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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#461

Post by seoaeu »

lock-the-spock wrote: post #414
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…

You somewhat seem to miss the wood for all the trees. The problem is the curve - grading on a curve is inherently unfair and irrelevant. Why should it affect your grade if others in the class cheat/struggle/..? Any teacher (and school system) worth their salt has by now dropped grading on a curve.

Maybe not a literal curve, but tons of instructors will compensate if an exam ends up being too hard (or too easy). Except the main way they tell whether the test difficulty was off is by looking at the grade distribution which obviously ends up skewed if some people cheat

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#462

Post by discardable_dan »

alexb_ wrote: post #338
yardstick wrote: post #311

I’m surprised at the number of people here justifying or supporting cheating. It’s not a victimless crime. Many university courses have minimum requirements to get into. Eg Engineering, Medicine, etc. Cheating to inflate your grades will result in people who didn’t cheat missing out on, or having less chance of, being accepted into their desired degree. Which they worked honestly for, without cheating.

Look at it this way. Cheating and not cheating has its own risks associated. And when the risk/reward of cheating vastly outperforms on average compared to the risk/reward of not cheating, every single rational actor will cheat. In fact, not cheating is a purely irrational thing to do given that you know these odds - it's based on a belief that your individual action will make any sort of meaningful difference. And w…

The process you are discussing is better summarized as: "a Nash equilibrium is not necessarily Pareto optimal, and vice versa." That's the issue with making it about ethics versus success: most successful people just aren't ethical. Entire companies are built around "cheating", and it is often seen as a good business strategy (e.g., Walmart running a store at a deficit to put competitors out of business).

Want people to stop cheating? Fix the incentives. Stop using a points evaluation system, and curves. The professor in this article managed to redesign his assignments to more or less make cheating difficult, and suddenly it was less of a problem. Imagine that!

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#463

Post by gault8121 »

dehrmann wrote: post #451

Not speaking to how to address cheating, but I found this interesting: > The content can be things like my old exams that someone uploaded without my permission But later... > And, sometimes as a professor who has access to online plagiarism tools like turnitin or safe-assign, you just want better tools. So students submitting "your" content (it was produced as part of employment, so it's almost certainly not actuall…

These are tools for teachers to catch plagiarism. He is saying he wants better tools to detect plagiarism because these don’t handle similarity matches well.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#464

Post by selfhifive »

The other side of the argument is that online classes have horrible engagement. Orders of magnitude worse than a normal class.

Virtual meetings also induce more fatigue in the participants than normal meetings (researched).

One or two off weeks can derail a whole semester. And professors themselves seem lost in absence of live feedback.

The schedules for live classes are rigid. While at college it is easy to follow them as you're in the same place, but schedules of individual homes vary widely and many students don't have the means to change them to suit the class timings.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#465

Post by derac »

grp000 wrote: post #396
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 is an issue that makes me feel conflicted in the case where there are already a lot of people cheating. If there's already a lot of people cheating, it doesn't make practical sense not to cheat, you're really just putting yourself at a big unfair disadvantage, and making an inefficient use of energy that could be used else where. It's unethical to join in the cheating, but a situation like that feels like there'…

option B, report the cheating

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#466

Post by Sirened »

stefan_ wrote: post #61
braingenious wrote: post #29

I feel so bad for whoever invited him into the chat. That must have been mortifying

That's the best part, the group invite was just posted in the official class chat. Those are some braindead cheaters.

I am also baffled that people were so brazen as to openly cheat in a group of 70+ people. Did they honestly believe that 70 people would all keep your secret and not try and get you failed out of spite? Like, I don't condone cheating but that's just shit ops.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#467

Post by derac »

silversmith wrote: post #428
failTide wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was taking an upper level marine biology course - the tests were VERY difficult, but they were take-home, do them at your leisure. I was cool with it. But walked into a coffee shop one day and found 75% of the class sharing answers and cheating anyway.

It seems very funny to me as a programmer, that what university calls "cheating" and threatens consequences, the industry calls "consulting with your colleagues" and encourages.

Perhaps because these aren't equivalent environments. In school you are expected to learn, not copy answers...

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#468

Post by mkl95 »

In my country these are the two main challenges students face:

- Storing and retrieving information (memorization). A process that is exhausting for the human brain but a database does effortlessly.

- Heavy computation, such as solving a difficult equation for a variable. Again something that is taxing for the human brain. A machine cannot always do it effortlessly but it will help in most cases.

Whenever I've observed cheating it's been because students had to solve problems in a human-unfriendly way, and education (lessons, problem sets) was subpar.

Honestly the industry is so different to school that it sometimes makes me think if higher education -as we understand it today- makes sense for people who don't want to become researchers.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#469

Post by lysium »

I find this f’d up at so many levels. The instructor seems to be more concerned about how to fill out forms to report a huge amount of her own class and come up with (surprising the student) countermeasures than about how to teach her students.

Such a huge amount of cheating is a clear indication that the whole system is flawed. This should have been the instructor’s top priority. Instead, she chose to fail her students. I was in pain while reading the article.

The moment she saw what she thinks was cheating, she should have confronted the students. And frankly: why shouldn’t the students help each other? Why did everybody have to learn in solitude?

She herself told the students that the midterm would consist of the same quiz questions. Of course you are trying to gather those along with the right answers.

Apparently, she was short on resources (no TA) and put the burden of that problem on the self regulation of her own students. I am ashamed that this calls itself academic teaching.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#470

Post by derac »

c3534l wrote: post #325

I've never understood people's attitudes towards cheating, which is perhaps why its so prevalent. People cheat at sports all the time and people just sort of accept it. When people cheat in school, we just kind of go "well, yeah, kids do that, I guess we'll give you a few warnings first." If someone is caught cheating how do I know they didn't cheat in previous classes, but got away with it? Do you really want to go…

This is why there should be zero tolerance for cheating. Immediate expulsion imo.
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