My students cheated... a lot • Hacker News Board

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#981

Post by jacooper » Mon, May 30, 2022, 7:37 PM UTC

JoaoCostaIFG wrote: post #762

I guess I can share a similar story, being a student and all. Last year, even though we were in lock down, most courses delayed the final exams, so they could be taken in person. The exception was a machine learning course, where we were allowed to do the exams online. When students heard about this, they got really excited, because cheating would be easier. So, the day of the exam comes, and I hear multiple say they…

Yup, I fully agree, I think the "stress of the pandemic" execuse is very overused and often is not real.

For many students the pandemic was epic, no school for a while, unlimited gaming time, and nothing to stop them from doing what they wanted.

At least that's how I felt it, and they time I had definitely changes where I was heading in my life.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#982

Post by jacooper » Mon, May 30, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

medler wrote: post #223

jl2718 wrote: 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…

Interesting that they both founded cryptocurrencies. It’s not surprising that academic success is uncorrelated with being able to run a good Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff was extremely successful in his time, but he wasn’t a prodigy either.

We are still saying that the entirety of CryptoCurrencies are Ponzi schemes ?

Yes some of them are, but its a very legitimate technology that will change the world.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#983

Post by com2kid » Mon, May 30, 2022, 7:52 PM UTC

nicolas_t wrote: post #718

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…

> 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 was an exchange student in the US, tests involved multiple choice questions, they were closed books with questions around rote memory.

As a US citizen, many tests were open book essay style, especially once we got to college.

In public school however, lots of "standardized" multiple choice tests that were used to grade the school. Some of those tests also include an essay portion.

Teachers in the US aren't paid to do grading, they typically do it at home in their own time, thus very few essay style tests.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#984

Post by Gtex555 » Mon, May 30, 2022, 8:22 PM UTC

CalRobert wrote: post #511

My former boss was an utter buffoon who knew nothing whatsoever about his field but managed to make $3 million as a "director" in the couple years before he was finally fired. Cheating seems to work well.

People who claim cheating will affect you down the line don't understand how the real world works, unless you're a doctor or programmer you rarely directly need the skills taught in school because most jobs are much simpler than school work. I worked as a credit analyst at a bank and a decent highschool graduate could do that work, you could cheat for all 3/4 years of University and it wouldn't affect you at all. Only when we automate away this simple jobs can we start catching cheaters 'down the line'.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#985

Post by PoignardAzur » Mon, May 30, 2022, 10:36 PM UTC

brigandish wrote: post #510

Fiahil wrote: post #472

Ah cheating ! I did a year abroad in California when I was studying computer science and I remember there was a huge difference between cheating there and cheating in my French school. In the later, we were given harder exercises and asked to deliver a working program with some constraints. This program is then tested and graded by a CI and examined by TAs. Usually TAs would get a cheating report for reused bits of c…

> Stupid assignments encourage students to cheat. Make them interesting and this problem will go away. and yet > Usually TAs would get a cheating report for reused bits of code and things that would solve an exercise with techniques far away from students knowledge or forbidden functions. TAs would ask you questions about your code and trigger cheating review if you could not explain why you wrote it this way. It was…

> Perhaps the same course could be run in California and would still attract the same level of cheating as the checkbox style one.

Actually, that's not a hypothetical scenario: School 42, an offshoot of the school GP described with the same cursus, has antennas in both Paris and California.

I wonder if the cheating rates differ between the two.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#986

Post by andrewflnr » Tue, May 31, 2022, 1:23 AM UTC

Gtex555 wrote: post #964

andrewflnr wrote: post #205

Despite this teacher's miraculous extraction of some character growth from a handful of the cheaters, I still think he should have just failed all of them as soon as he had an airtight case against them. There is no moral or practical justification for tolerating cheaters. They make a mockery of honest students and the higher education as a whole. They're a menace to the society into which they're released with a sta…

There are many studies that show that harsher punishments don't reduce crime, infact they make people act in very extreme ways once they realize they have already been caught. What you want is revenge since you seem to be a student who never copied , unfortunately revenge is no way to run a society(Pro-tip rehabilitation is the way to run society). Personally I think degree hold too much weight on one's future and I…

Many of the students in this article showed very clearly what they thought about their "rehabilitation": just another system to be gamed with lip-service and as little effort or change as possible. They won't treat it as anything else unless it hurts. I'm sorry, but you can't seriously propose to remove all punishment and be taken seriously. And I also don't think you can even seriously argue that failing a student for a class is too severe, either. It's not even necessarily denying them the degree, as long as they stop fucking cheating. That's your goal too, right?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#987

