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…
My students cheated... a lot
951–960 of 1001 posts
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#952I 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?
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#953Earlier 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…
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
#954Earlier 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…
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.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#956I 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
#957Threads 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…
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
#958Earlier 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 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
#959Earlier 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…
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
#960I 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.
do you have a link to this research? it sounds right but I'd love to see the source