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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#41

Post by simonsarris »

> Aside from all the ways that I can be empathetic, there was a lot of evidence in the chat that students were blowing off the course and making a mockery of the whole thing. But, the brash language in the chat could also be covering up difficult issues students were facing in their lives that were preventing them from committing to their studies.

This author really does not want to confront some plain truths about his students and academia as it exists today.

> My understanding is that students who collect multiple faculty action reports like baseball cards may cease to be continuing students at my institution.

I suspect the institution doesn't give a good goddamn as long as the students wounds are self-inflected and their checks still clear.

> Even the student who sent 15 emails of lies got a second chance.

In a strange way, this article is really a character study about the author, and not at all about cheating. The author is deeply interested in procedure and drama, which makes for amusing storytelling, like a detective that's trying to find a murderer while constantly trying to convince himself that whoever he was, he didn't really mean it.

It is interesting how often he is attempting to detect cheating and plagiarism, even writing his own R scripts, and then says

> TBH, I’m so over trying to deter my students from cheating. There are so many ways I could lock down my courses. Not interested. If real life was about being monitored by proctoring software that spies on you at home and forces you to test under duress, it would be a sad real life.

But then continues attempting plagiarism detection for the rest of the semester, and the next! Maybe he considers it separate from cheating. Slightly baffled by all his behavior. He is quite kind, and expending extraordinary effort over students who are adamant about expending none at all.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#42

Post by TulliusCicero »

rockzom wrote: post #37

So you join the chat, say nothing for months, and then pull the rug out from under your students? If a professor joined a group chat, without any corrections to what was being shared, "no news is good news" would be the assumption. Trying to read this was embarrassing.

After leaving the mormon church, I lost much of the attitudes that had been ingrained in me there, but one thing I didn't lose was a hatred for cheating.

> So you join the chat, say nothing for months, and then pull the rug out from under your students?

They pulled the rug out from themselves. Don't wanna fail? Then don't cheat.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#43

Post by bpodgursky »

nr2x wrote: post #5

Exams are the mark of a lazy instructor who doesn’t want to design appropriately challenging assignments, as the author says: “I hadn’t fully prepped the class”.

When I see statements like this I know they are by people who have never actually tried to teach a class.

What you are describing in an incredibly labor-intensive process. If you want to restructure education so no teacher ever has more than 8 students and 2 classes a semester (and tuition is $100k/yr)... maybe you can make this work.

In the real world, where a teacher has 3 sections of 30 students, "just make exciting and engaging material!" is honestly an asinine statement. You can't spend 2 hours evaluating each student's homework assignment.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#44

Post by voidfunc »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #20
voidfunc wrote: post #7

Not surprised. Just about everyone performs some amount or cheating in high school and college. Really if anything these places are teaching you not to get caught. To be honest I think academic integrity policies are stupid. Colleges administrators are living in a pretend world that doesn’t exist where they think the kids are there because they care and dont just want the piece of paper they are paying 200K for so th…

Do you mean that you're incredibly past careing about arbitrary constraints on someone's ability to solve a problem? If there is a policeman, the onus of enforcement lies on the policeman. The teacher plays this role by giving a grade. Any teacher that allows cheating is encouraging it.

Im tired of the overtop concern about it and the heavy-handed punishment I have seen for it mostly. Im also just not a fan of the entire academic system which puts people in massive debt (often because of parent/social pressure) that has surprised pikachu face when they cheat so they can pay off that debt.

The system is absolutely fucked.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#45

Post by memling »

realitysballs wrote: post #4

I hate to be a cynic here but I feel like education should be engineered in a manner that either : (A) assumes cheating will take place whenever possible and create curriculum , assignments, quizzes and exams with this in mind. (B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest.

> (B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest.

When I was in college, the rule in our department was that if you failed the final, you failed the course.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#46

Post by dotnet00 »

I've heard a lot of the same from the professors I'm close to, even when taking significant measures to prevent or reduce the incentive to cheat (like making the exam less important, making it open internet but no communication or using that annoyingly intrusive lockdown browser). Even when having the ability to look things up on the internet, there were cases of it being relatively obvious when people were communicating (not that I know how).

Many of them just ended up cancelling the results for those exams outright.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#47

Post by alar44 »

colechristensen wrote: post #12
realitysballs wrote: post #4

I hate to be a cynic here but I feel like education should be engineered in a manner that either : (A) assumes cheating will take place whenever possible and create curriculum , assignments, quizzes and exams with this in mind. (B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest.

Universities shouldn’t be credential factories. Get rid of grading and nobody cheats. Have a separate entity do the verification or make graduation more like PhD defense.

I'd argue that's exactly what they're for.

If it's for "pure" education or something with no grades, it's just a glorified library that sells expensive books.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#48

Post by dleslie »

usednet wrote: post #32

The best class I ever took in uni had 3 examinations taken by all students simultaneously, with variations between each exam making cheating nearly impossible. There was no attendance taken, all course materials were posted online, and the only grading for the entire class was the exams. I showed up to 2 classes the entire semester yet still learned all of the material and obtained an A. At least for certain STEM cla…

I had a few classes like that, decades ago; and I agree that they were the best in terms of curbing cheating. Stressful as all hell for those with anxiety issues, but the format also made some honors students become exposed for the frauds they were.

In retrospect, I think the format is still the best but I would remove the narrow time limit. Give the students a whole day to try; and so not artificially filter out those with anxiety.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#49

Post by frellus »

"In at least 150 words, demonstrate your understanding of what it means to behave according to a high standard of personal and academic integrity" -- should have made that 2000 words, minimum.

Great write-up, more than fair teacher who wants only what's best for their students.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#50

Post by sharkweek »

realitysballs wrote: post #4

I hate to be a cynic here but I feel like education should be engineered in a manner that either : (A) assumes cheating will take place whenever possible and create curriculum , assignments, quizzes and exams with this in mind. (B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest.

Vivid memories of my high school literature teacher reading Cliff’s Notes and ensuring her tests covered things not discussed in the notes…
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