My students cheated... a lot
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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 cases not a teacher, nor someone with any experience apart from once having been a student, do not have a good understanding of how exactly this system should be fixed, and that it’s not broken for fun but because there are some very difficult unresolved issues.
People love to rant about how bad tests are. “We just study for the tests” and so on. And yet this complaint seems to be international. Curious, isn’t it, how all these systems seem to fail in the same way?
In the case of testing it’s because you choose to focus on the obviously bad thing (current state of testing) rather than the very complex and difficult question behind it: HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?
These are very hard questions, and it’s frustrating to read the phrase “we need to fix the system” because yes, obviously we do, but agreeing that things are bad isn’t the hard part, and probably input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more.
So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
Cynically, this will never happen because reforms to battle educational issues in any democratic society usually takes more than 5 election cycles to show obvious results (and when the bad results start stacking up current leaders will take the flak regardless).
Trying to create a knowledge factory seems to me a pipe dream. All cheating comes from trying to force learning into a rigid mechanical box.
Solution? My opinion - remove colleges, bring back guilds.
Of course, this is an oversimplification, but the moment you remove the need to print out diplomas, everything does become simpler. The "measuring understanding mechanically at scale" is the hardest problem.
The “knowledge factory” exists for a reason. The way our society is constructed, we need structured specialization (pick a course), verification (you’re OK) and rating (you’re the top 5%) — because our entire society expects these things to work and be available.
It sounds like the only difference in your example is that these things exist but are not centrally verified to be identical, because apparently diplomas themselves are the problem.
People need to be able to improve, be excluded when incompetent and rewarded when excellent, because that is how our society works in all other aspects, and the one thing that will always be true about an educational system is that it will mirror society: and if it doesn’t currently it will in a few decades.
You cannot suggest fundamental changes to an educational system without more or less advocating a revolution in society. No wonder most complaints stop at the problem and never continue to proposed solutions.
Yes, exactly.
You are using a diploma as an indicator of knowledge, and you have a diploma-giving machine (university) that gives the diploma to anyone that can pass a test. People cheat the test in order to get the diploma. It will always happen, no matter how intricate you make your tests, because you cannot automate knowledge verification.
It isn't a "problem" - it's an "impossibility". And it's one impossibility software companies have gradually started dealing with - most don't care about diplomas anymore, because the correlation between knowledge and having a diploma gets lesser and lesser the more diplomas are printed artificially.
So, that is a pretty good solution, too. Remove diplomas altogether, and let employers measure knowledge in a way they seem fit. They will have responsibility for the mistakes of an employee, so it makes sense that they make the criteria. That way, educational institutions will have to make their education useful in the real world, or their reputation will crumble.
It's not a "pretty good solution", which shows if you start breaking down how you would attempt to achieve this. How do you, first of all, "remove diplomas"? Do you suggest that we fundamentally overturn how our entire society works just to remove cheating?
A "diploma", "certification" or whatever you want to call it, can be issued by many different entities: a collection of nation-states, a state itself, non- and for-profit organizations, even individuals. These all have varying degrees of value depending on the trust placed in the issuing body, from a certificate of having completed Bob's Weekend Sales Course to a state-issued certificate to perform a specific type of surgery.
First of all, which of these are you saying should be "removed"? Only the ones from universities? All of them?
Secondly, how do you remove them? Do you outlaw them?
Thirdly, what happens when they're all gone? How do you certify a surgeon?
Very simple - just stop giving them to people and let them be forgotten as a concept.
> Do you suggest that we fundamentally overturn how our entire society works just to remove cheating?
Are you suggesting that university diplomas are a fundamental factor of how our society works? If so, would you please explain how?
> First of all, which of these are you saying should be "removed"? Only the ones from universities? All of them?
Only those from the universities. Universities are officially recognized "places to learn" and they should be kept that way. Studying for longer than "appropriate" number of years should not be frowned upon, but encouraged. The whole process of "verification" should be completely independent of learning.
Bundling "learning" and "verification", the way universities do, inevitably leads to hordes of people who want verification, but not learning - i.e. cheaters.
> Secondly, how do you remove them? Do you outlaw them?
Very simple - stop issuing them (I suppose a country-level ban of university diplomas could do, but politics depend on the country so I can't give you a general answer). If you want a certificate authority, make a certificate authority and make it its sole purpose to verify that people have the knowledge. Leave university out of that.
> Thirdly, what happens when they're all gone? How do you certify a surgeon?
A certificate authority (that only verifies surgeons' skills, and doesn't bundle the process with "learning").
It seems like you've just moved the cheating problem from one organization to a different organization? How would this new certificate authority measure learning better than universities are currently measuring learning? Are there examples of such certificate authorities existing now? Do they also have cheating problems?
While that might seem redundant, keep in mind that most of the cheating happens because responsibility for both teaching and testing falls on the professor of the subject, and there is not much incentive to prevent cheating when the school must print X diplomas a year or disappear. I assume that an organization whose sole purpose is to certificate knowledge can be much more specialized for testing and spend most of their time trying to combat cheating.
> Are there examples of such certificate authorities existing now?
A sibling comment has mentioned pilot schools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31548177
Employer verification made sense, you mention they have to deal with it if their hire is dumb. This secondary certificate authority idea undermines your entire argument though. Maybe I’m missing something though and you have a good idea for how the CA will mitigate cheating that a university can’t do.
Because certificate authority will be separated from teaching, its sole purpose would be to prevent cheating, and they will be able to focus on it completely. Currently, universities don't have much incentive to focus on preventing cheating, because of overworked professors, or simply because they must print X diplomas a year or disappear.
Besides, when certificate authority has a sole purpose of verifying knowledge, it will become obvious which certificate authority allows cheating - people certified by it will fail at their jobs, thus ruining its reputation.
> This secondary certificate authority idea undermines your entire argument though. Maybe I’m missing something though and you have a good idea for how the CA will mitigate cheating that a university can’t do.
The difference is subtle but important - currently, universities don't suffer much reputational damage from cheaters, because the testing aspect of university is interleaved with the learning aspect - so if a university has good learning opportunities, nobody cares if a certain percentage of its diploma-holders are cheaters. They are on their own.
With certificate authorities, cheating will be naturally devastating, because the certificate authority will (I assume) serve just as a filter for employers - employers will choose employees which hold certificates from a trusted authority, i.e. the one that doesn't let people cheat. So there will be natural incentive to prevent cheating, and the free market will do its thing.
Also in Portugal and in Poland there is a thing called national exam which is a nationwide exam at certain check points. It is very useful in showing per school social economic issues as well as grade inflations(school grade VS national exam grade). I honestly do not understand why the verification is not done independently of the teaching in all levels of education. It would also liberate teachers to focus on teaching while having a nationwide benchmark validation on their approach to teaching. Teachers ironically hate to be evaluated.
Another factor that is very hard to handle is that education is an industry that employs a very powerful class, the teachers. More often than not when education is in the news it is for teacher' labor issues. In Portugal recently they held a strike on national exam days. To give you an idea of how important national exams are, they are held in police stations and delivered by police officers to the schools on exam day to avoid leaks and so nobody has unfair advantages.
I will never forget that teachers held students national exams hostage for their negotiations. (they lost and suffered such a public backlash that their bargaining power was neutered for a few years).
The only thing I know from education that does something similar is “Jena-plan” in elementary school and Teaching Assistants in uni. Nothing in our high school.
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.
How do you prevent them from becoming corrupt gatekeepers that maximize their own profits while ignoring learning as much as possible?
"measuring understanding mechanically at scale" is exactly the tool to prevent that.
There could be another organization that specializes in knowledge verification and certification. But that should be completely independent of learning.
Of course, now the question becomes "how do we prevent a verification and certification authority from abusing their power?" - but that question is not particular to this context and can be applied to any human organization of any kind. However, in this particular case, I think that employers would be the verification authorities themselves. They are the ones that need the real-world knowledge, so they should be the ones to measure it.
I don't agree that the system is broken (broken to me is something that is completely unusable, and we must stop using immediately). The progress we've made as a global civilization is to be credited to the way human knowledge is captured, distributed and taught by us as a species. And certainly formal schooling is a big part of that. And so, I'd rather view the situation as us being on a path of continuous improvement - where everything, including education can be improved.
Whether this means it’s “broken” or not is of course completely subjective because it depends on what you think the educational system should be doing in the first place.
Yup, you nailed it. That is the crux of the argument. I think it also leads into the meta discussion of what it means to be a "productive member of society" and how education fits into that philosophy. Why should one be forced by society at-large to be educated, or productive, or anything at all? :)
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 working exactly as intended. It's not "fixable" because there's nothing to fix (at this scale.)
Real learning happens either because a) the student is soaking up everything they possibly can using every resource offered or B) they've left college and are fortunate enough to be in a workplace where there are more knows than know-nots, and they take every opportunity to soak it in like a sponge.
College does not prepare people for the working world (and never will). It is operating exactly as it is designed to do.
Yes, this system is the best [1] because access is open to all (which it wasn't). So those that want to go, can, and those who want to learn, can.
What probably needs to change is the understanding of what college is for. It's not to give you an education, it is to give you the opportunity for you to take an education for yourself.
[1] for some definition of best. Not all schools are created equal, nor all subjects, scale is in play here as well.
That’s a bit extreme; I interpreted their view as, it’s hard to fix because of intractable issues, but it doesn’t mean we can’t have marginal improvements. Radical upheavals and revamps are sketchy.
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 translate for multiple choice tests where there is no partial credit but at least in engineering those don't really exist outside of first year and maybe one or two second year classes. And honestly, every intuition tells me that those classes that I remembered doing no-partial-credit multiple choice should not be doing so in the first place.
Maths classes like algebra, precalc, calculus, statistics, and linear algebra should by no means be using no-partial-credit exams. That defeats the entire purpose of the classes as those classes are to teach techniques rather than any particular raw knowledge.
Same for the introductory hard sciences like chemistry and physics.
And for the ability to handle those more "bespoke" exams, we really need to be asking the question of why certain students are taking certain classes. Many programs have you take a class knowing that only maybe 30% of that will be relevant to your degree.
Instead of funneling all the students through a standard "maths education" class, maybe courses would be better suited by offering an "X degree's maths 1-3" or even simply breaking up maths classes into smaller semesters where you are scheduled to go to teacher X for this specific field up to week A, then teacher Y for this other unrelated maths field up to week B, and teacher Z until the end of the semester. In-major classes need not do this but general pre-req classes could benefit by being shorted and split up through the semester into succinct fields of knowledge so that maths or physics departments aren't being unnecessarily burdened by students who will never once apply the knowledge possibly learned in that class.
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The solution to testing students in a way that they can't cheat is to simply design tests that require students to apply their knowledge as if in the real world. No artificial handicaps and at most checks should be made for obviously plagiarized solutions. If that's not a viable testing mechanism, it's probably worth asking why and considering reworking the course or program.
The solution to students not wanting to absorb knowledge is to stop forcing students to learn topics & techniques they'll never use because maybe some X<25% of them will. Instead split up courses into smaller chunks that can be picked and chosen when building degree tracks.
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Edit: I forgot to include it but this is largely based on my experiences not necessarily just on my own as a student but as a tutor for countless peers and juniors during my time at university, and as a student academics officer directly responsible for monitoring and supporting the academic success of ~300 students for an organisation I was part of. This largely mirrors discussions I've had with teaching staff and it always seems to boil down to "the administration isn't willing to support this" or some other reason based on misplaced incentives at an administrative and operational level (such as researchers being forced to teach courses and refusing to do anything above or often even just at the bare minimum for the courses they are teaching).
Coursework is already along these lines, no?
> The solution to testing students in a way that they can't cheat is to simply design tests that require students to apply their knowledge as if in the real world.
How would this apply to a course in real analysis, say?
University education generally isn't intended to be vocational.
It is but exams are not and if the intent of exams is to test knowledge, they should be in a format that is applicable to the real world and one that can't easily be cheated. Also for what it is worth, for essentially all of the courses I took in university, unless they were explicitly projects based classes, exams were the overwhelming majority of the grades in the course (often ~75-90%).
What this meant in practice was that exams that were closed-book, closed-notes often had averages in the 30s or 40s where everyone got curved upwards at the end of the day while open-book exams had averages in the 60s-80s and students who could apply their knowledge passed the exam while students who couldn't didn't. I can't recall a single course with the latter style of exams where I passed without knowing the material or failed while knowing it. For the prior however I personally experienced both and witnessed numerous other students go through this at the same.
> How would this apply to a course in real analysis, say?
Sorry if I wasn't clear but when I said "as if in the real world" I was referring specifically to students having access to the same resources they would have in the real world (aka reasonably flexible time constraints and with access to texts, resources, and tools) not necessarily that the questions needed to be structured as "in your field you'd use this like this" kind of questions.
Students should be graded on projects and ability to do real things not memorization of a pre-determined set of facts.
Your only concrete solution, produced by your years of study, seems to be "shut up and listen to educators". Well what are they saying?? How do we fix the problem of cheating and the other issues associated with measuring learning through testing?
If you have so much specialized knowledge about the problem, what does it tell you about how to fix it?
What I said was that we should listen to people who are active in the field for proposed solutions to problems we face. I also never said I was active in the field, in fact I said quite the opposite.
I really don’t understand why your comment is so confrontational. I never claimed to have the answers to all problems in all educational systems across the globe, I only suggested that if you want to resolve them you probably shouldn’t do it by having an open discussion involving only programmers (or any other non-pedagogical group of people for that matter).
Therefore, saying "fix the system" isn't helpful, everyone knows some fixing needs to be done but not how or even if they do, don't have the power to. Look at problems like poverty, housing supply, climate change, I can look at all these and say the system is broken
No, it's not. Not at all.
But your comment is saying "How dare you suggest that we listen to experts? We all should have a say!". And that's the problem the gp post is pointing out. Do you argue like that with your doctor before surgery? With your lawyer before they defend you in court? With a chef before they cook a meal you ordered in a restaurant? No? Then why is education any different and suddenly everybody claims to know how it should work..
Because knowledge is currency. It opens doors to privilege and status in society. It also ensures incompetent people are not put into positions where they can do harm.
Sure, but why would you hire an unlicensed electrician, or surgeon, or car mechanic, or builder, or elevator mechanic, or really anything that matters?
The only areas where this point becomes moot are in areas where certifications already are not an issue, i.e. in jobs that almost anyone can do.
Also, I’m fairly certain car mechanics are not licensed where I live. Sometimes licenses are just frivolous, especially in modern day society.
You don't need a licensing system, you just need a reputation system. Like how bonds have a rating system; nobody's stopping you buying a junk bond, but the system makes it clear to you that it's a got a high probability of default.
If it is not a matter of life and death, there's no possibility it will happen, because of regulations.
Anyway:
More than 250,000 people in the US die every year because of medical mistakes, making it the third-leading cause of death
10 percent of all U.S. deaths are now due to medical errors
can I sell it?
Can I buy grocery with knowledge?
Knowledge is a tool!
And it's not even universally true, if you know American English it is perfectly useless in rural China or Japan or Central Africa.
EDIT: I'll add another example that won't upset the American audience.
Numbers in French.
We are used to the decimal system, it won't work in France, they count numbers using the vigesimal system.
So 84, 80 + 4 is quatre-vingt-quatre, 4 x 20 + 4.
My way of counting numbers, which is a basic requirements for kids aged 5, is completely useless in France, even though France is a close Neighbour of my country and we dealt with each other since the dawn of history.
How are you telling whether you are successful at that? Even if you do not care about the personal individual achievement level (or whatever) of the students, you still need to be able to measure to understand where you are successfully teaching, and not, so that you can change/improve/etc teaching.
As the comment you replied to said, you can't just wish these problems away, and they are not easy things.
The overall thing is not a problem, they are systems. They can't be "solved" through simplistic answers
Some things to understand about teaching. You must always teach at the middle kid in terms of ability and intelligence. By default this already means that some kids will be lost and some kids will be bored. This is made worse by conflating age with competence. Additionally, teachers have no understanding of what the kids are going through at home. Say you have a kid that never does homework? Is that the teacher's fault? Is it because the kid is lazy and just plays fortnight at home? Or is it because the parent's only job is night shift and the kids is a de facto parent watching two other kids? Or is it because the parent has a substance abuse problem and the kid hides out at playgrounds until late at night after everyone is passed out and it is safe to come "home"? Statistically, kids with problems at home also tend to be lower on competence scales. The real problem here is social help for the parents but we don't have the political will for this. Do you have any idea how often a teacher has had a student's parent come to a conference to discuss concerns about the kid falling behind just to be told that "It is YOUR job to teach my kid, not mine!" Tell me how testing teachers fixes that? And these are the same teachers that must buy paper/pens/supplies with the other salary because we ration school supplies.
We have some similar problems at the collegiate level. I worked full time while carrying 12+ credits paying my own way through college. I had to cut corners and ration my time. This meant lower grades for some classes but luckily I have the aptitude to get away with it. We also are sending kids to college that shouldn't be there. They don't have a real desire for a professional career outside of something like Social Media Manager. Of course they are going to cheat and use all the tools they have at their disposal having grown up digital. They aren't interested in the subject matter they just want to check the boxes and get through it. There is an issue here that needs solved at the institution level that kids will always be better at tech than the teachers but that is silly to lay at the feet of the teachers. In the end they are trying to lay a foundation of knowledge but the students have to care. Most college classes don't take attendance, is that the teacher's fault too?
Having the best software engineers doesn't mean anyone will use the product. Having the best doctors doesn't mean patients will do what they are told. Having the best trainers doesn't mean people will workout on their own. Having the best therapists doesn't mean anyone will use the techniques suggested in their daily lives.
Finland topped Pisa rankings many years, because we 1) listen teachers and have good academic pedagogical research, and 2) teachers are highly educated and reasonably well paid, meaning that the job is attractive to competent people.
Then politicians started to think big and read all the hype papers from think tanks about digitization and how the young are digital natives. Let's give them computers and they learn by themselves and ... we started slipping. Still OK, but slipping. It turns out that computers are not magic. Having all the information accessible is not a pedagogical solution.
ps. Chinese studied Finnish school system and imported some of the best policies in Shanghai and it worked. Some lessons work across widely different cultures.
This, combined with the possiblity for good teachers to gain respect in their communities, is what makes Finnish schools more effective learning environment than Norwegian schools, I think. Not salaries, some specific methodology, etc.
Well, yes, but at some point we look at the system, see human beings spend over a decade of very precious years doing just that, and not really getting over a decade's worth of benefits.
If we just want to incrementally improve things then definitely we should let specialists have the most weight. But listening to educators will absolutely never lead to major reforms or (god forbid!) reducing the years spent in the system.
I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work and how I can solve problems and how, beginning with one ideea I can extend it or come up with an entirely different idea.
And I know I will get downvoted for saying this, but for me, programming without having a solid understanding of CS background and how computers work it would make me just a code monkey, able just to do what I saw in tutorials and copy pasting SO answers without understanding them. Which can be fine, lower level work is ok and highly needed. But wouldn't make me as good as someone who knows his stuff from a to z.
I hate it when I hear someone considering himself a programmer after he modified a WordPress theme or did a 3 weeks boot camp.
Why should this field be hold to much lower standards than medicine, physics, math, chemistry?
I never heard someone bragging that he is a doctor after watching YouTube videos, which happens often with writing and architecting software.
That led to my grades ending up exactly average, but also at one point I challenged myself and got the highest marks in the most difficult course in my degree. Everyone, specially those who were normally top of the class, were like "WTF did you do??" lol
Incompetent doctor? People die. Incompetent chemist? People die, or at least there's substantial material damage.
When it comes to mathematicians and physicists they only ever have any real impact when they roll up their sleeves, open matlab or R and turn their theoretical work into something practical. Does that make them programmers? Probably I guess.
Anyway as for us programmers there are very few jobs where a poorly written program will cause anyone any harm especially since it can be reviewed, tested, and corrected before being used for real, unlike a doctor who must use their skills on the fly and get it right first time, every time. So the bar for entry is obviously much lower and lowering standards doesn't do much to increase harm.
That's as true for any scientific or engineer field, for architects, pianists, lawyers, painters end economists as is for people designing and writing software.
And yet, all those occupations are generally practiced by people with a degree, who did a lot of study and practice. No watching YouTube videos, no 3 week boot camp will lend you a job as a physicist, concert piano player, economist or architect.
Is not that we don't have a high bar in this field, is that we don't have any bar at all. A programmer is a person who calls himself a programmer. Even car mechanics and construction workers are held at much higher standards than this.
This is not universally true. Many of the best blue collar wokers I've worked with had no formal training or certification, some have. A few trained and certified blue collar workers I've known have been mediocore at best.
The alumni of certifications, official training, and schools are only as good as the integrity of the institution and of the alum.
Car mechanics went through the same shift where learning how to fix cars was an on the job thing and many still don’t have a relevant degree. Construction work is an old profession, but still mostly an on the job thing outside of heavy equipment.
Many, many doctors are completely incompetent, as in, they don't know anything. Yet not all of their patients die.
I have been a "standardized patient" at medical schools; students at the end of their education (after 6-8 years of learning) still don't know shit. And most pass. Maybe they learn on the job... but I doubt it.
Yeah, it's an exaggeration. They certainly know some things, and some of them know a lot of things. But, they all had big holes in their knowledge (huge, gaping holes) and
1/ They weren't aware of it
2/ They were trained to hide them and appear to know everything about everything, because they're the experts. That's the scary part IMHO.
You've got to realize that we can't really train healthcare workers to admit failure. Culturally, it's not admitted in any society I ever lived in. People get really angry really fast if you don't hide the gaps, as they feel you're subpar and they're being swindled.
> They weren't aware of it
I recently taught an undergrad course, and I must admit I was baffled by the lack of knowledge of the students, and also how little effort they put into their studies. Doctors who don't read books. That's _much_ more worrying, IMO. Grade inflation, and all that...
I talked to one of their IT people who told me what a good place it was to work. And had multiple nurses say the same, one going on a 5 minute rant about what a good place it was to work. So that could be a significant factor.
Put in this way, the more software there is, the better programmers we want. But the cost itself is typically externalized over the consumer base and amortized over the lifecycle of these products. Further, the perception of software developers being a cost centre first and foremost is sustained. You surpass these problems by being skilled.
While there are times where a piece of code failure or poorly worded instructions can cause injury to others, those are exceptions to the rule. Generally speaking- the cost of failure for writing and software is lower than it is medicine, and it makes sense not to gatekeep these industries behind theory, and rather just let results speak for themselves.
Even in medicine, the first triage will probably be done by a nurse, then a doctor, finally a specialist.
You don't need a CS PhD for most of the work done with computers and it would be unrealistic and uneconomical to require such a high standard everywhere.
People make a good living customizing WordPress sites and the buyers get good value from it.
For very basic rote queries most pharmacy assistants (who are really just retail staff) will be able to guide you in the right direction too.
Then why require long time in school and residency for doctors? A boot camp should be enough.
>You don't need a CS PhD for most of the work done with computers and it would be unrealistic and uneconomical to require such a high standard everywhere.
No, you don't need any degree to use Excel or MS Word or modifying WordPress themes. But you should need a batchelor degree if if you want to be a high level specialist, programmer or architect.
>People make a good living customizing WordPress sites and the buyers get good value from it.
Likewise, you need a proper education to be a civil engineer or an architect. You do not need a degree to lay bricks or pour concrete.
I am asking for degrees for the higher levels of IT field, not for the people who modify WordPress themes, whom I am sure do a great job and are highly needed but are not exactly exponents of high level work in this field.
alternatively, I have seen people with long CS degrees but who cant code for their life. degrees are just papers.
Nurses don't go though the same system, what they go through is closer to a bootcamp.
> No, you don't need any degree to use Excel or MS Word
Yes you do, because if all I want is someone who can write Word documents, I don't need that person to understand computer architectures, see:
https://www.reed.co.uk/career-advice/what-is-ecdl/
> I am asking for degrees for the higher levels of IT field, not for the people who modify WordPress themes, whom I am sure do a great job and are highly needed but are not exactly exponents of high level work in this field.
The IT field is multi dimensional, a person who is building a 3D engine is not the same person who is going to set up the backend system for your bank or write your kernel drivers. If put everything in one hat you are either going to teach too much or not enough in the field that the student will end up pursuing.
Why do you believe the education sector would be a worse place if we would have 3D engineering, backend engineering, mobile engineering and Wordpress theme development as separate fields? I would enjoy it when hiring people if there would be more specific credentials to the role I want to hire for.
There are plenty of credentials out there. You just mostly don't get them from universities because universities are not in general in the business of granting trade credentials.
3D engineering and backend engineering are very different, but backend engineering is generally easier than 3D engineering. Meanwhile, mobile engineering and backend engineering are far closer related. If one argues mobile engineering and backend engineering are different enough to warrant separate majors, you might as well argue "console/pc game development" and "mobile game development" do the same. You end up with so many ways to split hairs you're really just appeasing hiring managers being lazy.
To put into perspective the absolute insanity, if it were up to hiring managers, we'd have a university trajectory "Bachelor Java backend developer", "Bachelor .NET backend developer", "Master of Microservices", etc. which are obsolete within 2 years and catching up is left entirely to the individual. The field changes way too rapidly while also denying the similarities between different aspects and the ability to learn most things as long as someone can function as a specialist (and most places have a specialist already). Current courses may be too generalist, but at the very least they acknowledge almost every field in CS is effectively still data creation, modification and storage, while strategizing around physical limitations.
I do believe that we could create specializations that are not too specific yet useful, the main goal is to get rid of subjects that the student likely never encounter, I mean, we can start teaching history in Computer Science because maybe you'll program the next Age of Empires, yet we agree that the likelihood of that is so small, we can round it down to 0, my issue is that we don't check this for all the current subjects so that we don't waste people's time teaching them stuff they will never use.
> To put into perspective the absolute insanity, if it were up to hiring managers, we'd have a university trajectory "Bachelor Java backend developer", "Bachelor .NET backend developer", "Master of Microservices", etc.
You don't need "Bachelor .NET backend developer", you just need "Backend Developer", someone who has a good knowledge of one stack can easily migrate to another in the same field.
> which are obsolete within 2 years and catching up is left entirely to the individual
- MVC was invented in the 70s, still useful, it's been over 50 years and counting
- SQL also appeared around the 70s
- OOP appeared in the 50s, that's over 70 years and counting
If you know MVC, you can do MVVM.
If you can handle MySQL it's doubtful that you will have trouble with MongoDB.
I'm not implying that there were no changes and you don't need to keep yourself up to date, I'm saying that there are technologies and concepts that have longevity.
I think that for a Batchelor degree, things are good as they are. Students are better learning CS fundamentals.
Learning the framework or the language du jour, is easy to do by yourself. Frameworks, libraries, tools, languages come and go. Fundamental concepts will stay.
I did a master in Web Development, so there is some specialization. Others did masters in Data Mining, Machine Learning, Database Technology, Bioinformatics.
I plan to do a PhD related to using ML in Web applications, so there can be even more specialization.
I'd like to ask, how are any of these specialties technically related to a bachelors degree?
One does not learn how to be a successful software architect in a semester or two of university. Neither does a bachelors degree make you anything more than a beginner in any specialized topic. While the definition of what's a "good" programmer is up for discussion, universities definitely do not produce them in any dependable capacity.
From my personal experience, at this point in time, major part of the students that complete a bachelors degree are in it just because programming is viewed as a well paying job and are about as worthless as a person that completed a 6 month bootcamp. The only difference being that the person with bootcamp experience might actually end up with an exact match of knowledge an employer wants, which hasn't had time to slowly evaporate over 4 years of "study".
Lastly to bring up another one of your points, I'd argue that learning from YouTube videos is not the same as going to a bootcamp. I do not view either highly, but I'd say that learning on your own deserves some level of commendation as it's the most crucial skill in a field that's constantly shifting and changing.
"We train you for the last job you'll ever have, not the first."
The intent of a well-rounded bachelor's education isn't to be able to walk through the JavaScript library du jour from memory, but to have at least a base level of understanding how everything adjacent to the thing you're doing works.
That's a bit funny for Computer Science since, even though I don't have numbers, I expect the average graduate now to work until they're 65+, and the vast majority will probably be out of the field of direct software development by the time they're 45 (burnout, people management, program management, project management, executive suite, etc).
That's entirely true. But if you din waste your time in school, you know fundamentals, you have the necessary background to proceed further and become good or excellent.
> that learning on your own deserves some level of commendation as it's the most crucial skill in a field that's constantly shifting and changing
I agree. You have to continously learn. But having a solid grasp of the fundamentals and understanding how things work will just help you on your path of future learning.
In University you still learn by yourself, but under supervision.
Someone else answered the question: Nurses do not require a long time. In some (mnany?) states you can become a nurse with a 2 year associate's degree, and career outcome/pay is correlated with experience, not the degree.
And nurses aren't even at the end of the spectrum. You have LPNs, etc.
But the reason I commented: This notion that it takes so many years of school + residency is mostly a US/Canada thing. In many/most countries, you go to medical school right after high school - it is typically a 5 year program.
A person who writes for a regional trade magazine, a failed novelist, and Shakespeare all considered themselves writers.
We can argue this about any other field.
>For example you’re likely not getting a job straight after college without facing the company’s interview process.
We should have a bare minimum standard, not a maximum.
But colleges and universities should be good enough that graduating one means you are in a proper position and have proper knowledge and abilities to start a career. Since that is not always the case, companies do still organize their own processes.
By not graduating some recognized form of higher education in the field, you don't prove to your future employers that you might be good at what they need. You just prove that you weren't willing to do the work for a few years and that you might not have the knowledge. Some won't care as their work is simple enough and they might train you on the job, some will test you harder and some will not get you past screenings.
Another option is that the candidate has relevant work experience instead of a university degree. This is the case for a lot of candidates I’ve seen. There are a lot of factors that make Software easier to get into. For example, in physics you need to have foundational knowledge that was created 100+ years ago. Whereas software frameworks go out of fashion every 10 years or so. Of course there are many important CS foundations and design patterns, but I believe those can be absorbed by working along other experienced engineers
The truth is, is that programming languages themselves have evolved far enough that knowing exactly what's running underneath the hood isn't needed anymore, outside of niche specialist cases. Most people don't even need to worry about seeing a single 'index out of range' issue, or worry about CPU cycles. And it's only going to become easier and easier.
I'd compare it to bricklaying. Yes, you need to use the correct formula for the cement you use, but figuring out that formula has already happened. For niche cases that require special cement, you go to the cement specialists that know the ins and outs of it.
I got serious doubts about this. It seems we are constantly changing the cement formula.
> but *figuring out that formula* has already happened.
Me
> It seems we are *constantly changing* the cement formula.
You
> doesn't change anything
Really?
OP makes the classic error to assume that A) physical engineering isn't changing; B) computer world is analogous to physical.
When issues do arise during the project, an expert is brought in/consulted. Standard cement formula's might change over time, for varied reasons, but it's not the bricklayers that keep themselves busy with that.
The same hold true for most IT projects.
Definitely not my experience. Even if you say choose Spring Boot the architecture and somewhat lower level constantly change.
