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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#971

Post by rvba »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #760
tomerv wrote: post #543

I had to stop in the middle of the article due to all the annoying animations. But something that stood out to me is this: > For consequences, I came up with a three strikes and you are out rule. and then > I wasn’t ready to inform them about what was going on until I had processed all of the facts, so I just pressed on with the lectures. My goal was to have all of the forms filled out and emailed before the next mid…

This is a college course, right? Do you really not understand what it means to cheat by the time you get to college? A quiz especially--you should not be sharing the answers to questions with other students. It's just about the most basic understanding of cheating you can imagine. You also shouldn't be sharing the answers to assignments unless the teacher/professor says you can do so. And finally, read your school's…

You seem to understand integrity very well, but fail to see that probably 50% of students cheat.

I dont even say that it is good, I just say that is the way it is, was and probably will be.

So you kind of not understand life?

Lots of jobs come through networking, another fact of life.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#972

Post by rvba »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #839
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…

> Snitching on your classmates is almost universally considered a bad thing to do here, and we would never demand that students do that, not only due to the fear of retaliation mentioned in the post, because... it's just not right, they're your classmates! Why exactly is it "not right"? I agree that the student should be compelled to police their peers. Both because everyone should be allowed to decide for themselves…

Not right in the way, that probably 50% do this - and you will be stuck with them for few years in multiple classes.

> College is a golden opportunity for young people to participate in building the kind of society they want to spend the rest of their lives living in

For most, it is just a piece of paper that allows them to get a job -> and often doesnt even prepare for that job in useful ways. Also it is a place that is supposed to teach you lots of useful stuff, or at least "winder your horizons" stuff - but it fails at all of those.

Nearly everything I learned during university was done on my own.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#973

Post by jokethrowaway »

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…

The real question is even higher. Why should we measure knowledge?

If it's learning for the joy of learning you don't need a test. If it's to get a piece of paper you need for a job, then schools are just shitty interviews mostly uncorrelated to real world tasks.

I think we should move to learning for the sake of learning (free, open door lessons or pick your own on the internet at your own time - no frontal lessons but still provide a space for students to socialise) and give the chance to students to work on projects that can prove they know something. Workplaces can look at these projects and find someone who fit with them.

You built a robot? I can reasonably expect you to know something about electrical engineering and math.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#974

Post by mcv »

A great read, but there's one thing I think he could have done differently to prevent the cheating getting out of hand: as soon as he discovered the cheating, just remind all students about academic integrity, and that cheating will mean failure.

It's easy to believe you won't get caught if everybody does it and nobody is reminding you that it's wrong. It can give an impression of unaccountability. I think a simple reminder can put a lot of students straight. Not the hard-core cheaters who are determined to fail, but certainly the much larger group that will get swept up with the cheating if nobody steps in to remind them not to.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#976

Post by mcv »

Avamander wrote: post #903
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 si…

Not at university, but at a company I worked for: the company had legal requirements to train its employees and contractors in various aspects of integrity. They'd made an app that gamified this, and at the end of every month, we should have out score above 70% in that app.

A coworker used our testing framework to write an app that would collect the correct answers and fill them in automatically, and only wait for user input if it didn't recognise a question. He gave to code to me when he left. I think I tried it once or twice, but it failed to work for me due to some network issue, so I figured I'd just stick to the spirit on the thing and keep my score up manually.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#977

Post by throwaway156037 »

I've studied at an online university. There were quizzes every week that were not graded; one or two graded ones during the course; one final graded quiz at the end of the course. 99% of all the questions were multiple-choice ones. Some questions from non-graded quizzes would appear in the graded ones. Then the questions from the graded quizzes during the course would appear on the final one. After taking the quiz, you could see the correct answer for each question. As I went through the course, I would add every single quiz question I encountered, the answers, and the correct answer into the database. Sometimes I would google questions I saw on the quiz and would find the list of the questions somebody else had posted. I would then verify the correctness of the answers against the course material and add them to my database as well.

I wrote a JavaScript that would get injected into the page with a quiz using the GreaseMonkey extension. It would go over the questions on the page, do a fuzzy search against my database that I compiled, and put the top 5 best matches next to each question. The library had its limitations, but it would take care of things like words being in a different order or a couple of words missing. I improved it by adding additional transformations to the question. Things like removing any non-letter characters but being careful to handle things like dashes and apostrophes in some cases; removal of the stopwords; stemming.

That would usually take care of about half of the questions. Sometimes, more than 90%. I would then spend the rest of the quiz time manually answering the remaining questions. Since this course was an open textbook, I would have one giant text file that would contain every single text that appeared during the course. It was allowed to look into any course material while taking the quiz. The end result of this is that I would get 98+% of the answers correct in almost every single course I took.

We also had written assignments which I always honestly completed while carefully following the citation rules. No clever tricks here.

I graduated with 10% in my university and was on the honors list. I never thought of what I did as cheating because I never collaborated with others. I never disclosed what I did and how I did it. I think that people who did those quizzes did them in a way that allowed me to do what I did.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#978

Post by DangitBobby »

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

Businesses are still making out like bandits now that the cost of learning how to do the job has been offloaded onto kids.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#979

Post by lovehashbrowns »

rvba wrote: post #971
lovehashbrowns wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a college course, right? Do you really not understand what it means to cheat by the time you get to college? A quiz especially--you should not be sharing the answers to questions with other students. It's just about the most basic understanding of cheating you can imagine. You also shouldn't be sharing the answers to assignments unless the teacher/professor says you can do so. And finally, read your school's…

You seem to understand integrity very well, but fail to see that probably 50% of students cheat. I dont even say that it is good, I just say that is the way it is, was and probably will be. So you kind of not understand life? Lots of jobs come through networking, another fact of life.

What are you even on about? How you could glean any of that from my comment is beyond me.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#980

Post by colinmhayes »

citizenkeen wrote: post #758
PheonixPharts wrote: post #101

> There were 100+ students in the class > I was suffering technical difficulties while giving online lectures. > It was extremely demoralizing to teach to a class that was blatantly cheating the entire time. How demoralizing do you think it is to be paying a fair bit of money (or more likely taking on a fair bit of debt) to be just 1 of 100+ students in a poorly functioning online class? To be clear, I'm not blaming…

There is absolutely shame in cheating, you just don’t feel any. Not the same thing.

There's shame in not cheating. Makes you a loser tbh. Why would you not use every resource available?
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