat wrote: post #882

shrug perverse incentives. For a lot of college students, the actual learning or lack thereof, while still important, does not affect them directly. But getting a bad grade does. Drop in average grade might affect their scholarships, various arrangements with their families and possibly future employment prospects. So while not learning the material properly is bad in a somewhat abstract and theoretical way, getting…

> cheating is a more energy efficient way of getting good grades.

Well, except for the fact that to cheat is to engage in an arms race with an agent who is incentivized to ruin your career if you are discovered cheating.

For someone with my personality type and abilities, the above adds a significant cognitive load that makes just plain studying a lot more energy efficient than cheating. I'm sure it's different for people with different personalities and abilities.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#906

Post by bckr »

efitz wrote: post #902

I wish we would replace our current post-secondary education system with apprenticeships. Apprenticeships could combine some classroom instruction with some actual doing. Now you remove most of the incentive for cheating- the classroom stuff is directly relevant to you because you’re going to have to use it shortly, maybe today. It’s no longer the grade that’s important; it’s the knowledge. The benefit of actually le…

For me, attending university was useful. I studied biochemistry but ended up in software engineering. That is a direct result of having met people and explored different options available to me in university. On top of that, my science and general education requirements helped me to think more broadly and deeply about the world.

I think the apprenticeship model is awesome, and also available through bootcamps + internships.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#907

Post by Gtex555 »

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…

I feel most cheaters get by in the industry pretty well, cause school is way harder than he average job. The reason they make it at work is that the deadline for work is everyday while you can procrastinate at school for 3 months straight plus you aren't getting paid at school.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#908

Post by Gtex555 »

emodendroket wrote: post #385
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…

Going to the grocer has for a long time been about the food, not the pleasure of the shopping experience. Given this, why wouldn't you steal?

risk of getting caught and arrested.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#909

Post by dragonwriter »

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 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.

It's always amusing to see lectures on correct usage from people who don't know the difference between etymology and meaning. (And also who don't know the etymology, either, since etymologically, pedagogy isn't “how children learn” but more like “the act of leading children”.)

In English, especially American English, “Andragogy” is mostly used in relation to a particular theory/approach to adult education originating with Martin Knowles, who leveraged the same conflation of etymology and meaning—even when it originated, pedagogy was well established with its modern and more general meaning despite the narrower sense of its Greek roots—to promote it; education for different audiences by age or other circumstance is not generally distinguished by different greek-root terms in English, but by English terms [“early childhood education”, “adult education”, “continuing professional education”, etc.)

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#910

Post by dariosalvi78 »

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 :)

I studied engineering in Italy and all my exams were both written (with exercises, multiple choice didn't exist at all) and oral. No way you could cheat or not engage with the materials.
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