Specialists in, for example, psychiatry don't need to understand how mitosis works, etc...
The same is also true in finance. People who do model equity index volatility don't remember at all how to derive the equation for put-call parity.
In each of these fields there are people who study each of the fundamentals, and then there are people who do more routine "code monkey" work in a narrow area - think chiropractor or vanilla stock trade execution.
Programming is not unique.
I'm not sure that this example is making the point you wanted to make. There's a reason we have Docotors/Pharmacists/Physios and don't reply on Chiropractory / Homeopathy. It's because we want to get better.
A psychiatrist has to obtain an MD degree before they can start to study their chosen specialty. There's a reason for that: before you can treat a psychiatric illness, you have to be able to eliminate all other possible causes for the condition. I for one would not want to be treated by a psychiatrist that couldn't distinguish bipolar disorder from brain cancer.
> programming without having a solid understanding of CS background and how computers work it would make me just a code monkey, able just to do what I saw in tutorials and copy pasting SO answers without understanding them
Other people genuinely want to understand how things work, and getting a CS degree is not the only way to get there.
Genuine interest is a requirement, a degree isn't. Anyone wanting to measure knowledge is even more fucked than we assume.
Yes, except ...
University courses are always going to have a mixture of people with different motives. One of those motives is going to be a desire to go into research, while another is going to be earning credentials to prove they have an understanding of their field before they embark upon their career. Then there are the people who take the courses with a pure desire to learn how things either in a structured environment or to learn along with like-minded people, without pursuing it as a career path. That runs the gamut from needing university credentials, to the credentials being nice to have, to not needing the credentials at all. Yet, in each case, the desire to learn is genuine.
Then there are the people who are cheating the system by treating the university as a credential mill, the means to an end, where the end has little to do with furthering their understanding. Some of them are upfront about this. I remember one of my high school peers saying they chose their discipline based upon how much money they would earn and how well they would perform. Some choose to deceive themselves about this, largely by griping about how poor instruction is or how irrelevant the course material is while putting little effort into the courses. Whichever way you look at it, these people are problematic when they step over the line by cheating. They go from being passive leeches on the system to actively destructive forces.
There are genuine advantages to learning in a university environment. For some it is structure. For some it is being able to work with their peers. For some, it is having access to professionals in their chosen field. All of these can contribute to understanding, if the learner chooses to do so. I have known very few professors who would turn away someone who was genuinely interested in learning. For the most part, they were more inclined to side with the students who would benefit from learning in a university environment, but were struggling to keep up with the demands of those who would not!
Is this really an issue? I eventually feel into that bucket. Went to university for EE since I figured I could teach myself CS easily, whereas learning EE without a lab would be harder. I quickly realized I hate a very large portion of EE (anything outside semiconductors) and for most of my courses I did the bare minimum to get an A with minimal understanding.
> They go from being passive leeches on the system to actively destructive forces.
I really don't see how that makes me a passive leech. I agree that cheating is actively harmful to the peers that don't cheat, but someone that doesn't engage is a net gain to the others in my book. By not attending any optional tutorials/office hours it gives other peers more focus time with the professor/TA.
The people I worked with typically wanted to see students succeed. It went well beyond the mechanics of delivering instruction and assessing work. They considered what they were doing and put time into modifying their practices when students did not appear to be engaged. For a handful of students, it would be successful. In the vast majority of students, it would flop since the disinterested ones were rarely receptive. Some cases may have been similar to yours, where it sounds like you were focusing on other subjects. Some students appeared to be, ahem, more interested in the non-academic merits of university life. It is difficult to tell what the breakdown is since those students were always the most distant. But either way those passive students were a drain. They simply weren't as much of a drain as the cheaters.
Teachers need to design their programs around actual learning principles like: Deep Processing, Chunking, Building Associations, Dual Coding, Deliberate Practice.
It's not the only way, but it is certainly a good way (at least for some).
In my case, I didn't really know what I didn't know. Before studying CS, I had this vague idea of programming as an activity I liked, but it never really "clicked" in the larger sense, as it was woven with magic that I didn't understand at the time. We make programs using Code::Blocks? Well, who made Code::Blocks, and how did they make Code::Blocks without using Code::Blocks?
After studying CS, it just felt like all those mysteries disappeared. Everything made sense, connected into a coherent whole by various mathematical links.
Of course, there's still a lot of things I don't know, and even more that I don't know I don't know. Every now and then, I run into a new concept that teaches me things that I've kinda wondered about, but couldn't put properly into words. Reading about such topics, and seeing the journey unravel, that another person took in order to discover what I'm getting on a silver platter, is one of the most rewarding things in the world.
I doubt it, but I downvoted you for saying that. No comment anywhere has ever been improved by adding "I know I will get downvoted for saying this, but". Please don't do it.
There are very _few_ reasons why you should downvote a comment. I found parent's comment great, so I upvoted it to counter your unfair downvote.
The "I know I'm going to get downvoted for this, but ..." thing is annoyingly common, and unfortunately it's common for a reason: a lot of the time it works: it lets you frame yourself as a victim without ever needing to be victimized.
And, strictly as a matter of fact, it's almost always false. I just did a search for HN comments saying "I know I|this will get|be downvoted" and checked out the first ten I found. Only one of them was net downvoted (which that particular one richly deserved), even though several of them claimed not just to know they would be downvoted but to know that they would be downvoted "into oblivion" or some such phrasing.
So, why do I care? Because (1) these things just add noise and (2) I think that on net they get unfairly upvoted; I want to discourage #1 and compensate for #2. (Also, most of the time comments that say "I know I'll get downvoted..." are in fact bad ones, but that isn't the point here. In this case, the comment itself was pretty reasonable. It just would have been better without the look-how-brave-I-am posturing.)
Every comment that has that line can be improved by leaving it out.
People say "you'll probably disagree" as a defense mechanism. They preemptively expect a rejection, and make it known, in order to make it hurt less. Works in a similar way as self-deprecating humor. "You can't hurt me, if i hurt myself first." "You can't reject me, if I reject myself/you first."
I myself, got triggered by this thread and it's display of emotionally immaturity, because I have some of it myself, and I dislike it with a passion.
I've noted that HN is a forum full of emotionally immature people that are usually polite in the way they show it. This little thread is a perfect example of it. Very off putting, still the threads are sometimes interesting, if we can accept this fact and try to look at the discussion itself.
I think you're projecting something here. I'm not triggered by his insecurity and don't see it in myself. I just think begging for votes doesn't belong here, and begging for votes through reverse-psychology doesn't either. Let the content of your comment stand on its own merits.
The issue is that modifying a Wordpress theme is just as much of a job as optimizing a low level 3D rendering pipeline or writing facial recognition software. One of these is not like the others and the issue is that universities fail to realise this and just try to teach everything.
In my mind we would need to abolish the idea of a general programmer and move towards specialization.
Yet real doctors actually believe the bullshit they get from medical reps when it comes to prescribing actual drugs that goes in patients bodies. I will let you ponder how successful that strategy is.
> I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work
I don’t think you do.
Genuine curiosity forged in one’s own mind. It is not something that can be bounded, repackaged as a curriculum, and sold in university. It’s like ether, it’s everywhere and can be captured by anyone, through multiple means.
University degrees for any professions are useless. Even in medicine! There are shit doctors and good doctors. Most people here would’ve run through a couple of them before picking one. I’ve been with my current doctor for 10 years now, because they are really good, empathic, and teach me rather than just pushing pills.
Software in my humble opinion works the same way. I care more about what someone does with the tools they have, rather than them being made of wood or metal or gold
I think there is a fundamental distinction between the professions of medicine and law, in that they have licensing boards that are a means of ensuring a standardized minimum amount of competency. Computer science does not.
Despite the fact that many call themselves "software engineers", they are not engineers in the legal sense of the word in US, unless they also have an engineering license. The point of these licenses is, in part, to protect society in professions where they are expected to ethically serve in the public good. One of the problems with CS degrees in the past is that there is no standardized curriculum, so one CS student may have had zero semesters of calculus and another required to take 4. The standardization is what helps pull structure from the ether. That structure is compromised when people cheat.
The boards are to provide society comfort, but they enforce as you, said the minimum. Something just cannot be measured. This is very true in medicine as it contains a human aspect, as well as ethics aspect (I make more money if I see more people and give each less time).
When I was a teenager, I was losing hair due to Alopecia. My doctor at the time, who barely made sense (both of us were ESL) decided to put me on a course of prescription Iron pills. I was pooping black haha. Only later, I was told that I shouldn’t be taking it and that it was prescribed to me by accident by her because she had the file of another patient. Their last name was my first name, and they were pregnant female, I am a male.
The same doctor injected my mom with some drug and as she did, she said “oh shit” and “OMG” and decided not to tell my mom what it was. She tossed the bottle in hazardous waste box so my mom could not find out what it was. My dad was furious and made a scene as he and my mom naturally got worried. We went to this board and they said they did nothing wrong, and my parents were making a scene, and that we should find another doctor. So much for protecting my best interests and holding a bar.
These boards are mafia; another high profile thread about this is in HN right now. The boards are there to provide a facade of credibility.
> The point of these licenses is, in part, to protect society in professions where they are expected to ethically serve in the public good.
I don’t want to be called an engineer and opted out of license because I think most of engineers are doing the exact opposite. Working at companies that knowingly continue operating when we know it’s causing depression? Collecting data for users without them knowing?
Regarding equality of curriculum and standardization, I hear you. None of this is stuff we can ONLY get in school. I think the interview questions we all conduct at our jobs, or give when applying are doing just that. Checking minimum competency; tangentially I much prefer take home tests or something of that nature.
After this, I tend to think learning should be like gardening. Not all gardens are the same and they have different needs. You may need to learn more calculus if you are in robotics, but not if you are working on something really far from that. Another example, you might really need to learn about algorithms and databases if your job/interests require it.
I think I agree with your gardening analogy. It seems to me that the issue is often rooted in the hiring process. If a company was able to adequately assess the skills, they wouldn't need to rely on credentials, period. I think credentials become a lazy shortcut in many ways. Sometimes I think this is borne from the fact that many hiring decisions are made by people who are too far removed from the work being hired for, and thus need some pragmatic shortcut. It's easier for HR to say "you don't have the right degree" than for them to read and understand your resume to conclude "you don't have the right skills". The first is binary, the latter requires a lot of nuance.
I started the process at one point in mechanical engineering (engineer in training exam) but moved on to a different type of job so there was never a reason to get the certification.
I'm not a big fan of credentials, but I understand when credentials become a proxy for something valuable. In some cases, the value of a PE is accountability and the legal authority for a PE to push back when they are being asked to do something unethical/unprofessional. I think one of the central issues of this thread is that the credential of a college degree has become so watered down that it has lost a lot of value.
You might want to read the transcript of this This American Life episode:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/719/trust-me-im-a-doctor
The summary: Licensing boards do a really poor job in maintaining quality. You can do extremely bad things as a doctor and still keep your license.
It doesn't, a good programmer is self evident to good peers.
And schooling isn't the only way to get there. I know plenty of academically educated CS grads that aren't a great programmer not because they didn't do well in school (I have no way of knowing but I assume they did well), but because they lacked curiosity and interest into programming.
Measuring knowledge at scale is futile, harmful, and pointless. The fact that a lot of society has been arranged around the fiction that this is a feasible endeavor does not mean it has borne out in practice, and prioritizing assessment in this way has been gradually hollowing out most forms of pedagogy of their value while building an ever-expanding series of increasingly meaningless hoops for people to jump through to get what they actually need. We have deemed it necessary to create assessments to prop up the idea that education can be easily measured and should gate meaningful life outcomes for most people. Most if not all "cheating" behavior is either just a rational, strategic response to this situation, or a disconnect between how people actually solve problems (e.g. often collaborative and laser-focused on the part of the problem that drives the outcome, in this case the assessment) and some weird cultist notion of what it means for an individual to do it "correctly".
Effective pedagogy will never scale unless we get some really AGI-like technologies (I loved The Diamond Age as a kid, but A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is from the perspective of extant tech a total pie-in-the-sky fantasy, illustrative of how meaningful teaching requires individualized approaches), and we see time and time again that teacher-to-student ratios as well as particularly good specific teachers are overwhelmingly the drivers of even the stupid metrics we are optimizing for
In short, this whole system is broken because its fundamental premise is flawed
As someone who’s hired plenty of people, exams and grades do not help one bit with the process and you shouldn’t pay any attention to them.
The only good use of exams I see see is as a potential entry gate, administered by the place you’re trying to impress, to get onto a course, be considered for a job, or be given a license to do something. As exit gates they’re just noise.
For better or worse, whether somebody completed their degree does often factor into hiring decisions, so exam grades do indirectly factor into hiring decisions. Having completed a degree signals some level of domain knowledge, conscientiousness, and intelligence. Without exams you would have a 100% success rate (unless you introduced some other assessment mechanism), so the signal would be gone; having completed a degree would only signal whether or not you were able to afford it financially.
Secondly, a large fraction of the students would lose motivation and not do anything by the second year. Many would stop doing homework, stop doing any real studying except maybe superficial reading, and many would hardly come to class. In fact, many students currently already do this until the first midterm, even though they know the midterm is coming. A lot of students need the existence of exams to motivate themselves. Not all students, but a lot. These students don't want to lose motivation and waste time; many would probably regret not learning anything for several years. Our monkey brains are not suited to motivating ourselves to do things with a >3 year time horizon. Exams are a mechanism to motivate our monkey brains to put effort into studying.
I think if we consider professions that are important to our own lives, we do recognise the necessity of assessment. Would you prefer your doctor or nurse, accountant, electrician, or for that matter, teacher of your kids, to have come from a school that doesn't do exams or from a school that does? If they are experienced, maybe it doesn't matter, but how many people are going to take a chance on a fresh graduate if they are from a program without any assessment, where the philosophy is "you do it, you tell people you did it, then you either convince them that doing it imparted something useful on you or you don’t"?
There are other ways to solve that problem, and some of them may even be better than the current system, but I'm not convinced that taking the current system and simply removing exams would work.
I think it might be worth spreading some of the standards from medical schools to other programs. Don’t assign a grade to a student, make everything pass/fail. Either you know the material or you do not. There’s no honor roll or deans list and no class rankings.
This is simply not the case. How well the person knows the material is more than yes/no. You'd be rounding the exam result to 1 bit and throwing away the extra bits of information. Maybe it's a good thing not to show that information to the student, but I'd like to see an argument for why the advantages of hiding that information from the students outweigh the disadvantages.
As for competitiveness in education...there are advantages and disadvantages to it. I'm not convinced that class rankings are a good idea, but I'm also not convinced that the optimal target for competitiveness is zero, to the point of not showing students their grades beyond pass/fail. Anecdotally I've seen the aim for zero competitiveness have perverse effects, where students instead start to compete on how lazy they can (appear to) be while still getting a pass, to show how smart they are.
Harvard is one example in the US and McMaster is an example in Canada. Neither place has students competing to be most lazy.
Measuring the effectiveness of school systems is difficult because of selection bias, but I'm sure you could find some attempts (e.g. PISA) if you went looking.
Should we also always listen to the car mechanics, used car salesmen, and cops because after all they are the experts?
No, we should listen to the people when deciding what the purpose of school should be, THEN refer to the experts on those purposes. Is it teaching random factoids? Making people "cultured"? Separating out people who follow instructions and learn well from those who don't? Introducing habits useful in a workplace? Good habits of thought? Teaching the knowledge required to vote sensibly? To provide some foundational knowledge for later vocational training? To navigate and function in the modern world? Is it just day care for kids?
First decide on the purpose(s) (and their weightings if many) and only then can we have a plan. I think there hasn't been anywhere near enough thought given by most people about what the purpose(s) of schooling is(are).
This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue.
You DON'T measure knowledge.
You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning.
> maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
pity that academics and teachers often disagree and, most of all, that schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say.
Teachers are not doctors, doctors practice medicine, teachers do no operate in such a stressful environment, they "educate" young people and is is often the case that it means they impose or suggest their opinions (because they can, nothing prevents them) and families see that kind of "education" unfit for their kids.
And they have all the rights in the World to be listened too, even if they are technically wrong or I disagree with them (I completely disagree on catholic schools for example).
The experts are there to find a solution to their problems, not to build hypothetical perfect solutions in a void.
Also: teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead. In my country (and practically all other countries in Europe) they are like bus drivers, they are fulfilling an obligation required by State laws under the State government but also offering a service the people paid for to the State.
Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics, we should look at places where the system is proven to work and copy it: see Finland.
CONTROVERSIAL
On a last note, there's a topic I believe it's the most important, that will quite certainly cause uproar.
If your youngest students die in school shot by someone just a bit older than them, the society you live in have failed in every possible way.
The fact that the system is broken is a joke compared to that.
>You DON'T measure knowledge.
>You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
>Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning.
What is satisfaction going to get you? As a student, I would have been very satisfied to have great marks while enjoying each night of the week, unfortunately I had to work and skip parties.
that's the wrong way to look at it.
As a student you would have been very satisfied to have recognition for your hard work (something that rarely happens in most school systems I know)
You switched cause and effect.
> while enjoying each night of the week, unfortunately I had to work and skip parties
So you were getting satisfaction from doing it, or you would have skipped studying to go to parties.
Which is what I did, I had great marks and went to parties to reward myself.
Personally I always loved STEM topics, and would go out of my way to learn about them. This ended poorly for me in school, as I ended up being incredibly bored in the STEM classes, as they were filled with content I already knew. Then the other topics I didn't love, and largely did not like to experience them. So in the end my satisfaction was miserable, and I dropped out of 7th grade.
Eventually I got a GED and went to college for CS, but it was that time in-between those two that even allowed that to happen. I needed time to explore the world, find what I wanted to know, and figure out how school can help me get there.
As someone on the other end of the hiring table now, I don't even care about knowledge. Knowledge tells me how far you've got. I don't care how far you've got, I want to know how quickly you pick up the material based on the job I'm hiring for. I care about acceleration. While the two can be correlated, it's not precise. There's not a single hiring test that I can do to figure out someone's acceleration. What I do know, that testing the farthest on some topic as a metric, like leetcode does, it's going to fail every single jack of all trades programmer.
Thanks for posting this.
This was my experience as well, with the added malus that when I went into school, people were still saying things like "what do I need maths for?" or "a computer will never write the next Dante" and things like that, so not only it was frustrating, it was borderline painful and lonely.
Then I discovered kids, I don't have kids on my own, but I have a very big family and I am grateful for being surrounded by people younger than me of any age from 3 to 20.
I saw them being entertained by the most boring stuff just because it was new to them and build up from there, at an incredible pace, and become young experts, with all the limits of being inexpert and also being kids, in a very short time.
I realized that what kept them motivate was a feedback loop that needed no external validation: knowing more about that thing made them happily satisfied and so they kept doing it. They don't care about understanding things the wrong way, eventually they'll get it right, they don't care about not doing any mistake, eventually they'll learn to make new mistake, they just wanna learn more and experience more.
What you call "acceleration".
I saw most of them struggle in school because they were bored, they were getting good grades, most of them at least, they were kin to put up the work necessary to get them, but their motivation started lacking, until they arrived to university and chose something that could (potentially) assure a good job or would make their parents happy.
It's a sad state of things, if I think about it, but it's also a "great filter" and we should strive to make education something that adapts to people receiving it (I'm not talking about schools for the gifted or smth like that) and not the other way around.
When I was in my 30s a friend of mine married a woman from Finland, who was living in Sweden, and then they moved back there when they had kids. I've visited them on many occasions and when I saw how they intend school there I was astonished.
They are not tracked, they are not tested, there is no standardized grade scale, there is virtually no homeworks, they do not compete, they learn by playing and are simply thought that you have to get the basics rights to go on and then helped to follow their paths.
I think that, in general, it makes happier adults.
Which is a good goal by itself.
I did an education degree, and come from a family of educators. Every educator and academic I've talked to (I can't remember an exception) wanted our system to be more like Finland's. The people pushing back against changes in that direction were not teachers, but politicians, parents and high-up administrators.
>Teachers are not doctors
Indeed. And you wouldn't tell a doctor how to do their job, even if you had spent years as a patient. People in the education system have opinions that are informed by years of experience in the field and decades of research. With respect, I'm thinking you are an example of the type of person described by the comment you're replying to: not much experience inside the system but confident in your opinion of how to fix it.
> schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say.
My country, and yours too I think, pays for health care with taxes along with education. Again, does that mean you and I get to tell a doctor how to do their job?
> teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead
Teachers existed long before mandatory attendance laws. Also, what point are you trying to make with this statement? That because they are necessary by law, their professional opinion is negligible?
That's not correlated: doctors ask patient how do they feel all the time.
If they don't feel well, they try to adjust the prescription and/or the therapy.
Don't like the word satisfaction?
Replace it with "listen to feedback from your customers".
Maybe it's gonna ring a bell.
disclaimer: most of my family members work or have worked in health care.
> That because they are necessary by law, their professional opinion is negligible?
The point is that they do not run the education system, they are employees of the education system
And should act like that.
Meaning that they have proper channels already in place to file their complains. Including protected rights like the right to go on strike.
If they want to govern it, they better step up their career and try with politics or with manager roles.
So that teachers can complain about them, their choices and how much of a better job they would do if they were in their position.
And teachers _constantly_ monitor how their students are doing - "feedback from their customers" if you want to put it that way. Talking with them during or after class to see how things are going, assessments on homework, projects and tests, parent-teacher interviews, individual learning plans, collaborations between teachers... I would venture to say "making sure a student is doing well" takes up most of the time of the job.
A patient complaining to their doctor about some treatment not working is not telling the doctor how to do their job. Your first comment made a claim about how student assessments should be done. This is something at the heart of pedagogy and has been studied and experimented on. The analogy to health care would be like if you declared the ways in which doctors should screen for cancer. Nobody without medical training would ever think to make such a claim, but many people seem quite confident in making similar claims about how the education system should work, as you did in your first comment.
I'm not even making an argument about whether you are right or wrong. There are many ways in which assessments can change for the better (educators would be the first to agree with you there). But to then go on and say "you shouldn't measure knowledge, only student satisfaction" without really showing an understanding of how knowledge or satisfaction are currently - or potentially could be - assessed... are you up to date with recent literature on these concepts? Do you have experience performing these kinds of assessments?
I'm still not sure what point you are making with your second section in this comment so I won't try to respond.
They actually don't do it, not constantly, nor as a way of improving teaching.
They monitor their output, but rarely listen to what the student have to say.
In the end it's not their job, their job is to teach what they are told to teach, they rarely go on a limb for their students.
Because their salary does not depend on it.
But as personal story I've always had a conflict with my Italian teacher in high school, I've always been an A student, even after high school, but she hated my temper, so I've always been graded C (I believe it means sufficient in some parts of the World, for us is 6 in a scale from 3 to 10) and when in our latest test I've submitted the assignment of her favorite and she submitted mine, she was graded 9 and I was graded 6, again!
I won't tell you what color her face was when we told her the truth.
You are going through all of this, no matter what, there's always gonna be some bad teacher and yo can't do anything about it.
And since the mentality is "don't tell a professional how to do their job" it's always the student's fault.
That's why I think student should be asked if they are satisfied of their teachings, not of their grades or about how much fun they are having, but of the people teaching.
> I would venture to say "making sure a student is doing well" takes up most of the time of the job.
I'm glad it was like that for you.
It isn't so common in places I know.
In my country they spend 12, 15 maximum, hours - by contract - a week in school as high school teachers, that is when students need it the most.
Let's start by making them work 30 hours a week, it's one of the few jobs left where presence is fundamental, but we still keep treating teachers like those poor souls who have to grade a bunch of four pages written tests, like if computers have not been invented yet. It takes them weeks usually.
> A patient complaining to their doctor about some treatment not working is not telling the doctor how to do their job
I think I have not been clear: they are not complaining, they are being asked questions and depending on their answers the doctor can (should) understand if the treatment is working as intended and not causing too many contraindications .
So the analogy in education should be smth like "what's your favorite Renaissance author, and why?" not "What's the date that changed the life of Machiavelli forever?" (real question from a real questionnaire)
There is no talking to them, nobody grades them for liking profoundly horror movies and writing beautiful essays about them, because it's not "part of the teaching program"
> The analogy to health care would be like if you declared the ways in which doctors should screen for cancer. Nobody without medical training would ever think to make such a claim, but many people seem quite confident in making similar claims about how the education system should work, as you did in your first comment.
I haven't said anything of the sorts.
I am simply saying that if half of the class is getting bad grades in maths you should blame the teacher, not the students.
But bad teachers are allowed to teach anyway, because they are not responsible for their bad teachings.
At least in my country they can't be fired even if they are literally doing nothing.
> without really showing an understanding of how knowledge or satisfaction are currently - or potentially could be - assessed... are you up to date with recent literature on these concepts? Do you have experience performing these kinds of assessments?
I have a few ideas.
For example monitor what subjects show the worst grades or the highest rates of absence from school the day of a test.
These are all basic symptoms of fear and anxiety.
It doesn't take a Nobel prize to understand basic human emotions.
Let's try to understand why, the subject could be really hard or the students really stupid or it could be the teacher. Anyway, being stressed by school it's not something that motivate students.
you could simply ask them to grade their teachers anonymously a couple of times a year.
Internet forums are full of cry for help from students not understanding why they are asked such silly questions and what's the point.
We could monitor those forums, for example...
Unsurprisingly when these kinds of discussions come up, unions complain and go on strike.
And I am all in favor for unions, I have been union delegate in companies I've worked for, but school unions, they are a corporations, at least here.
I've talked to some of them, of course what I'll say is anecdotal I don't pretend to know everyone of them, but when asked why they don't want teachers to be paid better instead of a lot of teachers badly paid who don't do anything important for __education__, they told me blatantly that they prefer two jobs at current wages than one job paid double. They can spin it as a victory. They also told me that if newer teachers are paid better, old timers are going to complain ans tart asking for the same pay (it's kinda impossible here to pay two people different wages for the same job, especially if it's for the public) and that better salaries would encourage more prepared teachers to start teaching and that would look bad for the rest of them.
That's the state of our education system, I hope it is different in all the other countries but according to my friends living all over Europe it's kinda the same everywhere, especially during COVID crisis, where families where left to solve problems schools would not solve, because they couldn't get teachers to get vaccinated or to go to school.
Except, of course, for a few exceptions, that I already mentioned.
But, back on topic, if people studying the subject have no idea, well, that's a problem, don't you agree?
If we wanna keep grading people and "judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree", I think pedagogy is not doing a great service to future generations.
Let's not forget that teachers quote pedagogists when it favors them, but when it goes against their interest, they criticize them saying that "they are talking from their ivory towers. they don't know what's like being a "street" teacher"
Not all is lost or grim, teachers still fight against school commoditization, they still fight against schools as furnaces that generate young workers/consumers, but there's still a lot of conservatorism disguised by idealism.
> Do you have experience performing these kinds of assessments?
As a matter of fact I do.
I wanted to be a teacher, I was discouraged by how limited the space for new ideas was.
In my family, that is very big as I've said, there are teachers.
All of them keep doing it because it's a safe job and the salary is granted, none of them is satisfied of the work they are doing and would gladly do something else, if they had the opportunity.
They all feel like are doing nothing substantial to help the students and that the students know it, but going against the status quo would cost them too much. They tried, they've been burnt, they gave up.
So to get rid of the guilt they grade everyone good, at least they are not unpopular.
> I haven't said anything of the sorts. I am simply saying that if half of the class is getting bad grades in maths you should blame the teacher, not the students.
Yes, this is exactly what you said:
> "This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue. You DON'T measure knowledge. You should measure the satisfaction of the students."
You quite explicitly made a claim about how teachers should assess students. Then I suggested that maybe you should take a step back and question whether you are qualified to make such claims. Now, it seems like you've doubled down, and written a diatribe which superficially touches on a half dozen issues in education. I'm simply pointing out this irony: that the commenter you first replied to was lamenting how so many people outside the field of education feel qualified to make claims about pedagogy. Even if their expertise is limited to, for example:
> I wanted to be a teacher... In my family... there are teachers
Are you aware of the Dunning-Kruger effect?
OK. Then how do you measure competency? Right now, a medical diploma indicates that the person took all the requisites and passed all the tests to be a practicing physician. If you only measure student satisfaction, how do you which medical student is ready to treat real patients and which isn't?
You don't.
You certify it, when it is required.
> Right now, a medical diploma indicates that the person took all the requisites and passed all the tests to be a practicing physician.
exactly! because it is required by regulations.
> If you only measure student satisfaction, how do you which medical student is ready to treat real patients and which isn't?
there is a high chance than an unsatisfied medical student is gonna be an equally unsatisfied doctor, even if they check all the boxes.
let's be clear: satisfaction is not a measure of how much they are having fun.
just like if you go to the gym you're not more satisfied if they give you free candies and hot dogs and couches with Netflix, but you end up being fatter and less fit than before.
> You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
> Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning.
But if they aren't actually improving and learning, their satisfaction and desire to continue with what they were getting isn't desire to keep improving and learning.
Self-improvement theater is as much a thing as security theater, and it's something we probably want to be able to distinguish from actual education.
good for them.
In which way this is an obstacle for those who want to?
It's very easy to make satisfying and engaging teaching. It's a lot harder to make that valuable.
If we focus on student satisfaction rather than understanding, we're failing them.
while making them unsatisfied gives them a lot of motivation to understand.
Anyway, satisfaction is about the product: the product is education.
The product is not entertainment.
When I was in school, many moons ago (in France) there were no quizzes. Zero. "Tests" were either dissertations (for topics such as literature, history, etc.) or problems. Everything was done in class, in longhand.
There were no good or bad answers, even in math class, because what was evaluated was the ability to describe the problem, the approach, and the solution, and you got points for that even if the ultimate result was wrong.
"Cheating" was very difficult; copying what another student was writing was hard and not very effective, because unless you could reproduce their whole argument, just taking a sentence or two would not make sense.
This system didn't "scale" very well; in fact it didn't scale at all.
If you build a system that let one person "teach" classes of hundred of students and generate quizzes that can be instantly rated by a machine, then some (most?) students are going to try to game that system.
This is inevitable, and I'm not even sure it's a bad thing.
In high school we often were given two (or more) sets of problems so we can't copy off each other because people sitting one sit away from each other have different sets.
I remember at least one test where I wrote down problems from both sets (they were verbally dictated by the teacher at the beginning of the test). Then I just solved both and passed the solution to his problems to the classmate sitting behind me (I was asked for this ahead of time by him).
In Poland cheating is frowned upon by teachers and they tried to catch the cheaters but there were no formal systems in place to report or excessively punished cheating (like in USA).
In the real world the solutions to your problems can’t be found online, or if they can it’s valid to search them there (and lawyers will charge you a lot to do that). Collectively searching and distributing a solution is something young people are quite adept at (e.g. gaming wikis).
Well obviously we need to fix the system of the system!
It didn't work, because you could see the same, let's say, idiosyncracies, in their code. For example, there might be three or four different ways to solve a coding exercise and about 60-75% of the papers would solve it using the same way, which was not necessarily the best, or even the most obvious, way (what is the most obvious way to solve a Prolog exercise might not be common sense, but that's why you are given a lecture, first, and then the exercise).
