You can only cheat at a game, which is what the accreditation system we call education is.
If we stopped making it a game, without points to earn and rewards for points, people wouldn’t cheat.
That aside, I think the act of cheating is a call for help, even if the callee doesn’t realise it. The pressure to do well coupled with a persons lack of self confidence or self belief come together to make cheating a reasonable route.
If you believed you could never get x, that getting x would massively improve your life, social status, parents acceptance etc you might be prepared to do anything to get x.
Not everyone though, some are probably just resigned to never getting x. They too are calling for help imo. But we weren’t talking about them.
> If we stopped making it a game, without points to earn and rewards for points, people wouldn’t cheat.
Nonsense.
There is an incentive to cheat any time there is a test, where capabilities are measured that are not routinely used.
For example, if I were an engineer designing an elevator, it must meet its rated load limits times a hefty safety factor. That safety factor is a test, and if I were unscrupulous then I would have every incentive to "cheat" to falsely certify compliance. Under ordinary circumstances, that safety factor is left unused when the elevator is operated as per instructions, but the cheating covers up a latent problem with potentially catastrophic consequences.
An academic degree isn't about a worthless piece of paper; it's ostensibly certification that the student has an acceptable mastery of the course material. Much of that material won't be used on a day-to-day basis, but it's still there, and it's still part of the credential that the graduate holds out to the world.
But even if you're unconvinced by that, there's also the character signal at play. The "kind of person" who will cheat on an academic test is intuitively also the "kind of person" who will cheat in other areas of their professional life.
> If we stopped making it a game, without points to earn and rewards for points, people wouldn’t cheat.
Have you ever heard of people who wait until the last moment to start work on an assignment, or who study intensively a few days before an important exam?
It's always seemed to me one of the big 'features' of college education you can't get with a library card or internet connection is the unstoppable steamroller of deadlines - slowly but inexorably advancing, reducing your options from 'study now, study later or fail' to only 'study now or fail'
Do you think that exams and assignments provide such a role, and if so would your proposal address that need?
>> If we stopped making it a game, without points to earn and rewards for points, people wouldn’t cheat.
I think the OP is saying that if the "reward" for education is that you know more -- and that brings it's own intrinsic value on a cultural and personal basis -- then there will be no need to "score points" on any test or report card. Therefore, no "game" necessary. And that follows that there will be no cheating (why would you cheat if you, and your culture, are happy with the reward of education in and of itself?).
imo, it's will take a quantum leap for us as a culture to reward education for education sake. To the point that when you interview, simply saying, "yes I understand X concept" will be met with belief by the interviewer/teacher (vs/ now when you have to "prove" your knowledge by a game-able "score").
As for personally, imo, people can do it now: love to learn for the sake of learning. No point in cheating on the test if you're learning the subject for your own edification. The test will simply tell you where you are still weak.
Somehow this question of cheating and should we tell feels like the wrong question to ask but I unable to precisely state why I feel so. I believe the answer to this question would also vary among cultures ... Like what would students in China feel about it, for example. After schooling in a competitive environment, kids are suddenly asked to solve problems together. If that's the requirement in society, shouldn't teaching process reflect that?
I doubt very many cheaters lack self confidence, as cheating takes some balls. They're the entitled and lazy but usually bright. Which is why they suck, because they could master the material, they're just too lazy.
There are always people who want the easy way out of anything. And there are always people who want to follow strict protocol even if it makes no sense.
I had classmates who just wanted to pass by any means necessary and take that diploma back home and get a job there —their competition back home was usually subpar since these students had a leg up with their English and had a diploma from a US school, no matter how far down the US News ranking a system would be.
> That aside, I think the act of cheating is a call for help, even if the callee doesn’t realise it. The pressure to do well coupled with a persons lack of self confidence or self belief come together to make cheating a reasonable route.
Sometimes in life to grow you need to deal with a situation or goal that produces anxiety.
Also sometimes your goals are simply not in line with your abilities or level of dedication, and you need to fail.
>> That aside, I think the act of cheating is a call for help, even if the callee doesn’t realise it. The pressure to do well coupled with a persons lack of self confidence or self belief come together to make cheating a reasonable route.
That's fine for the SATs. The logic holds in a system where people are competing against large groups of others. There you can treat it as a call for help and understand it as a reaction to pressure due to lack of confidence. But what about more competitive situations, times when say 10 people are fighting for one job in an all-or-nothing competition?
Think astronaut training. Only one person is going on the rocket. Second place, staying on the ground, is meaningless. Confidence doesn't matter. Everyone is confident. Trying hard is irrelevant as everyone is trying 100%. Work meaningfully harder than everyone else might cause you to collapse into injury or breakdown. In such situations "cheating" may be the only way to differentiate one's self from others.
I think that is why when professional athletes cheat they demonstrate little remorse. At their level it isn't a failure of confidence or morality, instead it is a reasoned choice made of necessity. That's why we need to closely watch people in such competitions. Morality, right and wrong, isn't enough.
You can only cheat rules/agreements/contracts. No rules, no cheating.
I'd agree that learning has no rules. There are some natural laws I guess, like the "forgetting curve", but those cannot be cheated (hence natural laws).
