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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#711

Post by scotty79 »

hnarn wrote: post #525

Threads like these are always frustrating, because as usual people (programmers in this case) freely air their opinions on how schools are broken with phrases like “we need to fix the system”. As someone who studied pedagogy for years and quit due to an immense frustration with exactly this — how broken the system is — I would encourage you to entertain the thought that maybe, you as a person who is almost in all cas…

> do not have a good understanding of how exactly this system should be fixed, and that it’s not broken for fun but because there are some very difficult unresolved issues

I think the reason for feeling of competence that prompts so many people to share their opinions on the matter is that nearly all of us went through this broken system at some point in our lives and our future lives literally depended not so much of what was taught but what was written down as the result of the teaching.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#712

Post by necovek »

raegis wrote: post #350
necovek wrote: post #3

Quite a read, indeed. As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others. Perhaps that's why I didn't care? Another thing is that college is voluntary, and everyone takes the courses for some perceived gain. If it's just a diploma with high GPA, I let them be. T…

> As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others. Years ago a few students in my class were complaining about cheaters. They were frustrated, and one even accused me of missing "obvious" cheaters. It was embarrassing for me, and brought down morale in the cl…

Oh, it sure does matter. Like it matters to most every student (teenage or college) how they are perceived by their most popular peers. I.e. it's a human trait to care about things that should not really bother us.

What I am saying is that it shouldn't.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#714

Post by eruci »

OK. This is a long slog, but I skimmed and got the gist.

There must be a technical solution to the cheating problem.

Many years ago I taught an intro to programming course. For the grading I built a randomized online test - students would have one hour to answer a number of programming questions using a terminal in the computer lab, and would get their grade as the test progressed with the final grade after the last question. It worked both at freeing up my time for grading, and eliminating cheating.

Automated randomized testing in all types of classes (not just an intro class where this task is much simpler) would go a long way towards solving the cheating problem.

There, a problem for all you to solve.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#715

Post by scotty79 »

bambax wrote: post #666
hnarn wrote: post #525

Threads like these are always frustrating, because as usual people (programmers in this case) freely air their opinions on how schools are broken with phrases like “we need to fix the system”. As someone who studied pedagogy for years and quit due to an immense frustration with exactly this — how broken the system is — I would encourage you to entertain the thought that maybe, you as a person who is almost in all cas…

> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it? When I was in school, many moons ago (in France) there were no quizzes. Zero. "Tests" were either dissertations (for topics such as literature, history, etc.) or problems. Everything was done in class, in longhand. There were no good or bad answers, even in math class, because what was evaluated was the ability to describe the problem, the…

> "Cheating" was very difficult; copying what another student was writing was hard and not very effective, because unless you could reproduce their whole argument, just taking a sentence or two would not make sense.

In high school we often were given two (or more) sets of problems so we can't copy off each other because people sitting one sit away from each other have different sets.

I remember at least one test where I wrote down problems from both sets (they were verbally dictated by the teacher at the beginning of the test). Then I just solved both and passed the solution to his problems to the classmate sitting behind me (I was asked for this ahead of time by him).

In Poland cheating is frowned upon by teachers and they tried to catch the cheaters but there were no formal systems in place to report or excessively punished cheating (like in USA).

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#717

Post by scotty79 »

adastra22 wrote: post #655
AdamH12113 wrote: post #431

>I knew that my students wanted a second chance, I wasn’t sure how many of them would take it. Part of completing the academic integrity assignment was a tacit admission of cheating, and some students seemed set on not admitting to anything. So, I was thrilled when I received the first completed academic integrity assignment. >What did the student have to say? There were many full sentences and as I read them I got t…

These people don't know how to do their own work, full stop. I've encountered the type before. They literally wouldn't know what to do.

What's interesting is those people are not necessarily maladapted to their future adult work lives.

In some lines of work finding the correct stuff to use for a task is way more important than ability to create it yourself from scratch.

Finding the plug that fits the given socket vs building the plug from scratch.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#718

Post by nicolas_t »

hnarn wrote: post #525

Threads like these are always frustrating, because as usual people (programmers in this case) freely air their opinions on how schools are broken with phrases like “we need to fix the system”. As someone who studied pedagogy for years and quit due to an immense frustration with exactly this — how broken the system is — I would encourage you to entertain the thought that maybe, you as a person who is almost in all cas…

> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?

I have experienced good tests and bad tests. I studied in France, tests were open book with no multiple choice questions, only problems to solve. This approach scales badly and is a lot of work for the professor grading but it measures knowledge.

The problems were long, had few questions besides describing the problem and maybe a few questions to guide the student along the path to solving it. We had either 3 or 4 hours to solve those problems.

Those tests worked very well. I'd come out from one of those tests having often learned something new.

I was an exchange student in the US, tests involved multiple choice questions, they were closed books with questions around rote memory. While I did feel that some of the education in the US was valuable and interesting, I hated those tests, they didn't correlate as much with comprehension of the subject matter and more with learning facts that are more or less tangentially related to the subject matter. I still remember in a computer graphics tests being shocked by being asked when Opengl was first released, which companies were involved and other completely useless knowledge.

What's interesting to me is that there's much less opportunities to cheat with the former tests while the later tests are pretty much made for cheating. So, imho cheating is a symptom of bad tests.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#720

Post by raverbashing »

eruci wrote: post #714

OK. This is a long slog, but I skimmed and got the gist. There must be a technical solution to the cheating problem. Many years ago I taught an intro to programming course. For the grading I built a randomized online test - students would have one hour to answer a number of programming questions using a terminal in the computer lab, and would get their grade as the test progressed with the final grade after the last…

Heh, I wonder if the quizzes just shuffled the questions between students, how many would get it wrong because their option A) was other people's option B)
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