What's most interesting is that I saw the same patterns repeated over the three years I TA'd for one of the Prolog courses. I guess they shared the answers between years, or somebody had put them online (I searched but couldn't find them). Or they just copied solutions to similar exercises they found online.
I didn't report the cheating because I felt there was no benefit in doing so. In particular with Prolog, because it's not a language commonly used in the industry, and it's taught at Imperial mainly for historical reasons (there are many of us logicists studying, or teaching, there) I reckoned that most students found it a useless chore and did not understand why they needed to learn it, and why they needed to "waste" time solving those coding problems. So they copied from each other in order to get the job done quickly and then have more time to spend on the things they felt were more useful to them (like learning Python or "ML" I suppose).
I personally thought, and still think, that learning to program in Prolog is useful, just to disentangle a programmer's mind from the particularities of the coding paradigms, and the programming languages, she's most familiar with. At CS schools today, programming is introduced with Python and I guess it's easy to get into a mindframe that all programming languages must necessarily work like Python. Studying languages from different paradigms, like Prolog or Haskell, can shake you off that mentality (it sure did me, back when I did my CS degree).
The problems is that you can't really force this appreciation of the need to learn different things on students, who are often in a terrible hurry and under terrible pressure to do good on their course, so they can get on with life. The Prolog course I TA'd was mandatory and so it must have really felt like someone was trying to force the knowledge down the studnets' throats.
I don't think that's a good idea. You can't teach people that way. They'll just see your obvious effort to force them to learn what you want, and they'll simply take the obvious route around it. And that ends up teaching them a lesson that you really weren't expecting to teach: the world is full of idiots who think they can teach you things, but you know better than they do and you'll show them who's boss.
That's what students do with tests, also. They can see they're a useless waste of time and they can see the obvious way around them is to cheat, and that it's to their benefit to cheat. And so they cheat. I don't have solutions to this. The students shouldn't have to fight the school, and the school shouldn't have to fight the students. The school is there for the students' benefit after all.
Because it conflates two things with conflicting incentives. This could and should resolve nicely.
1. Spreading knowledge 2. Certifying competence
To get e.g. a RHCE you may or may not attend the course. You may get the materials elsewhere and study from them, you might get tutoring from someone else who attended the course, you may have enough experience from your day job. This is knowledge acquisition.
Then you attend the certification exam and either succeeded or fail.
If you fail, you get back to knowdge acquisition. Decide to pay for the course this time. Get tutoring. Read the materials again. Maybe retry right away because you were just stressed and disoriented. Then you succeed.
Compare this with college. Fail a couple of examinations? Too bad, you are booted. Want to try again? Repeat up to two years! This is absolutely insane! No surprise people are cheating their way through!
Decouple knowledge acquisition from competence certification. Managed to reach end of the math track but failed physics? No problem! Certify math competence and let them study physics some more! Got enough certifications to warrant a title? Cool, give them the title!
Make it possible for people to step away for a couple of years and then come back to earn some more certifications and even the title when they actually need and want to learn those skills.
Make it possible to study 1/3 of your time for 15 years. Maybe people would stay in the learning mode longer. Unlike many doctors who are hopelessly behind the times. Make it possible to study with kids or sick parents to take care of. Make it a part of the adult culture.
Not something people had to suffer through in their youth to earn their place in the world.
The education is the major chunk of time and cost, but the credentialing is what most people are trying to get. By forcing people to buy them together, you can make people pay a lot (in terms of both time and money) for an education they find little worth in just because it's the only way to get the credentials.
At the end of the day the final grades from school / college grades depend on so many factors that this signal is close to noise anyway, but in college it often feels somehow more important than the actual learning and so much time and stress is spent on them.
In a better world I imagine it would be the organisations that need specific knowledge co-sponsoring "exam centers", separate from colleges, where you could go and get a certificate saying how well you know a given subject. Private companies that want to hire the best people actually have a good incentive to make these exams as fair and useful as possible.
To make an analogy with GAN networks in deep learning: the college would act as a generative part and "exam center" would be the discriminative part. It seems to work pretty well in ML, maybe it would work in education too?:D
Everyone has to pass the two certifying exams for their discipline, but there are multiple paths for assuming somebody has acquired the knowledge for the exam, ranging from years of industry work to passing standardized tests to having a college engineering degree.
It seems to me that a lot of problems in the real-world can be tracked down to unnecessary dependencies (in this case, having to attend college in order to get certified).
Our schools, in the aggregate, aren't that bad. We have a broad spectrum and inequality is severe, but even in the worst-off areas, it's not the schools so much as broader social conditions that are producing lousy academic performance. If kids are getting evicted, they're not going to be able to turn homework in on time. If they're doing nothing all summer, they're going to backslide. I also question the social value of "fun" projects like dioramas in grade school: the result seems to be that middle-class kids' parents do all the work, producing adult-quality work, while the less well-off students turn in projects that looks like they were made by kids.
We have ridiculous rates of cheating because we're in a society run by people who cheated and everyone knows it. Corporates cheat; you can't become (or stay) an executive if you don't lie and backstab your way to the top. The fish is rotting from the head, and young people are extremely alienated. This doesn't justify their actions, at an individual level, but it does explain the upsettingly high rate of dishonesty we're seeing.
People also underestimate the power of peer framing and moral drift. Generally, people don't wake up one day and decide that they want to cheat their way through college like some future insurance executive. It happens over time. They start with minor offenses like lifting a sentence without attribution, or looking up one answer on a phone... but, over time, they're plagiarizing whole papers and have stopped doing the actual work... and this is when they usually get caught.
Dishonesty also goes both ways. Grading might be broken, but a world without it would be worse--removing the SAT enhances the preexisting advantages of the rich. Once people become teenagers and realize that advancement in society isn't only based on merit but also requires playing social/nonacademic games (in high school, to be popular and appear "well-rounded" to admissions committes; in college, to get laid but also to get introduced to the best companies; in the work world, to ingratiate oneself to the right people and thus climb the ranks over more deserving but less likeable peers) at which everyone cheats, because everyone has to do so... because global corporate capitalism is itself a cheating system in which most of us are predestined to lose... it becomes harder to make a moral argument to them that cheating is categorically unacceptable.
I think the reason for feeling of competence that prompts so many people to share their opinions on the matter is that nearly all of us went through this broken system at some point in our lives and our future lives literally depended not so much of what was taught but what was written down as the result of the teaching.
I have experienced good tests and bad tests. I studied in France, tests were open book with no multiple choice questions, only problems to solve. This approach scales badly and is a lot of work for the professor grading but it measures knowledge.
The problems were long, had few questions besides describing the problem and maybe a few questions to guide the student along the path to solving it. We had either 3 or 4 hours to solve those problems.
Those tests worked very well. I'd come out from one of those tests having often learned something new.
I was an exchange student in the US, tests involved multiple choice questions, they were closed books with questions around rote memory. While I did feel that some of the education in the US was valuable and interesting, I hated those tests, they didn't correlate as much with comprehension of the subject matter and more with learning facts that are more or less tangentially related to the subject matter. I still remember in a computer graphics tests being shocked by being asked when Opengl was first released, which companies were involved and other completely useless knowledge.
What's interesting to me is that there's much less opportunities to cheat with the former tests while the later tests are pretty much made for cheating. So, imho cheating is a symptom of bad tests.
I understand it's incredibly uncomfortable.
I'm a pretty serious introvert and got the shakes and sweat dripping off my hands the first few times I did it. But with exposure and effort to self-improve, it's doable. I didn't like it, but I'm incredibly thankful I was forced to work on it.
It's like LeBron James saying "I learned to dunk, so anybody can dunk!" - but basketball is not just about dunking, and not everyone is LeBron.
Frankly, I've been in oral exams, in Romania they're (were?) part of a national exam at the end of highscool. You just have to practice.
If hundreds of thousands of highschoolers in a rather poor country could figure out how to do it (any generally not flunk due to the oral part), for sure university students can do it.
Anyone not able to do it will not really be able to pass any interview, persuade peers that their idea is good, etc.
> Anyone not able to do it will not really be able to pass any interview, persuade peers that their idea is good, etc.
I strongly disagree there. Orals are a situation of complete knowledge and power imbalance between two parties. That is not the case when it comes to persuasion.
As for interviews - yeah, they are similar, and that's why interviews also are seen as very problematic. A lot of people who can be perfectly productive in day-to-day situations, simply don't do well in interviews. We should be striving to correct that, not accept it as inevitable.
But if one, even if those situation really can't do it, they'd have to switch to a course/class without any oral examination to get their degrees, but I think it's way better to learn as a student than as a professional (and yes, like the sibling comment, I think most people _can_ learn to an acceptable degree)
> work in his corner, talk to his immediate peers and crank out solutions
Do such post really exists?
where he doesn't have to become a team lead or architect where he'd need to speak and present and instead steadily and happily work in his corner, talk to his immediate peers and crank out solutions?
The big thing here being "talk to his immediate peers". The guy I was describing was completely fine working w/ us, his friends. Put him in front of an audience and he's got a problem. Of course it'd be hard to get a job in the first place, but a lot of places also did exist at least back then where no coding (neither take home, nor whiteboard) were part of the hiring process. Of course you won't make that guy a consultant at Accenture, he's gonna fall apart.
well, that would have made the requisites for the posts harder to meet :)
You don't have that for verbal communication with other people, but I'm sure if digged far enough you would have the same reaction to something else that other people think is acceptable.
Just how accommodating should the standard test be?
If the answer is "infinitely", I think you won't find any test that satisfies it
And I'm not passing judgement on the choice made, nor saying the constraints aren't there, nor saying anyone should do anything different. I'm just pointing out that the scalability constraint will affect the test possibilities, which will affect the quality of the measurement. Feel free to disagree with this all you want.
EDIT: Also, I do happen to have some inside knowledge by having worked in higher education for about a decade, starting in the mid 00s. Coincidentally, most of my work was on cost-saving measurements, designing a few algorithms that allowed universities to reduce their teacher headcount (first at a university, then at a software vendor), so yes, the #1 goal there was saving money. But I don't think having done this affects my answer, nor I do think that I deserve special treatment. I'm merely answering to a chain of comments.
It obviously doesn't scale, so we'll use random sampling.
A lot of stuff you learn and the way you learn it isn't necessarily pleasant, but frequently you still have to do it and you really discover 20 years later why it was needed.
There's still a scaling problem, but I think it makes the ~200 student classes we have now more feasible than 100% autograding. I also like the other commenter's suggestion of coming back to interview certain students each time, if they need it.
This saved a bunch of time on actually grading assignments and made us write a very clear and unambiguous rubric (which required a very clear homework) and also demonstrated to the students that grading was not arbitrary.
Peer teaching/grading potentially scale out.
Several universities [1] scale out personalized instruction and interactive grading by hiring students from previous cohorts and paying them either in course credit (taking a "course" that involves teaching students in the current cohort) or at a low rate (possibly subsidized by financial aid) comparable to other on-campus student jobs.
[1] "Scaling Introductory Courses Using Undergraduate Teaching Assistants", SIGCSE '17, https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3017694
(I want a browser extension linking doi to google scholar btw)
If I say something imprecisely or if I make a non-fundamental mistake, an oral setting gives me the chance to correct myself and prove to the examinator that I have a strong grasp of the material regardless.
Written exams, especially multiple choice and closed-answer quizzes reward people who regurgitate the notes, oral exams and written long-form open questions reward actual knowledge.
Of course the "better" methods require a greater time investment, and I can't really blame professors who choose not to employ them. But it's quite clearly a tradeoff.
This is just even further proving the point, which is that in an oral context this means that the animosity of the examiner is much more significant than in a written one, which by definition implies that the oral one cannot be fairer than the written one.
You yourself are saying that you "have the chance to correct yourself". This is either because you will self-correct yourself on recognizing a specific (perhaps subconscious) face or gesture from the examiner, or because the examiner will directly tell you that you are wrong. Both cases present ample opportunity for unfair discrimination. In the first case, perhaps a person is less skilled at reading people, or perhaps the examiner just has a better poker face. In the second case, you are now at the whim of the examiner to decide based on your body language whether "you are making a non-fundamental mistake and deserve a second chance" or just "have no idea of the material and don't deserve a second chance". And, compared to the written exam, there is absolutely no record of the context that drew the examiner to such conclusion -- which is also kind of important, since evidently the written exam is also subject to some discrimination.
Nobody expects you to be 100% on point, it's just impossible; it's not like the spoken variant of a written exam. The kind of "correction" I mean is more along the lines of what would happen during a normal conversation. Imagine I was asked to write a recursive algorithm and I forgot the base case. It's not a fundamental mistake, but the professor might interject to make sure I actually know about termination, inductive sets, etc., which is actually great if you understand the material deeply, because it gives you a chance to prove that you actually just forgot.
Obviously this is assuming good faith by the examiner, but if you aren't willing to assume that, there aren't very many examination formats that are going to work very well.
How you deal with that is really where your score comes from. Because if you know what you're talking about you'll correct it and while doing so show that you know a lot of related things. While if you have no idea you can't guess yourself out of that type of question.
How would you blind oral examination so that the examiner is unable to distinguish the student’s gender/race/identity?
I still think we are conflating the objectives of
1. Teaching students skills and knowledge they need and want, and
2. Rationing access to jobs, status, etc.
FWIW, the study that "proved" that appears to have been a pretty bad study. So, in reality, no: people are not terribly prejudiced, and things don't change significantly when you blind the examination.
And yes, this is actually a well-known problem in Italy - with (typically male) professors being routinely accused (and occasionally convicted) of favouring attractive (and typically female) students.
* everyone gets the same questions meaning later students can cheat by asking earlier students what was on the test, or
* everyone gets different questions meaning much more effort to design the exam and big risks that some students will get easier questions and others will get harder questions
As an introvert, I am very happy not to have had too many oral exams during my studies (in France ;) ). I think I agree with you in principle, but to me that would have been torture.
I do know that since then they've moved to a continuous grading system. I'm not sure if that's the same with other grande écoles but I do know that my friends in other grand écoles had a similar system of 2-4 partiels a year.
To be clear, the only goal of chegg.com is to help students cheat. The world would be a better place if chegg and its copies did not exist.
It does, however, require gauging that individual X, for any individual X who have taken the course, said individual X have acquired enough knowledge to consider "having passed".
Anything beyond "pass/fail" is merely trying to stack-rack students and impose un-needed competition. But it is good for the gamification of knowledge acquisition, so perhaps not entirely bad.
As a US citizen, many tests were open book essay style, especially once we got to college.
In public school however, lots of "standardized" multiple choice tests that were used to grade the school. Some of those tests also include an essay portion.
Teachers in the US aren't paid to do grading, they typically do it at home in their own time, thus very few essay style tests.
This question has no meaning unless you specify what the goal of the measurement is. There are two main options.
1. Measurement as part of education process — for the sake of both teacher and the student.
2. Measurement as part of external qualifications — for the people who would later use the credentials achieved in measurement to accept you to higher education and to extend job offers.
Most of the problems with different measurement strategies happens because people conflate the two.
If people within the education system are getting upset that the people who are supposed to benefit from the education and who are paying an enormous sum of money in order to obtain the education dare to have an opinion about the education, I'd say that's a pretty good indication of the problems with the system. I can't think of any other area where there's anger at customers voicing their opinion. Institutions with that kind of attitude probably wouldn't last long if the education system was opened up and students were actually given some choice (say, by separating education and credentialing).
i’m not so sure we _can_ fix it or even _should_ fix it. in my opinion, fixing implies a standard of perfection. it’s an imperfect system, formulated by imperfect people - the types we’re going to meet and interact with for the rest of our lives. there are always going to be imperfect ways of measuring the “goal”, be it content domain knowledge, or project completion kpi, or something else.
the positives of an imperfect system that i can think of off the top of my head are that they give teachers the ability and motivation to find creative ways to impart information and knowledge, and it can implicitly educate pupils in how to navigate complex, broken systems.
teachers who come up with novel educational methods are generally heralded for their innovations, but there’s not much else to incentivize them to remain or continue to innovate. not to mention the fact that those innovations may be expressions of their personalities and not an actual template for how every teacher should teach.
the same seems true for students. they find adaptations for navigating those broken systems. some will fall into the stream of the system, play the game, and get high marks. what have they learned? i’d say they have learned a fair amount. some will discover a need to collaborate survive and they have learned about themselves. some will complain and resist, but pass based on raw willpower or charm or something else. some will fail but will see gaping holes in the system to explore, exploit, or fill. they’ve also learned.
these are just a few of the dimensions i can think of off the top of my head. i believe that the primary way that we should seek to reform or improve educational systems is through how we treat the educational infrastructure (teachers, staff, materials, services) and the students who are failing to engage the experience due to factors beyond their control (mental health, SES, etc.)
When you live your life in a rigorously controlled institution, you only consider what the institution echos. Outside the box thinking is possible, but it's the exception. You need outsider ideas and collaboration.
Politics will never solve these problems. It has to be grassroots and volunteer driven.
I've never met a teacher who didn't do those things; I have met many who wouldn't phrase it like that. Just because they're not using the same terminology as you doesn't mean it isn't happening.
It's very easy to look at a system from the outside and think that they're missing the obvious [1]; things become more complex the more you understand them.
This is the story of hacker news. And of most other online forums. And of most meetings. Let’s bikeshed. Hi, I’m on the Internet and I read the whole post title. Let me share my thoughts.
People are stupid, lazy, and uninformed in the general case. People writing in an 8 line comment fields on mobile aren’t going to be the exception.
There is no need to be frustrated. Unless you enjoy that feeling. Then by all means embrace it.
Try this? Dip into the comments with right expectation. These are off the cuff uniformed thoughts of the masses. Maybe they make you laugh or cry or maybe something inspires you. Maybe there’s a gem buried here somewhere.
Don’t expect HN commenters to know anything deep. If you are in the mood for a deeper thought, go to the library.
In other industries, passing an accreditation exam gives you value in the market. In software engineering, certificates are seen as useless.
This can explain the cynical attitude programmers have against testing.
There are tests you can take in those subjects, such as the Graduate Record Exam. Those tests work to some extent because the subject matter is relatively mature, and consistent from one college to another. And yet there are entire fields of math and physics that I've never been exposed to. Their main purpose is to see if you're conversant in a body of knowledge that would prepare you for typical graduate study, not for a job.
Software engineering is a comparatively young field, with less standardization. There are even debates on HN as to whether software engineering is a real thing. There are places where every programmer has the title "engineer" regardless of their background.
I'm only employable because most people hate math and physics so much that they're relieved if anybody offers to do those things for them. That, and I'm pretty good at programming and electronics.
Oh please. Teachers advocate for themselves. Academics are currently waging a war against standardized testing for ideological reasons. Instead of a polemic against people giving their opinions please just tell us what you think.
For my money, the problem with education is that we decided it's not about knowlege but rather increasing the socioeconomic position of participants. From this it follows that everyone needs a 4 year degree. Education will only function when it's a small number of weirdos who want to be there.
Solve the problem by attacking credentialism, reforming student loans, and bolstering alternative post-secondary education (trade schools, bootcamps).
The experts of pedagogy (academics and teachers) are rarely digitally literate (they can’t use technology in any competent, engaging or engaging enough way) enough compared to their students. This line was crossed about 15 years ago with most institutions still digitally functioning like they are in 2005.
Some neat studies out there about this. Profs are smart and know what they don’t know. Academic leadership often doesn’t have the will to modernize. We saw how many colleges resisted modernizing during the pandemic lockdowns and when they came back lamented how poor online was after designing a solution in 2 weeks.
Bureaucracies serve ultimately for their own self preservation.
Pedagogy is a red flag word. People who use it incorrectly often discount themselves pretty quickly. Pedagogy is about how children learn, it has less relevance in higher education, which is more about learning how to learn. Andragogy is how adults learn and I invite anyone to see how often that word is used.
It’s pretty telling when educational conferences how pedagogy is used every 3 words when… How adults learn (andragogy) including young adults is quite different than children.
When I hear the word pedagogy referring beyond high school it’s tell take sign of people using buzzwords, and a sign they might not really know the difference.
If experts really wanted to get into digital learning taxonomies based on old ones that don’t seem to bridge the divide, maybe that would be a start.
Instead academics have insisted on sharding the digital learning experience among dozens of digital tools for students ( how many different things do students have to log into), perhaps so it will not challenge their job security. Ironically most institutions have streamlined enrolment systems that are pretty complex but can take your money smoothly.
I think part of this is because too many academics are poor listeners though to openly entertaining ideas and positions that are not their own. There are amazing academics who get all of this and more (including the solutions) but they are often buried in the toxic cultures present at most post secondaries.
In Academia, afoption of ideas is gradual and slow, and too slow for the rapid changes taking place the past 2-3 years in society.
Another observation is that most universities only teach how to teach children, and churn out teachers. Maybe it’s why the word pedagogy is so present in academic circles. Do universities have a 4 year degree to teach university students like they do for K-12?
In this post - just reading about how WhatsApp and Google docs is used to learn together, for better and worse .. was created by students, not experts. Good on the prof for finding more ways to engage with the material. It’s a big problem.
Institutions have not kept up the skills of their staff. It’s decades behind. Probably another 10 years before the folks at the top wanting to keep things familiar enough start to retire and digitally native geriatric millennials can start getting into those roles and help change.
You have a good point about election cycles but it can go both ways to hurt education and curriculum too if that’s what politicians want.
Looking at students, Covid forced 10-15 years of change to happen in 2, while we have students who have missed a big chunk of education. There’s a need for our leaders, experts and institutions to recognize and do something about this, but bureaucracies ultimately serve their own self preservation at all costs.
One choice is expend all this effort fix the old institutions, or put the same effort into building new institutions for the future.
Education is no longer measured by hours of butts in seats. Education is no longer math not changing for 500 years so curriculum can take a few years to do minor tweaks.
It’s interesting to see how much more society has opened up to taking courses from anyone to learn the beginnings of any topic. If you ask me the clock is ticking on academic brands if they can’t create and revise curriculum faster than the 1-3 years it can take to approve and change a single sentence in a course.
If it’s relevant, I’ve built platforms to deliver online K-12, post-secondary education and industry training certification for a unusually long time. It feels like a weird world sometimes with the lens still stuck creating ad delivering education like it’s designed to be stored on encyclopedia CDs.
Meanwhile, Industry is often having to fill its own gaps to build the skills and competencies they need in people because education isn’t turning out people that are needed. The advances they put in place to keep their people safe shouldn’t be discounted.
Edit: Grammar, clarifications.
The original root of "pedagogy" relates to children, but I still have a lot more time for someone who uses that industry-standard term than I do for anyone preaching 'andragogy'. It's a niche, culturally-bound and assumption-based theory with little research to actually support any of its claims.
Despite the grandiose name, 'andragogy' is just another 'learning styles' or 'growth mindset' - it's pop psychology designed to sell training courses.
Happy to use a better term than andragogy - I’m happy to learn what it is.
Any ideas or suggestions?
It's always amusing to see lectures on correct usage from people who don't know the difference between etymology and meaning. (And also who don't know the etymology, either, since etymologically, pedagogy isn't “how children learn” but more like “the act of leading children”.)
In English, especially American English, “Andragogy” is mostly used in relation to a particular theory/approach to adult education originating with Martin Knowles, who leveraged the same conflation of etymology and meaning—even when it originated, pedagogy was well established with its modern and more general meaning despite the narrower sense of its Greek roots—to promote it; education for different audiences by age or other circumstance is not generally distinguished by different greek-root terms in English, but by English terms [“early childhood education”, “adult education”, “continuing professional education”, etc.)
Hopefully you understood the meaning of what I was saying and that we might agree that pedagogy applies/refers to children, not adults.
Is there a term that better refers to adults?
When I first heard that students often cheat in higher education not too long ago, I was shocked. When I studied during the 90s at two good German universities, I had not ever heard of anyone who cheated in any course. A cheating student would have been a huge scandal. To be fair, I studied philosophy and general linguistics. I guess people in more practical disciplines cheated even then, e.g. economics -- more specifically, "BWL" in Germany -- always had a bad reputation. However, even in these disciplines cheating was rare. Its incomprehensible to me why lecturers and universities nowadays appear to be so lenient about it.
The teachers are the problem.
After all I was also sitting in school for 13 years
The teachers I've known don't really care about measuring knowledge. They're looking for a reasonable way to motivate engagement with the class, that's not too disruptive of the overall flow of the course. One professor told me, "A student who has made an effort to work through the homework problems a couple times should be able to easily get a B on the exam.
Testing also acknowledges that you're competing for your students' attention, and if you give no assessments, your students will rationally focus all of their effort on the courses that do. Preparation for the test becomes a reasonable measure, not of your knowledge, but of how much effort you need to apply to a course. Since students have been taking exams for years, each student knows how to calibrate their own level of effort.
As a student, after some trial and error, I developed a pretty good routine for getting A's in the two kinds of classes I was taking: Those that were dominated by solving problems and proofs, such as math and physics, and those that were based primarily on written assignments, such as art history.
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.
To me measuring knowledge is a minor reason of having tests. The main reason is to force students to study. If you have no test on knowledge most people will just gloss over the detail and not learn.
This sounds like an entirely different question. When you have a method for testing, you have at least two different measures of effectiveness:
- how well the test measures knowledge when it is taken honestly
- how likely is the test to be taken honestly vs. subverted
I thought this thread was about the second question, but you seem to be focused on the first. But these problems require different kinds of solutions, and crucially, it is much easier (but still not easy) to verify success or failure in addressing the second question (cheating) than the first (predictivity).
I have some thoughts about the education system, and despite not being a teacher or academic I like to believe that my opinions have some value because I'm an expert programmer that has worked in the field for over 50 years. I attended three different major universities and have degrees in Math, EE, and CS. I still code almost every day (my Emacs configuration is never finished!), and I have in the past taught or been a teaching assistant for both undergrad and graduate courses for four semesters. Cheating has always been a concern, but now things are different.
The original article highlights the scale of exam cheating during the pandemic, but for us, the readers of HN, there is another problem with university learning that happens because of the internet. I've seen this affect virtually all of my younger friends pursuing degrees in CS. Programming assignments in school are unrealistically difficult, and it causes everyone to cheat.
Here's a typical real-life example: after covering doubly linked lists in the undergrad data-structure's class the programming assignment is to write a GUI based text editor in Java using doubly linked lists. This isn't especially hard for a professional programmer, but this is the first programming assignment of the course. Students had to wrestle with Eclipse, learning the AWT/Swing interfaces, event loop programming, and how to translate low level pointer based data structures into non-idiomatic Java based imitations of linked lists that kind of simulated using pointers. Most of the students really couldn't do this on their own, but they didn't have to because they can find the solutions to this very problem right on the internet.
Why would professors give such a program to beginning programmers to write? Because every student turns in a solution, and this causes the professors to lose touch with how difficult their assignments are. Over and over again difficult assignments are given, but the students are seemingly keeping up. The bomb lab assignment is a great assignment for CS students[1], but I've seen it given out with far too few attempts allowed to solve it. Again professors feel like a small number of attempts is all the students should need, they keep turning in the answers. The reason they can is that the complete solution is available on dozens of public Github repos and web sites.
The consequence of such hard and challenging programming assignments is a kind of inflation of the difficulty. The high difficulty causes students to cheat more, since their fellow students are cheating by downloading, cutting and pasting, or simply sharing their programs. There are commercial web-sites like chegg.com that sell the solutions to virtually every homework problem found in CS textbooks. Why should an undergrad spend so much time working on their own homework solutions while other students work openly in big teams at table in the university library?
This kind of cheating is pervasive at the undergrad level. How do we prevent our students to being pushed into cheating to keep up? Graduate school is different, the classes are smaller and more interactive. In my grad school classes I've often had to go to the board to demonstrate my code or proof to the class. Professor Dijkstra used to give individual oral exams to his students. So small interactive classes would help.
I've also seen assembly language programming classes given that require all work to be done on lab computers. The lab computers weren't on the internet and students had to sign in with the lab proctor to use the machines for their assignments. This at least helped some with the problem.
If I was teaching a programming class now, I would require everyone to maintain a git repo that could be checked for realistic commits of the programs as they are written. This might discourage the simple copying of a solution from GitHub the day before the assignment was due.
[1] The text for the bomb-lab assignment (highly recommended by the way): Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective, 3rd edition,Bryant and O’Hallaron, Prentice-Hall, 2016 (ISBN: 0-13-409266- X), a google search will return many bomb-lab assignments and solutions from colleges all over the world.
Cynically, because they're part of the problem.
Personally I don't think the "obviously bad thing" is the current state of testing. I'd instead say that the problem is the intermingling of education and credentials.
Society doesn't care about education, however all of the inspiration is geared around it. So you wind up with the case that students either become disillusioned with the system after realizing it's ripe with hypocrisy, or otherwise structured in a way that creates resentment in the system.
As an anecdote, a friend I went to high school with dropped out when he was disallowed to participate in the school band, because it was his only source of motivation to show up every day. I don't think that was the intended goal, but when faced with the reality of the situation, the system is unbending.
I think as a result, the ones you see succeeding in college tend to be more driven by either ambition or obligation rather than any actual desire to learn. So in that respect, I think colleges are self selecting for students that are more willing to think cheating is a good idea. And in many respects they may not be wrong.
> Curious, isn’t it, how all these systems seem to fail in the same way?
No...the systems haven't evolved independently. It's no more surprising to me than learning that felines could get covid.
For what it's worth, I'm a community college dropout. The education and mental health systems were absolutely structured in a way where my severe adhd (and its best friends anxiety and depression) went undiagnosed and untreated through my senior year of high school. I loved learning, but there wasn't any way to get an education that could present the coursework in a way that could keep me engaged. And of course my inability to do homework was continually met with being told it was some personal failure on my part and I should just apply myself.
So back to
> So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
_They're the ones that've made me think we'd be better of scrapping the system and starting over._
Spanish was a hard test. It involved listening to pre recorded conversations and giving responses.
Comp sci I didn’t take the class, just self studied for the test. It was my first exposure to comp sci and only intro to object oriented code. The test made you utilize an API for a little toy problem. That was very good in retrospect. I didn’t really grok APIs until that exact moment on the test. 12 years later fiddling around with game engines, object oriented concepts still seem familiar.
I think the two things that made these exams good is they were very broad so you needed to have mastered the whole course, and they were not designed by a teacher incentivized to give good grades, so they were pretty hard and didn’t advertise exactly what would be tested.
Not needing 90%+ to do very well on the test was good too. So much of school is avoiding tiny mistakes on otherwise easy content to get a perfect score. Not broadly getting the concepts mastered.
Some neighbor schools offered AP classes but it was culturally accepted that students would not get high scores on the exams. Struck me as pretty pathetic. That was a rich kid private school doing worse than my (admittedly fairly wealthy) public school experience.
