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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#801

Post by almenon »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #584
bruce511 wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it? This is what makes the problem intractable. Measuring knowledge takes time, lots of time, by a skilled person. That does not scale. Since we need (want) scale we necessarily have to use (ever weaker) proxies for measurement. And if there's one thing we do know, you get exactly what you measure for. Hence, the system is not broken - it's wo…

In the case of testing, it very much can scale. Tests need to be based on long form questions that test comprehensive knowledge. Open book, Open notes, and hell even open-collaboration up to some limit. If a test is already graded on partial credit, which in the field of engineering at least most are, then it's no harder to grade than an equivalent test that has less but longer questions. This obviously doesn't trans…

Can you expand on why splitting up the class would help? I didn't quite get that part.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#802

Post by spicyusername »

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…

> How broken of a person do you have to be to reflexively cheat on a simple assignment intended to give you a second chance after you’ve been caught cheating already?

My opinion is that most people only go to college these days because they perceive it as the only path to a good paying job, not because they are terribly interested in the material.

Given that assumption, it's easy for me to understand why people would try to minimize the amount of work they have to do for something they didn't want in the first place.

They are mostly just there for the "job ticket".

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#803

Post by Spooky23 »

readme wrote: post #113
PheonixPharts wrote: post #101

> There were 100+ students in the class > I was suffering technical difficulties while giving online lectures. > It was extremely demoralizing to teach to a class that was blatantly cheating the entire time. How demoralizing do you think it is to be paying a fair bit of money (or more likely taking on a fair bit of debt) to be just 1 of 100+ students in a poorly functioning online class? To be clear, I'm not blaming…

you're radicalized against the system the system is not rigged, going to college at all is a privilege that many don't get i can't imagine trying to justify cheating with this logic while simultaneously there are more honorable people scavenging their lunch from the trash i get it though, online school that resulted from covid is some of the worst instruction. fortunately that's coming to an end

I’m went to school at a time where everything was curved.

In that environment, you had to fight for every GPA point and were at a disadvantage of you were a stickler for academic integrity. In a 500 person lecture, ~25 were getting a 4. It’s easy to be on a high horse at an Ivy school, where people who don’t show get gentleman’s Cs and the average GPA is like a 3.6.

Obviously this situation in the article wasn’t that. But I think the professor did a good job of empathizing with the students and accepting that there are varying types of motivations.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#804

Post by sanderjd »

How is this kind of "cheating" any different than study groups? When I was in school we would have small study groups where we would collaborate on figuring out homework answers. Maybe this was also cheating, but I don't think so; it was among the most enriching experiences in school and certainly a hell of a lot more like the working world than it would be to toil in solitary silence.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#805

Post by randusername »

I haven't seen anyone mention grade inflation yet, which I've always thought was deeply related to cheating. Obviously undergraduate GPA is a useful metric for aspiring academics, but I don't understand why everyone else is encouraged to care so much about it. I would rather our undergraduate institutions acknowledge that most students are busy learning a variety of lessons inside and outside the classroom and present those students with honorable paths to lesser commitment. Maybe systems split along mastery, competence, and familiarity (and failure). A world where it is perfectly normal for a future web dev to phone it in on a surface-level track for algorithms, but a future civil engineer is completing oral exams in statics to prove mastery.

Nobody _wants_ to cheat. Personally I really regret all the shenanigans I pulled in college to clear hurdles when I felt I had no other option. I wish I would have spoken more frankly with the professor and worked out some way to write some papers or do a project for an honest (and interesting!) C rather than keep killing myself gaming the problem sets for the B+ that was expected of me in classes I wasn't a good fit for.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#806

Post by nonrandomstring »

themantalope wrote: post #689
nonrandomstring wrote: post #661

This thread, more than any I have read on Hacker News shows the greatest variation of opinion, and the least ability for us to have common agreement upon terms, normative behaviours, standards of judgement or goals. Sadly, education really is a mess. I think it reflects the schisms within wider society. After 30 years in and out of "academia" I am exasperated and despondent at the state of affairs and what I consider…

I'm curious, what changes in governance and funding to higher ed institutions would you change? What did you teach/study?

Thanks for asking. I am an international visiting professor of computer science (specialising in DSP, signals and systems). I'd submit that's given me a fairly wide experience of higher education at least around the north-western hemisphere over three decades. Enough that I write regular and quite popular features for the Times. Any sincere answer is surely the contents of at least one whole book, so my response here would disappoint you. Instead please read my more positive commentary here [1] and here [2].

[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/author/andy-farnell

[2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/authors/andy-far...

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#807

Post by andai »

themantalope wrote: post #689
nonrandomstring wrote: post #661

This thread, more than any I have read on Hacker News shows the greatest variation of opinion, and the least ability for us to have common agreement upon terms, normative behaviours, standards of judgement or goals. Sadly, education really is a mess. I think it reflects the schisms within wider society. After 30 years in and out of "academia" I am exasperated and despondent at the state of affairs and what I consider…

I'm curious, what changes in governance and funding to higher ed institutions would you change? What did you teach/study?

Also, how would that impact cheating? I don't see the connection.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#808

Post by danpalmer »

sanderjd wrote: post #804

How is this kind of "cheating" any different than study groups? When I was in school we would have small study groups where we would collaborate on figuring out homework answers. Maybe this was also cheating, but I don't think so; it was among the most enriching experiences in school and certainly a hell of a lot more like the working world than it would be to toil in solitary silence.

There's a big difference between a discussion between a few people to figure out an answer that they all understand, and posting the answer to a multiple choice question directly to the whole class.

To use the author's measuring stick, study groups typically engage with the course material. Learning that the answer to question 5 is "B" is not engagement.

Also, anecdotally, the study groups I was a part of were almost all based around figuring out answers to publicly available past exam papers, _not_ marked assignments. I think the sharing of answers (vs understanding) would have felt quite wrong to those of us involved.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#809

Post by jimmaswell »

Way too soft. I went through all of college without participating in anything like that, and you know why? I'm not a scumbag parasite. These rotten apples should have been filtered out of the system long ago. Their place in society is shoveling manure, not wasting valuable space in higher education.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#810

Post by 323 »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #661

This thread, more than any I have read on Hacker News shows the greatest variation of opinion, and the least ability for us to have common agreement upon terms, normative behaviours, standards of judgement or goals. Sadly, education really is a mess. I think it reflects the schisms within wider society. After 30 years in and out of "academia" I am exasperated and despondent at the state of affairs and what I consider…

Kids cheating seems to be an universal behavior, it happens in very different educational systems (US, Europe, Eastern Europe).

I remember when I was a student, cheating didn't seem that much of a crime, to me, or to my peers. We mostly understood that if you cheat you might (or not) have problems later because you just basically wasted time in that course. So it was an assumed risk.

It feels to me that the fight against cheating is basically fighting against (kids) human nature.

Also, snitching on cheaters was unthinkable. And not because of retaliation, but it just felt like very scummy behavior. In a way, like how criminal law in most places doesn't require family members to snitch on other family members who committed a crime.

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