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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#951
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…

Finland is a great example of a world class school system that doesn’t measure “knowledge”. So perhaps trying to measure “knowledge” is the real problem?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#952
post #170

I taught two courses to undergrad CS students at Stanford. I think about half of students cheated on problem sets and tests. The answers were all way too uniform and done without correction. In the first course, there was a student who definitely didn’t cheat and was objectively horrible at all tasks assigned, consuming a frustratingly large portion of my grading time. This student ended up with a massively impressiv…

Was it Do Kwon?

My own feelings aside, Do might be a good case study. I don’t think he’s an intentional scammer; he just had an idea that he was convinced was brilliant, without the knowledge or maybe imagination to see how spectacularly dangerous it was. I personally avoided Terra/UST from genesis because I immediately saw that is was exploitable with a big enough position on UST. But it took some searching to find the exact peg mechanism, and by the time it collapsed, it had gotten so big that I started to question my own judgement. Do might have caught whiffs of the already risky ideas surrounding algorithmic stablecoins, and pushed forward something that looked passably similar at his introductory level of knowledge. The apparent possibilities at this level are far greater than what is possible with more knowledge in the area. The investor class is also stuck at this level of knowledge, because they make their money by raising from and selling to the level down from there. I don’t see any distinction between crypto and traditional equities in this regard, except that the SEC is supposed to protect ignorant consumers, which they clearly can’t, and the government is there to backstop any disasters at the expense of everybody smart enough to avoid it in the first place, which makes them the dumb ones in the end. So yeah, it was a stupid idea, but look hard enough and you’ll find the same stupid ideas behind every investment with any hope of keeping up with the cost of feeding, housing, and educating your kids. If there is evidence that shows that Do is the one who pulled the rug, then my theory is flawed. Basically, it is that people who achieve great investment success are operating at a level of genuine enthusiastic ignorance that cannot be faked by a scammer or an expert.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#953
post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s less about not having the time and being constructive.

Happy to use a better term than andragogy - I’m happy to learn what it is.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#954
post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is…

That’s great. Thanks for the clarifications.

Hopefully you understood the meaning of what I was saying and that we might agree that pedagogy applies/refers to children, not adults.

Is there a term that better refers to adults?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#955

> For example, in this course I ran short multiple choice quizzes each week. Students could take the quiz as many times as they wanted during the week. The quiz questions changed each time (pulled randomly from a pool), and students always got their most recent quiz grade. The quizzes were low stakes. I also told students that taking the quizzes would help them study for the midterms, which would contain questions fr…

Correct, that is not the cheating OP is talking about. Take another read.

I’d prefer not to. The author framed students embracing their own educational structure as cheating, and set out to sleuth them out as cheaters for doing what the program was designed for them to do. That’s dishonest and I don’t trust anything else the article says.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#956
It's hilarious how common this is, as a TA, I had to deal with this entirity of last few semesters. My students aren't that dumb to invite me into the group chat though.

I have to say the school really let the instructor down. An instructor should not have to fill 70 forms.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#957
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…

You make it more important to be eventually right than initially right.

Allow tests to be continuously regraded as the things students get wrong are corrected.

Automation would go a long way towards making that more feasible (i.e. easier for a multiple choice test than a written one).

But the emphasis on being right initially as the only thing that matters is unhealthy, and certainly in part what leads to the majority of people doubling down on confirmation bias rather than admitting being wrong and learning/incorporating the knowledge for the future.

Yes, there are practical issues with improving the system. But I've had a few select teachers that had that policy in some form years ago, and it was often the best teachers that did. We'd benefit from a widespread adoption of similar and it might lower the inventive for trying to cheat to be right the first time, as to the kids being brought up in these systems and reflecting these systems, that's the only thing that matters.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#958
post #745

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…

Totally agree. I might a bit partial to that, because I tend to underperform multiple choice tests for overthinking, but I've really the impression that open ended questions test knoledge much better and make it more difficult to cheat. Beside that, having almost nothing to do with cheating, another good thing in the French system is the continuous grading: labs were graded, projects were graded, small intermediate t…

I went to INSA in the early aughts and we didn't really have continuous grading, labs (TPs) were graded but the biggest part of the grades (les partiels - exam week) happened twice a year (or 4 times a year during the first two years of prépa intégré).

I do know that since then they've moved to a continuous grading system. I'm not sure if that's the same with other grande écoles but I do know that my friends in other grand écoles had a similar system of 2-4 partiels a year.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#959

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 studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work and how I can solve problems and how, beginning with one idea I can extend it or come up with an entirely different idea. > programming without having a solid understanding of CS background and how computers work it would make me just a code monkey, able just to do what I saw in tutorials and copy pasting SO answers without understanding them Other…

> Other people genuinely want to understand how things work, and getting a CS degree is not the only way to get there.

It's not the only way, but it is certainly a good way (at least for some).

In my case, I didn't really know what I didn't know. Before studying CS, I had this vague idea of programming as an activity I liked, but it never really "clicked" in the larger sense, as it was woven with magic that I didn't understand at the time. We make programs using Code::Blocks? Well, who made Code::Blocks, and how did they make Code::Blocks without using Code::Blocks?

After studying CS, it just felt like all those mysteries disappeared. Everything made sense, connected into a coherent whole by various mathematical links.

Of course, there's still a lot of things I don't know, and even more that I don't know I don't know. Every now and then, I run into a new concept that teaches me things that I've kinda wondered about, but couldn't put properly into words. Reading about such topics, and seeing the journey unravel, that another person took in order to discover what I'm getting on a silver platter, is one of the most rewarding things in the world.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#960
post #409

I dunno, I never cheated, but I would never report other people for doing it either. It’s not my job to detect and report other people cheating, and getting dinged for not reporting people that cheated would make me hate you very quickly. That said, I just don’t see the point in cheating. University isn’t that hard if you have some basic level of skill. You go to the classes, you read the stuff the assign you, do the…

The classes being online is a major factor. Those classes are engagement hell. Also research has shown video conferencing is much more fatiguing than a real meeting. Even if you start engaging one bad week can put you off the course for the semester.

>research has shown video conferencing is much more fatiguing than a real meeting

do you have a link to this research? it sounds right but I'd love to see the source

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