Post by advael » Tue, May 31, 2022, 4:48 AM UTC

jules wrote: post #685

advael wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My position on this has been pretty controversial when I've shared it before, but I still think it's correct: Measuring knowledge at scale is futile, harmful, and pointless. The fact that a lot of society has been arranged around the fiction that this is a feasible endeavor does not mean it has borne out in practice, and prioritizing assessment in this way has been gradually hollowing out most forms of pedagogy of th…

What you are saying is not at all controversial, but it is incomplete, which is probably why you have received pushback in the past. Criticising the existing system is easy. Giving an alternative is harder. Implementing that alternative and showing that it's actually better on some metric is MUCH harder than that. But you have not even given an alternative!

What part of "its fundamental premise is flawed" is unclear? I don't propose an alternative because I don't believe the stated goals of the system are achievable or desirable. Also, if one believes something does more harm than good, an argument to stop doing it does not require an alternative.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#988

Post by stadia42 » Tue, May 31, 2022, 7:05 AM UTC

vehementi wrote: post #929

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

No, I didn't mean that I cheat, and therefore everyone else cheats. I meant that the one time he got to see what's going on, he found that nearly everyone cheats. Unless he has some evidence to the contrary, a reasonable conclusion is that cheating is near-universal.

Evidence to the contrary could be, for example, that this class was very different from a typical class in some way, etc.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#989

Post by atraac » Tue, May 31, 2022, 9:08 AM UTC

spicyusername wrote: post #802

AdamH12113 wrote: post #431

>I knew that my students wanted a second chance, I wasn’t sure how many of them would take it. Part of completing the academic integrity assignment was a tacit admission of cheating, and some students seemed set on not admitting to anything. So, I was thrilled when I received the first completed academic integrity assignment. >What did the student have to say? There were many full sentences and as I read them I got t…

> How broken of a person do you have to be to reflexively cheat on a simple assignment intended to give you a second chance after you’ve been caught cheating already? My opinion is that most people only go to college these days because they perceive it as the only path to a good paying job, not because they are terribly interested in the material. Given that assumption, it's easy for me to understand why people would…

> My opinion is that most people only go to college these days because they perceive it as the only path to a good paying job, not because they are terribly interested in the material.

I know most people here refer to American system and universities but my experience in Poland is, degrees, especially related to computer science, mostly teach you useless, outdated stuff, that you will never need to know. Most people here approach CS degree as something that you simply have to do to get a decent job in IT(though it's slowly changing toward not doing a degree at all), or simply because your family expects you to. Most universities here pump out diplomas to get paid by government and industry, so they can pump out more diplomas. Honestly I haven't met a single employer or even coworker that ever cared if I had CS degree. Most of stuff I learned there is 'nice to know it exists' but nothing I've ever used in real life work, most professors clearly have never even worked in the industry. Best thing that came out of my BEng in CS are friends and realization that noone cares about me so I needed to solve issues and learn on my own.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#990

Post by thawaya3113 » Tue, May 31, 2022, 1:29 PM UTC

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…

And then us engineers come in and fix education just like we did taxis (regulatory arbitrage, offloading costs to the ordinary workers in surprising ways they aren’t aware of, increasing traffic congestion throughout cities, but hooking people onto the rides with unsustainable loss making introductory prices long enough that alternatives such as regular cabs and public transport become worse).

Or the way we fixed productivity in ways that has led to no measurable increase in productivity despite nearly everyone having the most powerful device ever invented in the palm of their hands.

Or the way we fixed housing through regulatory arbitrage, once again, converting housing for residents into short term rentals for vacationers, making housing for residents more expensive globally and making their communities worse.

Or the way we fixed cable by going from bundled cable packages where we have to pay $70-$100 to get all our channels, to unbundled walled gardens where we have to pay $70-$100 to get a fraction of content plus we also have to pay internet fees in addition.

Or the way we fixed messaging and phone calls by taking something like a $1/yr WhatsApp membership that offered safe encrypted chat and converting it into a data harvesting machine.

Or the way we fixed stock investing by gamifying investing, bringing in a lot of people into active trading who have no business being in active trading and should just park their money in Fidelity, and then promising “free” trades by allowing big banks to trade against, leading to a massive wealth transfer from naive individuals to sophisticated banks at the best of times.

Or how we destroyed inflation through BTC.

Or saved art through NFTs.

The list just goes on.