> I think the act of cheating is a call for help
Or a lack of respect for the rules, or sheer curiosity. Maybe there are more reasons.
The kids at Stuyvesant who cheated are now bankers and lawyers -- depends what they were learning to do. I figure if the invested the same energy in studying than cheating they would have had equal grades.
Maybe I'm naive but I believe cheating can be eliminated by allowing students to have a notecard when taking tests and where they're allowed to write down formulas or whatever is necessary for them individually before the tests.
I know a misconception exists in education "about memorization being something every student can perform optimally for succeeding" in getting top marks. That ignorant belief is simply not the case for everyone and I find it cruel we penalize children that could have succeeded if they're allowed to use their organization skills optimally. Otherwise they're hindered by their genetics or neglectful/abusive home-life that resulted in development issues with memory.
I know I'm not alone as a programmer using a trusty note taking app for multiple things I rather not memorize. Obviously I don't use it for syntax of the language I'm writing. Thus, brings me to my last point of how students will still be unable to cram all the subject material on a notecard and for completing a test within the time limit given. That makes it so the student gains a real life useful skill of organizing and breaking down material being taught. Further helping the longterm understanding than just memorize a few nights before the test and all is forgotten later depending on the subject being taught.
I've had classes where we were allowed to bring our textbooks and notes into the exams. For most Mechanical Engineering classes, if you haven't learned the material, cramming during the exam isn't going to help you. Or, if you can figure out how to do it during the exam just by using the textbook, you're going to be fine in the real world.
It's a pretty niche job if you need to do thermodynamics calculations under time pressure without any reference material.
Memorisation is also just not that useful in my day to day as a programmer. I mean, sure, it’s great when I know something off the top of my head, but I have autocomplete and reference material and an interactive shell and whatnot.
In uni, we had one particular class where we were supposed to study something like ten or twelve different concurrent algorithms in some weird concurrent language that I’ve forgotten and not seen since, and would be asked to write four of them out in the test and talk about them a bit. We didn’t know in advance which four, so most people tried to memorise as many of them as they could and hoped that the four that came up would be among them.
Me, being stubborn, thought that was too much effort. Instead, I learned the bare minimum about the language so I could wing it in the test and write it up myself. I already programmed as a hobby so thinking critically about problems wasn’t a big deal. My code was a bit weird, because, for example, I only learned the syntax for while loops and not for loops, so had to make do with what I did know, but it didn’t matter which four problems came up. The problem description gave me enough to figure it out. I got really good marks in that class and put substantially less effort into preparing for the test than my classmates did.
My point, I guess, is that memorisation is a stupid thing to optimise for (I guess it’s harder to design good tests that can’t be best beaten by memorisation), isn’t that useful in “real life” and is a lot more work than if you were thought the actual building blocks so that the students have a toolbox they can use to approach problems.
It would be nice to think so, but sadly, some students will cheat even on open-book tests.
Check out this recent Reddit thread, discussing an incident in which over 100 students were caught cheating in an introductory college calculus class after it was moved online due to COVID-19: https://www.removeddit.com/r/rutgers/comments/g9f57x/126_of_...
> Maybe I'm naive but I believe cheating can be eliminated by allowing students to have a notecard when taking tests and where they're allowed to write down formulas or whatever is necessary for them individually before the tests.
I think there's different "cheating by writing down formulas / information we're supposed to have memorized" and "cheating by copying someone else's answers".
In the article, he actually describes a situation where there were identical problems, but with slightly different numbers between seats. One of the students had test version A, but the correct answer from version B. This clearly falls into the latter category; reading the full story, it's really not clear that having a notecard would have helped him.
We got that in signal processing. Two sides of one sheet of engineering paper, anything you can fit, prof gets to examine it as you enter the exam. Some people would put their sheets through the printer and go for 8pt font... I used pencil
I once had an electrical engineering exam and had the textbook brazenly lying open on my desk and trying to find something. The teacher made his rounds through the class, me assuming that he just hadn't noticed. After the third round when he walked by he put his hands on the book and said "If you haven't found it by now you might as well stop".
That's it, no repercussion.
That's something I will remember for the rest of my life. I do believe that people will always try to find an easier solution for a problem, that does not mean the punishment has to be too excessive.
If you notice that cheating attempts get out of hand take correctional steps before hand, by for example taking them in shifts to increase space between the students, and interrupt cheating attempts when they happen.
Just using draconian measures to try and make everyone behave is a lazy solution for a social problem.
Telling students about your anti-cheating measures seems like a health inspector telling restaurants in advance the dates when he'll show up. The problem is that most professors are not going to go out of their ways to employ anti-cheating measures; by catching cheaters, you are doing a service to the larger college community by removing them.
When I was a teenager I worked at a Shell gas station. Once I had a customer who asked about the advantages of using Shell nitrogen-enriched gasoline. I didn't know anything about it and found their question really odd.
As I recall, they came back later and revealed that they were a secret shopper for Shell, and we failed the random inspection. All because of a question that no real customer ever asked in my experience. ;-)
Ironically when I worked in a deli, we actually were told the dates the health inspector would turn up. You can imagine the day before was spent cleaning and scrubbing!