I think there are a few constructive things that can be done. One is allowing curious students to design their own academic career (with guidance and supervision). I think students usually cheat because they think the course work is irrelevant to their future lives. Sure people need to be exposed to new things, but a semester on something you know you will never care about is torture. I have a computer science degree, but I remember being forced to take geology. To this day I can't think of a bigger waste of time, I remember nothing from it, and even if I did I would never use it.
Vocational schools and apprenticeship should also really come back. I know parents want their kids to be part of the affluent elite, but in a good society being a car mechanic should be a good life. There's no point saddling people with student debt if their degree gets them a job at starbucks.
I also think that things like essays are a lot better than quizzes. Sans plagiarism, it's hard to fake knowledge if you have to write it out.
Of course everyone can have an opinion! But are these truly likely to contribute to solving the problem? Of course not. Some people are more likely to have the experience and skills to comprehend and advocate for better solutions.
Yes, I tend to support democratic forms of government over others. However, I'm under no illusion that democracy's broad, sweeping claims about what government are "best" are really defensible when applied to the general problem of collective problem solving under real-world constraints.
Having one person, one vote seems intuitive and valuable for certain decisions. In particular, it seems useful and practical for selecting certain representatives. But I (and many others) don't think it is a great way of making policy decisions in general. Just as one example: committees of experts can make sense in some contexts.
But in general, we can do better than what most of us have seen so far. We have to do better than that. Look at how well government(s) at all levels are serving their constituents. I think it is self-evident that all can stand tremendous improvement.
So, for any particular context, think about how to design mechanisms that are likely to work well. In so doing, one must account for many factors, including: human biases, cognitive limitations, cultural differences, imperfect communication, economic costs, time constraints, factions, self-interest, lack of experience, and so on.
Keeping these in mind, how exactly would you select, organize, and structure an ongoing set of interactions between, say 1,000 people such that one can maximize the quality of their resulting collective recommendations?
One option is to choose 1,000 people at random and weight their opinions evenly. But this is underspecified. How do you compress those recommendations into a form that others are likely to read? How do you discover collective preferences? There are dozens of key questions even if you generally adhere to the idea of "equally weighting each person's opinion".
But there are manifold other options where each individual's starting opinion is not the driving factor.
I encourage everyone here to study political economy, history, philosophy, and anthropology. Disregard your preconceived framings of how people make decisions. Look at how others have done it. Look at what theorists suggest might be alternatives. It is an amazing journey. I've been thinking about it for almost twenty years, and it is just as fascinating, if not more, as when I first got exposed to these ideas in policy school.
I find it enormously frustrating when people (not you) complain about "teaching to the test." Teaching to the test is good pedagogy! First, determine what you want to students to know/do. Then choose how you're going to assess their knowledge/ability. Then design instruction that prepares them for the assessment. This is called backwards design.
I would actually focus on the question of "Why do I need to quantify everybody's knowledge at a high resolution?"
When I was TAing, I held the position - never accepted I should say - that we should make more courses pass/fail; and instead of investing effort in the numeric grading keys, try to give more meaningful feedback on assignments.
Some alternative suggestions I brought up:
* I suggested that the final grade be a combination of the assessment a roll of 1D6 points - to hammer it in that the grading is to a great extent artificial. Somehow this was even less popular of a suggestion...
* I once proposed we offer people a perfect passing grade if they just never show up to class nor submit anything, and only people who want to learn would risk an imperfect grade. I really liked that proposal, because it put the two motivations - learning and making the grade - which are often conflated, at direct odds with each other.
Of course none of this was taken seriously - even though I was serious. Kind of.
It's kind of hard to believe this needs to be said, because it is so obviously correct.
The only people that ought to be involved are the teachers (and other school employees) the students (and their parents) of that school.
The fact the it might take ‘5 election cycles’ to see a reform through, is a disservice to the students, and often frustrating for the teachers as well.
If government does it, that literally opens the door for everyone else to be involved, muddying otherwise clear waters.
2. What are the barriers to entry and the fungibility of the educational market? If the educational market isn't truly a free market, then what's the point? More private monopolies and oligopolies without proper oversight?
And why is it necessary for education to be ‘free’ or universal for that matter?
People are different, doesn’t mean we all need to learn the same exact things in the same exact way to be productive members of society. Not that such a goal is ever realistically achievable.
Free universal education was the key to take poor people out of poverty.
How is this even worth discussing?
Do you realize that if that goes away, we won't be in a libertarian paradise, we'll be back to feudalism?
Countless people from bad environments broke through due to free universal education.
I guess you're not aware of the history on this domain or are just privileged and you don't realize it.
Allow tests to be continuously regraded as the things students get wrong are corrected.
Automation would go a long way towards making that more feasible (i.e. easier for a multiple choice test than a written one).
But the emphasis on being right initially as the only thing that matters is unhealthy, and certainly in part what leads to the majority of people doubling down on confirmation bias rather than admitting being wrong and learning/incorporating the knowledge for the future.
Yes, there are practical issues with improving the system. But I've had a few select teachers that had that policy in some form years ago, and it was often the best teachers that did. We'd benefit from a widespread adoption of similar and it might lower the inventive for trying to cheat to be right the first time, as to the kids being brought up in these systems and reflecting these systems, that's the only thing that matters.
Yes, because they've proved they know things by passing through the system and getting good grades. Oh wait...
Sorry for the joke, but seriously, you can't expect us civilians to shut up. Leaving education to educators is as pernicious as leaving law just to lawyers, or journalism just to journalists. In all cases, the outcomes are everyone's business, and because there are real conflicts of interest here (and not just disagreement on facts) it can't just be delegated to experts. Even calling for it will make people rightly suspicious of your agenda.
Unlike with law or journalism though, pretty much everyone has A LOT of experience with the educational system in practice, by being on the receiving end of it for 12+ years. There's a challenge with sharing our experiences in a fruitful way and not just shouting over each other, sure, but suck it up: we have opinions about what education should be and can be, and we won't shut up and leave it to you.
If it's learning for the joy of learning you don't need a test. If it's to get a piece of paper you need for a job, then schools are just shitty interviews mostly uncorrelated to real world tasks.
I think we should move to learning for the sake of learning (free, open door lessons or pick your own on the internet at your own time - no frontal lessons but still provide a space for students to socialise) and give the chance to students to work on projects that can prove they know something. Workplaces can look at these projects and find someone who fit with them.
You built a robot? I can reasonably expect you to know something about electrical engineering and math.
Or the way we fixed productivity in ways that has led to no measurable increase in productivity despite nearly everyone having the most powerful device ever invented in the palm of their hands.
Or the way we fixed housing through regulatory arbitrage, once again, converting housing for residents into short term rentals for vacationers, making housing for residents more expensive globally and making their communities worse.
Or the way we fixed cable by going from bundled cable packages where we have to pay $70-$100 to get all our channels, to unbundled walled gardens where we have to pay $70-$100 to get a fraction of content plus we also have to pay internet fees in addition.
Or the way we fixed messaging and phone calls by taking something like a $1/yr WhatsApp membership that offered safe encrypted chat and converting it into a data harvesting machine.
Or the way we fixed stock investing by gamifying investing, bringing in a lot of people into active trading who have no business being in active trading and should just park their money in Fidelity, and then promising “free” trades by allowing big banks to trade against, leading to a massive wealth transfer from naive individuals to sophisticated banks at the best of times.
Or how we destroyed inflation through BTC.
Or saved art through NFTs.
The list just goes on.
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.
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 of people were cheating (I think maybe over half the class).
The scariest thing about cheating is that whenever a bunch of people do it (and aren't caught), it screws up the class curve so much that people who don't cheat will be forced to put in way more time studying, which will then take time away from other classes. It also screws up metrics that the professors and TAs use to understand how well they're teaching material, which assignments to drop, etc
imo this is why people shouldn't cheat. If nobody cheats, the grades might on average be lower but once the class is curved or assignments are dropped it will be a fair indicator of where everyone is at. If people cheat, it screws up the fairness and can encourage others to start cheating. If everyone (or most) are cheating, you have people who aren't getting anything out of the class, getting credits as prerequisite that they shouldn't be getting, moving on to future classes and continuing the cycle
I think it's strange to think cheaters are anything other than selfish. To make an altruistic appeal seems misguided.
This isn't going to convince anyone in particular who wants to cheat, that wasn't really my intention
Getting 80% in an exam in a weak cohort of students might earn you an A, while doing so in a strong one might get you a B instead. Is this fair toward a student getting a B this year with the same score that earned somebody an A the year earlier just because they happened to enroll with different peers?
Also why should the grade distribution of an exam be determined beforehand?
because we know beforehand that population density over repeated trials of some measure will fall in a normal distribution, especially when constructing such a test is more straightforward than 90% gets A, 80% gets B, etc
During my studies, there was one professor who openly said that, if he caught you cheating, he will fail you in his class (which, in Polish universities, means going through a lot of bureucracy to not have to repeat the entire year) - as opposed to other professors, who will usually just allow you another attempt at later time. Also, during the written exams, he wasn't staring longlingly at the sky throught the window (like some other professor did - I assume they wanted to help us cheat, so that we can pass their class and be out of their lives), but was watching us like a hawk 100% of the time. In result, AFAIK there was no cheating in his class at all - it just didn't pay off.
Personally, this hypocrisy and game of cat and mouse was one of the main lessons I learned in high school and later in university ("it's ok to cheat as long as you don't get caught", "nobody cares about their work anyway" etc.). It's a shame that the education system is corrupting the morals of young people in such a way, but on the other hand, the grown up world they're about to join is pretty corrupt anyway, so maybe it's actually teaching valuable survival skills.
On the other hand, all the effort could pay off in an unexpected way down the line because all the cheaters pushed you to achieve more than you would have normally, plus the ethical implications.
Full disclosure, I did have a situation where cheating like that happened, and I did take it. It was for a pretty irrelevant course, and I don't feel bad at all about it. I also haven't made much use of the course material afterwards.
This world is messed up.
And the fact that Justice never correctly delivers justice in any country of the world, but adds 2 to 10 years and large expenses in the process.
Sometimes, the entire community will protect its cheaters.
After you graduate, you will have a network of friends that consider you a super-smart, trustworthy, loyal and friendly person.
Chances are, you will learn more than the rest, and end up with a high GPA. And some of the lost opportunity to socialize in bars and clubs, and build networks that way, will be compensated by the relationships with people you helped.
Btw, this same behavior can still work once you're in a job. If you get a reputation as someone who can provide help when people are stuck in some difficult problem, and not shaming them for it to their boss, that tends to reflect positively back to you over time.
This is your problem right here. There is no rational argument for grading people on a class curve. That just makes the class a lottery and incentivises sabotaging for others to get an upper hand yourself.
I did an exchange year, and sent my grades over to a professor. Guy was like "What's up with all the non As" and I had to talk about how we do things differently here (giving points for right answers, and then adding them all up).
Of course there's always an overall curving happening on a high level because teachers choose how hard to make assignments or not, and ultimately grades are not really fundamentally important, but when people just have those to judge you on and choose to, it really fucks things up.
but also the prof will know if the class is full of overachievers and curve in a way commensurate to the class
I don't think that people would typically go to the lengths of trying to sabotage someone else, in practice it could just look like a bunch of people working separately and not cooperating at all
In an ideal world, there wouldn't be any curves and the coursework would be tailored sufficiently for every cohort of students for every semester
But I admit I might be a bit radical here compared to most people. (Who I am sure will argue that utilising teacher time to the maximum is the only reason to gather students in one room.)
In the class I mentioned above, the prof and TAs weren't pissed off about people using each other to understand concepts or even high level design. They were pissed because people were copying source code verbatim, comments and custom debug messages and all
On a related note, if someone ever asked me for help with a concept or high level design I would be more than happy to oblige. But (most of the time) people aren't asking for that, they want source code that they didn't contribute to
this could be fixed by making assignments collaborative, but then the professor has no means of verifying where everyone is in terms of understanding
Those exams were often the most edifying couple hours of the whole semester. You also got a clear sense of the difference between you and a real master of the material which is a helpful lesson in humility.
I went back to grad school recently and it seems like that mode of testing has gone out of style in the last ten years. The exams I took were geared more towards establishing a minimum bar of competence, more for my future employers' benefit than my own.
I think the problem with this is, although cool, very few professors are capable of doing this well and very few students benefit from it. IOW, it doesn't scale.
To my mind, oral finals or 'discussions" would repair the cheating issues quite well. But again, it's hard to scale and professors would need to be trained in how to do them.
When I set (free-form written, math/CS) exams, I always made a point of designing the exam in a way where I didn't really expect anybody to get more than 90% of the points. I also made sure that students knew this.
I always set grade brackets before grading (e.g., 80% of points gets you an A, below 35% is a failing grade, and so on). I always ended up with a pretty reasonable grade distribution.
It was simple. The weekly assignments contained 6 questions. One of those was the mindfuck question and wasn’t graded (if you solved it you got extra credit, but hadn’t been solved so far).
You don’t even need to hide the crazy questions. Offering them as extra credit is a simple solution that works well.
But in that same example, if many of the students get close to 100% on the final by cheating, then the remainder of the class will suffer
If an exam turns out to be too hard the teacher can investigate, consult their peers, talk to their students and decide if it's worth to scale all grades by a factor to correct.
It should be, but profs and TAs change from semester to semester. The coursework changes also. Also the profs, TAs, and coursework of prerequisites change too
> It shouldn't be easier for one cohort over another just due to the first being, on average, less prepared than the second.
A good professor will have the sense of discretion necessary to know when a class is half-assing on average
That way you don't incur any of the (pretty severe) drawbacks of a curve but don't punish students for questions that were badly phrased or weren't properly taught.
As far as I'm concerned, curve grading single courses is just as bad as stack ranking at work. And in here, with high concentration of engineers who loathe stack ranking, a disproportionate fraction are somehow in favour of per-course curve grading.
Blind spot? Stockholm syndrome? Go figure.
Whole stack ranking is just weird. Either the people are good enough to do the work or not. If not eventually fire them. On other hand at top the rewarding extra is an problem, but I don't know if you can do that without someone gaming it.
> Whole stack ranking is just weird. Either the people are good enough to do the work or not.
Even at the risk of veering quite far from the thread topic, I am not sure that's the only angle to look at things. In my experience, pretty much anyone who is genuinely curious and has the discipline to work at understanding how/why a ${THING} functions, is going to be good at their job. Some people just don't find what their thing is, and surprisingly many are in jobs where they are not even allowed to figure it out.
As far as I'm concerned, curve grading single
courses is just as bad as stack ranking at work.
In stack ranking you have to designate some team members as superior and some as bad. You could have a team of ineffective idiots and be forced to label some of them as high achievers, or a team of superstars and be forced to label some of them as bad. I agree that this is manifestly ridiculous.
I've never seen curve grading like that.
BTW, I don't know if it's a named fallacy, but saying "there's no rational argument for X" is not a good argument against X. You can't prove a negative so you cannot know if there is not a rational argument for X.
There is no rational argument for grading people on a class curve
The counterargument is that it would be rare for a prof/teacher to absolutely nail the correct difficulty for an exam.
If they feel that their students' average exam grade fails to accurately reflect how well the class is learning the material, then some kind of adjustment makes sense... imagine a scenario where you have a classroom full of motivated and engaged students who are showing good understanding of the material, and yet the average exam score is 60%. This strongly suggests professor/teacher has erred and an adjustment is in order so that the scores better reflect actual mastery of the material.
There are of course also a lot of situations where grading on a curve is blatantly unfair and/or simply makes no sense.
I would like to see a system where almost all (something like 99 %?) of students just plain "pass". Then we have the lower statistical anomalies (lowest 0.5 %) and upper statistical anomalies (highest 0.5 %) which fail and get an "excellence" type grade.
If the average score is too low or too high, that doesn't mean more students fail or perform excellently, that just means the teacher needs to recalibrate.
(Of course, these percentiles ought to be measured over as inclusive a reference class as practical. Ideally across schools and years simultaneously.)
Any teacher (and school system) worth their salt has by now dropped grading on a curve.
this assumes that those skills are somehow unique and others cannot learn it.
This is when you learn things, and everyone brings something to the table.
I'd say the equivalent of an exam is a job interview. When the other party wants to see what the individual knows.
There were also people who would pay someone else to do the assignments, and then upload PDFs of completed assignments to a private chat. World of difference.
That said, a lot of this stuff seems kind of culturally specific. At least for the two degrees that I experienced in the UK, there were roughly three types of graded work: exams (overseen, sit in silence, possibly with your own notes but generally not, fixed time limit around 1-2hrs); lab-work (usually done in the building although worked on outside of lab hours as well, fixed deadline of around a week or two, usually graded at least in part based on an oral conversation with the examiner); and coursework (take-home work, fixed deadline ranging from one week to a couple of months, allowed to discuss but direct copying is banned).
In these cases, it rarely makes sense to cheat by directly sharing answers. Obviously in an exam it would be useful, but the conditions of the exam make it largely prohibitively difficult. In coursework, it's usually obvious if people are handing copies of the same work in. And for lab work, the challenge was usually not to just complete the lab and get a "right" result, but rather to understand the task and be able to explain what was going on to the TA grading you. If you can cheat well enough to pass that, you probably understand what's going on - which is exactly the aim of the course anyway.
Whereas it feels like what people are talking about here is students being sent home with problem worksheets, being expected not to talk about them at all, and then getting grades based on those answers. That seems to me to be a system that practically encourages cheating - work together as a group, and you'll obviously be able to achieve more than any one individual, even if you could all pass the course in the first place. In contrast, we also had similar worksheets, but they were never graded, and we were usually encouraged to work together to figure out what was going on. We could then take our answers to tutorials and have a discussion about where we went wrong and why we went wrong usually in a group of any four or five.
So reading this article and some of the comments here, I'm really struggling to get an image of what these teachers are expecting from their students, if they're setting problems that are so obviously gameable.
What the hell are you talking about? I routinely consult with others and others routinely consult with me. That's afaik standard practice in most professions: engineering, medicine, architecture, psychology, marketing, and yes software development.
The statement saying "if you consult with colleagues/friends outside of your company you would get fired" is false.
Asking someone for help with homework (much more equivalent to general consultation) is not generally considered cheating in education either.
You are also correct that this is not a productive discussion, because we are discussing a misunderstanding (due to me not being clear enough).
I did find your language and reaction a bit disproportionate though.
No you didn't, you said "if you consult with colleagues/friends outside of your company you would get fired", which is clearly false. I'm the one who said rules should be followed. But I'm happy that the mistake was corrected and we're now on the same page.
The students hunting for "the snitch" adds another layer of dysfunction. If someone joins the group chat and leaves because they notice other people cheating, then they could become targets of the other students. That's not the sort of college experience anyone wants to have.
Automated teaching and testing with social sharing automate that dynamic. There's less attention seeking, but much more passive aggressive subversion.
But that's not the scariest thing. The scary thing is that if it's a STEM field these students go on to get jobs in which they have no competence. This is truly catastrophic if you want software that works and buildings that don't collapse.
Worse - the skill they've learned best is gaming the system and hiding their incompetence.
It's a double failure - of culture as well as knowledge.
Kudos to the prof in the story for handling it so well. Most profs won't.
The underlying issue is that there's been far too little research into the social consequences of automating all kinds of interactions.
The 70s utopian ideal of "Give everyone a computer to empower them" turned out to be ridiculously naive. What happened instead is that various dysfunctional economic and cultural patterns were automated and enhanced.
Culture as a whole has no defences against this because hardly anyone has realised that it's a problem inherent within the culture-amplifying effects of automation, and not an unfortunate byproduct that just sort of happens sometimes - and who knows why?
So they're ideally qualified for a career in politics.
Schools want to churn out more students, industry wants more fresh grads. Online quizzes/assignments (which are vulnerable to cheating) and Leetcode screener questions (which are just a little better than rote memorization) are how schools and industry react to scaling issues.
I feel like everyone would have better outcomes if we could somehow be satisfied with less growth.
And also why we can’t trust a degree to show competence, leaving it to companies to figure out with LONNGG multi-part interviews
An excellent example of the prisoner's dilemma.
But yes I understand screwing up the curve has other negative effects. I think in some ways this is a tying of learning to employment and life success. People cheat because they don’t want to learn but they do want a good job. I don’t know how you separate these two things, or whether you should, but if you made the benefit of cheating simply not understanding the material it would end. In the mean time your best strategy is probably to snitch.
I didn't complain until after the term was over and was just chatting casually with him while waiting for lunch at a food truck on campus. He was completely oblivious and didn't believe it.
I had a entirely autograded class on my first year at uni, it was awful. Immense amount of tests each week that were so basic yet so picky about the input, you lost points for no good reason and it frustrated me so much.
Ended up making a browser extension that parsed the tests, calculated answer probabilities based on previously completed tests that had similar questions. Unless the teachers were willing to hide the final score, it figured out the correct answer to each and every question.
It ended with a large majority of the class using the extension during the final exam, they couldn't really prove anything and nobody got caught. The next year the amount of tests was reduced and the exam was on paper (I'm sorry undergrads).
I don't feel bad about it, the lecturer abused our time and resources asymmetrically, listening to feedback was years overdue. It doesn't always boil down to "omg cheating bad"
A coworker used our testing framework to write an app that would collect the correct answers and fill them in automatically, and only wait for user input if it didn't recognise a question. He gave to code to me when he left. I think I tried it once or twice, but it failed to work for me due to some network issue, so I figured I'd just stick to the spirit on the thing and keep my score up manually.
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".
In the later, we were given harder exercises and asked to deliver a working program with some constraints. This program is then tested and graded by a CI and examined by TAs. Usually TAs would get a cheating report for reused bits of code and things that would solve an exercise with techniques far away from students knowledge or forbidden functions. TAs would ask you questions about your code and trigger cheating review if you could not explain why you wrote it this way. It was usually effective for detecting people that didn't wrote their own exercises. As the exercises were harder than expected for a class and projects were long and difficult, students were encouraged to talk, discuss and exchange ideas. Ideas sure, code meh.
Then, in the US, exercises were stupid checkboxes-style questions and graded on a curve. So of course everyone "cheated".. I must confess that I did it too. It was unworthy of my time and attention, as it was just about taking the course material and regurgitate it with different words. Of course, I can't imagine anyone learning anything from this way of working.
Stupid assignments encourage students to cheat. Make them interesting and this problem will go away.
What you describe in France is exactly how my classes in the US were (at UW Seattle) ~15 years ago.
I got a 2.7 in my CS classes because I had perfect scores on the tests and homework, but the teacher decided to make a huge percentage of your grade consist of quizzes about random factoids from the book that had literally nothing to do with computer science. (Literally: "What color was the elephant on page 12?") The book cost like $200, so I decided to just study from other books and the lectures and eat the loss of GPA
Man, I wish I could remember that professor's name so I could send him some hate mail..
and yet
> Usually TAs would get a cheating report for reused bits of code and things that would solve an exercise with techniques far away from students knowledge or forbidden functions. TAs would ask you questions about your code and trigger cheating review if you could not explain why you wrote it this way. It was usually effective for detecting people that didn't wrote their own exercises.
So both courses have cheating, one possibly has less cheating, and that one has a more effective detection procedure, but cheating happens on both all the same. The problem does not go away with a better course but is - based on your anecdote and not from the presumably better view of the TAs - lessened somewhat.
Perhaps the same course could be run in California and would still attract the same level of cheating as the checkbox style one. Maybe it's simply that a course that appears more difficult to cheat on or is more difficult to cheat on attracts less cheating.
I was a TA in France, and did a bit of TA-ing unofficially in the US. So, my view is based on both experience, TA and Student.
While there was some cheating happening on both sides, it was practically non-existent in France after a few weeks of school. The abilities required to cheat and get away with it were extremely hard to master, and usually would carry much more risks than just complete the exercise. Successful cheating were, sometimes, rewarded if the problem solved was worthy enough. You could even get clearance from the professor in advance (not for copying code from StackOverflow, of course, but rather for using forbidden functions or libraries).
Finally, most important projects were done in groups of 2 to 5-6. Individual students putting a group at risk deliberately, would get caught extremely easily and carry a far worse sentence than just a bad grade: they would be excluded from other students groups and left to do their projects alone or with dropouts students. Finding back you way after this is very very difficult.
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.
Actually, that's not a hypothetical scenario: School 42, an offshoot of the school GP described with the same cursus, has antennas in both Paris and California.
I wonder if the cheating rates differ between the two.
If a student admitted to cheating, while they would face academic disciplinary action (i.e. receiving a failing or low grade), they would not be brought up to the administrative office that deals with issues of academic integrity, and therefore would not face consequences like expulsion or being on official academic probation.
However if a cheating student decided to risk it and not admit their guilt, they were at risk of a potentially even greater degree punishment. The course staff would run all students code through a piece of software to detect similarities between each other, as well as online solutions. Students who were flagged by this software would then have their code hand-checked by at least one course staff, who would make a judgement call as to whether it seemed like cheating.
I found this policy quite interesting. As a former high school teacher, I've certain encountered teaching in my own classes, and have historically oscillated between taking a very harsh stance, or perhaps an overly permissive one.
The one taken by the lecturers of this course offered a "second chance" to cheaters in a way I hadn't seen before.
They are basically stating that this “software” is 100% accurate. Furthermore it’s then left to whims of some TAs?
No algorithm can detect cheating unless the number of permutations are very very large (I.e being struck by lightening). Maybe one way to offset would be to use data as the student is entering the solution but that was never the case for us; just upload the source code to their custom made Windows app.
Since it is intended to be used by instructors and staff, the source is restricted (though "anyone may create a MOSS account"). According to the paper describing how it's used [1], "False positives have never been reported, and all false negatives were quickly traced back to the source, which was either an implementation or a user misunderstanding."
Sources:
[0]: https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss
[1]: http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/sigmod...
I will also say that there’s problems where that is not the case. For example, we were told to write simulators for scheduling schemes (RR, MLFQ). Other than using different data structures (even that’s a bit of a stretch) not sure how much variance there will be.
Using the right tool for the right job is important.
Just above your post another author posted/cited results of a system that “never produced false positives”.
I think that cited number another author shared is probably correct but presumably, the tool is used in cases where problems are big enough to warrant it.
On the test data we were given (anonymized assignments from prior semesters together with known public git repos), we never had a false positive. On the flip side, small refactorings like variable renames or method re-ordering still turned up above the "suspicious" threshold because there would be enough remaining matching k-grams to make that pair of projects an outlier.
Our school explicitly did not use the algorithm's numbers as evidence of cheating and did not involve the TAs--the numbers were used only to point the professor in the right direction. We excluded all k-grams that featured in the professor's materials (slides, examples, boilerplate code). It also helped that they only used it on the more complex assignments that should have had unique source code (our test data was a client and server for an Android app).
My sense was that this was a pretty good system. Cheaters stood out in the outliers test by several orders of magnitude, so false positives are extremely unlikely. At the same time, the k-gram approach means that if you actually manage to mangle your project enough that it's not detected as copied, you had to perform refactorings in the process that clearly show you know how the program works--anything less still leaves you above the safe zone of shared k-grams.
To start with, at an undergrad level, most students had fairly distinct coding styles - usually with quirks of not "proper" coding. Some cheaters had the exact same quirks in multiple students assignments.
Also, some cheaters had the exact same mistakes in their code, on top of the same code style.
Yes the software picks up people that write correct solutions with perfect syntax, but those are the ones that you just toss out because there isn't any proof there.
The people that get caught cheating generally don't know what correct solutions and good code look like, so they don't understand how obvious it is when they copy paste their friends mediocre code.
Edit: here's the text of my alma mater: Any behavior of individual students by which they make it impossible or attempt to make it impossible to make a correct judgment about the knowledge, insight and/or skills of themselves or of other students, in whole or in part, is considered an irregularity that may give rise to an adjusted sanction.
A special form of such irregularity is plagiarism, i.e. the copying without adequate source reference of the work (ideas, texts, structures, designs, images, plans, codes, ...) of others or of previous work of one's own, in an identical manner. or in slightly modified form.
[https://www.kuleuven.be/onderwijs/oer/2021/?faculteit=500004... translated with Google]
What I didn't do was show them my implementation or even talk about how I solved it. Yeah, doing it the long way takes a bit more effort, but the result is that the students I helped actually understood the code they submitted and were better equipped to solve the next assignment without help.
Most students will probably pick the easy professors who give only As - because for them the degree is just a ticket for the job.
In fact those "tough" professors can have an adverse effect on those who picked the harder route. If you dont get good grades, you will have a lower GPA and that dream company will not even invite you for an interview. Some automated HR system will reject your application. They dont care that you went to a professor who taught you a lot -> they only see the low grade.
Same for scholarships - tough professor makes it already difficult to have good grades, but if you are graded without a curve, you get bad grade -> and can lose your scholarship.
Nobody cares about you as a person, or your knowledge, they measure you by your grades.
This is a tragedy of the commons in some ways: professors are supposed to give good grades, otherwise students wont choose them. Those who want to know more, are punished for it - in multiple way (first of all, they need to study more, but then they get a lower grade, which means lower GPA, what can lead to worse job offers, no scholarships etc).
If you want to be a "popular" professor, just pass everyone?
On a side note, in those great universities, dont they pass everyone anyway? I think frontpage had an article some time ago, that when you get to Ivy League, you will get a B or C even if you are bad, they generally dont kick out students who try to study, but arent particularly good.
Curves wouldnt be needed if every course had an objective list of material that should be learned - but even this is difficult - and not comparable between professors on same university, not to mention different ones - despite standards and various efforts (not to mention measuring if students really can know the whole list)
It's a pity to have to fail students sometimes because they failed to secure their accounts and someone stole their code, but they have been warned and hey, securing your stuff is not the worst bitter lesson you can learn if you're going to devote your career to CS, I guess...
The problem is: what's the realistic alternative? Just letting cheating happen is also unfair (to students who fail while the cheater passes). And finding out what exactly happened is not viable because students lie. We used to try to do that in the past, but the majority of the time all parties involved act as outraged and say they wrote the code and don't know what happened. Some students are very good actors, many others aren't, but even when you face the latter, your impression that they are lying is not proof that you can use in a formal evaluation process and would withstand an appeal.
So yes, it can be unfair, but it's the lesser evil among the solutions I know.
On the other hand, even if I am very confident that a student didn't write the code because they clearly don't understand it (which is often the case), this is difficult to uphold if the student appeals. For better or for worse, the greater accountability in grading and the availability of appeal processes means that you need to have some kind of objective evidence. "It was written in the rules that duplicate code would not be accepted, and this is clearly duplicate code" is objective. "I questioned both students and I found that this one couldn't correctly explain how the code works, so I'm sure he didn't write it" is not.
Note that I do this kind of questioning routinely (not only when cheating is involved) and take it into account in grades, because it of course makes sense to evaluate comprehension of the code... but outright failing a student on the grounds of an oral interview can easily get a professor into trouble.
You can ask “tricky” questions that someone who understands the material shouldn't have a problem answering, such as “if the problem required you to also do this, how would you change your code?”.
"I questioned both students and I found that this one couldn't correctly explain how the code works, so I'm sure he didn't write it" is not.
Fair enough. But at least you can give a bad grade for not understanding the course material.
People that don’t cheat may benefit in the future for not doing so.
