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Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

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Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#71

Post by kevindong »

The problem is that not all math problems are worth doing. For instance, when I took Calculus 2/3, some of the homework problems weren't usually hard per se, they were just arduously long. And honestly not really worth doing by hand. If I misplaced a single number and didn't realize it immediately, I would spend the next 10 minutes solving an integral that had no use, plugging it into Webassign for it to tell me I'm wrong, backtrack until I find my issue, and solve the corrected integral. I would usually do this at least once per problem (but usually more like two or three times).

So by the end of the course, I would just figure out the integral (or rather, the triple integral), plug it into Wolfram, plug the outputted answer into Webassign, and if the answer was wrong I'd backtrack until eventually the answer that Wolfram outputs is correct. At which point I'd solve the integral by hand.

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There was one time when the homework problem asked me to find the intercept of this obscenely complex trigonometric equation. I tried for a solid half hour and couldn't solve it, so I went to the math help room to ask the TAs for help. I ended up stumping three of the TAs. A few days later, I went back to see if they had figured it out. Turns out they hadn't. They said we should just use Wolfram to get the answer.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#72

Post by adamnemecek »

yequalsx wrote: post #58
adamnemecek wrote: post #11

Playing the world's saddest song on the world's smallest violin there Denise Garcia. How about maybe updating your curriculum for the 3rd millennium. Nah, that would be to much work, complaining in wired is much more productive. The best part is that people in the school administration might do something like blacklisting Wolfram Alpha on computers in the school library and feel like they've dealt successfully with t…

Have you tried teaching calculus where everyone gets to use Wolfram Alpha and/or Mathematica? I did for three years. I discovered that the students really don't understand the concepts and more importantly don't want to. They just want to mimic problem types. They don't want to understand the why. Plug and chug is their true desire. Using the computer exposes right away if a student understands the concepts. You can'…

> I discovered that the students really don't understand the concepts and more importantly don't want to.

The problem is that you are forcing people who don't care about it to learn it. Ofc they'll take shortcuts.

> Plug and chug is their true desire.

I mean, most tests are very plug and chug so it's no surprise.

Also note that it might be unreasonable to expect students who never used these tools to use them for the right purpose. Mathematica is a complex tool but I can't imagine that much class time is dedicated to the tool itself.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#73

Post by vlasev »

Rjevski wrote: post #50

Wolfram Alpha isn't the issue. The issue is that we're grading students on an arbitrary and meaningless metric, instead of the end result. As an employer, if I hire you to do a task, let's say build a toaster, I couldn't care less about how you achieved that - as long as I've got my toaster and it can help me grow my toast-making business I'm happy. Education should work the same.

Plug and chug with Wolfram Alpha is very similar to plug and chug Stack Exchange answers in your code base.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#74

Post by yequalsx »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #61
yequalsx wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried teaching calculus where everyone gets to use Wolfram Alpha and/or Mathematica? I did for three years. I discovered that the students really don't understand the concepts and more importantly don't want to. They just want to mimic problem types. They don't want to understand the why. Plug and chug is their true desire. Using the computer exposes right away if a student understands the concepts. You can'…

Sounds like Mathematica is the way to go then? Because it turned out students who could do the problems. The 'old paradigm' leaves most behind, which serves no one.

Students could not do the computer based problems. Save for a few. More students get through with the old paradigm.

Old paradigm problem. Here is f, using the definition of derivative find f'.

New paradigm problem. Here is f. Here is a Mathematica function defining f(x+h) - f(x) divided by h. Graph this function for appropriate values of x and h to show whether or not f is differentiable at 2.

The old paradigm problem you just proceed as in all the examples. In the new problem they get intimidated because it involves using a computer and not a graphing calculator. They don't understand that you keep x fixed at 2 and vary h around 0. When they start the problem they give nonsensical input to the computer, get nonsensical output and promptly blame the stupid program.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#75

Post by opaque »

SteveCoast wrote: post #27

When I was 18, back in 1999, I had an internship at WRI (Wolfram Research) in Illinois. I'd applied armed only with a library copy of the Mathematica book, so they sent me a CD with Mathematica on it. I made some demo things and got a slot, and flew to Champaign. I worked on polyhedra for a summer, writing code that could unroll a polyhedral model to its 2D net. Find the volume, the number of faces and all kinds of s…

> working with what I still think is one of, if not the, best language ever.