But would all those cheaters still have become cheaters if the act of cheating had been more difficult?
I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that someone who started cheating because they saw an easy opportunity to do so at some point would never have cheated at all if that easy opportunity had never been there to begin with.
"Oppurtunity makes the thief" as the old saying goes.
Speaking from a really longterm idealized answer, the answer is "both".
You should communicate to the students that you take several measures to make cheating difficult like passing out multiple versions of the same exam.
You should also mention that you're consistently inconsistent. Sometimes you have 4 exam kinds, sometimes just 2. You do your best to mention it, but you know, people forget things.
Forgive an unkind analogy, but when you're training a dog you don't want to reward it _every_ time. You actually want to be inconsistent with rewards so that it doesn't intentionally stop the behavior the first time it doesn't get a reward.
The goal is to train students to not cheat by communicating that the cost of cheating is very high. At the same time, actually hunting down possible cheaters is hopefully not valuable - there's always some freeloaders but they should be at a low enough percentage to not influence very much.
In big courses at my university we'd print 4 colors of exams, with 2 actual versions. It was a little extra work upfront, but we almost never had to deal with cheaters.
Bottom line, my job was to teach, grade homework and proctor exams. The last thing I want to do is play piggie -- I don't wanna stay up at night worrying over my student getting expelled / deported. The easiest way to keep focused on my actual job is to take some precautions that make cheating feel risky to the students.
So I really don't understand the other professor in this anecdote. Your students are stressed, sometimes as a result of bad life choices, sometimes as a result of external issues like family death&drama, sometimes as a result of sadistic asshole professors... typically it's a combination of the above. So for each 200-person exam, you'll frequently have students for whom this is literally the worst week of their brief and sheltered lives. They might make a choice they'll regret. So you have a choice: add risk to scare all but the very most dedicated cheaters (and fuck those kids), or lay a trap for the vulnerable kids that the skilled cheaters will skate through.
I think that not telling students about different versions of tests is better for deterrence. Of course, not if applied once, but each test they will think twice before copy&paste of an answer.
...
Cheating is a form of deception. The person in the story wanted to cheat an exam, and then later - manipulate OP that they are the victim. One shouldn't fall for that.
> I think that not telling students about different versions of tests is better for deterrence.
No. Deterrence is not putting up a hidden camera. Deterrence is when you tell people the area is monitored by cameras. People will slow down their car when they know the police is around, not when they don't know.
If you want to catch cheaters, you set up anti cheating. If you want deter cheaters, you warn them about anti cheating measures.
I was lucky to spend my childhood and college years in peer groups where cheating was incomprehensible. Nobody would cheat in a math competition, for instance. That would just be a loud, lame declaration of stupidity.
When I went to the other side and started having to enforce the rules, I realized that while the top decile could be trusted, everybody else was suspect, and enforcement of the rules was incredibly hard. What do you do when you grade a string of tests containing the exact same silly mistakes? What about a group of students that suddenly jumps to high performance on one exam and then immediately crashes back down? Remote proctoring is even harder. I once saw a student fabricate an entire school with the aid of his parents, complete with website, address, and fake teacher information, so he and his parents could do the exam together. How are you supposed to vet hundreds or thousands of people like this?
I really hope that I get a faculty position where I can just teach low-pressure graduate-level seminars, and never have to learn the answer. Mass education is damn hard.
> I realized that while the top decile could be trusted, everybody else was suspect,
That is until the top decile is stuck in a required course they're not very good at and aren't interested in, then suddenly they have no problem handing in the same, slightly modified assignment the rest of the class handed in that was emailed by 'some classmate' who enjoyed stats programming in R.
Educating and testing are separate issues. If you are testing to see what to teach next, and the student cheats, well they just cheated themselves out of learning what you were going to teach if they failed the test.
In high school I ended up the "president" of a team involved in academic competitions. We worked on the assumption that at this level no one would cheat. Every week we'd do a contest in the group, among other things. The scores on the contest determined who made the A team that competed with other schools. One student was a rampant cheater and made it onto the A team, which we didn't discover until the intermural competition began and this student dragged us all down. I guess she got something to put on her college applications, though.
- You've absolutely no duty to warn students up front. If this is done, it's because it's a good idea on your terms.
- You have a duty to actively fight and punish cheaters. This is because that kind of cheating "steals" value and/or time from students that don't cheat. The honest students expect the rules to be enforced as part of the "contract" they paid for. To not enforce it strictly is theft by the cheaters and contributory negligence by the school.
- It might be good for honest students, the "wobblers", and the educators to warn, in vague unspecific terms. Young students might be expected to make mistakes and need to learn meta-things like "cheaters don't prosper" too. Like: "This course is hard. If you cheat, we WILL catch you. this is what will happen..."
- It might be good for students and the educators to have graduated penalties. Something like, first offence: fail the exam. 2nd offence XF. 3rd offence expulsion. This should be clearly documented. Lack of contrition may result in escalation. Again, meta-lessons for the more, erm, stubborn.
- "fool me once, shame on me". "fool me twice..."
- All of the above being stated, I do NOT believe in "zero tolerance" policies. Fairness cannot be had without judgement.