I said May here because I generally found university education to be useless for myself. Instead, I wish I had met folks I consider mentors at work, earlier in my life.
This makes sense in the justice system, but in the justice system you often can find proof as to what happened, so the system still acts as a deterrent even if a fraction criminals get away with no punishment. In university assignments, most of the time it's practically impossible to find evidence of who copied from whom, so applying that principle would basically mean no enforcement, that everyone would be free to cheat and assignments would just not make sense at all.
Also, failing a course is far from such a big deal as going to jail or paying a fine. At least in my country, you can take the course again next year and the impact on your GPA is zero or negligible. You will have an entry in your academic record saying that you failed in the first attempt, but it won't be any different from that of someone who failed due to, e.g., illness.
If the consequences were harsher (e.g. being expelled from the institution, or something like that) then I would agree with you.
Anyway, when I detected two basically-identical submissions, I would call in both students to my office. I would chide them, explain to them that learning to code happens with your fingers, and that if they don't do it themselves, then even though they might sneak past the TA, they'll just not know programming, and would be stuck in future courses.
The I would tell them this:
"Look, I have a single assignment here, with a grade, on its own, of X% (out of a total of 100%), and two people. I'm going to let you decide how you want to divide the credit for the assignment among yourselves, and will not second-guess you. Please take a few minutes to talk about it outside and let me know who gets what."
Most times, one person would confess to cheating and one person got their grade. For various reasons I would not report these cases further up the official ladder, and left it at that.
This kind of mistyping reminds me of those example of people whose names fit their job but it's rare to find such an apropos example.
Sorry to derail your point but the juxtaposition of "ch" and "t" here is perfect.
They are much more likely to be applied to homework assignments, where the opportunity for copying is large, but the chance of two students producing the exact same >500-1000 line program is slim to none. Perhaps once in a while a critical function will be copied and no one will realize or similarities in a trivial function will be unnecessarily flagged, but this will be relatively rare and quickly discovered in manual review.
Both they had less paperwork, and well, they wouldn't report that person.
>What did the student have to say? There were many full sentences and as I read them I got that feeling again. So, I copied and pasted some sentences into Google, and yup, the student was plagiarizing the academic integrity assignment. Whole swaths of text verbatim copied.
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? How can that be the first thing you go for? This is really sad. I seriously don’t understand the thinking here.
In some lines of work finding the correct stuff to use for a task is way more important than ability to create it yourself from scratch.
Finding the plug that fits the given socket vs building the plug from scratch.
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".
I know most people here refer to American system and universities but my experience in Poland is, degrees, especially related to computer science, mostly teach you useless, outdated stuff, that you will never need to know. Most people here approach CS degree as something that you simply have to do to get a decent job in IT(though it's slowly changing toward not doing a degree at all), or simply because your family expects you to. Most universities here pump out diplomas to get paid by government and industry, so they can pump out more diplomas. Honestly I haven't met a single employer or even coworker that ever cared if I had CS degree. Most of stuff I learned there is 'nice to know it exists' but nothing I've ever used in real life work, most professors clearly have never even worked in the industry. Best thing that came out of my BEng in CS are friends and realization that noone cares about me so I needed to solve issues and learn on my own.
As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others.
Perhaps that's why I didn't care?
Another thing is that college is voluntary, and everyone takes the courses for some perceived gain. If it's just a diploma with high GPA, I let them be.
There are also plenty of ways to legitimately score a high grade without really engaging with a course (basically silly ways to study just to pass), which in the end result is not much different from simply cheating (there was no appropriate engaging in the material) — while the main difference is in fairness, that's a moral value that's beyond some random teacher's ability to teach adult students — so I don't see why bother.
The main question I have for the author is if they would have offered the same get-out-of-trouble alternative syllabus if they had 10% of the students cheating? Basically, how influential was the proportion of students to be failed in their huge investment in reworking the course?
Obviously, they did a bad job with the original syllabus in promoting exactly the behaviour they didn't condone, but one should never discount the thrill humans experience in engaging in risky behaviour (like figuring ways out to cheat which is sometimes more work than studying, but more thrilling — and helping others along the way adds a nice cherry on top).
Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters, and the grades matter for your future.
I know in the program I attended I was up against a fair few who were taking cognition enhancing drugs, others who had exam copies from prior years to help them prep, and a lot of people who copied each others’ homework. It was frustrating to be on a curve with them.
I had a few professors who didn’t use curves. It was wonderful.
I think curves are in general unethical due to cheating, and feel they’re a sign that a professor hasn’t done the hard work to really zero in on exactly what knowledge the student is expected to master.
Open to counterarguments.
Here’s the real problem. Grad programs and/or employers are cheating—-they aren’t doing their own homework.
There’s the key problem.
A vitality curve is a performance management practice that calls for individuals to be ranked or rated against their coworkers. It is also called stack ranking, forced ranking, and rank and yank. Pioneered by GE's Jack Welch in the 1980s, it has remained controversial. Numerous companies practice it, but mostly covertly to avoid direct criticism.
Trying to consider the other hand reminds me of question I had at an all-hands last year: “If the only raises are annual review based, does the inflation rate mean that everyone else takes an effective pay cut?” The response hedged on HR doing market adjustments. Maybe Welch was just being realistic? Maybe encouraging folks to change employment until they are in a position in which they excel is the better option long term?
I don’t know. There’s a saying “it’s cruel to be kind” and maybe I’m too soft to survive.
You also create an attitude of fear which is not conducive to a productive and adaptable environment in the long term. You can get away with it for a while, but it's not a good principle.
Get rid of the annual review entirely. Active management is better than passive with guiderails like prodding reviews. I've never been motivated by an annual review nor have I seen it successfully motivate others; have you?
The opposite is true in my experience. People fear it and become less productive as it nears, it takes time that would be better spent on other things and it's not personally rewarding for the manager or the worker. If done poorly, it also lowers team unity and especially doesn't work as a reward because people don't recognize the behavior that led to it. If you reward behavior right after it happens, people associate the behavior with the reward. If you wait six months, they don't. They can intellectually but the team impact is lowered. Not to mention if you're individually evaluating a team based on arbitrary statistics you miss the people who hold everything together. Nobody wants to help their teammate if it will cause their teammate to get a raise instead of them.
Finally, it causes people to game the system instead of improving their work because the work improvement has less impact on their remuneration.
All that to say I don't think the annual review is a good tool.
If there's an actual correspondence (eg you get next year scholarship for your studies only if your GPA remains above X), that's an incentive to cheat, so there is one issue.
And while curves do suck, it also sucks to be compared with someone having photographic memory in most exams where that is a very useful skill (even though the exam is not sttempting to favout photographic memory). Or some lazy bag who is more talented at something so it took you 10x more effort to get the same understanding. Basically, you are stacked against so much, that cheating is just a small part of all of that.
In short, it sucks being compared to people using everything they can to their advantage. But then again, that's what happens past university too, so it's just real life.
There are two cases, usually, where curves make sense.
* When the professor doesn’t actually know how hard the exam is because it’s a new test. And since people save tests that’s most classes.
* When the professor is actually trying to find that one kid. This is super common in theoretical maths. The exams are incredibly hard with the expectation that you won’t finish it and graded on a curve or some other measure like “the test is out 100 points but there are 200 possible.” But when someone gets a perfect score you direct them to the phd program.
There's a big range between "that one kid" and "everyone". In some of my courses it'd be easy to believe 15% were cheating in some way. Another comment in this thread put the share at 50%. How's a curve going to deal with that?
I feel drugs and copying are quite different - the guy on drugs did put in the work and the effort, after all.
This would eliminate a lot of cheating, and a lot of advantages for those in a good position (better access to new drugs and nutrition, better recovery programs, better training programs — aren't they all unfair at some level?)...
The ultimate goal is to get us to experience the top level combination of talent and effort, both in science/work and otherwise. Getting there is never going to be completely fair (hey, you scored better on it even though you prepared for 3 days and I took 30: tough luck for me, I guess, but the fact you are more talented for that exam is not something I can do anything about).
I've also seen non-cheating people who are excellent at exam taking (great scores) without ever taking anything from the actual material (zero learnings). I've never felt threatened by them either, though maybe I would have if I wanted to pursue an academic career.
By the same measure, pain killers, kinesio tapes, surgeries, ice baths: they are routine stuff for common athletes over-exerting themselves.
I've never seen anyone naturally grow a kinesio tape, yet I think 90% of people in pro sports wear them. :)
It always was and remains a question of where we draw the line?
I think that the rule should be the same for the entire population — if we are aware of the adverse effects, prescription required.
Many sports are life-ruinous by nature (check out those NFL head injury studies), yet we incentivise people to take part in them (by paying a lot for the games).
I always cringe when I hear from pro sportspeople how engaging in sports is promoting a healthy lifestyle: I mean, sure, unless overdone like all pro sports do.
I suppose we accept that in sports -- even without doping, if somebody's gonna sacrifice their body to make a play then that's their call -- but in academia, too?
In academia, pulling all-nighters to meet unreasonable demands, psychological toll of political games, jerk mentors and professors...
In sports, I know of no-one participating even recreationally who does not have a lingering sports injury (me included).
Basically, if you want "your equipment to last", you would not participate in any high level sports at all.
Are curves still that common these days? In my time at university, the only classes that got curved were a couple math classes that were curved in the students' favor.
I disagree; there's no objective criteria for what students should be "expected to master" in a particular course. it's inherently relative to what the typical student at that institution is capable of. a class where everyone gets an A is probably a waste of time for everyone involved. it strongly implies that more material could have been covered.
if a whole institution is like this, it gets back to the original problem. when everyone else is graduating with a 4.0, a 3.8 looks a lot like a 2.0 from a more rigorous school.
ideally, the material itself would be designed to get a good distribution of As, Bs, and Cs with a few Ds and Fs for people who didn't try or understand at all. but it's pretty hard to get this exactly right. better to err on the side of making things a little too hard. then the occasional bright student will really shine, and you have enough signal to compress the range into the expected letters at the end.
Not exactly, but depending on the course you can get pretty close. In my engineering statics and solids classes, it mapped well with what you'd be expected to do when working as a stress engineer (which is what I worked in after school). In my heat transfer course, it mapped well with the responsibilities of a thermal engineer.
ideally, the material itself would be designed to get a good distribution of As, Bs, and Cs with a few Ds and Fs for people who didn't try or understand at all. but it's pretty hard to get this exactly right. better to err on the side of making things a little too hard. then the occasional bright student will really shine, and you have enough signal to compress the range into the expected letters at the end.
And that's exactly what my professors who didn't curve managed to do. It was clear they worked very hard at prioritizing the important material, teaching it well, and testing it fairly. It was a breath of fresh air.
But when the average score on an exam in one of my other classes was 22% -- and they weren't looking for the next Einstein, it was just another upper division engineering class, presumably the geniuses would have revealed themselves by that point -- it was clear that the professor wasn't even trying. Throw a bunch of crap on the test and let the curve sort it out, so the professor could get back to what they really wanted to spend their time on: research.
I've never heard of this interpretation before, it seems this is a difference in whether the GPA should represent a student's actual grade on assignments, or the student's overall achievement relative to their piers. It seems the curve exists for the latter ideology - you can't expect every FAANG recruiter to say "well they got 2.9 from Georgia Tech, that's better than this 3.4 from Duke", if they did, you'd probably have pretty arbitrary hirings (although, if it became policy, I can see some Googler making an internal tool to 'normalize' school GPAs); although it seems MIT has a "no curves" policy and graduates still manage top-tier GPAs.
Yes, writing a new exam each time is a bore but I prefer my students learning my style rather yhan not.
If GPA is a factor to achieve certain jobs, positions, grants, PhD programs, etc. (which it obviously is, to varying extents depending on countries, but AFAIK it always is) then someone who is inflating their GPA via cheating can basically "steal" your job/PhD/etc., curve or not.
It's beyond me why is this even allowed.
Are you grading results of your educational effort or are you organizing a beauty pageant?
Not grading on a curve should be part of academic integrity standards.
You voluntarily agree to abide by the academic integrity rules. If you don't want to do that, you can voluntarily go to a different institution with different rules and standards. The goal of the place is learning not pointscoring and cheating undermines that.
I went there for learning, and I never felt that was undermined by others' cheating.
How does cheating undermine learning for non-cheaters in college?
I can see loss of motivation or external pressures (family or scholarship demanding a particular GPA) when you are curve graded, but that means that one cares not only about learning — which is ok, we all care about ranking to some extent, but as long as you recognize that it's a flawed system, you can either focus on that or focus on learning imho. And accepting that someone else cares about grading more than you do (which pushes many into cheating as well).
Edit: Oh, and loss of motivation for the teacher, as brought up by the author in the article.
Because there is no way to measure whether the teaching and learning is effective if you just make stuff up. There is no way to do research if you just make stuff up. There is no way to advance human knowledge if you just make stuff up. It's not some convoluted thing, a lot of systems, probably most you encounter in adult life in an industrialized society, depend on essentially voluntary cooperation.
That's not to say the way universities work is somehow optimal but again, as you point out yourself, you don't have participate if you think their methods are too poor to bother with.
I did not go to college to “learn”, and I’m not sure I know anyone who did.
It is depressing when I hear from people otherwise, I can't imagine missing out on the joy of learning.
If you take away the aspect of college as “a place to get a credential” you’ll see the cheating stop. Instead for those credentials just hold exams like the AP, ACT, SAT, RHCSE, or the 7 Actuarial exams. No college required. Whatever you do to pass them is fine.
Then make college totally ungraded except as a mechanism for student feedback. Have tracks for people that just want the credentials (just like the APs) that terminate at the exams. All other courses are just for people who are genuinely interested and confer no status or praise.
Now the incentives are aligned. Outside of the testing areas there is literally zero reason for anyone to cheat, and non-credential classes have to actually be interring, engaging, and useful to students for anyone to take them.
No, you won't. People will cheat because it is perceived to be easier than doing the work generally, even if they don't have the external incentive of the score meaning something.
People cheat at casual games of "Call of Duty;" not even ranked.
Years ago a few students in my class were complaining about cheaters. They were frustrated, and one even accused me of missing "obvious" cheaters. It was embarrassing for me, and brought down morale in the class. I have policed exams more aggressively ever since.
In another class, I caught a cheater during an exam (Calculus 2 or 3), and one of his classmates e-mailed thanking me, noting the student cheated his way through the prerequisite class the prior semester.
This stuff really matters.
What I am saying is that it shouldn't.
"The argument was that chat groups have become indispensable tools for students taking courses online during the pandemic. The essay detailed all of the useful info passed around in chats. I totally agreed with this point....Their strategy was to leave the chat before every quiz and midterm so that they couldn’t be there for the cheating. Then they rejoined afterward."
So, in order to be competitive in a class where (whether explicitly curved or not) the difficulty will be adjusted up or down until the "right" portion of students are passing, even a student who wanted to not cheat needed to be in the chat. He made a course in which it required extraordinary efforts to find a way to be able to both pass and not cheat, and then acted surprised that so many students cheated.
Any teacher who can fire up R to process the chat group logs, could have figured out a better system for quizzes and tests, so that it wasn't this hard to be competitive without cheating. Also, if he hasn't ever taken a course on game theory, he should; if he has, he shouldn't have passed.
His goal is clearly stated: for people to honestly connect with the course material. That's hard if a group like this is poisoned with cynicism. My thought here is how these types of messaging groups spaces have become an incredibly important aspect of the educational experience and beyond. I think about all the 'toxic' cultures in places I have been in and how they usually revolve around people trading information and socializing.
"The best advice was a student telling everyone they could just go to the website for the textbook, then control-F in the textbook and search for words in the question to find the answers. I mean, ya. It’s in the textbook."
This does not sound like a difficult course to me. I have taken courses where it's rather trivial to ace the online quizzes by looking things up in the textbook (I am taking one right now, in fact). Students who can't even do this and resort to sharing the answers in a group chat must have become incredibly jaded about their education. I fully agree with the author's decision to both sanction them for cheating and give them a second chance to engage with the course material. It was very satisfying to see that all of the effort paid off in the end.
"The argument was that chat groups have become indispensable tools for students taking courses online during the pandemic...I totally agreed with this point"
I think they just really enjoy catching people cheat and see how far it goes. Sort of masochistic tbh
As someone who recently graduated, this student is a freeloader. Comparable to companies who heavily use OSS but never contribute. I expect them to be a terrible coworker.
But something that stood out to me is this:
> For consequences, I came up with a three strikes and you are out rule.
and then
> I wasn’t ready to inform them about what was going on until I had processed all of the facts, so I just pressed on with the lectures. My goal was to have all of the forms filled out and emailed before the next midterm. I tried as hard as I could. But, I couldn’t get it done. I had to give the next midterm, and I knew that probably meant a bunch more cheating.
So basically, this professor know about "low-impact cheating" (cheating in quizzes, where "[t]he quizzes were low stakes"), but instead of saying anything just kept pushing forward.
I wonder if anyone even told those students up front in clear terms that sharing answers on the quizzes was not allowed. In school we're often told to co-operate in assignment. Where is the line between an assignment and a quiz?
Just letting the whole group slide gradually into cheating territory is a lose-lose strategy.
A course should tell you what works and what doesn't early on, just like a good computer game. If people go down the wrong path early on, it means early on something failed.
After the halfway point they tilt strongly from justice to mercy and ethics education.
You also shouldn't be sharing the answers to assignments unless the teacher/professor says you can do so.
And finally, read your school's handbook for a proper definition of cheating.
I dont even say that it is good, I just say that is the way it is, was and probably will be.
So you kind of not understand life?
Lots of jobs come through networking, another fact of life.
I'm firmly of the opinion that the negatives of group study out weight the positives and generally should be banned in college. Banging your head against a problem for hours at a time assures you understand all the wrong ways of getting the right answer. This means you have a far more detailed understanding, and there is always formal academic study/the prof/etc and the possibility of asking about difficulties in class.
And finally, group chat is small potato's, I'm fairly certain there is a fair bit of 3rd parties basically doing assignments/taking tests these days for students. Primary because I was "mentoring" a student in a subject and found myself in a situation that I had to extract myself from because it crossed a line of mine.
That's a... strong opinion.
I'm genuinely at a loss of how you can think that. If studying in groups was harmful enough to be banned by colleges, then shouldn't online classes have been tremendous boons to learning? On a personal level, I can barely straighten out two thoughts in my head unless I have someone I can talk it over with, I couldn't imagine collaborative study being outright banned.
Am I missing something here?
I can confirm this.
Personally, I have seen as high as 10 %, but those numbers were heavily skewed towards students who could only speak Chinese. Not sure what was up with them.
I do not teach anymore, but I have heard that the situation became much worse in the last few years.
After 30 years in and out of "academia" I am exasperated and despondent at the state of affairs and what I consider the total bastardisation of the function of education.
The OP story of rampant, shameless cheating is all too familiar and is simply grist for the mill. It's something to which most professors have grown thick skins. This is the ordinary background against which we have to teach, day in, day out.
Despite being a optimist in so many areas of life I see little prospect of fixing this without extraordinary and radical changes in the governance, funding and mission of universities.
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/author/andy-farnell
[2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/authors/andy-far...
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.
Yes you're absolutely right. Wars on symptomatic abstractions like "drugs", "terrorism" and "poverty" are always failures and become ad-hominem, as wars on addicts, wars of terror, and wars against the poor.
As surely as thieving loaves of bread is a response to starvation, cheating is just another symptom - as you say, a naturally human response - to an unjust and impossible circumstances. That doesn't make it "right", but the context at least offers us some understanding.
People will stop seeing "selfishly gaming the system" as acceptable social behaviour once our systems resume serving the fullest interests of the people instead of trying to control, manipulate and limit them to the benefit of the few.
Sure you could copy your friends code, but you still had to present it to a TA who would certainly get suspicious if you couldn't answer to what you had written. Ditto for exams and essays/reports.
Cheating, or elaborating on how to cheat, just wasn't efficient use of my time as a student, disregarding the morality of it. Frankly, it seems to me the way these students are being tested is not appropriate as it's easy to abuse and creates incentives for students to cheat.
For most of my life I would've been frightened to even say so, or risk accusations of being a "swot", "teachers pet" or as the Aussies call it, "a tall poppy".
But the attitude that it's "normal" to cheat is common within US/UK/AUS culture now. Truth is I always considered cheating beneath me and was simply _WAY_ ahead of every class I ever took - but you can't say that in "polite" US/UK culture - one cannot be too pious and clean-cut, one must seem little bit like "everybody else" - even if everybody else is not really like that, if that makes sense.
So actually I've taught at universities in Sweden (Stockholm) and Finland (Helsinki) and notice similar attitudes to those you say. But those cultures aren't without dirty hands either. Here's the weird thing: Tall Poppy Syndrome is culturally closest to Jante Law [1], a Scandinavian ethos of "Don't think you're better than anyone else" which is precisely the corrosive culture that means people cheat because everybody else is cheating and causes a downward spiral or race to the bottom.
"When you've done your very best
When things turn out unpleasant
When the best of men take bribes
Isn't it the fool who doesn't?"
-- Human League 1978
If we were given take-home multiple choice forms to be judged by I'm certain people would cheat. But I've never seen that, possibly because it feels like a pretty lousy (and lazy) way of evaluating and educating students.
In the first course, there was a student who definitely didn’t cheat and was objectively horrible at all tasks assigned, consuming a frustratingly large portion of my grading time. This student ended up with a massively impressive resume including all the best places, and became the founder of a billion dollar cryptocurrency.
In the second course, the worst student also clearly didn’t cheat, and sometimes I gave extra points for answers that were wrong but the only ones in the class that were invented rather than regurgitated. That student founded one of the most influential companies in modern computer science, and also a 10 billion-dollar cryptocurrency.
I’m not sure what the lesson is. I had honest and very good students that didn’t do much of note, but there were only two honest but awful students, and both had superlative success. Just for reference, I was honest and pushed hard to land somewhere in the low middle, and I’ve had my share of ups and downs, but definitely no competition for the lanterne rouges.
It's sad because I think a lot of those classes are curved and people who don't cheat probably have a disadvantage. Despite putting more effort in and maybe even knowing more than other students, people who don't cheat could end up at the bottom of the curve but might have actually fared better under different conditions.
This is the side effect of lazy teaching. Unique tests cannot be leaked. Problem solved.
Or maybe don't do stupid tests for computer science.
This is a space where whiteboarding is a good idea, in fact, interactive whiteboarding with a whole class is a great way to teach and work through problems.
Any type of interactive test is hard to fake.
I have never heard of lazy teachers ever getting any consequences, so why should they stop doing these things? You could make it a part of their job, but of course lazy principals wont do that either. There just aren't any incentives to run a school properly.
Teachers go to learn how to teach, in the abstract sense, for 4 years, to go to teach high school kids. They learn the techniques and tools to effectively translate subjects and educate people.
Professors do not do this.
The result? The final contained a majority of questions from that cheat sheet. I still pose this scenario to a couple friends nowadays asking if this would be considered cheating, and the responses are actually a mix of "no, you're just taking what's publicly available" and "yes, you're manipulating the system to get where you are and taking spots from someone with academic integrity".
As others have said, we go to college these days for a fastpass to middle class. If you haven’t needed the knowledge since, maybe you got what you needed out of the class and you worked the system in a legal way. Or maybe you paid a lot of money for that class and yet cheated yourself out of the knowledge you were paying to be taught. On some level it comes down to how you feel about it.
you may be on to something with this one
Tangentially, it seems incredibly unfair that self-plagarism is a thing because "if you're not coming up with new material then you're not engaging with the course" and yet professors aren't even taking the incredibly simple step of changing a few numbers between repeats of an exam. It's basically self-plagarism from the professor, the professor isn't engaging with the course in the same way that a self-plagarizing student is not.
The dead-simple answer to students who are looking at test banks is to produce semi-novel material for each course, in the same fashion that students are expected to produce semi-novel material for each course. In both cases, yeah, it's kinda trite, there's only so many novel takes you can have on the best way to factor an integer or the implications of shakespeare on russian 20th century literature, but that's the system we've agreed upon.
It should cut both ways and the fact that professors suffer consequences and difficulty from not producing novel material is not really the student's problem. The solutions of forcing syllabus-level contracts-of-adhesion above and beyond the school academic policies is not a fair solution either.
I realize there's usually a "and whatever the syllabus says goes" clause but that's shitty, a lazy professor should not be able to exempt themselves from academic diligence by adding a "and it's OK for this professor to be lazy" clause in a contract of adhesion.
https://docs.cardano.org/explore-cardano/relevant-research-p...
If this is a ponzi then I have to give them credit, to be doing research at a university level in order to swipe me of a bundle of dollars is amazing. They don't have anything about making themselves richer at the expense of new users either, for some reason it's all focused on developing a great blockchain that is sustainable and is usable for dapps which ultimately provides utility for end users.
This continues to be a mystery to me as it seems no one can put themselves in the common man shoes. The common man doesn't care about tech. They don't care about the integrity behind it. They care about whether it can make them money.
List 5 coins I've never heard of and I'd probably say, "ponzi scheme" without hesitation. Do I actually know if it is? No. Does it matter? No. If the majority of shitcoins come off as a ponzi scheme, then why would anyone think something like Cardano isn't?
The "shittier" those "shitcoins" are, the quicker they'll die out. The ones that heavily incentivize early adopters might hang around longer, but they too will inevitably fizzle out if they don't offer any practical innovation.
But if something has a steadily growing user base year after year, maybe it's worth some attention after all?
Or you can just keep screeching "Shitcoins! Shitcoins!". I guess we can all settle for ourselves what form of discourse we consider more constructive and worthwhile.
Yes some of them are, but its a very legitimate technology that will change the world.
It strikes me that your comment would read by crypto fanbase as a success story, and yet as crypto detractors like myself as even further reason to regard them as terrible... you may have just invented the "completely unintentional if-by-whiskey argument[1]"
Could you expand on what you mean here? What are the aspects?
You can read more about issues on Vitaliks website for example when Musk tried to become a blockchain expert overnight he looked a bit silly:
https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html
Vitalik is probably the only Billionaire in the world I don't hate and ethereums innovations are incredible.
At least this is honest and doesn't provide a date given how many times the planned date has slipped.
The idea that no name engineers at Google work on more interesting problems is laughable to me as someone who worked there for 3 years and saw the vast majority of them work on garbage Angular apps or borgcfg . Not exactly designing a zero knowledge roll up chain in complexity.
The “cryptocurrency=bad” bros on hacker news are getting so tiresome. Many people think things like adtech are scams yet if every single time someone brought up Google we derailed into that conversation it would rightfully get moderated but with crypto, dang is asleep at the wheel.
Actual cryptography experts like Dan Boneh and Silvio Macali are full time on cryptocurrency, but since your L4 Google buddy thinks it’s a scam, that settles it so we bring it up every damn time.
Meanwhile adtech is making the internet awful, and thus stories increasingly show up about how bad Google has been getting as well.
I used to read all the white papers for all the new coins, and was definitely on the side of Ethereum as an interesting experiment when it released, but nothing has happened to make me think a premined securities play hasn’t turned out to be a scam.
And not everyone at companies like Google are doing the same thing. Just because you didn't know them doesn't mean there wasn't brilliant work being done there, especially with regard to their scaling and machine learning. The folks at deep mind are doing far more brilliant and innovative work than Ethereum.
> I’m not sure what the lesson is
Gambling is a profitable business.
They're both valuable skills of course, but they should be recognized as being distinct from each other; and measuring "intelligence" as some one-dimensional modality is a spectacular failure to do so, IMO.
This idea is also to an extent analogous to the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning (AI).
When I was in college I was attending a course teaching to build C++ project, the professor checks plagiarism by checking the creation date of source code files, since the project was built step by step with new files being added progressively.
I was being perfectionism about my code and did a lot of refactoring before submitting the project, and got a very low score because the professor saw the dates of my files were new and all the same and thought I copied my homework from someone else. While the ones who actually did plagiarize the homework got high scores, because they copied other students' source code lesson by lesson.
My professor obviously did not even read the source code of our homework, otherwise he would easily know who was writing original code and who was just copying.
- Here, it is always assumed that many students (maybe 50%?) will cheat if they believe they can do so without being caught. When the pandemic hit and we moved to online testing, basic anti-cheat measures like shuffling the order of questions in a test or not allowing going back to previous questions were taken from the get go, it's considered obvious here that you need to do that (just like, in an on-site multiple-choice test, you have to either have several shuffled versions of the test, or enough distance between students that they can't see each other's test, or really good surveillance). It's shocking to me that this professor is surprised that cheating happened under these conditions.
- On the other hand, while cheating students are failed and/or otherwise penalized when caught, we would never penalize, or even scold, a student for not snitching. Snitching on your classmates is almost universally considered a bad thing to do here, and we would never demand that students do that, not only due to the fear of retaliation mentioned in the post, because... it's just not right, they're your classmates!
- When I myself was a student (also here in Spain), I had a professor who spent some time in an American university and used to talk enthusiastically about how in America they had a very strict academic integrity culture and cheating just didn't happen at all. No students would even think about it, because it would be a dishonor, they would be deeply ashamed if they got caught and no one would want to talk to them anymore, or something like that. While this professor was a good guy and I'm sure he really believed what he was saying, I never really believed it. Accounts like this confirm I was right. I think he probably saw there this attitude of not accepting as a given that cheating will just happen when possible, similarly to the post author, and confused his American colleagues' thoughts with reality. I often wonder how many professors in America live in this bubble where cheating does not exist if you don't see it, and whether it's just naiveté or hypocrisy.
I think it's a bit of laziness and religious mentality. In US it is believed, I think, that making the rules, framing them in language of morality and harshly punishing the ones that don't obey them is as good as understanding and solving the actual problem.
Holy word, sin, punishment.
And when enough money is involved you my go light on punishment which is beneficial for enforcers and provides outlet for people who otherwise would bring down this system and replace it with something more reasonable. There's so much gray area everywhere under the overt strictness of the rules.
This mentality is visible in so many systems in the US.
Why exactly is it "not right"?
I agree that the student should be compelled to police their peers. Both because everyone should be allowed to decide for themselves if they want to take the risk reprisals, and also because it may create perverse incentives.
But I don't accept that it's "not right". College is a golden opportunity for young people to participate in building the kind of society they want to spend the rest of their lives living in. Do they want one where corruption and other injustices are exposed in the open, or one where they are swept under the rug and allowed to perpetuate themselves?
A quick cheat or bribe for a shortcut to meet your goal feels good when you can get away with it, but how will it feel down the line when you're the one who have fallen victim and nobody will speak on your behalf? Because this is the precedent you're setting for your students here.
> College is a golden opportunity for young people to participate in building the kind of society they want to spend the rest of their lives living in
For most, it is just a piece of paper that allows them to get a job -> and often doesnt even prepare for that job in useful ways. Also it is a place that is supposed to teach you lots of useful stuff, or at least "winder your horizons" stuff - but it fails at all of those.
Nearly everything I learned during university was done on my own.
It really is a cultural difference. Spain and the UK have ticket barriers for their public transport, while Germany and Switzerland don’t, preferring to rely on random controls.
