My students cheated... a lot

What do they do with the information? The threshold in most courses is to be able to pass the next course. The students who won't do that, tend to drop out, or switch to an easier major, of which there are many.

Teachers do tend to change their content and methods if a large number of students are failing exams, but I think it's based more on a hunch, than on hoping that test scores will yield analytical quality data. This is the sense I get from talking to a lot of teachers. My only teaching experience was one semester at a big ten university, a long time ago.

> Finally, most important projects were done in groups of 2 to 5-6

Much less reason to cheat in group work too. It's much easier to just put in minimal effort and let someone else in the group do the work. That's just another form of cheating.

In Germany we say "Team" in teamwork is an acronym for "Toll Ein Anderer Machts" (great someone else does the work) and especially in university there is a lot of truth to it. Especially so when there is a big difference in motivation in regards to the final grade.

Not to say there aren't a lot of upsides to group work. But stopping people that don't wanna engage with the subject isn't one of them.

> Please consider the the students perspective. I, myself, went through academia with a one single goal - to obtain a piece of paper for future employment reasons, which I endured, with gritted teeth > > I have no idea how it works on your country of residence, but I had a curriculum that consisted of about 20% of classes, of absolute irrelevancy to my primary field of study. I have no regrets cheating on those classes, just to get it over with.

The point of academia isn't to prepare you for your future profession. It's not supposed to teach you the on-the-job skills. It's about learning to learn, about getting equipped with a toolset to tackle novel problems and give a broad theoretical basis for that in your field of study. Also to demonstrate you can learn and work through a subject that's not (or you think is not) directly relevant for you.

That and more are the qualities future employers attribute to that piece of paper and letting cheating slide is certainly not pragmatic.

Interesting proposal.

Let's say this was formalized as follows:

Each student would be encouraged to serve as mentor for up to 3 younger students, starting on year 3 of their studies, and each semester thereafter, and receive some small stipend for each mentee.

At the start of each semester, prospective mentors would be listed and students would be allowed to seek them out. Both parties would be allowed to know the grades of each other, and the mentees would be allowed to reach out to former mentees of the same mentor. Mentors would also be allowed to do some kind of self-promotion where they could "sell" their abilities as mentors.

After each exam, the mentoring would count as having taken a course for the mentor, with the grade equal to the average grade of their students, and it would provide a numbe of "mentoring credits" equal to the number of students passing. This might seem unfair, but the idea is that this would encourage competition among mentors to "catch" the best students, encouraging the mentor to put effort in.

For the next semester/course, new mentor student connections could be set up, or the same as the semester before could be kept, if both sides agreed.

When a student receives their final diploma, all the mentoring results would be listed, both courses, average grade of students, and number of students, as well as total students*courses mentored and the average grade for those.

I can imagine a lot of employers would be highly interested in this information, as it could be extremely predictive for some kinds of positions (in particular positions of leadership or teaching). Students who had repeatedly mentored other students who achieved great results would be likely to, in the future, be able to recruit and keep high quality employees and help maximize the output of a team. In both cases, it might be it would be the very students they had been mentoring that would be potential hires.

Or, if employed by a university, would be likely to attract high quality post-graduate students as well be effective supervisors for them.

Now shy, intravert or people with bad social skills might find this unfair. But I think there would still be room for people who focused exclusively on learning the subjects themselves, and these would have more time available for that. These might also care less about those jobs where mentoring success would be seen as crucial.

The original cheating, maybe. Cheating, doubling down by lying, and then cheating again on the get-out-of-cheating-free assignment seems like it’s only adapted to a future life of white-collar crime.