- After stern warnings, make sure the students get the toughest test first and get the chance to drop the class if they can't "hack it" without cheating. And tell them this when they get caught.
It didn't seem like much of a dilemma to me. If it appears that it was a clear case of cheating, then the only response to the student is that they shouldn't have to be told not to cheat. Where's their inner moral compass?
How severe should the penalty be? I give an instant oral quiz, and if it looks like they could have solved the problem anyway, I let them off with a warning.
What does game theory say about academic cheating?
The hardest grade I ever earned was from my peers. Teacher let us choose our own project teams. We competed against other teams, which comprised most of the grade. Then team members graded each other to apportion the grade. (Teacher retained discretion to account for the human condition and fairness. For example, "most improved" students would get high marks.)
The remarkable thing was kids are brutal towards cheaters and freeloaders. Almost like it's hard wired.
--
The Logic of Collective Action has prescriptive game theoretic strategy for freeloaders and defectors: require collective bargaining.
Governance remains among the hardest of problems. Cheaters, freeloaders, thieves, bad faith, fraud, and so forth.
Peer review in the sciences is currently innovating. Share your data, show your work.
Good government (progressive) style movements begat transparency, accountability.
The comments here are interesting. My experience has been that cheating is too much trouble to deal with, but I can see that's others have had more success. Might depend greatly on the personalities involved.
Once I was a TA for a class and a student came to me asking for a regrade on part of one exam. They claimed that I unfairly gave them zero on a particular problem. I looked at it and yes, I did give them a zero. But I never give zeros on a larger problem unless nothing or almost nothing is written down. I think that I'm quite generous for gibberish even. There is no way I would have given this student a zero for this problem if he had what was present at my office hours. I told him that I believe he is trying to cheat by doing the problem after the exam. I didn't report him but I did make it clear that I didn't believe his story.
The student went to the lecturer, who was furious with me. The lecturer said that I had no clear evidence that he didn't do the problem; me saying that I never give a zero unless the problem is not attempted wasn't good enough for the lecturer.
I spoke with my advisor, who said that to avoid problems like that he puts a line through any problems that were not attempted.
The lecturer didn't like the line solution after I graded the next exam. He was furious with me again. He told me "You don't trust your students!" I don't trust some students, sure. Since putting the line through empty parts I haven't had anyone claim anything similar, though.
The lecturer was apparently so disappointed with me that he told my advisor to kick me out of his research group (or something along those lines). I didn't learn that until years later. My advisor told me at the time that the lecturer had a reputation for being a jerk to his TAs, so I figure my advisor just thought this lecturer wasn't worth listening to.
(To his "credit", the lecturer had another issue with me that he got furious over: He had a very particular system for writing grades on exams. As I recall on the back page on one of the top corners he wanted the total points received written over the total on the exam. On about 5 out of about 100 exams I wrote the wrong denominator by accident; the numerators were correct in all instances as far as I recall. Now, I'm sorry to have made this mistake but it wasn't on a number that mattered and it was only on a small number of exams. This issue combined with the cheating is all rather minor and not worth raging over.)
I did keep putting lines through empty parts when grading, at least after I stopped TAing for this class. But this experience made me reluctant to give a zero for cheating, much less report the student to the university.
I had a similar situation when I was a TA, except for the issues with the prof. We handled it by Xeroxing that student's exams before handing them back. If he did it again, we were going to have evidence to nail him.
I learned a lot reading the book "the honest truth about dishonesty" by dan ariely.
He did a whole bunch of really interesting experiments, like self-reporting how many you got wrong on a test before it is fed into a shredder and similar.
fascinating book.
How many of you work exactly 8 hours a day with your employer?
Not quite a fair comparison because most software engineers are salaried, not hourly (at least in the United States).
I’m trying hard to think about what cheating would be in the software world. Here’s a few things that I see:
* Grabbing an open source package without a license check
* Pushing to production without running all the integration tests (or worse, just SSHing into production)
* Accepting a PR without actually reviewing the code
* Writing code without unit tests
Its hard for me to come up with these - most involved skirting controls, which were usually there for a reason.
Data science seems much more obvious:
* Lying about performance on the test set
* Using highly correlated features which leads to instability
* telling people the model has broader applicability than it does (e.g. a speech to text model was trained on complaint phone calls and claiming it can be just as good for in person meetings)
This could be because I spend more time in the ML world, but I’m curious what other people think.
Isn't cheating a symptom of the failure in how the education system works? This^ very interesting video of Ken Robinson produced by RSA was recently posted by someone on this forum. It diagnose this problem very well.
Trying to put kids in a system that is boxed due to constraints of age, time, subjects and grades is very harmful for the real development of individual kids. Kids understand this and get disengaged from the system but still have to force themselves to follow along because they are not provided with an alternative.
Look, we live in the real world with scare resources distributed to different needs, one of them education. It is sad that a lot of times students will have suboptimal teachers and teaching. Even at the best schools and universities in the world, there will be certain parts which will be taught badly.
Secondly, in the real world, some high value creating jobs can be extremely tedious and boring. And in the real world, some things you need to learn to do either these boring jobs or even interesting jobs, can be very boring.