Anyway, last month, some ditzy 20-something banker posted up on TikTok her scheme to cheat on the test, and referenced the institution. This got back to my sister and her colleagues before the exam, and when time came, the cheater was exposed, and ultimately sacked from what promised to be a lucrative career.
Probably more often than not cheaters prosper, but it does gladden the heart to see the odd one get their just desserts.
And yet people regularly share things they’ve recorded themselves that they are then embarrassed by or claim they’re being doxxed when the video gets shared widely. Why would you publicly state that you’re gonna cheat? Why would you publicly state that you’re gonna break the law? Why would you publicly record and share yourself breaking the law? Using an app made by a regime that sees privacy as an inconvenience.
100% of Tiktok users are not anonymous to Tiktok, which means with a simple subpoena are not anonymous to anyone.
I could perhaps turn a blind eye to the gross lack of integrity (I wouldn't, but I could); it's the sheer ineptitude that drives me up a wall.
When students heard about this, they got really excited, because cheating would be easier. So, the day of the exam comes, and I hear multiple say they didn't even study, and that it is going to be the easiest exam ever. Almost everybody I knew cheated on that exam, and the teachers found out. The funny thing is that there were no sanctions, because everyone used the excuse of "we are so stressed with the pandemic situation", and the teachers bought it. Needless to say that it was all lies. Almost no one was suffering with the pandemic. As a matter of fact, I still haven't met someone that didn't love being home playing games and talking with friends while in class.
For many students the pandemic was epic, no school for a while, unlimited gaming time, and nothing to stop them from doing what they wanted.
At least that's how I felt it, and they time I had definitely changes where I was heading in my life.
> This was the first time when 75% of the class was cheating way beyond the pale for half a semester
I know people who are on school for immigration reasons. Specially with computer science, there is so much nonsense that sometimes people must work through. This doesn't mean they don't have integrity.
The author says they sympathize with students. But do they really? Making the students write a humiliating "academic integrity essay" is not engagement. It's forcing someone to smile and then boasting that they have a good time.
I am forever grateful for my bachelor's. Not because they thought us a lot, actually the opposite. I happened to be in a unique situation in which course work was practically non-existent.
It was marvelous! As a 19 year old I was just learning to have adult social experiences and the school really allowed me to do that. The classes were not about pass or fail. They were about being in an environment and finding what's interesting within it. I know it sounds like this sort of thing will create terrible candidates for FAANG, and maybe so (not in our case), but perhaps it could also avoid the need to question the integrity of a teenager.
When cheating is easy, and especially if the grades are curved, non-cheaters are harshly punished.
The author intentionally created such an environment and is surprised cheating is going on.
The only possible solution I can see is that the majority of the grade is derived from non-online exams held under strict conditions:
* IDs are checked
* Randomized seating that is announced just before entering the class.
* Enforced distance between test takers.
* Outside proctors that have no sentiments towards the students.
* Even going to the bathrooms should be regulated.
* Smart devices are deposited during the exams.
* Swift harsh punishment to cheaters, and policy violaters (e.g. use of smartphone during exam)
* Constant vigilance in adapting to new methods of cheating.
Without all the above, non-cheaters are effectively punished.
Nothing is perfect, but such steps limit cheating and reduce the incentive for cheating.
It was like that before the pandemic. If you expect academic integrity in an online class, you are deluded. The students here were just dumb enough to do it in a class-wide chat. Smart cheaters do it in small, trusted, cliques.
I have pre-pandemic experience as a student and as a TA in both an Israeli university and a top American publish university.
The Israeli systems does it as I described above, and the American university does not. The US university held an exam for 350 students in a single conference hall. The proctors were the TAs. We could not check IDs, students seated themselves, and there were no effective supervision. The easiest way to cheat was just to switch the exam forms with a friend.
We intentionally created a massive incentive to cheat. Worse, we curved the grades, punishing non-cheaters.
I tried to protest, but was completely ignored because it was always done like that.
The pandemic only made this worse.
* They read comments about their teaching, and shrugged it off as “a vocal minority”. I cannot guarantee it’s the case, but it’s not a “minority” it’s most likely the median opinion that most students are too shy to share. And then the online course evals are sent out the last week of the semester and most don’t care anymore to share what they really think.
* The author made no discussion of the add/drop deadline which is usually around Midterm 2. If I was a student not cheating but in the group chat and realized the professor was running a sting operation (instead of reporting cheaters when they discovered them?) I would probably be inclined to drop.
* The Author explains their love of R analysis, then gives no data or statistics on students who were in the chat and still did well on Midterm 2 (still learned material).
* I prefer the weekly quizzes that are basically homework, with free discussion / question compiling on google docs, but then have very strict exams. To claim something is “open notes” but then also that discussing the questions afterwords is cheating seems silly.
College for the longest time has not had anything to do with learning for the VAST majority of students. You go to college because you have to have a degree to get a job. And you have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job. College is not about actually learning anything - it's a purely monetary investment, where you go into debt totaling up to hundreds of thousands of dollars because you know that it will net you more money in the future. Not cheating is completely risking any hope of financial independence you can ever have for your entire life.
Given all of this, why wouldn't you cheat? You take an extremely minimal risk (most profs don't have any clue, or do not care about cheating at all) to avoid a much greater risk (you not getting good grades and potentially never getting any return on your lifelong 6 figure deep debt).
None of the above is meant to deny the benefits of getting into the ivy league self-dealing club.
If you have more information on the source of your confidence, please do share.
Also when I was teaching pre-covid I always assumed my undergraduates would cheat if I gave them anything cheatable. Even if they're cheating though some small percentage gets through and sticks with some small percentage of students.
My mentors always said thats who you should teach to, and to assume good intentions with the rest. It takes a long time to settle into an adult brain.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/09/ten-tips-for-slightl...
In several interviews we even went over some of the actual subject matter from some of the more interesting courses, and I was able to leverage algorithms from my genetic engineering undergrad work during some whiteboarding.
I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely love to go back to school to learn. Now I feel like I'm in a position where I can appreciate academic material and concepts because I understand how they relate to the real world. Please give me those advanced graph algorithm, database, and real analysis classes that I couldn't appreciate 15 years ago due to a lack of real-world experience.
There's good stuff there!
I think a big part of this is split attention, but I also don't feel comfortable taking 1-2 years off my job in the middle of my career just to study.
Far too many have just been screwed over time and time again from professors who reuse old (usually outdated) course content and whose lectures don't actually add anything to the textbook or slides.
Anecdote time: I took a class where a module taught Python 2.7 in Fall 2021, and I know it was taught again in Spring '22. My professor literally read the slide content to us in lectures, that was it. I found out that a professor wrote all the course content in 2017 and it's just been passed around by all the professors who got assigned to teach that class. The same assignments have been used, and apparently they've been published to every "student assistance" platform around.
When you're faced with a public scandal at your hands as CEO after you've cheated your way up the ladder, are you going to admit fault and take a loss for the sake of society or are you going to make "the right choice" for the business and double down on your deception?
You love the idea of doing something you’re not doing now. I see further down in another comment, you dismissed the idea of learning from free online resources.
If you were in your 30s and in school, you’d love to be able to go off in the and work with your hands — or something else to distract yourself.
I'd love to have the "college experience" again now, but this time with a focus on learning instead of a focus on getting good grades. Focusing on good grades (over learning) is the rational choice as a young student and I don't regret doing so, but now my goals are different.
I sympathize with the reason why students cheat, but I can't see that those reasons are the same as what you say. You don't need to attend classes to learn the content nor display mastery - I appreciate a good syllabus for that reason where you know what is expected and can learn on your own time. I liked the approach the author of the article took for that reason. But none of this requires cheating.
I can see why this would lead students to cheat, but this looks to me like a strawman in addition to victim blaming (on part of the prof).
When people were offered a nearly complete fresh slate, they still cheated. And then plagiarized.
He at length describes how much of his class were blowing off almost every aspect of the class; not attending lectures, skipping assignments, almost never attending his office hours.
Many of them openly say in the whatsapp chat that they didn't do reading, classwork, or study.
This is not even remotely close to behavior of people participating in a high-stakes all-or-nothing, if-I-don't-graduate-I-am-fucked-for-life situations.
In my state college they had zero tolerance policy. You caught cheating, you're out.
I think it's a combination of culture and every person's upbringing which sets priorities on students to waste time cheating. They have to be there because of expectations either from parents or society, but they don't really want to be there. Students who aren't trying are just going through the motions and will take the path of least resistance which is cheating.
You said it yourself.
> college is very limited in how much it can prepare you for a real job.
The goal isn't to be well prepared for a job. The goal is to get the job. For most students, including myself while I was there, university is a massive signalling exercise. I just cared about the magic combo that would lead to a good paying job.
I have also had the experience where a professor interviewed me and one other student because our homework appear too similar. That experience reinforced my impression that cheating is a risky venture and I want none of it. (Also, leaving printouts of your code around is extremely high risk if helping someone to cheat is roughly as bad as cheating at your university).
have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job.
After a couple years, get a job at a small startup where you and 5 other people write the entire product. From there you will be a far stronger candidate just about anywhere with a real engineering culture.
My GPA was fairly reasonable, but I worked through college, so I got a position at a large name brand company. Drove me nuts after having worked at places where I had written more code in a single year than most of the lifer's had written in their entire career. That is when I went the startup route, and basically did small companies for ~20 years until wife/kids/stability drove me into the arms of a mid sized company where I only work ~40h/week. Now I write code on the weekends to keep my mind active.
[Edit]
To state something more on topic, I never once even considered cheating in school. I don't think it ever entered my mind, even when I was in danger of flunking out.
In general, cheating isn’t common in college.
This was simple game theory during the pandemic.
Glad that I at least dropped out when it stopped being fun. Highly recommend dropping out after ~2-3 years if you can get away with it.
You pay for school, do whatever you want with it.
Your knowledge and skill level is the most important thing they will evaluate you for, for the three SW jobs that I've gotten nobody asked me for my college degree let alone my grades, including a FAANG-type company.
Everybody expects the fresh college grads to be fairly green, but you can really tell when someone has no clue about even the basic principals of their job, the one they supposedly have a degree in.
So the danger is having a good GPA but then washing out in job interviews with real companies. "Wow, a 4.0 in CS from CMU! So why do you seem to be completely mystified by Fizzbuzz?"
It's the worst kind of corruption, because all other forms of corruption hinges on everyone staying silent and playing along. Anyone who espouses the "snitches get stitches" attitude needs to be socially ostracized, because they are a menace wherever they go, whether in academia, industry or public office.
> If it has a crying face emoji does it mean the threats weren’t serious? I don’t know, wasn’t going to take any chances.
> I won’t repeat the email exchange with the student who had to be contacted by judicial affairs.
This was the worst decision in a series of somewhat-too-lenient decisions. I would not want to teach at, study at, or send my kids to school at an institution that lacks a zero-tolerance policy for such threats.
2) What does the university do to these students as a response? This is an administrative action rather than a course-level action, and why the author had to fill out forms.
3) A separate administrative response is given for threatening behavior. The consequences for this are different than for cheating. There are potential legal ramifications associated with this.
I think in this case the author was saying he gave this student a second chance (the second syllabus) while also submitting to the other two authorities in the matter.
The cultures could not have been any more different. The engineering labs were loud, full of collaboration and discussion. The professors would sometimes find out a student copied some code and would simply ask "Well, do you understand it?".
The computer science labs were dead quiet. Strict policies around code plagiarism were posted at every door (instant fail and a 1 year ban from any CS class). People were terrified of helping each other and so everyone just worked in isolation.
I learned more in the engineering labs and made deeper connections with people. The coursework was frankly harder, we built more complex things completely from scratch, but because of the collaborative culture I was able to learn from my peers, tackle hard problems, and retain the information.
There was still definitely a fair amount of real cheating though. Especially during the online classes of COVID.
Most of the cheating I saw was from classes that had clearly had difficulty creep up year after year due to un-caught cheating though, and had truly awful professors. Chegg, I think, has really inflated the difficulty for the hosest people.
I think the most common cheating i actually saw in engineering was group work where only 1 person did anything. Hell, I have an example on my GitHub where my partner made one commit with one line of code which I then had to redo anyway.
I've tasted university education very little ever since. Academia is just flooded with intellectual fraud of all kinds. The students sense the lack of seriousness and accountability and realize that no matter what is said, that'll get away with it because the profs don't really care and in fact depend on cheating to survive.
In freshman engineering courses [*], students would gather and do the assignments. They would divide and conquer questions, sharing answers. This was definitely cheating. (I didn't participate. But I didn't seriously consider reporting it either; I wanted to have friends...) The assignments were repetitive and stupid, so this was a rational if dishonest coping strategy. TAs certainly knew this happened. I had a bad habit of skipping dumb assignments. One TA actually emailed me something along the lines of "why don't you just cheat like everyone else".
In physics classes, students would gather and do the assignments. They would each do all the work. When someone got stuck, others would suggest techniques, help them where they were stuck, etc. Collaborative and honest. The assignments had far fewer problems, each unique and involved, done from first principles. Homework was graded on showing (extensive) work as well as the answers. If folks had skipped/copied problems, they would have missed out on great learning opportunities and likely flunked the exams even if they weren't caught.
In computer science classes, I don't recall students gathering to do the assignments. Maybe I just wasn't part of the group. (Many of my friends were in engineering, and most of my academic time was spent in the physics building.) Maybe they just didn't work together, similar to what you observed. What I do know is that a lot of students had very little understanding, and I was surprised they got degrees.
Of course, I prefer the physics approach. It's probably not a discipline-wide thing though as much as that my school had a great physics department and a lousy CS department. More similarities than I expected in your story, though, despite presumably different schools and times.
[*] I dropped my electrical/computer engineering major after freshman year. I graduated with a comp sci major + physics minor. Maybe later engineering courses were different.
If you want to mould a Taylorist's dream of obedient, quiet factory workers who spend their lives making the left side of the head of a pin then yeah, go ahead and discourage cooperation.
For anything else? Especially the creative work that will be expected of current students in the future? Cooperation should be a major goal of education.
Education mostly doesn't work like that for most people in most places.
Teachers are not allies of students. They are the enemy, they are the problem. Students are rarely interested in learning. They are interested for this whole thing to be over and with a decent result.
This adversity pushes students to cooperate against the faculty. That's a strong motivator to connect and support each other in the face of common enemy. And they are learning a lot from each other, both in terms of knowledge and cooperation. There are also freeloaders in that cooperation that come just for the answers. But when the answer is not as easy as picking a letter, for example the answer is a way of solving a class of problems even those cheaters learn from this coopeartion. And they learn more than they could learn from their teachers.
By exploiting adversarial dynamics, having good materials available and technically ensuring it's hard to cheat trachers can basically have half of their teaching work done by the students as they teach each other. This benefits everybody.
You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place?
Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses. (Sure, there are cases, but over time they quickly attenuate from “sometimes” to “never” as time passes.) You might as well strive, get the most you can out of the course, and let the grade fall where it may.
Here’s an idea: if you’re cool with cheating, after school is over, just lie when anyone asks your gpa. You can get all the A’s, in one single, easy, low-risk cheat. Many won’t check and there’s little consequence for those that do (maybe you wasted some time at a job interview). This “frees” you to just do the best you can when you’re actually taking the courses — to get the most out of them you can — no risk, all gain.
Careers eventually filter out (most of) the cheaters. From my observations, only the students who were committed to understanding the material went on to have superb careers, with maybe a few exceptions. The rest ended up in dead-end mostly-mindless work, or dropped out of STEM-related fields all together.
I have a concern for the future of our society when the majority of an entire generation seems committed to cheating, though.
I disagree. They are undermining the value of the qualification other have earned.
The COVID pandemic makes me worried about this even more. It's gotten really bad, I can't imagine how bad it's going to get when the generations it affected reach college. Maybe I'm overestimating it (if you cheated through HS, you might not go to college), but there were already clear trends that are definitely going to be exacerbated.
For STEM, sure. This guy is a psych professor though. I suspect that most of their jobs will have absolutely nothing to do with this class. Obviously being truly successful instead of cheating will help in their careers, but I doubt anything they learn in this class would.
> Careers eventually filter out (most of) the cheaters.
Some yes. Some no. I cheated in my computer architecture class. I was already an accomplished programmer in Perl and Java, but cpu design was kicking my ass. It required a lot of time and effort, and I had little left over to give. I got the gist of most of the class, but I cheated a lot in order to pass. By doing so, I eked out a passing grade, satisfied that requirement, and got my diploma. And I have had a good career since then, needing absolutely nothing that I learned in that course. I also cheated a little in american history and poli sci.
I needed a diploma, and if I hadn't cheated, I wouldn't have gotten the diploma. And the fact that I understood less of those courses than my grade would suggest, has hurt me not one whit, so far in my fairly lengthy career.
Cheating in some courses is a self-defeating mistake. But your assumption that the only purpose of college is learning course material is a little naive. I got a LOT out of college, in terms of social experience, credentials, professional connections, etc. I did not cheat myself at all.
Obviously it’s going to be irrelevant to compilers or something, but not to heuristic approaches or anything with some quantifiable (and actively quantified) nondeterminism.
Should you enable the optimizer change by default, or not? Or do you still need to collect more data? How much more data? What data - more runs or more different code samples? How confident do you want to be, and how confident can you be?
These are questions you will face in your real day to day work, and a few statistics courses will be incredibly helpful to you in answering them.
(It has nothing to do with "in the context of computer science").
For example, in mechanical engineering, I know how to make reliable systems out of unreliable parts. Software engineering is still focused on a hopeless quest to make software perfect. How to do it assuming unreliability has been slowly seeping into software engineering the hard way, bit by bit, over my entire career.
One example: running the brake software on the same computer that is connected wirelessly to the internet.
What you're describing (the brake system) is just simply incompetence.
> What you're describing (the brake system) is just simply incompetence.
I regularly discuss this with people who are convinced they can make such a system secure.
For another example, I frequently advocate on HN for embedded systems to have physical write-enable switches for reprogramming the system memory. This makes it a physical impossibility for malware to infect that memory. Nobody agrees with me. They all think they can write bulletproof code.
I can't buy disk drives with physical write-enable switches, either, not since the 1990s. This is necessary so if you try to restore from a backup drive, you can't make a mistake and overwrite the backup, and the ransomware on your system cannot write to it. This is a regression in the industry.
And yet nobody on HN thinks this is a good idea, because it's inconvenient. Or they'll suggest a software switch, which of course is inherently corruptible.
BTW, the aviation industry gets this right. The stabilizer trim has a physical cutoff switch on all their airplanes, including the 737MAX. Unfortunately, in the 3 incidents of MCAS runaway, only one use the switch properly (and you never hear about that incident). The second never used the switch at all, and the third crew decided to disable the trim system when the airplane was in a non-recoverable dive without using trim. (The electric trim switches also are physical and override the software.)
The MLE job market is booming.
For a programming job that requires knowledge of chemistry, it's easier to find a chemist who can program. Likewise physics, math, statistics, electronics, etc.
These bad professors would take forever to grade, if not that then they would do what you describe and give us irrelevant information and odd spiels about whatever thing was bugging them in the politics world, or maybe even something their dog or cat did the week before that totally delayed them getting us our grades or assignments. I remember in my statistics course the guy spilled coffee all over our written mid terms! How careless.
I, not much unlike yourself would try and find any easy way to get ahead of the curve. Now, a common theme among these bad professors is definitely giving irrelevant information, being lazy, or even completely disorganized to no hope. With all these mistakes, they end up making huge mistakes in their own syllabus. You have no idea how many terrible things these people would do in their own work!
A neat little thing I found that nearly all bad professors do is list the exact material they would cover throughout the course, maybe not always week by week but an overview of the material we would touch on. How silly of them.
That's not even the kicker, these bad professors would even list the exact place where they took things from. Hilarious indeed. It was usually under some strange section called 'Required Course Materials' or 'Recommended for Review'. These suckers couldn't be any worse at their job, practically giving us the answers.
When I figured this out, I started going all in with the cheating. After getting the syllabus I would get this thing and read it from the beginning to the end, trying to cover as much material going topic by topic to be covered in the schedule. I could finish the course in practically 2 weeks, didn't even have to wait for these lectures that were pretty much a waste of time after going through it. By the 3rd bi-weekly lecture, I would have learned the entire course. Those fools never knew what hit them either, I would ace their assignments and finish exams before anyone else. I would even stop showing up to class with how adept I was at cheating. No one even suspected that I was cheating.
I would try and get others to follow my path. They would always ask how I did it, how did I, who really wasn't all that special, or smart, get so many A's. Even in spite of the quality of instruction.
The answer was always the same - read the textbook!
You literally just studied and worked ahead. That is not cheating...
By the way, I don’t think you really cheated (in an academic integrity sense), you thoroughly read the course material to get these grades. You deserve to get these grades since you already know how to study on your own.
I was trained as a mechanical engineer. Yet I write compilers. And yeah, a lot of things I learned from ME have made it into the seemingly utterly different compilers. I see a lot of mistakes SE's make because they are completely unaware of other fields.
Do you mind elaborating on this or providing a link if you've discussed this before?
https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b39.html
https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b40.html
And one about its influence on compilers:
Writing is how you promote yourself through articles, presentations, etc.
Then the blocked out part becomes neglected so it turns kind of on/off in nature. It now gives you either super great or awful information.
So as a result, it's not that you don't see the big picture. It's that your inadvertent feedback loop converted high level thinking into a huge scary monster of high-level disasters that will seemingly result if you aren't as clever as can be.
This also explains the cleverness in the face of everything else. Caught? Email back and be clever. Etc. Don't ever stop being clever, caught or no. It is your only (seeming) chance.
But did you also catch the high level thinking student who was feeling stuck and potentially screwed, in their honesty? They realize the system might just as easily punish them. They are also lucky the professor had a considerate perspective rather than a blanket-projection attitude that many have. They are also lucky they weren't randomly selected by the cleverness cabal...
(Also notice that really good professors make for reliable bridges between high and low level perspectives, with expectations of the former but also multi-dimensional empathy for those living the low-level system. This professor is indeed a very clever person on their own. So for them this is situation is probably less likely to result in massive disillusionment as it would for pure high-level folks.)
I went through an unconventional learning path - I didn't think I was ready for post-secondary straight out of highschool, so I worked first. After I felt I was ready, I went. Everyone told me I was crazy and I needed to go straight to post secondary, but as a result I was able to figure out what I wanted to do, and gain some discipline and perspective while I was at it. I did well in post-secondary school, far better than I ever could have dreamed of in highschool.
At College I couldn't believe the number of people straight out of highschool who slacked off and wasted their parents' money. I was involved in a student drive and I got to see it even more firsthand. Asking students about why they were interested - "my parents want me to go". "I don't know". Those were the most common answers.
People mature at different rates, and expecting everyone to be ready for College right as they enter adulthood is madness. Some people need some life experience, some people will never gain those skills and should take alternate life paths. To be clear, taking an alternate life path can be risky, and the one I took is not the one for everyone. I think we just need to take a critical look at what we're asking of late teenagers and young adults.
how does this follow from not cheating. if you care about not wasting money, you would do everything, including even cheating, to pass.
they don't even know what they really want to do with their lives
or maybe they do know and just see 4 years of college as a waste of time to get there.
If you care about not wasting money, why risk everything you've spent and not even gain the education that you've purchased while you're at it?
>or maybe they do know and just see 4 years of college as a waste of time to get there.
If they truly already have the skills they need to skip to their life of choice - why cheat? If they don't have this capability, their feeling that they should just be able to skip over education is wrong.
To someone who values college as almost exclusively for its educational value, maybe that doesn't matter. But to many, especially HR, the degree is valuable for its signaling capability and watering that down has real and lasting consequences.
The ability to use critical thinking does not come from a college education.
Were it possible; employers might screen candidates on the results of a test of critical thinking, as opposed to a degree. However, this has been illegal since Griggs vs. Duke.
I still don't appreciate the value of a good education. You could have replaced mine with pre-recorded Stanford lectures, set coursework, work placements, and Saturday morning coffee with a senior engineer to go over the week with our laptops out. It would have been 10% of the cost or less and it would have taught me more.
Turns out 90% of the shit I learned in college was a waste and GPA matters quite a bit.
There are still jobs that's ask my GPA 10 years in. And your first job determines your second one, and I imagine I lost out on somewhere between 70-250k in compensation at least from having a bad GPA.
I still want the main takeaway to be that we shouldn't necessarily always be pushing teenagers straight into College, and that something clearly needs to change.
what. the. hell.
I hate that mindset with passion.
Folks, just skew the odds.
Basically that there's some "chain" of dependencies, impossible to overcome when it comes to career
like previously quoted statement for me sounds like
good gpa -> good first job -> fast path to high tc jobs
mediocre gpa -> mediocre job -> a lot of other not fancy jobs -> high tc job after a lot of years
What I'm saying is that "And your first job determines your second one" is not true (except edge cases like govt jobs).
You can start your career at the most unknown company in country and still manage to jump to the top companies
>or what "skew the odds" means in this context?
Just because the odds are not favoring you, it's still doable
Time to build up a competitive resume so you get an interview despite a lower GPA, and time to study so that when you do get the interview you leave a better impression to make up for the poor GPA.
I don't even remember my GPA because I've seen it maybe twice - once when I received diploma and second time when I've been going thru my documents and just wanted to check out of curiosity
It's so flawed metrics that I'd never even consider it as reasonable when interviewing people
Also had several jobs I wanted that required a certain GPA even 5-10 years into my career.
For some visa application the criteria was to have graduated from college, and a printed paper saying “this student graduated in 20xx” was enough. No job cared to ask what school it was, how it’s ranked or what grades, as it was out of their social ranking and they wouldn’t be able to pin it in the hierarchy. It was a good school and I enjoyed the curriculum, but really nobody cares.
I think that’s the central point.
- It’s not _their_ money, it’s their parents’ either “hard earned” money, but they’re too inexperienced to understand its meaning, or “not so hard earned” money and they’re just going through it like their parents do.
- the goal is also money on the other end of the pipe. The statistics that get repeated is how much more you earn with a college degree vs without one. There’s no catchy clickbait title about how _learning more_ makes your life better. It only makes sense for them to go for the fastest route to having a degree, if possession is the only thing that has been pitched to them.
For an observer POV, the decades of engineering that led to that Ferrari never really take the spotlight. Also I'd argue people will pursue the Ferrari whatever it costs when they could really work that road race with a red painted Subaru. Here again the branding is taking the front row.
It also showed in that Enzo didn't give much of a crap about interior quality or amenities. He had to be forced into adding A/C. All he cared about was the performance of the cars. He also was (in)famous for refusing to sell Ferraris to people he thought were not appropriate. Ferrari will never sell one to Justin Bieber again :-)
If we want to students to behave this way, we're going to have to change how professors behave too. Mentorship and teaching are two different things, and what you're describing sounds more like the relation one seeks in a mentor, not a teacher.
I'm currently in undergrad for electrical engineering, and I do not give a single fuck about the classes I'm in. I have no passion for electrical engineering - I don't wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB. I do it because it's a good job and I want money, and I know that I need to get a good GPA to get a good job. I don't really care about how I got that GPA or if I learned anything from college, I just want money.
I pay a fuckton of money of classes that I'm forced to take on subjects that I learned in the freshman year of my highschool that I really do not care about (and aren't related to my major) and yet I'm supposed to feel incredibly enthralled showing up to class everyday and doing the assignments? No, I'm just going to cheat to save time and effort. I don't care about the subject at all, I just care about the GPA that I get at the end of the semester.
And employers check your GPA now. I often hear (usually from older people who have been in the industry before computerized background checks) that you can just lie on your resume and bullshit your way in, but that doesn't fly anymore as an entry level. They just type in your credentials into a database and have your info, and universities are part of that database. It's true that after your first job no one looks at your GPA, but how are you going to get that first job if your GPA isn't actually good to begin with?
Yup...this is not the 80s or the 90s. Employers got burned enough times, and now check that shit closely..lot's of screening.
I'm currently in undergrad for electrical engineering, and I do not give a single fuck about the classes I'm in. I have no passion for electrical engineering - I don't wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB. I do it because it's a good job and I want money, and I know that I need to get a good GPA to get a good job. I don't really care about how I got that GPA or if I learned anything from college, I just want money.
Agree..ppl just want that certificate which acts as a ticket to the middle class lifestyle. they don't care about knowledge for its own sake. Those who care more go on to get a masters or doctorate.
I am sad for you. There's nothing wrong with wanting to make money. But there are endless ways to make money, pick something you actually like.
I've counseled many kids: Draw two circles, one around what you like, the other around what makes money. Do the things in the intersection.
Except I never thought about money until I graduated. "Holy hell!" I realized. "They want to pay me a ton of money for this? I'd do it for free!"
Fortunately I was smart enough not to say that last part out loud.
Can you imagine flying a P-51? I splurged and bought a 30 minute ride in the back seat. Sigh. Holy Crap! Pure heaven! I was smiling for the next week.
*Or rather I thought at the time they were nasty. Later I learned about nonlinear differential equations, where Laplace transforms don't help.
Happy to see that other's found this too :) This was my experience with CS—I always loved it and I am, to this day, still surprised that they pay me so much because I used to do this exact same stuff at home for fun. I feel like I got exceptionally lucky that my passion just so happens to be something exceptionally profitable because I have no idea what I'd do otherwise.
Why are you solely responsible for this?
I think people aren't baffled by you choosing a high-paying career, but by you not having anything that's both high-paying and interesting. Why electrical engineering and not CS or nuclear or something? Is there nothing at all that both interests you and pays well?
And I know it's a sentiment that isn't unique to me, since a lot of my friends from similar backgrounds share this feeling. You choose the major that you can tolerate and also pays well.
I was replying to a college student. Someone going to college does have the option of which major.
I am also referring to people in America. I understand that Americans have a lot more opportunities than people in other countries.
And the worst part is that you're doing this to yourself. You won't have anyone else to blame for it.
I totally understand the pressure, and the idea that these choices are a means to an end. And this isn't meant to sound condescending so please don't take it that way, but please PLEASE do not take this attitude into industry. Especially into a safety-critical industry. Believe it or not, it's more prevalent than you may think and humans are always good at rationalizing taking the easy way out.
I know the knee-jerk reaction will be "yeah, I won't do it when it matters" but these types of choices tend to become habits, and as the saying goes, habits become one's character and character becomes one's fate.
For context, these were a safety-critical systems. A lot of times when something went wrong on a research effort, people can cover their tracks by calling it an "anomaly" and avoid further digging to press forward. But a lot of the "anomalies" can be traced back to avoiding requirements or equivalently lying about test outcomes, most of the time due to schedule pressure or just a simple lack of expertise. And because many safety issues are low probability events, people can get lulled into complacency where this behavior becomes normal since it's still rare for something bad to happen.
Another example further down in the discussion was VW's cheating of emission tests by changing their vehicles operation when it was connected to a test stand.
I see this a lot in computer science / SWE too. I realize you don't have the life experience to answer these questions well so maybe they're just rhetorical: do you think you will be successful when you get a job laying out PCBs and designing schematics? What will your competence level be given that you cheated your way through the relevant schooling? How long until you burn out?
