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College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

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Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#311

Post by Tainnor »

sudosysgen wrote: post #300
Tainnor wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what? how does that work?

You give it a few hundred problem classes, and constraints for possible answers, and it will randomize the class of problems and generate a unique problem as well as calculate the answer. Then you submit the answer as well as your work and it gets corrected. For things such as proofs, it might give you a problem for which the theorem is needed, then ask you to solve the problem, indicate which theorem you used, and t…

Do you have any example of any software that can generate problems for actual proof-based courses (e.g. abstract algebra)? I'm having a really hard time imagining this, we can't even fully automate theorem proving - how are we supposed to automate theorem generation? And this ignores the fact that you also need to make sure that all the proofs are "of the same difficulty" in terms of fairness.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#312

Post by sudosysgen »

Tainnor wrote: post #311
sudosysgen wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You give it a few hundred problem classes, and constraints for possible answers, and it will randomize the class of problems and generate a unique problem as well as calculate the answer. Then you submit the answer as well as your work and it gets corrected. For things such as proofs, it might give you a problem for which the theorem is needed, then ask you to solve the problem, indicate which theorem you used, and t…

Do you have any example of any software that can generate problems for actual proof-based courses (e.g. abstract algebra)? I'm having a really hard time imagining this, we can't even fully automate theorem proving - how are we supposed to automate theorem generation ? And this ignores the fact that you also need to make sure that all the proofs are "of the same difficulty" in terms of fairness.

Ah, no, the theorems would have to be manually selected. But given a high enough number and an automatically generated context it makes cheating much harder.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#313

Post by jdmichal »

jdmichal wrote: post #273
csa wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with a lot of your comment, and I basically think large swathes of education are just fundamentally broken for a variety of unfortunate reasons. That said, I would like to answer this question: > Why are there still weeding-out classes? In majors that are oversubscribed (e.g., pre-med, CS, etc.), these classes weed out the people who like the idea of the major/career more than the actual work involved. Good w…

> 1. There is no way that a department could get through the same amount of material if they had to accommodate the less motivated and less capable in all of the courses. This is the high-school-ification of university, and it's part of the problem. This is not mandatory learning / babysitting. Just stop accommodating them. Every class just moves at the pace it needs to move at, and if they can't keep up, so be it.

For my own notes into posterity, on further reflection, maybe the schools aren't accommodating. Maybe weed-out classes are hard because they're just moving at the pace they need to move at. But since they tend to be foundational classes, they have a lot of area to cover and so move relatively fast.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#314

Post by csa »

jdmichal wrote: post #313
jdmichal wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. There is no way that a department could get through the same amount of material if they had to accommodate the less motivated and less capable in all of the courses. This is the high-school-ification of university, and it's part of the problem. This is not mandatory learning / babysitting. Just stop accommodating them. Every class just moves at the pace it needs to move at, and if they can't keep up, so be it.

For my own notes into posterity, on further reflection, maybe the schools aren't accommodating. Maybe weed-out classes are hard because they're just moving at the pace they need to move at. But since they tend to be foundational classes, they have a lot of area to cover and so move relatively fast.

This summary captures the intent of my comment accurately.

I will add that the follow up classes can also move more aggressively since the weaker students have been culled by the required weeder course.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#315

Post by seg_lol »

bzbarsky wrote: post #228
ghaff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then the teacher can spend a couple of hours per student to assess their understanding. That sounds as if you're steering close to a whiteboarding interview which a lot of people will claim isn't great. Take home tests aren't perfect but I had plenty of them in school. And even when I didn't I don't think I had just about any engineering class that didn't assign problem sets that counted for a decent portion of you…

> That sounds as if you're steering close to a whiteboarding interview which a lot of people will claim isn't great. One major difference is that unlike a whiteboarding interview there are presumably clear expectations as to what one is expected to have learned in the class and therefore what topics the discussion will cover, and at what depth. Another issue with whiteboarding interviews, specific to computer-related…

I could see notebooks being a useful way to both handout homework and projects as well as automatically check for correctness.

A merge/code review tool could be used to annotate individual problems. Have you seen this done?

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#316

Post by Jugurtha »

seg_lol wrote: post #315
bzbarsky wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That sounds as if you're steering close to a whiteboarding interview which a lot of people will claim isn't great. One major difference is that unlike a whiteboarding interview there are presumably clear expectations as to what one is expected to have learned in the class and therefore what topics the discussion will cover, and at what depth. Another issue with whiteboarding interviews, specific to computer-related…

I could see notebooks being a useful way to both handout homework and projects as well as automatically check for correctness. A merge/code review tool could be used to annotate individual problems. Have you seen this done?

We have collaborative notebooks on iko.ai[0] which makes it easy either to pair program/troubleshoot on the same notebook, or for a teacher or instructor to review work.

We haven't added autograding yet as it is specific, but nbgrader[1][2] comes to mind.

- [0]: https://iko.ai/docs/notebook/#collaboration

- [1]: https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io

- [2]: https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io/en/stable/command_line_tools...

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#317

Post by searchableguy »

KMag wrote: post #214
searchableguy wrote: post #88

I curious if proactive measures to curb cheating like inthe parent post results in lesser people cheating outside of college environment. Any controlled studies? Are college students more ethical and honest than their non college counterparts?

> results in lesser people cheating outside of college environment What metric are you using to determine which people are "lesser"? Less educated? Less motivated? Less intelligent?

Sorry, I meant lesser = fewer.
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