As an educator, I am all for making education better (like a lot), but for the above reasons, parts of education will always be boring. And I understand that some students will cheat because of this boredom.
But what I observe is that the rate at which students cheat is much higher than the fraction of their education that is boring or badly done. Students cheat because it is easier than working hard, students cheat because it is cool to cheat and brag about it, students teach because they don't care about learning at all.
In academia, professors are quite concerned with cheating right now, when all teaching happens online.
Some professors are considering using software to randomize the exams, so no two exams are identical. This obviously increases the grading effort. Some are asking students to take a pledge, like "I solemnly swear to not google the problem". Some are just trusting the students to not cheat.
There's no easy and universal solution. Ideally, technology could solve the issue, but it's not that easy to identify and implement a technology solution in a matter of weeks.
I'm not a teacher, so maybe I should just stay out of it, but I'm of the opinion that teachers should try to help cheaters the same way they help failing students. Cheating is really just a proxy for failure, so why not just treat it the same as failing?
That being said, some kinds of cheating don't deserved to be punished. The given scenario is bad for the cheater, but some students put so much effort into writing notes to cheat with that they just end up doing the amount of effort required to pass.
Cheating is only rarely a proxy for failure. It has been my experience as a TA and instructor that cheating is more often considered an “accelerator” or “advantage” than an act of desperation. It’s not something that can be solved by academic support because the most brazen cheaters usually feel entitled to cheat—they view it as equivalent to doing the assigned work because it reaches the same end (a passing grade). For example, the student in the linked article admitted cheating, but had no contrition about it.
No. Cheating is not a proxy for failure. They are in fact much more frequently inverse to one another. Cheating is intentional circumvention seeking reward. Failure is an outcome that comes more frequently from low effort, unethical effort, or honest effort with low capacity or skill.
Sure and the next time you have a surgery the surgeon might be really, really bad at cutting inside you, but passed their exams because the other students helped out a lot.
Honestly, an exam should control the success of learning, nothing more. Passing an exam should always finish a course or topic. Failing an exam, though, should be quite normal and just lead to more repitition.
[+] [-] iovrthoughtthis|5 years ago|reply
You can only cheat at a game, which is what the accreditation system we call education is.
If we stopped making it a game, without points to earn and rewards for points, people wouldn’t cheat.
That aside, I think the act of cheating is a call for help, even if the callee doesn’t realise it. The pressure to do well coupled with a persons lack of self confidence or self belief come together to make cheating a reasonable route.
If you believed you could never get x, that getting x would massively improve your life, social status, parents acceptance etc you might be prepared to do anything to get x.
Not everyone though, some are probably just resigned to never getting x. They too are calling for help imo. But we weren’t talking about them.
[+] [-] Majromax|5 years ago|reply
Nonsense.
There is an incentive to cheat any time there is a test, where capabilities are measured that are not routinely used.
For example, if I were an engineer designing an elevator, it must meet its rated load limits times a hefty safety factor. That safety factor is a test, and if I were unscrupulous then I would have every incentive to "cheat" to falsely certify compliance. Under ordinary circumstances, that safety factor is left unused when the elevator is operated as per instructions, but the cheating covers up a latent problem with potentially catastrophic consequences.
An academic degree isn't about a worthless piece of paper; it's ostensibly certification that the student has an acceptable mastery of the course material. Much of that material won't be used on a day-to-day basis, but it's still there, and it's still part of the credential that the graduate holds out to the world.
But even if you're unconvinced by that, there's also the character signal at play. The "kind of person" who will cheat on an academic test is intuitively also the "kind of person" who will cheat in other areas of their professional life.
[+] [-] michaelt|5 years ago|reply
Have you ever heard of people who wait until the last moment to start work on an assignment, or who study intensively a few days before an important exam?
It's always seemed to me one of the big 'features' of college education you can't get with a library card or internet connection is the unstoppable steamroller of deadlines - slowly but inexorably advancing, reducing your options from 'study now, study later or fail' to only 'study now or fail'
Do you think that exams and assignments provide such a role, and if so would your proposal address that need?
[+] [-] garraeth|5 years ago|reply
I think the OP is saying that if the "reward" for education is that you know more -- and that brings it's own intrinsic value on a cultural and personal basis -- then there will be no need to "score points" on any test or report card. Therefore, no "game" necessary. And that follows that there will be no cheating (why would you cheat if you, and your culture, are happy with the reward of education in and of itself?).
imo, it's will take a quantum leap for us as a culture to reward education for education sake. To the point that when you interview, simply saying, "yes I understand X concept" will be met with belief by the interviewer/teacher (vs/ now when you have to "prove" your knowledge by a game-able "score").
As for personally, imo, people can do it now: love to learn for the sake of learning. No point in cheating on the test if you're learning the subject for your own edification. The test will simply tell you where you are still weak.
[+] [-] sriku|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] merpnderp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|5 years ago|reply
I had classmates who just wanted to pass by any means necessary and take that diploma back home and get a job there —their competition back home was usually subpar since these students had a leg up with their English and had a diploma from a US school, no matter how far down the US News ranking a system would be.
