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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#691

Post by Fiahil »

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…

> The problem does not go away with a better course but is - based on your anecdote and not from the presumably better view of the TAs - lessened somewhat.

I was a TA in France, and did a bit of TA-ing unofficially in the US. So, my view is based on both experience, TA and Student.

While there was some cheating happening on both sides, it was practically non-existent in France after a few weeks of school. The abilities required to cheat and get away with it were extremely hard to master, and usually would carry much more risks than just complete the exercise. Successful cheating were, sometimes, rewarded if the problem solved was worthy enough. You could even get clearance from the professor in advance (not for copying code from StackOverflow, of course, but rather for using forbidden functions or libraries).

Finally, most important projects were done in groups of 2 to 5-6. Individual students putting a group at risk deliberately, would get caught extremely easily and carry a far worse sentence than just a bad grade: they would be excluded from other students groups and left to do their projects alone or with dropouts students. Finding back you way after this is very very difficult.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#692

Post by Ygg2 »

c048 wrote: post #683
DeathArrow wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never gave a fuck about grades. For some courses I had below average marks, for others I was the best. I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work and how I can solve problems and how, beginning with one ideea I can extend it or come up with an entirely different idea. And I know I will get downvoted for saying this, but for me, programming without having a solid understanding of CS backgroun…

Because most of what is needed out there doesn't require an equivalent of a doctor's degree. The truth is, is that programming languages themselves have evolved far enough that knowing exactly what's running underneath the hood isn't needed anymore, outside of niche specialist cases. Most people don't even need to worry about seeing a single 'index out of range' issue, or worry about CPU cycles. And it's only going t…

> Yes, you need to use the correct formula for the cement you use, but figuring out that formula has already happened.

I got serious doubts about this. It seems we are constantly changing the cement formula.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#693

Post by culopatin »

franciscop wrote: post #627
DeathArrow wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never gave a fuck about grades. For some courses I had below average marks, for others I was the best. I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work and how I can solve problems and how, beginning with one ideea I can extend it or come up with an entirely different idea. And I know I will get downvoted for saying this, but for me, programming without having a solid understanding of CS backgroun…

In retrospective now I know that I unconsciously sabotaged myself, I knew the best way to pass subjects was to have a basic understanding of the theory and then practice a lot of exam question examples, but I just couldn't get myself to do that until I had in fact understood the theory in depth. That led to my grades ending up exactly average, but also at one point I challenged myself and got the highest marks in the…

Ha, this led me to fail school the first time I tried it. Now 10 years later I’m back in school with a 4.0 because I’ve learned to navigate the system and I know what the school wants. I still balance diving deep into what I’m interested in, but I don’t let it get in the way of the grind.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#694

Post by lr4444lr »

moffkalast wrote: post #634
DeathArrow wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never gave a fuck about grades. For some courses I had below average marks, for others I was the best. I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work and how I can solve problems and how, beginning with one ideea I can extend it or come up with an entirely different idea. And I know I will get downvoted for saying this, but for me, programming without having a solid understanding of CS backgroun…

Well it's probably down to the harm done if the standards are lowered vs. the gain. Incompetent doctor? People die. Incompetent chemist? People die, or at least there's substantial material damage. When it comes to mathematicians and physicists they only ever have any real impact when they roll up their sleeves, open matlab or R and turn their theoretical work into something practical. Does that make them programmers…

Has more to do with credentialing bodies holding legal power over who can practice. If you masquerade as a pediatrician and tell every parent their kid needs an hour of exercise and fruits and vegetables, just letting the nurse give the injections, you'll probably do fine in 99999/100000 cases. But that one time you'll miss childhood leukemia because you don't know what you don't know. Likewise, you write SQL injection code and for maybe 99999/100000 visitors you'll be fine. Until the first malicious bot destroys your company's primary DB and you lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in data, and trash your reputation for getting future contracts due to data security.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#695

Post by Fiahil »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #662
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…

Always a pleasure to see a fellow Epitech alumni on HN!

Aye! We're quite a few ;)

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#696

Post by drnonsense42 »

I’m guessing this was an introductory course? Every college stuffs kids into courses they have no interest in. Society pressures them into college in the first place. Most introductory courses, perhaps not this one but especially in liberal arts, involve not much beyond agreeing with the professor’s personal opinions presented as fact to get an A. And, well, people like to cheat to get ahead, mooch off the government, etc. Today is probably worse than other periods; generations in the US are on a steep downhill slope, and academia and educators in general seem increasingly deranged. Convincing others this is a solvable problem sounds like a great way to get money.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#697

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

rout39574 wrote: post #173
rossdavidh wrote: post #118

So I think the teacher missed the main point of his own essay: "The argument was that chat groups have become indispensable tools for students taking courses online during the pandemic. The essay detailed all of the useful info passed around in chats. I totally agreed with this point....Their strategy was to leave the chat before every quiz and midterm so that they couldn’t be there for the cheating. Then they rejoin…

I don't think your interpretation is supported: it's not that the course was "too hard" without cheating, the cheating began at the outset.

Which is one of the most interesting takeaways for me. What this guy was dealing with was a cultural problem - a toxic culture had developed in the temporary group/space.

His goal is clearly stated: for people to honestly connect with the course material. That's hard if a group like this is poisoned with cynicism. My thought here is how these types of messaging groups spaces have become an incredibly important aspect of the educational experience and beyond. I think about all the 'toxic' cultures in places I have been in and how they usually revolve around people trading information and socializing.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#698

Post by JohnBooty »

kqr wrote: post #412
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…

> it screws up the class curve This is your problem right here. There is no rational argument for grading people on a class curve. That just makes the class a lottery and incentivises sabotaging for others to get an upper hand yourself.

    There is no rational argument for grading people on a class curve
It's an imperfect solution for a legitimate problem.

The counterargument is that it would be rare for a prof/teacher to absolutely nail the correct difficulty for an exam.

If they feel that their students' average exam grade fails to accurately reflect how well the class is learning the material, then some kind of adjustment makes sense... imagine a scenario where you have a classroom full of motivated and engaged students who are showing good understanding of the material, and yet the average exam score is 60%. This strongly suggests professor/teacher has erred and an adjustment is in order so that the scores better reflect actual mastery of the material.

There are of course also a lot of situations where grading on a curve is blatantly unfair and/or simply makes no sense.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#699

Post by peter_retief »

I remember that cheating was considered very serious and anyone caught would be expelled.

Surely the reputation and integrity of the institution comes before the rights of a dishonest person.

Perhaps more effort should be in catching the cheats and removing them?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#700

Post by kqr »

JohnBooty wrote: post #698
kqr wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it screws up the class curve This is your problem right here. There is no rational argument for grading people on a class curve. That just makes the class a lottery and incentivises sabotaging for others to get an upper hand yourself.

There is no rational argument for grading people on a class curve It's an imperfect solution for a legitimate problem. The counterargument is that it would be rare for a prof/teacher to absolutely nail the correct difficulty for an exam. If they feel that their students' average exam grade fails to accurately reflect how well the class is learning the material, then some kind of adjustment makes sense... imagine a sc…

This is why I'm generally against grades with more than three levels.

I would like to see a system where almost all (something like 99 %?) of students just plain "pass". Then we have the lower statistical anomalies (lowest 0.5 %) and upper statistical anomalies (highest 0.5 %) which fail and get an "excellence" type grade.

If the average score is too low or too high, that doesn't mean more students fail or perform excellently, that just means the teacher needs to recalibrate.

(Of course, these percentiles ought to be measured over as inclusive a reference class as practical. Ideally across schools and years simultaneously.)

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