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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

I thought the article was fairly strong except for in the two points you highlighted here. In the first case, I still don't understand why you don't just mark their answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and move on with life. And in the second case it seems like just not worrying about cheaters and letting it be their own funeral (or not) is optimal. I remember who the cheaters were in my classes and a couple decades later it's clear that to a one, I would much rather be in the shoes of the diligent hard workers than the cheaters.

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Both questions were answered in the article. The reason for precise directions is because otherwise people will complain, and if you ignore their complaints, they will complain to your boss. At the end you'll win, but you'll waste a bunch of time defending yourself.

The reason for not allowing cheating is repetitional. If you get a reputation for allowing cheaters, then all the cheaters will want to take your class, and eventually you'll have so many that your testing will be worthless. And if word gets out that your institution allows cheating, then your students will not be respected when they leave, causing harm to the non-cheaters and your chance at keeping your job as fewer people want to attend a school known for allowing cheats.

There's a deeper reason for not allowing cheating: you are building cheaters. People who cheat in courses will cheat in industry, why wouldn't they? They normalize this behavior. So you end up with major corporations that steal, politicians that lie, etc.

If for example, Harvard and Yale's law schools stopped rampant cheating. Maybe so many of their graduates wouldn't go on to routinely lie to the public?

I don't teach because it's some sort of penance that I need to pay. I teach because I like it and I want to help build smart humans. Not contribute to our society degenerating.

I would be willing to bet that most of the politicians/ceos/etc that currently lie to everyone's face and went to harvard/yale didn't need to cheat their way through and didn't bother more often than not.

You would lose your bet. Let's just say that I know what I'm talking about first hand and I'm not making a conjecture.

just out of curiosity, did they cheat more than the average cheater? I knew a few of people who cheated in college but it was infrequent and varied by class, friend group, etc.

Sorry I wasn't clear, I saw and understood the explanations in the article, I just find them weak.

> The reason for precise directions is because otherwise people will complain, and if you ignore their complaints, they will complain to your boss. At the end you'll win, but you'll waste a bunch of time defending yourself.

So instead you force all your students to do busy work, like signing a statement accepting no grade if they use the wrong size bread board or photographing the breadboard next to a compass to prove it's the alignment?

To me this sounds like lazy teachers punishing students rather than working to solve the problem.

> I still don't understand why you don't just mark their answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and move on with life

Because the actual incidents are often in fuzzy areas where it seems possible the teacher's instructions were confusing. You're stuck making a character judgment of your student instead of evaluating knowledge. Over a career, it becomes easier to cordon off fuzzy areas than it is to risk a moral challenge.

> it seems possible the teacher's instructions were confusing.

Yes; I've been on both sides. I've written assignments that I thought were clear and unambiguous, only to find that a significant number of students misunderstood what I meant. They weren't intentionally trying to make the problems easier, they just weren't sure what I wanted. (And, of course, who is going to interpret an ambiguous problem so as to make more work for themselves? A few students will do it both ways -- the easier interpretation and the harder one -- but most won't.)

And on the other side, I've taken continuing education classes taught by other teachers where the instructions were confusing, ambiguous, or sometimes just plain impossible to follow ("You'll find the answers to this quiz in the article you just read." but the article was revised and now uses different terminology from the quiz.)

> who is going to interpret an ambiguous problem so as to make more work for themselves?

I did.

In fact I always tried to find a unique or novel solution to my problem sets, ambiguous or not. (If the problem set contained a hint I tried mightily to not use the hint, I'd always try to replace a proof by contradiction with a constructive proof etc...)

My marks suffered for it. I even almost failed a first year exam cos I didn't want to perform a grody 4x4 matrix multiplication. Later the prof said: "Your exam was crap, but you came up with a better answer for problem four than I'd thought of."

It's still one of my most cherished memories from undergrad.

I always hated the: "Will this be on the test" type of attitude. Are you there to learn and break new ground or to just get marks? I had crappy marks but my work spoke for itself.

Students should put more effort into creating their own body of work. If they spent half the energy they put into finding tricks and gaming the system, they'd be much better off for it.

I usually can tell which students will do well by how they answer ambiguous questions: they'll answer both ways, both the easy way, and the hard way.

I was never one to game the system until I was failing 3 classes while on academic probation (2 Fs would have gotten me kicked out). Then I gamed the shit out of the system.

That was my breaking point. Others it's losing a scholarship; others, getting a B.

I find that students talk to each other and spread interpretations of the assignment. They might be correct, they might not - either way the interpretation spreads (never through anything like 'official' course forums set up for students to ask about interpretations, of course). They've also gone through shared experiences in other courses beforehand and will often simply come up with the same incorrect interpretation. For 5 years the basic assignment was clear and easily understood, then the next year it's almost universally misinterpreted. Those shared misunderstandings have easily outnumbered creative interpretations to help grades in my experience.

In the first case, they complain, and there's ~750 of them (in the course I TAed) so even a small number can take up a lot of time. The right way to think about it is for a small additional bit of time spent clarifying instructions you save yourself a larger amount of time later.

In the second case, it does depend upon how much the instructor feels it's their duty to uphold the integrity of the grades in their class. I'm not sure if I would have made the same choice in my advisor's shoes, but that is the decision he made.

I was a TA too, though not for a course that large. I guess my feeling is that complainers should just be noted and ignored.

> In the first case, I still don't understand why you don't just mark their answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and move on with life.

Because your job is to educate them. They also complain about the task which in effect waste your time or give you trouble.

> Because your job is to educate them.

"Creatively misinterpreting" instructions means to me that the students are intentionally doing this (to get away with doing less work, or whatever). I think marking them down and moving on is educating them: it very quickly tells them that sticking to the letter of the law but ignoring the spirit is not ok, and will not be tolerated. It's pretty good preparation for being in the real world, too.

Regardless, giving ridiculously over-specified assignments will not be good preparation for the real world, where many (most?) things are under-specified and ambiguous. Adults need to learn how to read between the lines, interpret things properly, be comfortable asking follow-up questions for things that are not clear, and just figure things out when such clarity doesn't exist.

> They also complain about the task which in effect waste your time or give you trouble.

That sounds annoying, but to me it feels like over-specifying tasks in this way is the opposite of education. And it feels like the time dealing with the misinterpreters wouldn't be wasted; it would be spent actively teaching students that the world is not black and white, there's often no instruction manual, and that getting out of doing work through "creative misinterpretation" will not get you far.

It seems like a good learning experience to get an answer wrong because you didn't succeed in interpreting the question. Nobody takes pains to describe things in minute detail in real life.

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