[+] [-] unishark|5 years ago|reply
Sometimes in life to grow you need to deal with a situation or goal that produces anxiety.
Also sometimes your goals are simply not in line with your abilities or level of dedication, and you need to fail.
[+] [-] sandworm101|5 years ago|reply
That's fine for the SATs. The logic holds in a system where people are competing against large groups of others. There you can treat it as a call for help and understand it as a reaction to pressure due to lack of confidence. But what about more competitive situations, times when say 10 people are fighting for one job in an all-or-nothing competition?
Think astronaut training. Only one person is going on the rocket. Second place, staying on the ground, is meaningless. Confidence doesn't matter. Everyone is confident. Trying hard is irrelevant as everyone is trying 100%. Work meaningfully harder than everyone else might cause you to collapse into injury or breakdown. In such situations "cheating" may be the only way to differentiate one's self from others.
I think that is why when professional athletes cheat they demonstrate little remorse. At their level it isn't a failure of confidence or morality, instead it is a reasoned choice made of necessity. That's why we need to closely watch people in such competitions. Morality, right and wrong, isn't enough.
[+] [-] cies|5 years ago|reply
You can only cheat rules/agreements/contracts. No rules, no cheating.
I'd agree that learning has no rules. There are some natural laws I guess, like the "forgetting curve", but those cannot be cheated (hence natural laws).
> I think the act of cheating is a call for help
Or a lack of respect for the rules, or sheer curiosity. Maybe there are more reasons.
[+] [-] zappo2938|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abellerose|5 years ago|reply
I know a misconception exists in education "about memorization being something every student can perform optimally for succeeding" in getting top marks. That ignorant belief is simply not the case for everyone and I find it cruel we penalize children that could have succeeded if they're allowed to use their organization skills optimally. Otherwise they're hindered by their genetics or neglectful/abusive home-life that resulted in development issues with memory.
I know I'm not alone as a programmer using a trusty note taking app for multiple things I rather not memorize. Obviously I don't use it for syntax of the language I'm writing. Thus, brings me to my last point of how students will still be unable to cram all the subject material on a notecard and for completing a test within the time limit given. That makes it so the student gains a real life useful skill of organizing and breaking down material being taught. Further helping the longterm understanding than just memorize a few nights before the test and all is forgotten later depending on the subject being taught.
[+] [-] KMag|5 years ago|reply
It's a pretty niche job if you need to do thermodynamics calculations under time pressure without any reference material.
[+] [-] dkersten|5 years ago|reply
In uni, we had one particular class where we were supposed to study something like ten or twelve different concurrent algorithms in some weird concurrent language that I’ve forgotten and not seen since, and would be asked to write four of them out in the test and talk about them a bit. We didn’t know in advance which four, so most people tried to memorise as many of them as they could and hoped that the four that came up would be among them.
Me, being stubborn, thought that was too much effort. Instead, I learned the bare minimum about the language so I could wing it in the test and write it up myself. I already programmed as a hobby so thinking critically about problems wasn’t a big deal. My code was a bit weird, because, for example, I only learned the syntax for while loops and not for loops, so had to make do with what I did know, but it didn’t matter which four problems came up. The problem description gave me enough to figure it out. I got really good marks in that class and put substantially less effort into preparing for the test than my classmates did.
My point, I guess, is that memorisation is a stupid thing to optimise for (I guess it’s harder to design good tests that can’t be best beaten by memorisation), isn’t that useful in “real life” and is a lot more work than if you were thought the actual building blocks so that the students have a toolbox they can use to approach problems.
[+] [-] teraflop|5 years ago|reply
Check out this recent Reddit thread, discussing an incident in which over 100 students were caught cheating in an introductory college calculus class after it was moved online due to COVID-19: https://www.removeddit.com/r/rutgers/comments/g9f57x/126_of_...
[+] [-] gwd|5 years ago|reply
I think there's different "cheating by writing down formulas / information we're supposed to have memorized" and "cheating by copying someone else's answers".
In the article, he actually describes a situation where there were identical problems, but with slightly different numbers between seats. One of the students had test version A, but the correct answer from version B. This clearly falls into the latter category; reading the full story, it's really not clear that having a notecard would have helped him.
[+] [-] lainga|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blensor|5 years ago|reply
That's it, no repercussion.
That's something I will remember for the rest of my life. I do believe that people will always try to find an easier solution for a problem, that does not mean the punishment has to be too excessive.
If you notice that cheating attempts get out of hand take correctional steps before hand, by for example taking them in shifts to increase space between the students, and interrupt cheating attempts when they happen.
Just using draconian measures to try and make everyone behave is a lazy solution for a social problem.
[+] [-] ipunchghosts|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dooglius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btrettel|5 years ago|reply
As I recall, they came back later and revealed that they were a secret shopper for Shell, and we failed the random inspection. All because of a question that no real customer ever asked in my experience. ;-)
My boss didn't care, fortunately.
[+] [-] anitil|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DavidVoid|5 years ago|reply
"Oppurtunity makes the thief" as the old saying goes.
[+] [-] vorpalhex|5 years ago|reply
You should communicate to the students that you take several measures to make cheating difficult like passing out multiple versions of the same exam.