Part of the reason colleges force you to take a lot of courses irrelevant to your major is so the students like you have a slightly higher chance of finding something they ARE passionate about.
I say that having also been the cheater who hated the material and got the grade. Why did I do that? Parents wanted me in a "good career," same as everyone else. They saw a script and they kept pushing in that direction. So I convinced myself into it, at least for a while. It was phony baloney given that in my actual career the majority of my money has been made by crypto speculation and miscellaneous random opportunities, not anything that ever needed a credential. Fortunately I pushed myself onto a path that actually worked for me along the way and graduated right when I was actually starting to appreciate the coursework. Some people make it all the way through medical or law school and then immediately quit the field.
My advice is this, basically - don't try to win at your career, just try to survive; winning is a temporary thing that you can get by pushing harder for a short period, but surviving is a matter of doing everything at a viable level, forever. If you really think this is the best shot you have under the circumstances to achieve a decent life for everyone concerned, then sure, by all means. But aim to exit towards something that actually fits you as soon as possible, even if it's a "simple" move like going from IC into management.
I wonder what you think will happen after you get that job?
(Either go in a different direction now, or else you might as well start learning how to keep your head above water in your EE career now.)
edit: I should add: I posted the comment you’re replying to and in regard to this:
> …are people who have never had the experience of being a "bad student"
Nah… I’ve been a bad student — just based on averages, likely worse than you. My only “special” skill is that after multiple crushing failures I realized, “hey.. maybe I should think more than zero steps ahead” when considering my many pressing life problems. In retrospect, I’ve found it’s like a superpower because it seems like almost no one bothers to do it, so you can get ahead in almost any circumstance.
During college, I focused on learning a ton from the few courses that I found interesting (and where I learned new material), and I passed the rest with a B- average. As a result, I got to work with several professors on research and as a TA, and that totally overshadowed my low-3's GPA in the job market. "Research courses" with no requirements other than work I found interesting let me pad my GPA. I graduated in the bottom 30% of the class having done two years of research and taught a course (as the instructor, not a TA). I left for a position with the highest salary of anyone in my class, and I had a company literally begging for me to interview after I turned them down for asking about my GPA.
These are opportunities which you cannot get if you do not engage honestly with the material you are learning. Professors usually know when you are cheating, and professors talk - they may know that you are a cheater the moment you step foot in their classroom. They don't want to report it, though, because it's a lot of work to gather evidence and go through the process.
Some professors of required courses are happy to help you if you are honestly not very engaged with the material in their course. Some have egos that are too big for that, but a lot of them don't. They understand that the course is required, so you're going to get a B or a C if you don't cheat and you want to focus on other things. All they want is for you to learn something from them, and you will still learn a thing or two by doing half their homework honestly.
The back door in the job market is a lot bigger than the front door - a lot of people get jobs from referrals rather than the traditional application process, and most of the really great jobs are found that way. Cheating at school almost completely shuts the back door in the entry level job market, since your professors and fellow students will know you are doing it. Don't underestimate what you're giving up.
How on earth would an electrical engineering degree help you get a good job?
I'm not sure how many young people made the choice to study what they study in college by themselves. But if you did, ask yourself if you are willing to make the sacrifice.
I bet if someone compared cheaters to students who were working and their wages went into tuition, there'd not be a strong correlation.
Nobody ever asked my GPA after I graduated. My diploma is somewhere in the basement, I've never displayed it and nobody ever asked about it. I attended graduation only to please my parents, who came out for the occasion. I didn't want to buy the class ring, so my dad gave it to me as a gift.
I didn't care about the diploma. I only cared about the education. If I only wanted a diploma, I'd have gone to a much easier university.
In an American university, I've seen people being quite motivated to cheat because their financial aid was depending on a GPA. Nobody might have cared about the GPA later, but when you have thousands of dollars a year on the line, and your first midterm didn't look good...
So sure, most people in an American university, in most circumstances, shouldn't even be considering cheating as an option. But systems and circumstances can be different for others. The fact that this students were using Whatsapp already tells you that maybe their circumstances were different, and they really might be in circumstances where the incentives to cheat are strong.
> if you’re cool with cheating, after school is over, just lie when anyone asks your gpa
Tons of employers require transcripts, especially for new grads.
Students aren't always passionate about the required subjects for their degree , potentially because these subjects won't always have a direct correlation in meeting job requirements or improving job performance, and even the students who are passionate may never get the education they desire (picture a lousy lecturer on tenure who's forced to give lectures as part of the job).
Now put yourself in the shoes of a student who comes from a long history of generational poverty who was able to scrape by enough money to save up for a degree so that they can get a 6 figure job at Morgan Stanley (or the like) as a business analyst. The job will probably only require them to put some numbers into spreadsheets and make graphs. The qualifications to do that will require them to get a degree made more expensive through gen-ed requirements and a whole lot of classes they don't need.
Now in that situation would you forfeit your goal for the threat of passing a difficult, irrelevant science class requirement when a better alternative exists that will also free up time to spend more on the classes that will actually be relevant to the job? Even if you wouldn't, it shouldn't be hard to imagine why someone would.
First, to be clear. DO NOT CHEAT.
Ok. Grades DO matter. When I graduated, there were several companies that wouldn't interview me because I didn't have the grades. I had a 3.2 ish. That meant I had to get a job slightly outside of my degree - which impacted my entire career (12 years amd counting).
Also, you can't lie about your grades - they will ask for your transcripts. The job I got out of college asked for mine after 6 months
This seems so strange to me. I have a BA in Philosophy, but professionally I work in software development.
I got my first job 15 years ago by just showing them the code I wrote for my side project, since I didn't have a degree in the field of any professional experience. Every job since then has been because I was recruited by previous co-workers.
My college degree was never an issue, and certainly not my grades. Many of my coworkers are surprised when I tell them I have no degree, but it is always just a "huh" and then move on.
I am now a director and have hired a lot of people, and unless they have zero professional experience, I pretty much never look at their degree when I am evaluating candidates. I have worked at very large companies, and have never had an issue trying to hire people without a degree.
I am sure there are places where it would matter, but I just can't imagine asking for proof of a degree, let alone grades.
It took me a long time to give up on my dream of being an EE - but I like what I do now. Also, to your point, I ignore college credentials and I don't look at GPA.
Starting 15 years ago was different than starting now.
http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
There's also an article around here somewhere on signaling theory that I don't have on hand.
As always, when an arbitrary metric becomes a goal, it will be gamed. Especially with the path dependency nowadays where your first job sets the course of your early career. Just as your academics/leadership in high school can make or break whether you get into the prestigious universities, which will quite literally pay dividends ten or twenty years down the line.
Sometimes, the most driven students are the ones cheating because the stakes are too high. If an employer has two viable candidates, one from MIT and one from a state school, they’ll go with the MIT grad as a heuristic. Or similarly if FAANG is inundated with resumes for entry-level jobs, they’ll use school/GPA as an easy first-pass filter.
I don’t see cheating changing until the incentives are minimized. Lower GPA cutoffs + casting a wider net for the entry-level roles and setting a fair skills-based bar.
Three months after starting the job, I got an email from HR asking all new grad hires to send in their transcripts which I conveniently "forgot" to do. Never heard from them ever again after ignoring that first email.
My feeling here is that these are just vanity metrics that companies like to parade around to signal how "prestigious" their employees & hiring practices are.
They're also probably not paying for it out of pocket - either they've taken out loans that they haven't really considered the long term impact of, or their parents are covering some/all of it.
I've been a TA, and I've talked to some students who cheated or considered cheating.
The answer is simple: there is no premeditated reasoning behind cheating. Students don't actively make a decision that "I'm just gonna apply to a university and cheat". That's not what happens in their minds.
They do think they can get through uni on their own when they first started. Then, they make bad decisions, usually small ones, like skipping a class, or something, but it grows into a habit, even an addiction. Before they know it, half of the course is over, and they learned nothing. When the exam comes, it is too late. There is no time to decide to "get everything out of it anymore". So, they cheat, instead of swallowing the bad grade (which they should).
In some cases you're paying for second rate material, so this holds little sway. Why worry about squandering the learning opportunity when the best learning resource is free on the internet. I'll try to save time in the class and reapply that time to better learning resources (my morals won't let me do this by cheating, but I understand why some do).
My current classes are light on technical merit and heavy on APA style citation requirements. This during a time where many very powerful people can't reliably compose a coherent Tweet (2 sentences max). The bottom half of educational institutions aren't providing real learning opportunity. I will get my piece of paper though.
The weight between these fluctuates over time, and increasingly there are better & cheaper resources for (1) outside the traditional classroom setting.
My undergrad college tuition was 100% free via a state scholarship program.
Scholarship funding was dependent on maintaining a certain GPA, so I could see why some might be tempted to cheat. Most of my friends lost their scholarships due to GPA.
(For the record, I never cheated in college. I withdrew twice, for a variety of reasons, and never went back.)
The Case Against Education makes a convincing case about how worthless most of higher ed really is.
Diplomas have tremendous value. The education however…
Bryan Caplan's book concerns precisely this subject: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-educatio...
And then, culturally, we don't tell you that you need actual skills to get an actual job out of school. We do tell you that you need a degree. And even if you believe a degree is necessary but not sufficient, it may not be at all clear to you that the skills you need are the same as what you're learning in school.
I never cheated, probably because my strongest skill is learning raw material on my. But I get the perspective. You're paying for a degree and would like to actually receive what you're paying for.
Graduate programs are also GPA-gated. So best get those grades up if you want your license to science (i.e., a Ph.D.).
The other theory is that school is an arbitrary experience designed to separate out high skilled from low skilled workers into a separating equilibrium (or, replace skilled with wealthy and you're probably closer to the truth).
[1] If a short term solution keeps working, is it really short term?
If you cheat your way through life, what do you do when you’re 40 and no longer cute & full of potential? You don’t trust anybody and nobody trusts you.
Now for sure it could potentially be that the students just don't have enough foresight, being younger and having less experience with life on this planet with other human beings. But again, what if we're not so quick to blame them?
The best thing I can come up with using this line of thinking is that a lot of the stuff that students are forced to study just isn't essential...i.e. it's not actually mandatory for life. Now life is very diverse and there's very little that is actually mandatory. But there are still a lot of things that are pretty important. What if the structure of our education system was more customizable, so students would have a clearer ability to choose their own adventure? Or as another commenter here alluded to, what if our system was more customizable about when you choose to get particular bits of education?
Well its about pretending to be something you are not, people are all about this.
Cheating is really a habit and to a certain extent a lifestyle and not an event. Cheating continues all life, couldn't get promoted? people hop jobs, land a promotion/hike and then pretend they made progress. People wear expensive clothing to hide fat bellies, spend on vacations to take photographs to send out a message to their friends and family they are rich. People pretend to be a lot of things they are not- pretend to be healthy, wealthy, prosperous. If they actually cant be something they'd rather pretend to be.
Cheating exists as a natural consequence of people pretending to be something they are not, its one of the most primal sort of lies a person says to themselves. This is so easy to do, and so easy to convince yourself to be like this- you do this for a while, it will come to you naturally.
>>You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place?
Same thing with buying expensive gym memberships just to go post selfies, or buying books and not reading them.
>>Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses.
Precisely, pretty one no one cares about anything at all so you might as well make genuine progress by putting in the work. In these days when no one remembers their parent's date of birth, who bothers themselves remembering anything about the other person at all.
In short stop lying, more importantly stop lying to yourself. Make genuine progress.
Do not get high on the very dope you are selling.
At least for certain STEM classes, I think this should be the norm.
In retrospect, I think the format is still the best but I would remove the narrow time limit. Give the students a whole day to try; and so not artificially filter out those with anxiety.
The second was after the first big project, a project that's usually a few thousand lines of code; relatively large by the standards of a student. This exam was a bug fixing exam: the TA's randomly insert three bugs into your project's source, and you have to find and fix them within a few hours. Not terribly challenging if you really did the project by yourself, but if you cheated I imagine you'd have a hell of a time.
It turned out, of course, that structural similarities are so obvious. My worst case had 23 students accused of submitting the same program for a lower-level course. I held an event where all (or most) of them attended. Somehow they tried to explain how their use of not-just-similar-but-exactly-the-same variable names, structure and comments in a C or C++ (it's been a while) program. I mean, exactly the same. One spent an hour berating me on the phone (well before I figured out that I could just politely end the conversation and hang up) explaining that it was his work. It was not.
I was disappointed over and over seeing how blatantly and cavalierly my fellow students would break the rules. It was unpleasant for everyone involved, despite a reasonably lenient punishment process - students, faculty and us alike. I didn't like lording over my fellow students, but felt it was important to hold a line of sorts. I wish very much that there was no need for this function but time and again students turned in work that was not theirs. I strongly suspected at the time that most professors only turned in the most blatant open-and-shut cases. It was particularly sad considering how very much money each class cost.
The institution was far from elite; they used to send staff on recruitment drivs in faraway places, because (a) overseas students get to come th this country when otherwise they wouldn't get a visa; and (b) they pay more. The result was that many of the students were rich, and assumed they didn't have to work. Many didn't have basic qualifications for doing the work. So they cheated extensively (there was no web and no WhatsApp; they just copied one-another's coursework submissions).
I asked my experienced colleagues what to do. They said that I could report the cheating to the school; but I would then be tied up in exam boards all summer, for which I wouldn't be paid. Also I could expect to have to fight charges of racism. Alternatively I could explain to them the difference between helping one-another out (good) and plagiarism (bad). Guess which choice I took!
Basically, the institution didn't care about plagiarism; they didn't care about the unfairness to honest students; and I don't think they cared whether the students learned anything. By the next year, I didn't care either. I just delivered the material, and went home.
The bottom-of-the-barrel diploma mills don’t give a damn, as long as they don’t face the threat of losing official status.
Though I'm not confident that A-list schools are any better at curbing the cheating than an average university.
Just looking at some of the replies in this thread from people who were students and TAs at A-list schools, and from other conversations I've seen about this, they describe that cheating is rampant at prestigious schools too.
When we look at the "best" schools really the best since they teach so well? Or maybe they are the best, since they got a brand early and simply collect the best candidates? Those best candidates would be the best students/more successful in later life even if they went to a mediocre university?
Obviously the better universities probably are better at teaching, but I still wonder how much depends on the quality of students that they accept. Also in the absolute top universities, lots of students come from "old" wealth - and are destined to inherit money and positions from their parents.
Obviously it doesnt make sense to send a kid to a bad university, because it is probably bad (bad teachers, bad students), but I wonder if those "good" universities are really that good due to own actions.
I wasn't taught very much at university. There were a few lectures a week, and a weekly tutorial.
I think there's a difference between the UK and US undergraduate experience: I suspect that US students expect something like school, but better. So you get showbiz professors with charisma. In the UK, at least in research universities, teaching undergraduates is a boring side-job, unless they are showing potential as postgrad students (who can be put to work helping the professor's research). The purpose of a batchelor's degree, then, is to train you to study on your own, which is a prerequisite for postgrad study.
I happen to think that's a good thing; I don't think universities should be providing vocational training. That should be done by another kind of institution. A good batchelor's degree - any good batchelor's degree - is then evidence that you can work and learn under your own steam.
I've never been to university in the USA; I'm guessing, based on how US and UK students describe their experiences, and on the differing styles of US and UK professors on Youtube, TV etc.
An interesting consequence of the honor system is since the students liked it, they hated cheaters. Any student who was cheating was well advised to not tell anyone about it. Wanna be ostracized? Brag about cheating.
I remember one Physics midterm which most of the class failed. Not what you'd expect if there was significant cheating.
What I wish existed was an independent board exam that students had to take for employment. Many professions have this, from medical professionals, accountants, engineers, and the trades. My thought is this would disincentivize cheating and encourage deep learning at the university level, while offloading the cost of cheat detection and enforcement to a board, whose job is to solely evaluate if someone is capable of entering the workforce. A separation of concerns.
Another reason for board exams: when I was working, I was asked to do a bunch of flimsy engineering to satisfy management. It would be nice if I could respond "If I do this, I could lose my license, so no." Just like if someone asked a carpenter to build a house not up to code, or a dentist told the hygienist to do shoddy work to improve throughput.
If anyone knows anything about this, I'd love to chat, because its something I've been thinking about for a long time and I hope there's a good reason why it doesn't exist.
So my axiom takes me to "we can test if you can read or write, but beyond that, there are an infinite ways to write about star crossed lovers, so just greping for Romeo and Juliet is it going to work"
Then again there must be incentive to cheat at bar exams.
People would still cheat on the hypothetical licensing exam.
Licensing also would add friction in changing jobs, immigration policies, thereby hampering general mobility of workers. More paperwork and bureaucracy would develop.
A company’s interview process is currently where someone’s declared skills are put to the test, which although imperfect, provides the filtering mechanism you’re looking for.
Though, anyone know what “hes so Canadian” means? I assume it means he is Canadian, hence why he seems to be taking this so calmly and not flipping out, but I’m not sure.
Edit: I’m now reading the comments. The amount of people trying to justify lying and cheating is truly disheartening.
Edit: didn’t see the other reply, but it’s pretty much the same idea
Prestigious University A: More classes pr. semester, quizzes/homework every weekend. Cheating was rampant - and well known. It was aptly called "cooking", as in "cooking the books".
The classes usually had established lecturers, who'd done the same classes for YEARS, and often re-using the problem sets over and over again. Students would compile a compendium of these problem sets + answers, and hand them down to the next class.
I think the cheating was simply a result of the heavy workload. Students would have 4 problem sets to solve every weekend, and then lab work, project work, and what not. These were smart kids to begin with, as getting admitted to the Uni. was a feat in itself - but there's just so much time.
Regular University B: This Uni. followed a much more "traditional" sciences program. You'd get the syllabus on first or second lecture, the due dates to 1-3 assignments, and date for final exam. Sometimes it was only a home-exam + final exam. Also fewer, but more in-depth classes.
The assignments were much more involved, and each would probably take 2-4 weeks to finish. But cheating was much less common.
Should the student report the cheating to the professor? Assuming there was a curve in the class, how do you deal with the "but everyone else is doing it" argument with regard to benefiting from the cheating (even passively, by seeing the questions/answers posted)?
I have wondered about similar issues involving ADHD meds, which seem widespread as well.
Lots (probably most) of people are in college for the credentials. Most of the rest are there because they feel they are supposed to be there. They do the work required for the credentials. Most of what is taught in college has little value or applicability and is quickly forgotten. Cheating is often rational.
Bryan Caplan once gave an example I found memorable and persuasive. For most university courses, even at elite colleges, you could just show up and attend the course without enrolling. Not like "auditing" the course as a student, but just as someone who lives nearby, you could walk into the class and sit and listen. Nobody is checking IDs, nobody would notice, and, if they did, the professor would, more than likely, be willing to let you sit in on the course provided you asked nicely and didn't cause problems.
Why aren't college courses overloaded with freeloaders? Cause what they actually teach isn't that valuable.
If you were to sit somewhere and hand out free bottles of Gatorade you would quickly run out of Gatorade. Many people would take you up on that. Conversely, colleges effectively hand out free lectures (since they don't control who attends) and approximately nobody takes them up on that. This makes me think that the average value of a college lecture is less than a bottle of Gatorade.
With this perspective on the value of college the issue of cheating is reframed as a question "Why would people skip the boring useless work and more easily obtain the valuable credential they are seeking?"
On the other hand, attending a semester’s worth of lectures and engaging with assignments takes a lot of time and effort.
Finally, you can just change the thought experiment a bit. If you offered to pay someone twenty dollars to attend a random college lecture, would they? Probably some people would. And that fixes the upper bound of the value of the average lecture at less than twenty dollars, since, if it was that high, many people would be freeloading.
This has never been true at any college I have attended. You absolutely got booted if you were not on the class roster after the enrollment period was done.
At California community colleges, it seemed it's also a matter of insurance liability. They were remarkably aggressive about enforcement.
That describes practically every college class I have ever taken--even at community colleges.
Because freeloaders want quick wins. A lecture is a lot of time consumed, without an immediate financial gain, where they could be collecting multiple Gatorades instead.
Ie Physical, immediate gains are greatly preferred by freeloaders. They don’t see the long game.
Ha, as a prof, this is a fun thought experiment. But notice your same argument would apply to textbooks at the library.
Why aren't all the library textbooks checked out all the time with huge waiting lists? Because their content isn't valuable?
Only a small part of university learning involves reading a textbook (or watching a lecture), there is also the scaffolding of assignments, assessment, feedback, guidance, and externally enforced deadlines and requirements. Instead of free gatorade, a lecture is more like free tomato seeds. They're valuable but people won't take them because they aren't willing to plant and water them over the course of months.
> Most of what is taught in college has little value or applicability and is quickly forgotten.
I think this is generally wrong, and obviously both of us are entitled to our own opinion, but I'll point out that putting your brain through exercises and experiences that stretch it will permanently alter your brain, even if you forget many of the details that make up those experiences. For example if you put together 50 puzzles, you can forget the details of all of them but still be much better at puzzle-solving.
Bryan Caplan's book, The Case Against Education, discusses defenses of education along the lines you present here. For example, he goes over surveys of college students to see what information they retained after graduating, and finds they retained almost nothing.
Maybe learning and studying is good for your brain and will enhance your ability to learn and study. But, this is an argument to learn and study, not to attend or try hard in college where learning and studying are very much optional.
This post is a great example. 70% of the OP's students were in this one particular cheating group. How many were cheating in other ways? Why are the majority of the students cheating? After all, aren't they only cheating themselves? Are they are irrational? Or, maybe, they are there for the credential which is the vast majority of what you get from college.
Plagerizing an ethics violation apology letter...to a lecturer who is clearly on a mission. At that stage just fail them.
Clearly they have neither ethics nor intelligence going for them so that spot in higher education is best taken up by a more deserving member of society.
That said, I just don’t see the point in cheating. University isn’t that hard if you have some basic level of skill. You go to the classes, you read the stuff the assign you, do the assignments, and you should mostly be able to pass the course.
Cheating always seemed like a complete waste to me. I’d be paying a lot of money to learn nothing (aside from how to cheat better). If I’m going to be there anyway to get my degree, I might as well put in the work.
And then later you have these instances where it turns out that because you actually paid attention in school, you know more than people from top universities that (apparently) cheated their way to a degree.
Of course, they’re also 2 levels above you earning twice what you make. Because that’s the way these things work :/
do you have a link to this research? it sounds right but I'd love to see the source
Reporting someone for academic dishonesty is a deathblow to any kind of application to higher ed. This was an undergrad psych class I think? Anyone there trying to get into the PhD programs is in for a world of trouble now, that's a competitive place.
It's not that I think cheating is good, I just wonder if these students peers in this class/other schools who had better outcomes did things the right way, or maybe they just didn't have a professor who enjoys this so much that he will spend weeks writing R code to fully catch everything. That seems like an arbitrary way to have a dream end, I dunno.
He should have said on the WhatsApp group, right at the beginning, "I am your professor,and I monitor this gc. You can use the gc to discuss the class and ethically help each other, but if you engage in exam and quiz cheating on here I will see it, and I will fail you. If you open or join a new secret gc to circumvent this, I will find it and I will fail you. Do the work.".
If they cheated after that, immediate ban. Cut them from the course. Stop wasting everyone's time.
Instead he got off on spying on them for months, buffing his ego with how good he was at using tools to measure the cheating, had to actually change the course and the final because he was letting the level of cheating get out of hand.
He's like a boss who gives you zero verbal feedback all year, maybe only positive feedback, then sticks you with a bad annual review, listing behavior that would have been easily corrected had it been mentioned.
Yes everybody knows they are not supposed to cheat, but he let cheating become the way things worked "in practice" for his class, and then punished them after wasting a lot of their time and money.
Great write-up, more than fair teacher who wants only what's best for their students.
You've lumped too many people together in your use of "they".
In the author's own words:
> The semester from hell ended. Some students still failed. Some did some more plagiarism and failed. But, most of them got decent grades and engaged substantially with the course material. A small win for me and them.
Whatever the word count, the instructor seems motivated to discover plagiarism.
1. Tell students that the remote exam is open book. Everything is allowed EXCEPT for any communication between students. Moreover, there is a Zoom breakout room for discussing specific questions with ME.
2. Exam starts.
3. Students move to that breakout room to exchange solutions.
While you were in that room? Did you put a stop to that?
We must assume they don't care about learning, so if we want to cram some knowledge into them anyway, hit them the only place they apparently care about: their transcript. Either they'll shape up or be rightfully denied the (ever more scant) honor of a degree. The heroics of the author here cannot be scaled, and we shouldn't be asking anyone to go to that extent. Just fail the bastards. You're only recording what's already true.
Specifically, different systems of incentives and permissiveness will produce different behavior. I taught high school computer science for 4 years, and I can attest that cheating occurred in the classes I taught. I've also been enrolled part-time in Stanford's MS in CS, and have taken a number of the core undergraduate curriculum for CS majors.
I also went to a hypercompetitive US public high school with a number of brilliant classmates, many of whom also cheated.
My experiences have showed me that there is a wide spectrum of "cheating", ranging from students sharing things like, "I was at office hours and heard from the TA heard from the professor that topic X is going to be really emphasized on the exam, so you better study for it!" to outright blatant copying of other's code or answers.
What I've noticed as qualities of a learning environment that seems to increase the likelihood of cheating are:
1. The technological ease of which it is to cheat: it's easier to cheat on an asynchronous online exam than when you're taking it synchronously in a large classroom.
2. How "high stakes" the course is for students: for students at institutions like Stanford, where they be used to a certain level of academic success, failing a course isn't just a blow to their transcript -- it's a psychological blow to their identity as a "smart student." They may find it easier to cheat and maintain their self-image (and projected image to their family/friends) as a great student than to take the honest hit to their GPA, and have to give up their identity.
3. How "legitimate" the course feels: classes where the instructor is widely perceived as "unfair" or "incompetent" seem to have more cheating. Students feel disrespected ("How could she put X on the exam? We barely covered it!") or unvalued ("He doesn't even bother giving clear instructions on the homework assignments. Why should we respect his test?") may try to 'retaliate' by cheating.
4. How permissive the academic culture is around cheating: if there is widely perceived to be little-to-no consequences to cheating, or if cheating is seen as, "well everyone does it", then you will have a lot more cheating.
I'm sure the above is not an exhaustive list. My broader point is that in order to address the issues around cheating, we need to be more encompassing than simply punishing the cheaters. If the stakes are high enough, and the incentives strong enough, cheaters will still exist even if they are aware of the severity of the punishment.
I went to school pre-2000, so the Internet existed, but was not as prevalent as it is today. What struck me most in the article is how easy it is today to cheat today. Real-time group chats, easy sharing of screenshots and quizzes, the volume of easily-copied content off the Internet, and tools available 100% of the time simply put fraternity list of historical quizzes and copied texts in the library to shame. The ease of cheating today is one less barrier that people have to cross to compromise their morals.
I think if a goal of post-secondary education is to prepare their populations for professional success, then you're right, simply punishing cheaters does not achieve that goal. But our world today is full of examples where it's easy to take the less moral or ethical road and suffer little to no consequences. Hopefully, schools will not succumb to that too much.
That's not to say that it's justified or right. Of course they shouldn't even cheated, even though it was popular and easy. But it's a much more understandable mistake to make, when doing the wrong thing is so popular and easy. When 5% of a class cheats, that indicates a serious moral failing on those students' parts. But when 70% of a class cheats, it's harder to believe that they're all so morally bankrupt.
Maybe I'm too much of an optimist, but I'm a strong believer in giving people second chances and encouraging them to learn from their mistakes instead of immediately jumping to punishment.
Ed: not that "it was easy" is anywhere near an excuse. Not letting yourself be pulled into something you 100% know is wrong is one of the most basic forms of moral self-restraint. If you can't handle that in its most black-and-white form, to say nothing of the gray areas you'll encounter anywhere less sheltered than a college classroom, you can still take the consequences right in the face and no one should feel the slightest pity, much less make excuses.
Cheating, or academic integrity, or "over collaboration" is not a binary action that evil students take, and good student don't.
Instead, cheating is a culture, and institution. And looking at it, in this way, provides a much more helpful framework for solving it, than overmoralizing it, and simply calling cheaters bad.
The reality is, that how much students work together, or are allowed to work together, is a culture that is vastly different on a class by class basis. There are some classes, where the professors explicitly encourage collaboration among students, to the point where the profesor straight up expects that everyone is copying everyone else's homework, and that is OK and encouraged, officially.
And then there are other classes, where talking to anyone else, or asking a single question about homework, is automatically cheating.
And then there are further complications, where there is no official policy on collaboration, and everyone just guesses about what is allowed.
This vast difference between classes and collaboration culture, means that regular people, who would otherwise not cheat at all, will often do so, due to problems with the culture and expectation of the class.
And the way to solve this, is not to engage in extreme moralization, instead it is to set clear guidelines, and address problems as they come up, so things don't get out of control.
Or, in other words, if everyone is doing something, then other people will start to think that it isn't even against the rules and also do it themselves, and the blame is more on the culture and system, than it is on the individuals.
And as I said in my other reply, letting "culture" grow up is part of the problem that lack of punishment creates, and was never a true excuse at all. They knew.
And I am telling you that students directly copying answers from others can and is sometimes directly encouraged by the professors in a class.
As in yes, literally copying other's work, is something that the professors explicitly allow and encourage in some classes.
Even if you're claiming the students were genuinely unsure whether they were doing something wrong, that can only possibly hold before the first quiz when the prof told them outright he didn't approve (in fact, even during that lecture their messages showed they knew he wouldn't, but let's ignore that for the sake of argument). After that, when they still tried to cheat in the second quiz, and continuing even after that failure, they have not the faintest excuse.
It means you can't run giant survey classes and asynchronous, online courses.
It's sad to see cheating this rampant. When I was doing my physics undergraduate degree, we had little to no cheating. We worked together on homework (as expected by the professors) and tests I think everyone was scrupulously honest on. The one time someone asked for help, multiple people yelled at him. This was at University of Virginia, which has an honor code. There was a lot of cheating in the big survey classes, but students in the upper level classes in their majors took it fairly seriously.
https://www.teamblind.com/post/My-friends-who-cheated-in-int...
Leetcode just incentivizes people to play the Leetcode game. It does not signify skill or ability or anything of the sort. It at most filters for candidates that cheat or candidates that end up particularly lucky that day.
Is the system perfect? Obviously not. Are the rules of the game laid out in advance? Yes. Do you agree to them as a student? Yes. Is there a clear path to success on your own merits, through your own effort. Yes.
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.
I do agree that cheating on exams would be bad. Maybe my perspective comes from not really thinking graded homework is that great of an idea to begin with.
> 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 the teacher here but the system has continually failed students. It's become a stupid game that you pay a lot to play because you have to. When I was younger I used to very anti-cheating, but I realized with time that was a foolish principle to hold on to. The game is rigged and there is no shame it taking short cuts. The university is trying to exploit you the student so why would you not return the favor and seek to exploit the system whenever you can?
