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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#991

Post by MacroChip »

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…

This is true for so many other aspects of life as well. Things are the way they are for a reason. Not understanding the deep and complex factors that got the system to where it is dooms you to repeat the mistakes of the past. This is why I go for depth on what I complain and ideate on rather than breadth. Dive deep on something you care about instead of having an opinion about everything. Humans have done well with specialization. If you enjoy breadth, go for it. I just don't see it as very effective.

I suppose that complaining without proposing solutions is akin to protesting. You may not necessarily know what you want specifically, but you don't want the current system.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#993

Post by FabHK »

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…

> imo this is why people shouldn't cheat.

Well, people shouldn't cheat for a whole lot of reasons. But the main take away from this is, in my opinion, that people should not be "graded on a curve".

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#994

Post by FabHK »

silversmith wrote: post #428
failTide wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was taking an upper level marine biology course - the tests were VERY difficult, but they were take-home, do them at your leisure. I was cool with it. But walked into a coffee shop one day and found 75% of the class sharing answers and cheating anyway.

It seems very funny to me as a programmer, that what university calls "cheating" and threatens consequences, the industry calls "consulting with your colleagues" and encourages.

Come on. In one case, you aim to prove that you have mastered an established body of knowledge. In the other case, you are trying to solve an open problem with any legitimate means available. Those are entirely different things, and conflating them is obtuse.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#995

Post by ghostoftesla »

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…

The petit-bourgeoisie elegies here are ridiculous. You take the higher moral ground by establishing that you have "studied pedagogy and know all about it" and then you proceed with providing cliché points on how education has failed. How can you apply critisism to a system you have been indoctrinated by? How fruitful is it gonna be?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#996

Post by lysium »

tornato7 wrote: post #483
lysium wrote: post #469

I find this f’d up at so many levels. The instructor seems to be more concerned about how to fill out forms to report a huge amount of her own class and come up with (surprising the student) countermeasures than about how to teach her students. Such a huge amount of cheating is a clear indication that the whole system is flawed. This should have been the instructor’s top priority. Instead, she chose to fail her stude…

The author didn’t fail all of the cheating students. Did you read to the end? Many of them ended up with an A+. That’s in fact the whole point of the article, to say that more engaging course material reduces cheating.

Thank you for pointing this out! I couldn’t make it to the end. I tried several times but found it unbearable for the stated reasons.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#997

Post by lysium »

Sebguer wrote: post #473
lysium wrote: post #469

I find this f’d up at so many levels. The instructor seems to be more concerned about how to fill out forms to report a huge amount of her own class and come up with (surprising the student) countermeasures than about how to teach her students. Such a huge amount of cheating is a clear indication that the whole system is flawed. This should have been the instructor’s top priority. Instead, she chose to fail her stude…

Your unconscious bias is showing by the fact that you think this professor is a woman. Quick edit: Also, it's very obvious that the professor had no issues with the class 'helping each other', but what was happening was people literally just sharing answers to the exam, and being completely unable to succeed without doing so. This wasn't a factor of students sharing study notes - the Professor's example is people lit…

> Your unconscious bias is showing by the fact that you think this professor is a woman.

I’m wondering if you had posted the same sentence if I had used a male pronoun and which pronoun I should have used instead to not provoke an off-topic comment but at the same time not promote the idea that a professor must be male. ‚They‘ did not seem to be a good choice either.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#998

Post by 8note »

I remember the hard math-heavy university courses having homework questions that came down to copying down a solutions from somewhere, and having a score for it was there to make sure you wrote down those solutions over and over again.

Doing that properly burned those approaches into my mind and even though I wasn't coming up with those solutions myself, I did get the learning step

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#999

Post by sanderjd »

TheBigSalad wrote: post #947
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.

Helping each other understand the material means you are learning. You'd do well on a test. They were sharing answers and then all failed the tests when they weren't able to. Anything that gets you a good grade without learning the material is cheating.

I know this is an old thread but I just saw it and maybe you'll see my response: if they all failed the tests, then did they actually get a good grade without learning the material?
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