Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My students cheated... a lot

crumplab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

921–930 of 1001 posts

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#921

Post by oblio »

strawhatguy wrote: post #919
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…

That last paragraph shows the real issue: that schooling is government controlled and provided. The only people that ought to be involved are the teachers (and other school employees) the students (and their parents) of that school. The fact the it might take ‘5 election cycles’ to see a reform through, is a disservice to the students, and often frustrating for the teachers as well. If government does it, that litera…

How do you offer free universal education without government control?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#922

Post by brutusborn »

oblio wrote: post #921
strawhatguy wrote: post #919

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last paragraph shows the real issue: that schooling is government controlled and provided. The only people that ought to be involved are the teachers (and other school employees) the students (and their parents) of that school. The fact the it might take ‘5 election cycles’ to see a reform through, is a disservice to the students, and often frustrating for the teachers as well. If government does it, that litera…

How do you offer free universal education without government control?

Government vouchers for every child that can be used at any education institution whose curriculum includes the government mandated curriculum.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#923

Post by oblio »

codefreeordie wrote: post #893
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…

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

Because we have a limited number of everything and we have to compare people.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#924

Post by throwoutway »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #631
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…

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…

> But that's not the scariest thing. The scary thing is that if it's a STEM field these students go on to get jobs in which they have no competence. This is truly catastrophic if you want software that works and buildings that don't collapse.

And also why we can’t trust a degree to show competence, leaving it to companies to figure out with LONNGG multi-part interviews

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#925

Post by JoeAltmaier »

throwoutway wrote: post #924
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But that's not the scariest thing. The scary thing is that if it's a STEM field these students go on to get jobs in which they have no competence. This is truly catastrophic if you want software that works and buildings that don't collapse. And also why we can’t trust a degree to show competence, leaving it to companies to figure out with LONNGG multi-part interviews

Some do summer hires - a sort of 90-day interview - in their Junior year. Much better signal-to-noise.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#926

Post by Skunkleton »

nivertech wrote: post #480
gmd63 wrote: post #401

It makes me sad that so many engineers seem to think cheating is a just and or good solution. Cheating is objectively bad system design (for society, we're designing our society with daily actions every day), as it rewards people without integrity who want the easy way out. Sure, you can blame the system for encouraging incentives that reward cheating, and there are benefits to thinking like a cheater to identify gap…

Agile is cheating Scrum is a gc (group chat)

Professionally we collaborate with our peers to achieve some goal. In school, the goal is individual achievement. If you "collaborate" in this way in school, you absolutely aren't achieving the purpose you are spending so much time and money working towards.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#927

Post by L3viathan »

burntoutfire wrote: post #664
hackernewds wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Students will cheat. the solve is to get rid of curving classes in this manner

The Polish university I went to never even heard of grading on a curve, and yet cheating was rampant. I think it's just human nature - as long as cheating is not heavily penalised, many people will choose to do it. During my studies, there was one professor who openly said that, if he caught you cheating, he will fail you in his class (which, in Polish universities, means going through a lot of bureucracy to not have…

I don't think the comment you replied to meant to say that getting rid of grading on a curve would stop cheaters, merely that it would stop some of the bad effects cheating can have on those not cheating.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#928

Post by panda888888 »

To play devil's advocate here, was it clear that the students knew they were cheating and that their behavior was unacceptable?

If a teacher told me that the work was open book, open notes, open internet, I might legitimately believe that I could openly talk to people about it. Probably not for an exam, but for a low-stakes, "check your knowledge" type of take-home quiz? Maybe.

I'm not sure if this is a generational divide or if the author's description of the rules was unclear, but I wonder if some students legitimately didn't realize they were cheating.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#929

Post by vehementi »

stadia42 wrote: post #459

The professor surely knows that cheating is near universal because the incentive structure of modern life makes cheating optimal in expectation. Nothing he can do will change this fundamental fact. So why bother?

Another person in the "I am a cheater, surely everyone else thinks like me, right?" bucket

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#930

Post by josephcsible »

panda888888 wrote: post #928

To play devil's advocate here, was it clear that the students knew they were cheating and that their behavior was unacceptable? If a teacher told me that the work was open book, open notes, open internet, I might legitimately believe that I could openly talk to people about it. Probably not for an exam, but for a low-stakes, "check your knowledge" type of take-home quiz? Maybe. I'm not sure if this is a generational…

Here's what the article said:

> Also, by the way, I should say that the quizzes were entirely open book and open note. All of the course material was online and freely available to the students. The quizzes were individual assignments, and students were not supposed to help each other by sharing questions or answers.

That seems clear enough, so assuming the syllabus said something similar, I'm fairly confident that the students did know they weren't supposed to be doing what they were doing. Also, if they thought they weren't doing anything wrong, then they wouldn't have been so worried about a snitch.

Post reply on HN