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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#371

Post by paulcole »

mywaifuismeta wrote: post #316
alexb_ wrote: post #287

I think a lot of people here are missing the root cause of why students cheat. College for the longest time has not had anything to do with learning for the VAST majority of students. You go to college because you have to have a degree to get a job. And you have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job. College is not about actually learning anything - it's a purely monetary investment, where you go into debt t…

We're going to college at the worst time in our lives. When I was in college I did exactly what you described. I didn't really cheat much (I remember just one time), but all I cared about was grades and getting a job. I couldn't have cared less about learning or retaining anything. And I didn't learn much. This strategy worked out well for me, but it was a huge waste of time. I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely…

> I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely love to go back to school to learn.

You love the idea of doing something you’re not doing now. I see further down in another comment, you dismissed the idea of learning from free online resources.

If you were in your 30s and in school, you’d love to be able to go off in the and work with your hands — or something else to distract yourself.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#373

Post by kubafu »

> If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself. — Immanuel Kant

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#374

Post by throwaway675309 »

User23 wrote: post #294
alexb_ wrote: post #287

I think a lot of people here are missing the root cause of why students cheat. College for the longest time has not had anything to do with learning for the VAST majority of students. You go to college because you have to have a degree to get a job. And you have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job. College is not about actually learning anything - it's a purely monetary investment, where you go into debt t…

And this is why tech companies stopped giving a shit about undergraduate degrees back in the 90s at the latest. There’s literally no signal to be had. None of the above is meant to deny the benefits of getting into the ivy league self-dealing club.

Since we're converting purely anecdotal data into blanket generalizations, I am happy to provide a counter point. Graduated in 2004, and most of the companies that I looked into listed a bachelors degree in computer science for entry level software engineering positions.

In several interviews we even went over some of the actual subject matter from some of the more interesting courses, and I was able to leverage algorithms from my genetic engineering undergrad work during some whiteboarding.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#375

Post by jl2718 »

willbudd wrote: post #240
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…

Becoming successful requires a stubborn conviction that you can make your own ideas a reality. Doing well on tests requires the ability to re-enact the ideas of others. They're both valuable skills of course, but they should be recognized as being distinct from each other; and measuring "intelligence" as some one-dimensional modality is a spectacular failure to do so, IMO. This idea is also to an extent analogous to…

I’ve known a fair number of very successful people, and the strongest theme among them is ignorance of the challenges they had committed themselves to, perhaps even a stubborn disability to heed warning that there is yet another layer of the onion after years of peeling. I really don’t think it’s some kind of dreamer attitude or deceptive nature; maybe just blissful ignorance. In most cases, it starts with a simple idea that everybody had, e.g. a CS50 class project that everybody else did, but they all saw the technical and legal and market and competitive challenges, and most importantly and predictably failed to answer the biggest question, “why me?”. Somehow the person with the worst answer to that question is always the one that fails to ask it. Despite this observation, none of this has changed the way I see things in my real life. I have read that the parasympathetic nervous system causes people to pay attention to details and become overwhelmed by risks. Chronic pain or fear or lack of sleep or overtraining or infection can do that. I recently had a lidocaine injection into a painful joint deformity, and the rest of that day I experienced astonishing positivity. So something tells me that it’s not really all that complicated, but simple things like happiness and good health and relationships are far more rare than we would expect, at least among those with curiosity for difficult subjects.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#376

Post by kamaal »

jmull wrote: post #64

I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this… You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place? Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses. (Sure, there are cases, but over time they quickly attenuate from “sometimes” to “never” a…

>>I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this…

Well its about pretending to be something you are not, people are all about this.

Cheating is really a habit and to a certain extent a lifestyle and not an event. Cheating continues all life, couldn't get promoted? people hop jobs, land a promotion/hike and then pretend they made progress. People wear expensive clothing to hide fat bellies, spend on vacations to take photographs to send out a message to their friends and family they are rich. People pretend to be a lot of things they are not- pretend to be healthy, wealthy, prosperous. If they actually cant be something they'd rather pretend to be.

Cheating exists as a natural consequence of people pretending to be something they are not, its one of the most primal sort of lies a person says to themselves. This is so easy to do, and so easy to convince yourself to be like this- you do this for a while, it will come to you naturally.

>>You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place?

Same thing with buying expensive gym memberships just to go post selfies, or buying books and not reading them.

>>Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses.

Precisely, pretty one no one cares about anything at all so you might as well make genuine progress by putting in the work. In these days when no one remembers their parent's date of birth, who bothers themselves remembering anything about the other person at all.

In short stop lying, more importantly stop lying to yourself. Make genuine progress.

Do not get high on the very dope you are selling.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#377

Post by throwaway675309 »

geraldwhen wrote: post #59
pvg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing is that college is voluntary You voluntarily agree to abide by the academic integrity rules. If you don't want to do that, you can voluntarily go to a different institution with different rules and standards. The goal of the place is learning not pointscoring and cheating undermines that.

The goal of college is to receive a degree to unlock job postings. I did not go to college to “learn”, and I’m not sure I know anyone who did.

From a purely depressingly pragmatic perspective, yes you are correct. But for me it was an opportunity to be immersed in a world of abstract knowledge and the exchange of ideas - an experience that I would not trade for anything.

It is depressing when I hear from people otherwise, I can't imagine missing out on the joy of learning.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#378

Post by MattGaiser »

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…

Cheaters by definition are not interested in fair, so this argument will not convince any of them.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#379

Post by Cd00d »

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…

> If people cheat, it screws up the fairness

I think it's strange to think cheaters are anything other than selfish. To make an altruistic appeal seems misguided.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#380

Post by eyelidlessness »

> 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 from the quizzes.

So… your students were… studying? This isn’t cheating. There’s more in the article that clearly frames these quizzes as learning reinforcement and permissive in how the students take them. The students were doing what was intended: studying the material and preparing for the exam that matters. Good for them. Shame it got missed in the zealous pursuit of a pervasive cheating racket.

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