931–940 of 1001 posts
Use discord?
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…
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'm currently grading an open book test as you describe. It turns out that someone put their attempt at answers on chegg.com shortly after I posted the test. The temptation to use chegg is too great for students to resist. When chegg has the wrong solution (which is often the case), students will doubt themselves and will go with the wrong chegg answer. To be clear, the only goal of chegg.com is to help students chea…
He should have said on the WhatsApp group, right at the beginning, "I am your professor,and I monitor this gc. You can use the gc to discuss the class and ethically help each other, but if you engage in exam and quiz cheating on here I will see it, and I will fail you. If you open or join a new secret gc to circumvent this, I will find it and I will fail you. Do the work.".
If they cheated after that, immediate ban. Cut them from the course. Stop wasting everyone's time.
Instead he got off on spying on them for months, buffing his ego with how good he was at using tools to measure the cheating, had to actually change the course and the final because he was letting the level of cheating get out of hand.
He's like a boss who gives you zero verbal feedback all year, maybe only positive feedback, then sticks you with a bad annual review, listing behavior that would have been easily corrected had it been mentioned.
Yes everybody knows they are not supposed to cheat, but he let cheating become the way things worked "in practice" for his class, and then punished them after wasting a lot of their time and money.
My anecdote: 1. Tell students that the remote exam is open book. Everything is allowed EXCEPT for any communication between students. Moreover, there is a Zoom breakout room for discussing specific questions with ME. 2. Exam starts. 3. Students move to that breakout room to exchange solutions.
> 3. Students move to that breakout room to exchange solutions. While you were in that room? Did you put a stop to that?
This professor seems very pleased with himself but I think he handled this in the worst way possible. He should have said on the WhatsApp group, right at the beginning, "I am your professor,and I monitor this gc. You can use the gc to discuss the class and ethically help each other, but if you engage in exam and quiz cheating on here I will see it, and I will fail you. If you open or join a new secret gc to circumven…
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…
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?
And why is it necessary for education to be ‘free’ or universal for that matter?
People are different, doesn’t mean we all need to learn the same exact things in the same exact way to be productive members of society. Not that such a goal is ever realistically achievable.
How is this kind of "cheating" any different than study groups? When I was in school we would have small study groups where we would collaborate on figuring out homework answers. Maybe this was also cheating, but I don't think so; it was among the most enriching experiences in school and certainly a hell of a lot more like the working world than it would be to toil in solitary silence.
There's a big difference between a discussion between a few people to figure out an answer that they all understand, and posting the answer to a multiple choice question directly to the whole class. To use the author's measuring stick, study groups typically engage with the course material. Learning that the answer to question 5 is "B" is not engagement. Also, anecdotally, the study groups I was a part of were almost…
I do agree that cheating on exams would be bad. Maybe my perspective comes from not really thinking graded homework is that great of an idea to begin with.