Really? Mathematica is amazing and uncontested for symbolic algebra, but writing anything more than a notebook/paper is a nightmare. In built stuff is good, but functions you have to define yourself instantly become an incomprehensible mess of parentheses. Leaving aside the fact that it's a propriety language and the many flaws of its eponymous founder.

I long for the day SymPy or similar gets good enough that we can dispense with it.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#76

Post by captain_clam »

In my two semesters of college math, I've gathered that the faculty has something of a phobia to, if not wolfram in particular, students' access to help outside of the department.

Homework problems were oftentimes deliberately difficult, and attending tutoring/office hours was almost certainly necessary for most students to master the material.

I got my hands on an instructor's manual of the textbook, and it was a tremendous boon for my mastery of the topics. By having immediate access to the solutions of difficult problems, I was able to comprehend how to approach problems of that type, and therefore could solve more difficult but similar examples in the future. The cycle of attempt/fail/check-solution/repeat was really effective. Waiting for the instructor's office hours or the availability of tutors would have made this process, if not impossible, incredibly inefficient.

Do any math educators have any insight to this? Is this math department clinging to an antiquated curriculum in which faculty is something of a gate-keeper to knowledge? Is there a good reason for their distaste for 'going around' them?

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#77

Post by mnarayan01 »

The are many things which are difficult to measure directly, and thus people tend to use indirect measurements instead; school-learned math is full of such things. Consider a fairly simple example: "What is the factorial of a number?"

Determining whether a student knows this is going to take a bit of work (particularly if they lack a formal way to specify it e.g. Pi notation or even a programming language), but we might approximate it by instead asking "What is the factorial of 5?" Now obviously this is not a perfect measure of what we're actually looking for even in the absence of calculators (e.g. someone might memorize 5! = 120), but it's easy to evaluate and is probably a decent proxy in the absence of calculators.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#78

Post by throwawayjava »

deft wrote: post #65

Today I learned you can cheat on homework. So apparently giving up and having the wrong answers (or no answers at all) is what professors would prefer. Cool :)

> So apparently giving up and having the wrong answers (or no answers at all) is what professors would prefer. Cool :)

It's much easier to correct known unknowns than unknown unknowns.

The best advice I was ever given as a student was "Pretend like you'll get an automatic A on your report card and treat your grades as a feedback mechanism for figuring out what you do and do not understand. Just focus on learning." As a simple corollary, cheating is kinda silly.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#79

Post by rflrob »

throwawayjava wrote: post #46
wodenokoto wrote: post #6

It is not cheating. It is leveling the playing field. Some students will inevitably have access to tutors or parents who can give them the full answer. With wolfram|Alpha all students have access to this. What this really show is that homework isn't the best tool for gauging student prowess.

> It is not cheating. It is leveling the playing field. This is not even remotely true. I think you seriously under-estimate the value of parents/tutors. Students with tutors/parents will not just get the right answer. They will also be led to the right answer, over and over, and told what they need to practice in order to improve. Explanations will be tailored to their learning style. So they get direct help on assi…

While W|A doesn't come close to making the field level, I think there's an argument to be made that it makes the field more level than it was. The perfect being the enemy of the good...

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#80

Post by nilkn »

res0nat0r wrote: post #2

You may cheat all you want on your homework, but if calculus tests are like they were when I was in college, taking your exam with no notes or calculator, if you've only cut and pasted from Wolfram Alpha all semester is going to lead you to getting an F in the course.

I was a math major in college only a few years ago, and lower-level courses tended to concentrate most of the grade in exams for this reason. The exams were always pencil-and-paper only, with no resources of any kind allowed. In upper-level classes, the trend often shifted, with most or even all of the grade coming from problem sets. Some classes didn't even have exams. But this is because the material had become entirely proof-based. Referencing books was not only allowed but encouraged.
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