You should also mention that you're consistently inconsistent. Sometimes you have 4 exam kinds, sometimes just 2. You do your best to mention it, but you know, people forget things.
Forgive an unkind analogy, but when you're training a dog you don't want to reward it _every_ time. You actually want to be inconsistent with rewards so that it doesn't intentionally stop the behavior the first time it doesn't get a reward.
The goal is to train students to not cheat by communicating that the cost of cheating is very high. At the same time, actually hunting down possible cheaters is hopefully not valuable - there's always some freeloaders but they should be at a low enough percentage to not influence very much.
[+] [-] klyrs|5 years ago|reply
Bottom line, my job was to teach, grade homework and proctor exams. The last thing I want to do is play piggie -- I don't wanna stay up at night worrying over my student getting expelled / deported. The easiest way to keep focused on my actual job is to take some precautions that make cheating feel risky to the students.
So I really don't understand the other professor in this anecdote. Your students are stressed, sometimes as a result of bad life choices, sometimes as a result of external issues like family death&drama, sometimes as a result of sadistic asshole professors... typically it's a combination of the above. So for each 200-person exam, you'll frequently have students for whom this is literally the worst week of their brief and sheltered lives. They might make a choice they'll regret. So you have a choice: add risk to scare all but the very most dedicated cheaters (and fuck those kids), or lay a trap for the vulnerable kids that the skilled cheaters will skate through.
[+] [-] stared|5 years ago|reply
...
Cheating is a form of deception. The person in the story wanted to cheat an exam, and then later - manipulate OP that they are the victim. One shouldn't fall for that.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|5 years ago|reply
No. Deterrence is not putting up a hidden camera. Deterrence is when you tell people the area is monitored by cameras. People will slow down their car when they know the police is around, not when they don't know.
If you want to catch cheaters, you set up anti cheating. If you want deter cheaters, you warn them about anti cheating measures.
[+] [-] knzhou|5 years ago|reply
When I went to the other side and started having to enforce the rules, I realized that while the top decile could be trusted, everybody else was suspect, and enforcement of the rules was incredibly hard. What do you do when you grade a string of tests containing the exact same silly mistakes? What about a group of students that suddenly jumps to high performance on one exam and then immediately crashes back down? Remote proctoring is even harder. I once saw a student fabricate an entire school with the aid of his parents, complete with website, address, and fake teacher information, so he and his parents could do the exam together. How are you supposed to vet hundreds or thousands of people like this?
I really hope that I get a faculty position where I can just teach low-pressure graduate-level seminars, and never have to learn the answer. Mass education is damn hard.
[+] [-] grawprog|5 years ago|reply
That is until the top decile is stuck in a required course they're not very good at and aren't interested in, then suddenly they have no problem handing in the same, slightly modified assignment the rest of the class handed in that was emailed by 'some classmate' who enjoyed stats programming in R.
[+] [-] naveen99|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DFHippie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fargle|5 years ago|reply
- You've absolutely no duty to warn students up front. If this is done, it's because it's a good idea on your terms.
- You have a duty to actively fight and punish cheaters. This is because that kind of cheating "steals" value and/or time from students that don't cheat. The honest students expect the rules to be enforced as part of the "contract" they paid for. To not enforce it strictly is theft by the cheaters and contributory negligence by the school.
- It might be good for honest students, the "wobblers", and the educators to warn, in vague unspecific terms. Young students might be expected to make mistakes and need to learn meta-things like "cheaters don't prosper" too. Like: "This course is hard. If you cheat, we WILL catch you. this is what will happen..."
- It might be good for students and the educators to have graduated penalties. Something like, first offence: fail the exam. 2nd offence XF. 3rd offence expulsion. This should be clearly documented. Lack of contrition may result in escalation. Again, meta-lessons for the more, erm, stubborn.
- "fool me once, shame on me". "fool me twice..."
- All of the above being stated, I do NOT believe in "zero tolerance" policies. Fairness cannot be had without judgement.
- After stern warnings, make sure the students get the toughest test first and get the chance to drop the class if they can't "hack it" without cheating. And tell them this when they get caught.
[+] [-] sriram_malhar|5 years ago|reply
How severe should the penalty be? I give an instant oral quiz, and if it looks like they could have solved the problem anyway, I let them off with a warning.
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|5 years ago|reply
The severity of punishment, student morality, ect are context only. hence "A non-moral dilemma about cheating"
[+] [-] specialist|5 years ago|reply
The hardest grade I ever earned was from my peers. Teacher let us choose our own project teams. We competed against other teams, which comprised most of the grade. Then team members graded each other to apportion the grade. (Teacher retained discretion to account for the human condition and fairness. For example, "most improved" students would get high marks.)
The remarkable thing was kids are brutal towards cheaters and freeloaders. Almost like it's hard wired.
--
The Logic of Collective Action has prescriptive game theoretic strategy for freeloaders and defectors: require collective bargaining.
Governance remains among the hardest of problems. Cheaters, freeloaders, thieves, bad faith, fraud, and so forth.
Peer review in the sciences is currently innovating. Share your data, show your work.
Good government (progressive) style movements begat transparency, accountability.
Who, if any one, is innovating in scholastics?
[+] [-] btrettel|5 years ago|reply
Once I was a TA for a class and a student came to me asking for a regrade on part of one exam. They claimed that I unfairly gave them zero on a particular problem. I looked at it and yes, I did give them a zero. But I never give zeros on a larger problem unless nothing or almost nothing is written down. I think that I'm quite generous for gibberish even. There is no way I would have given this student a zero for this problem if he had what was present at my office hours. I told him that I believe he is trying to cheat by doing the problem after the exam. I didn't report him but I did make it clear that I didn't believe his story.
The student went to the lecturer, who was furious with me. The lecturer said that I had no clear evidence that he didn't do the problem; me saying that I never give a zero unless the problem is not attempted wasn't good enough for the lecturer.
I spoke with my advisor, who said that to avoid problems like that he puts a line through any problems that were not attempted.
The lecturer didn't like the line solution after I graded the next exam. He was furious with me again. He told me "You don't trust your students!" I don't trust some students, sure. Since putting the line through empty parts I haven't had anyone claim anything similar, though.
The lecturer was apparently so disappointed with me that he told my advisor to kick me out of his research group (or something along those lines). I didn't learn that until years later. My advisor told me at the time that the lecturer had a reputation for being a jerk to his TAs, so I figure my advisor just thought this lecturer wasn't worth listening to.
(To his "credit", the lecturer had another issue with me that he got furious over: He had a very particular system for writing grades on exams. As I recall on the back page on one of the top corners he wanted the total points received written over the total on the exam. On about 5 out of about 100 exams I wrote the wrong denominator by accident; the numerators were correct in all instances as far as I recall. Now, I'm sorry to have made this mistake but it wasn't on a number that mattered and it was only on a small number of exams. This issue combined with the cheating is all rather minor and not worth raging over.)
I did keep putting lines through empty parts when grading, at least after I stopped TAing for this class. But this experience made me reluctant to give a zero for cheating, much less report the student to the university.
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffdavis|5 years ago|reply
There are two questions:
Should it be the job of teachers to catch cheaters? If not teachers, who?
How do you salvage "borderline" cases where someone cheats but may not use it as a life strategy (at least, not yet)?
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
He did a whole bunch of really interesting experiments, like self-reporting how many you got wrong on a test before it is fed into a shredder and similar.
fascinating book.
How many of you work exactly 8 hours a day with your employer?
[+] [-] pridkett|5 years ago|reply
I’m trying hard to think about what cheating would be in the software world. Here’s a few things that I see:
* Grabbing an open source package without a license check * Pushing to production without running all the integration tests (or worse, just SSHing into production) * Accepting a PR without actually reviewing the code * Writing code without unit tests
Its hard for me to come up with these - most involved skirting controls, which were usually there for a reason.
Data science seems much more obvious:
* Lying about performance on the test set * Using highly correlated features which leads to instability * telling people the model has broader applicability than it does (e.g. a speech to text model was trained on complaint phone calls and claiming it can be just as good for in person meetings)
This could be because I spend more time in the ML world, but I’m curious what other people think.
[+] [-] bsldld|5 years ago|reply
Trying to put kids in a system that is boxed due to constraints of age, time, subjects and grades is very harmful for the real development of individual kids. Kids understand this and get disengaged from the system but still have to force themselves to follow along because they are not provided with an alternative.
^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
[+] [-] abdullahkhalids|5 years ago|reply
Secondly, in the real world, some high value creating jobs can be extremely tedious and boring. And in the real world, some things you need to learn to do either these boring jobs or even interesting jobs, can be very boring.
As an educator, I am all for making education better (like a lot), but for the above reasons, parts of education will always be boring. And I understand that some students will cheat because of this boredom.
But what I observe is that the rate at which students cheat is much higher than the fraction of their education that is boring or badly done. Students cheat because it is easier than working hard, students cheat because it is cool to cheat and brag about it, students teach because they don't care about learning at all.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] credit_guy|5 years ago|reply
Some professors are considering using software to randomize the exams, so no two exams are identical. This obviously increases the grading effort. Some are asking students to take a pledge, like "I solemnly swear to not google the problem". Some are just trusting the students to not cheat.
There's no easy and universal solution. Ideally, technology could solve the issue, but it's not that easy to identify and implement a technology solution in a matter of weeks.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] reeealloc|5 years ago|reply
That being said, some kinds of cheating don't deserved to be punished. The given scenario is bad for the cheater, but some students put so much effort into writing notes to cheat with that they just end up doing the amount of effort required to pass.
[+] [-] cgearhart|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] getlawgdon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] econcon|5 years ago|reply
And really what's the point of getting grade/scores in school, when we can teach kids to collaborate with each other and create great new things.
Not everyone will be good at math, not everyone will have same drive to study physics. But everyone of us might find smth interesting in a project.
We shouldn't be pitting students against each other.
[+] [-] choeger|5 years ago|reply
Honestly, an exam should control the success of learning, nothing more. Passing an exam should always finish a course or topic. Failing an exam, though, should be quite normal and just lead to more repitition.