Consider the counter position: what would an incredibly passionate, engaged and hardworking student get from this situation? This experience for that type of student is scarcely better than just teaching yourself from a text book and free online lectures (in fact, all of the material for this class is free online)... only you don't get a degree doing that.
My only critique of the teacher here is not having a enough empathy for these students and spending far more energy trying to catch cheaters than address the fact that these students have gotten a raw deal. Ignore the cheaters and spend those extra hours chatting one-on-one with the students that actually give a shit (if there are any left).
Instead of focusing on why you think other people are more evil than you are, instead people should focus on ways to actually solve the problem, instead of satisfying their internal need for moralization.
In other words, groups (society and otherwise) have created standardized curriculums for a reason. You may not agree with their decision, but the reasonable response is to remove yourself from consideration, not to lie in order to get the outcome you want.
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
Increase the price, decrease the cost, and also the balance of power is against the student.
That looks rigged to me.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Yes the university system has its issues, especially through the COVID pandemic. But that does not justify this behavior.
> Ignore the cheaters and spend those extra hours chatting one-on-one with the students that actually give a shit
Actions have consequences. You can't just ignore them.
I would agree with your position if college was either extremely cheap or free. But as a money making endeavor it serves more as a roadblock to prosperity or in numerous other cases a potential pit of debt.
Supporting a "benign neglect" model of cheating is how you get a very expensive degree mill. The perception of others that your institution is a degree mill both degrades the value of those who already graduated with a degree from there and it devalues the research put out by the staff ("oh, look at this paper that came out of that sham university down the road").
Even if you find it demoralizing, the cheating behavior was to basically half-ass the entire course and not try at all. We already have an intellectually lay and pervasive culture of "just tell me the answer."
The best teachers I had in university were very tough and very strict. They taught me to study harder. They taught me how to learn difficult material. They taught me to understand things at a deep level. They would give 10 minute pop quizzes designed to fail you if you did not know the material (no time to even look up an answer or pass to a friend) ahead of time.
Fail the cheaters. It's for everyone's own good. No one grows up if you never make them.
Are you fucking kidding me? After the absurd lengths he went to to give them chance after chance after they kept cheating, lied to his face about it, possibly threatened each other with violence, and repeatedly plagiarized their apologies for plagiarizing? After all this, you have the gall to claim he doesn't have enough empathy? What does it take, in your view?
I agree, except that this teacher did have tons of empathy for the students. That's pretty clear from the lengths they went to individualize the repercussions, offer second chances, and so on.
I suspect this teacher has perhaps a bit of fun catching cheaters? I'm not sure. They've written code to detect plagiarism in the past. They use a quiz/exam structure that's ripe for cheating: multiple chances for quiz retakes, long windows for exams, and question re-use between quizzes and exams. They wrote code to archive the chat log daily, identify students, and determine instances of cheating. They gave second chances, creating a new syllabus, after which cheating still occurred. Then they wrote this article.
So I agree - the teacher spent a disproportionate amount of time on the cheaters, which is unfair to the honest students.
Why not use cheat-resistant course material? They were able to restructure the second midterm exam this way - one question at a time, no backtracking, randomized order, and no question re-use. I suppose this is also time sink to combat cheating, but it seems more efficient than spending additional time filing reports and writing chat analysis code and so on.
Or the California driver thinking of "if we're all speeding, they can't ticket all of us."
Also some interesting practical game theory lessons in here.
> The content can be things like my old exams that someone uploaded without my permission
But later...
> And, sometimes as a professor who has access to online plagiarism tools like turnitin or safe-assign, you just want better tools.
So students submitting "your" content (it was produced as part of employment, so it's almost certainly not actually his, and it was arguably licensed to students by the university) is bad, but submitting their content to a service that retains a copy and profits off it isn't?
Fair use covers the school's use of students work. Submission to such services might also be construed as fair use. It seems to have been litigated as such already:
https://www.eschoolnews.com/2008/04/17/judge-turnitin-com-do...
The school almost certainly does.
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf
Tests are explicitly mentioned in the list of works make for hire, but it's also within the scope of employment, so it's double counted.
> If a work is made for hire, the employer...is the initial owner of the copyright unless both parties involved have signed a written agreement to the contrary.
Another argument given was: even if you only have to *think* about using such a tool you are already in a situation where good scientific practices is no longer guaranteed. In other words: if you/the students would have followed all rules of good scientific practise right from the beginning, you would never need to use such a tool. But I guess if you are the developer of such a tool or work in that area of research, you probably see things differently...
Also; how many different ways are there to explain rules on scientific practices within 150 word? How much similarities would you expect from O(100) different students - even if they write independently? - I'm not sure if that is taken into account in such tools. On a different scale: when piping e.g. a typical PhD thesis though such a tool, the first introductory paragraphs will always have red flags (simply because that topic was already introduced 10000 times and everyone read more or less the same introductory textbooks). The important part - the main part of the thesis - of course should be unique (but if the supervisor/examist/committee is not able to "detect" this in their own, well...). Of course literally copy&paste an introduction is still not okay. But -as the blogger also said- this can easily detected by issuing a simple yawhoogle search in case the text already reads suspicious (e.g. if the style of writing varies a lot between paragraphs etc).
So yes, I'd agree that the use of such tools is relatively limited when it comes to "real" scientific works but in this particular case it was quite neat to see how easily you can use it to atomatise the collection of evidences if you have a large class of students...
Would you really want to work with a software developer who doesn't understand how functions, loops, etc work?
Apart from that one incident when I copped it, mostly I felt bad for my team leader who had to babysit the guy all day every day. After the incident above it was changed from "supervise experienced guy" to "babysit".
That company really struggled because they were using a niche language to solve a very niche problem. It was the right language for the problem, but it was very hard to find developers who had used it, let alone who were good at it to the point of being useful in their first year with us. So throwing out Captain Useless took a couple of years.
...you cheat yourself out of an education - the opportunity to learn from and join a community of true experts.
...you cheat the society in which you live that created and supported you then provided you an educational opportunity.
...it's a pretty big middle finger to every student who didn't get the spot you did.
Probably the solution is to avoid the gatekeeping role degrees have played. Perhaps even to recognize and harness the positive aspects of the collaborative and knowledge sharing behaviors that can also serve you and the society you live in.
> At my most mystified, I proceeded to release a class announcement warning students not to plagiarize the academic integrity assignment.
To cheat on the very assignment that is giving you a second chance is ... stupid and/or brazen and/or pitiful.
So, why warn the students again? This was their second chance, right?
I'm open to many reasonable definitions of justice, ethics, and fairness. However, at that point, given the context, reporting the offending students seems the most just thing to do.
I am curious though what the frame of reference is for someone who cheats on the assignment where they promise not to cheat.
Perhaps there are people who make it through life with a sense of learned helplessness or even possibly a cultural mandate - basically, something that represents a higher authority to that person than the Western standard of justice, ethics and fairness.
I'm fully in favor of true justice, shared ethics and fair and compassionate treatment - that's a conversation for another time.
If that's not reality for that person, then to have a teacher attempt to engage with them seems more likely to have an impact on their success in a Western society. I'd guess that failing them and possibly expelling them would not.
I'm curious what you think?
An excellent point.
It seems likely their notion of a promise is non-binding.
P.S. W.R.T. promises and ethics, Kant has an interesting point of view. For example: https://open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/the...
They pledged it
They’re chastising the students for not reporting it, but then, it seemed to take a while for the teacher to do it as well
One thing I've ended thinking is that University is just not good for learning in-depth (at least my field of computer engineering) I'm way better at that on my own, what it was good at tho is helping me building a map of knowledge of concepts I was not aware of, I'm thankful I discovered ML in a class which then became my passion and career.
So yeah, getting a good grade is more important than actually learning and let's be honest, cheating is a more energy efficient way of getting good grades.
Well, except for the fact that to cheat is to engage in an arms race with an agent who is incentivized to ruin your career if you are discovered cheating.
For someone with my personality type and abilities, the above adds a significant cognitive load that makes just plain studying a lot more energy efficient than cheating. I'm sure it's different for people with different personalities and abilities.
- Storing and retrieving information (memorization). A process that is exhausting for the human brain but a database does effortlessly.
- Heavy computation, such as solving a difficult equation for a variable. Again something that is taxing for the human brain. A machine cannot always do it effortlessly but it will help in most cases.
Whenever I've observed cheating it's been because students had to solve problems in a human-unfriendly way, and education (lessons, problem sets) was subpar.
Honestly the industry is so different to school that it sometimes makes me think if higher education -as we understand it today- makes sense for people who don't want to become researchers.
I had to write special programs to detect written cheats. The online cheating during the written exam was easy to detect, the offline not so. But having written this program helped a lot, and I told nobody the details.
In the end the cheaters were the minority. But if you allow it to spread, 90% will start cheating. The broken windows theory.
PS: And I still talk a lot to my professor colleagues, who are still teaching at university. They told me that COVID was a total cheating desaster. Everyone cheated, everyone. It was impossible to do proper exams at the end of the course. They are all extremely frustated.
My institution has almost no ability to enforce plagiarism rules. Many of my colleagues plagiarise. When I do catch students cheating I have to be sure. I just submit a grade, usually 0, and then it is someone else's job to follow up.
The new generation is particularly sensitive and expects...exceptions. They roll up with parents and lawyers and parents who are lawyers and swing their...suitcases around. We end up giving a second chance or a third.
Luckily, I have only had one major case of plagiarism, the rest have been bad but easily dealt with.
However, I think students having an obligation to report cheating to the university is ridiculous. Find the cheaters yourself, or give me a bonus to do it for you.
By cheating, you're voting for a society of scammers, and you think you deserve more than the honest student because you're willing to eat honor instead of preserving it and growing it for future generations.
Yes it is? Cheating is cheating. You can get caught cheating, but you're still cheating if you're aren't.
In real world you have to weigh in the risk of getting caught, but if no one can ever know (very very improbable) you didn’t cheat according to them. And make it even more absurd - after cheating you can cheat again by saying I didn’t cheat.
This is applicable to a lot of things like crime, faking it, copying it, you name it.
Cheating is a symptom of something worse. Viewing studies as a means to get a diploma, rather than a means to get an education. This is a deep issue, that stems from things like using the threat of failing a test to get people to engage.
The educational system presents itself as a bunch of hoops to jump through to get a successful life. Parents tend to see it the same way. Society often does aswell. This ruins a lot of the intrinsic value of education.
Universities used to be the place where the best brains of the country studied and advanced science itself afterwards. Nowadays, with university r&d budgets slashed and those that remain in r&d being forced to waste half their time chasing grants and another quarter in administrative bullcrap, it's a place to weed out people with adhd or otherwise disadvantaged so employers can pick up the "creme de la creme" without violating a ton of anti discrimination law or the risk of hiring a dud. It's obvious when large companies require a BSc for an accountant or other paper pushers of all things.
Students know this and optimize accordingly - as usual, when something becomes a KPI it becomes useless.
These are people who will eventually go into the workforce, into jobs that have certain expectations of individual knowlege and ability. You can't just coast forever on the people around you.
It's just that when you throw at them the 57th of the same exercise with some words swapped out, that desire is extinguished a little.
Humans do something amazing in response: they cooperate to reduce the damage done by the 58th such exercise.
Give them more interesting things to do and they will cooperate in more productive ways too!
----
I also disagree that you have to learn everything for yourself and stop relying on others. Granted, I only have a decade or so of full-time work behind me so far, but in all of it, I have been as productive as I have been thanks to the ability to rely on others.
I don't know how to pave roads, yet I rely on roads paved by others to even get into work. Well there, I don't know how to build refrigerators, but I trust it to keep my lunch safe. Even in performing my actual job, I'm not the sharpest at economics, so I often cross-check my reasoning with other people before going on to spend time on things.
I would be stuck in a cave looking for berries if I didn't rely on other people for skills I don't have, every second of the day.
Humans are built to survive by offloading work on each other.
Of course we rely on others for stuff. But you don’t take a math class to simply say “I’ll just skip the classes and have my neighbor take my tests. My goal is to learn as little as possible.” Why even take the class then?
In fact, the medical profession has practically adopted cheating as a formal practise: they call it grand rounds and it consists of sharing "answers to exam questions" (outcome of patient care) with their colleagues, so they don't have to go through the effort of discovering them on their own.
I suspect you aren't trying to argue about this situation, though.
I think you're asking about comparing the performance of the student who does know the material well, and the student who needs assistance with it. The answer is not to forbid assistance, it's to design tests where assistance becomes obvious.
This is laughably naive. Most of the cheaters I dealt with in my courses were masters students who had zero interest in learning. They were paying for the M.S. on their resume for job prospects or for visa reasons.
You’re right that some students will cheat on rote stuff because they just get bored. Where you’re wrong is thinking that’s the majority of the issue. Huge chunks of students are in college for entirely the wrong reasons.
Pretty sure stack overflow would be out of a use case if that was true.
The real answer is that in the real world people pay you to provide value. If what you are doing can be replaced by a google search, the value you are providing is nill, and you are probably making min wage. Real jobs are not contrived, and thus can't be cheated on in the same way. Sure you might have to look things up, but that's not the part they are paying you for (unlike in many exam settings)
I learnt to program using books (pascal, c, c++ etc) and that was slow. When I learned JavaScript every question was seconds from a clear answer. That's a MUCH faster way of doing things, and I for one am a fan.
Mind you that's all just syntax. Analytical thinking, data structures, program logic (ie, how to actually program) we're laid down in a CS degree 30 years ago. So it helps if the foundation is there.
This isn't either-or, unless you have a very specific job where you only do the same thing again and again until retirement. There are people who do specialize like that (e.g. developers of compilers or kernels), but most of us aren't them.
My experience says that the best programmers with the best skills are precisely the ones that the boss will take aside one day and say "Hey, Bob, we are about to tackle a really complicated problem and you are the best fit."
At which point, you are back to "relying on others", because your skills need updating and it will be the others you are going to learn from. It is a cycle, not a straightforward journey upwards on some kind of skill ladder.
I mean to need some skills, and the right birthright in general, but this is exactly what Capitalism is and the wealthy ruling classes seem to be doing excessively well at it. In the UK, some of the over-class have collectively banked £billions from government reserves -- under the guise of providing PPE -- for doing nothing more than knowing the right people and being prepared to cheat (ie be criminally corrupt).
Those involved, if they manage things well, could have a dynasty of extraordinarily wealthy offspring that going forward are likely to have the power to spread immeasurably more corruption.
Companies would fail if everyone worked in isolation.
Also, "cheating" may be viewed as "not re-inventing the wheel" (someone already made the proof for this theorem, just copy paste it from your smartphone), "not doing the same work twice" (your neigboor just solved the equation, why re-solve it ? ), and "using the fastest, most reliable solution" (your neigboor is better than you in Maths, just take his answers). This is similar to taking a library (ex : deep-equal) or framework (nextjs) or service (carrds, netlify) instead of doing it yourselves.
I agree that, the issue is mostly not the student but the school (and society):
1. Does the student really need to remember historical dates, or Maths equations, when nowadays he can just google them in 10sec ? (Aka : unnecessary use of memory)
2. Does the student really need to understand the notion by himselves ? For example, I don't know how to use quaternion myself, buy I know how to work with, in Unity. I also don't care about Pythagore theorem proof, I know it works, that's all I need (all Maths lover will condemn me).
The thing is that we believe that school focus on teaching. They don't. They are called schools, but behave a lot more like evaluation (grading) centers. And mostly evaluate (grade) memorization and servitude btw, not actual understanding.
To be clear, evaluation (grading) is what you in job interview and for pilot, to make sure he knows how to fly the plane.
Is evaluation a part of learning ? It is. But not the same type of evaluation.
"I am able to make a small game like ping pong from scratch ?" - evaluate yourselves, test your skills. If you have success, it means learning phase is completed.
When evaluation is part of learning: - You do it for yourselves, not for someone or something else (employer, school, teacher, parents, certification organism). That is called intresic motivation (vs extrinsic). - There may be or not be grading, but only you care about grading.
The employer doesn't care about how you grade to the tests he send to you, what he care about is that you've got the skills he need. And grading is just a means for that.
Everything the school does should be a means for making someone a good person for the society, a happy person, a person that can contribute to the society (a phrasing more large than employable).
What I have seen in my scolarity, is students and teacher focused on "passing exams", "getting good grades". But completly forgetting exams and grading "means to".
In a pure teaching environnement, grades and exams only purpose is to give a learning status indication to the student.
In school (in France national education), they also serve to give you right/priority on school entrances. And serve as social status indicator (the dumbs and the smarts).
Cheating in a pure learning environnement make no sense. If students cheat, it means your environnment contains more than just learning.
When you create extrinsic motivation (carrot and stick), it override intrinsic motivation. And you end up with student doing the homework ONLY if it is graded (carrot) or if not doing it is punishable (stick). And not because it give them a learning opportunity.
Schools (I am still referring to France national education) believe that humans dislike learning. This is false. Babies loves learning. School is teaching us that learning should be hard and painful.
If you do teaching, you don't need a carrot or a stick, because authentic learning is fun by itselves !
(I don't want to make this text longer, but this make me question if schools are just doing big mistakes, or if they have been designed in a way that favour something else than learning (eq : have there been malicious intention ?)).
I also agree with you that in an ideal world we would not need the gatekeeper role and tests would only help the students on how far along their learning journey they are. However, reality means we do need gatekeeping, we need to test that a student has sufficient knowledge to perform a certain task, because literally lives can depend on it, e.g. we would not let people drive on the roads without an exam or let a doctor operate someone without proven knowledge that they can do it.
Because of the gatekeeping requirements and the interests of students they will optimize for outcomes, that might mean they learn some subjects in depth, but it will also mean they learn some subjects with the bare minimum to pass (and that is fine).
Unfortunately the students who optimize for outcomes generally outweigh the students who want to learn (at least vocally). I think everyone who taught will be able to tell you that students are incredibly conservative towards changes, even if they improve their learning outcomes (give us recipe instructions, not try to get us to figure out things for ourselves), because it might mean more work.
And I agree that ideally (and practically) we should need much less carrot and stick, but saying we will never need them is quite unrealistic IMO.
You're at 'cheating = bad', which is the level of a 5 year old naive little boy.
Try upgrading that system instead of pointing fingers. You only have one life to live and all that.
> Agreeing to follow specific rules and then silently not following them is lying. Do you consider that to be okay too?
Students are hardly in a position where they can express their views freely. Do you consider laying out rules and punishing anyone who voices objections okay too?
Things are never just black and white.
Read any introduction to moral philosophy for an explanation of why that is.
It's not that I like or respect cheaters, it's that I'm just entirely unbothered by them. They're just students taking a high risk strategy and they'll sink or swim and I'm not angry about them or shedding any tears for them. Students who actually focus on trying to learn instead of trying to pass tests are screwed even if there wasn't a single cheater in the classroom. They won't go to the best schools or get the best jobs because they aren't cramming flash cards of likely test answers.
The group that focuses on pure learning, and engaging with the material, may not end up with the best marks, but they have a deep understanding, and delight in the subject that will serve them very well over their working career.
Equally though, not all courses are equally useful (to one person). I enjoyed oceanography, I went to class, did the work (mostly) and learned something. But I don't like boats (get seasick) so I've never "used" any of that knowledge. Ditto astronomy.
Comp Sci on the other hand consumed all my spare time. We gave ourselves extra tasks, read far beyond the textbook, and pushed the envelope. This would be our career and we were all in. Sometimes test scores suffered (I didn't actually study for tests) but I got a job (one I still have and love) and 30 years later I'm still applying those fundamentals I learned.
Maybe I don't have the highest paying job, but I'm where I was made to fit, and money can't tempt me away.
Those that cheat, well, you can fool some people some of the time, but it's a lot of work. And a career spans a long time.
Personally, I was an honors student until college, and I was often the one in my group of friends to figure out how to solve an exercise, yet I would often get average (or lower) results compared to some of my friends, because some of them were just great at drilling themselves until they could repeat every single style of solution quickly. I admit - that made me a little frustrated at the time, but 10 years later some of those folks that did really well in the exams are not doing as well in their careers because real life requires innovation and deep understanding, not just rapid application of past solutions.
I know many highly successful people didn’t go to university and this why is doesn’t matter.
This is like your ML model loading your test set into training without your consent.
So as a student, your best option is to actually prepare as many of the questions in the bank of old test so that you're ready for the exam.
So although you somehow cheat, you indeed review the course thoroughly by preparing the questions...
At least in my experience, my professors didn't make the old material available to other students, and neither did the fraternities/sororities.
No, educating people is about the governance structure de-individualising people making them all think its a similar way that both fosters uncritical love on the system as well as dependence.
Can you clarify what you meant by this? As it stands it sort of reads like you claiming actually smart people don't get into the best schools - which is absurd.
Other stuff once you understand it the exams are straightforward, if tedious. Antenna design was like that for me, I'd solve it geometrically in my head then work out which transforms and equations matched my solution. Other people just ground that stuff out along with all the rest. I hope no-one was twisted enough that ODE's made sense...
Scrum is a gc (group chat)
During my schooling years, I observed that people most driven to cheating were the ones who could not absorb enormous amounts of material needed to pass an exam. I never had problems with that, so I wasn't tempted to cheat, but I also noticed that a year later, I barely remembered anything from what I have learnt so painfully to pass.
This isn't a good preparation for a job in modern world, where if you do something, you always have Google (or StackOverflow etc.) at your hand. And people who have a good ability to put 2 and 2 together tend to be more successful at such jobs.
Scammer implies there is a victim. Who is the mark here? The college that charges huge tuition despite having a huge endowment? The professor who is being paid a salary to tech courses ppl are uninterested in? The employer for requiring degrees for jobs that don't need them? If cheating became so widespread that degrees stopped mattering, employers would have to find other ways.
Humans (and other primates) have an innate desire for fairness. Ethics helps guide human interactions. If you don’t think interpersonal ethics are important, it’s hard to have a functioning society.
If someone realizes that they have become an agent of a much larger system tasked with the grunt work of a harmful and illegitimate process like college education as a career credential, and if that person wants to avoid being evil, they need not lift a finger. It is easier not to do the paperwork than to do it!
That's so much "average college student" it hurts.
And all the quizzes were open book, etc.
> The best advice was a student telling everyone they could just go to the website for the textbook, then control-F in the textbook and search for words in the question to find the answers
That's cringe
Forget about the cheating, I'm angry they can't even cheat properly!
I mean, come on, imagine a scenario where class A has a test and class B has the same test a day after. Of course the people in class B will ask the people of class A what was in the test. Of course. That's why everyone is tested at the same time.
Having a similar system would work well there, if one can make exams (and midterms?) either physical or less susceptible to cheating.
One interesting approach I saw one course do to handle online exams is to have an unsupervised open book exam with some randomization in the problem statements and then inviting a random subset of students for an oral re-examination. Basically just a 10-20 minute conversation in which you should explain how you went about answering the questions. The idea seems to be to do that often enough and you will find the cheaters who will be unable to explain how they derived their answers. I wonder if that‘s an approach that could work generally and maybe even for homework assignments though the effort becomes quite considerable then.
One solution is make HW an evidence of effort, not knowledge. That's what happens in many courses in my uni: HW are some 10-30% of final grade and average is very high. Students share their solutions with each other and we are ok with it (well TAs are definitely aware) as soon as it is not copy-paste. It is so common that it is called "reference" solution.
Then there are courses that are hard to evaluate during the exam (e.g., programming ones). It seems that my uni solution is to give assignment so hard it will require understanding even when cheating (unless someone solves it for you of course). There are assignments taking north of 40 hours for top students (from scratch).
My point is that cheating is of course bad. But trying to catch cheaters beyond very obvious ones is just waste of time. Just design your course as cheat-proof as possible: ideally, the student who didn't learn won't pass given all possible external resources at home.
Assignments were designed to require iteration until you met the specifications of the problem. If you got the same or similar answer as anyone else, then it was almost certainly cheated.
Exams were open book, but quite difficult and long. You pretty much had to make sure you knew where to find all the information required in the course materials and were often similarly open ended as the assignments in the course were.
>It seems that my uni solution is to give assignment so hard it will require understanding even when cheating (unless someone solves it for you of course). There are assignments taking north of 40 hours for top students (from scratch).
Using this as a method to reduce cheating disturbs me. The goal shouldn't be that students have to make their homework a full time job, imagine is someone was taking 7 courses all with assignments like that.
To be fair it's the largest assignment of the semester for that course (compilation theory). The assignment structure per course is more or less fixed, so people know what awaits them in the semester and try not to take courses with large overlapping assignments. Then again, I think almost nobody does it from scratch (and it still takes people tons of time), but rather use "references".
And you know, studying is kinda your fulltime job when you're a student.
Also, I have a trauma from a calculus exam back in my day. Writen exam, physcial classroom, first year students. The professor hands out the exam, then proceeds to smile, go “i’m gonna get a coffee” and leave. Yay, let’s look things up! In about 3 minutes all of us realized there is nothing to look up. The questions were constructed in a fashion that you could only answer them if you understood the material. Also, any plagiarism would have been obvious. Besides, none of the questions seemed to have _a_ correct answer.
I cannot compose such exams. Therefore I keep an eye out for obvious things but generally assume my students either are motivated enough or are not worth the time to chase after them. I do my best to keep them interested, though. As to grading, I do oral exams over video calls. Takes about 8 min per person and this is where they can’t cheat. They either understand or it’s obvious they don’t.
But at the same time... My goodness. Plagerizing the plagerism essay? That's so brazen, I'm not sure I could give a student a second chance after that. Like... You've got to learn a hard lesson at some point. The sooner the better.
So there is a failure in at least the rich, western world:. We can't teach enough children to plan for a week or more. Anyone an idea how to deal with this?
While it may seem contradictory at first, the appearance of low ability amongst credentialed candidates also lowers the perceived value of the non-credentialed; fore if the credentialed are so lacking in ability, then those unable to achieve even such a low bar must be worse, yes?
Of course, this isn't always true. But for hiring managers dealing with an insurmountable mountain of candidates any generalized filtering metric, however shaky in its footing, is appealing.
Widespread cheating is part of why we have credential inflation.
Honestly, these kind of multiple choice tests just suck, and OP shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t take this stuff serious.
This works because it's closer to a real work environment, where you'll have a manager who's at least somewhat aware (or should be) of how much each person is accomplishing. The whole, "just let the group figure it out" process that is so common in schools doesn't work, because there's no one with manager-level awareness and authority.
Multiple choice quizzes are also useful to the student because they provide a snapshot of fact memorization and maybe some application but there is no point in counting the grades, IMO.
If we must evaluate students, then we should be treating evaluation as important as imparting knowledge and experience and spend the time on it that it deserves. Students deserve and need timely and thoughtful individual feedback in order to improve anyway. That means thoughtful projects and a lot of time spent grading. How you incentivize this amongst educators who often don’t even want to be teaching is beyond my pay grade.
(Additionally, a grade should reflect level of mastery at the end of the course regardless of progression but that’s not how grades are generally calculated.)
Instead of making class Dog extend class Animal for the whole semester, I found myself learning how to do polygon collision detection, optimize it with a rectangle intersection pre-test, modeling thrust and inertia, etc. I started adding level-ups like extra lives, missiles, procedurally generating increasing difficult levels.
Still some of the most fun I remember having with a computer.
I expect this is hyperbole, but the sense that degrees have softened their content density is palpable.
Even when I was attending, decades ago, the administration at my university was conjuring plans to greatly diminish the breadth and depth of content in their courses in order to graduate more students.
In my degree, object oriented programming came in later semesters, often paired with courses on symbolic computing, discrete mathematics, and computability and complexity.
In any case, you've shifted the goal posts from:
> the sense that degrees have softened their content density is palpable.
Having low level content come later isn't "softened content density".
-There usually isn't a prep course available, nor are there other prerequisites.
-When there is a prep course, it is usually called remedial as if being failed in high school, being an older student who left high school years ago, or just never being exposed to a subject makes you, as a person, deficient. (And, of course, these legally have to be included in a person's transcript.)
-Universities are under pressure to push people through quickly, so they don't want students taking extra prep courses early on.
-Universities/parents/students all want to see good grades and frequently prioritize this over education (which is probably the fundamental problem of education: how to evaluate and what to do with those evaluations)
-There are no ways, difficult ways, or arbitrary ways to drop out of an intro course.
-A syllabus is fundamentally a contract, but you (usually) don't get to see it until you have registered, paid, and been to the course. ... etc.
In your particular case, I'm glad you had a good professor that allowed you to spend otherwise wasted time learning. However, I can't help but feel you should never have been forced to take (and presumably pay for) that class.
I felt the same way, so I dropped out of school and started looking for someone who would hire me without a degree. I regret not having a university experience, but as far as career goes, I got a two year head start and no debt.
Welcome to real life with all kinds of proprietary software.
Society has demand for X trained software engineers as long as X is higher than the available number (X - Y), you have higher salaries which flashes a bright light drawing more people to Software Engineering. To fill that gap, the current educational system draws in the [talented with luck to have gotten the freedom to learn and play with code early] + [people who are talented at anything and pick SE for because of the lifestyle] + [the people who are in it for the money but not necessarily the inherent talent for it] + [the confused or misled who want to try things]. There is a massive missing pool of people who are talented or have the brain to be excellent in SE but never get to try it in an approachable way at with a good teacher or educational tool before they get pulled into something else. The truly talented SE people are often more interested in the Tech and less in teaching, and those who teach may not always have the love for the field an obsessed SE has. The Education system is a very brute tool - spray a little bit of many fields among many kids and see who catches on and then squeeze any love for the field out of them with as much pressure as possible to surface the gold nuggets of aptitude (talent) and attitude (persistence) who are the only ones sent on to train properly. If you want real outcomes, expose every child to a great Software Engineering program that is fun (maybe online, maybe via a textbook, maybe by video + a piece of software like scratch), then let them play consistently for their entire educational career without judgement but with rewards for talent and persistence (only upside, like computer games). Then start filtering only at the career level - when applying for jobs, or judging open source contributions after graduation. You would have a much broader pool of candidates and much higher quality at all levels.
The worst was when a student turned my own solutions back into me with a few variable names changed.
The tests I respected the least, were the ones were you were required to write down memorized definitions. I mean why? In this day and age I can google any definition on my phone in few seconds. I can also memorize definition of some rule without properly understanding it. That's not useful. Give me a task to solve that requires me to truly understand that rule.
If a class can be passed by this kind of cheating, it‘s a shit class, simple as that.
Classes need to be designed with the knowledge in mind, that the modern student is a highly social, cooperative creature that grew up with cheating being completely normal.
I designed classes by 80% of credit being given for big, final projects and the verbal, live „defensio style“ explanation they had to do for their projects, with me asking class general and project specific questions that made detecting fraud and grading very easy.
Your saving grace might be that you actually managed to create a somewhat more engaging and useful class after all. But besides that, your behavior was sadistic and frankly, inhumane.
This response has been generated by GPT3.
I have to say that Crump was incredibly forgiving and put in a lot of extra effort. I don't think anyone I've been taught by would have gone to this much trouble.
As an aside, I will say, weekly quizzes are one of the lowest-reward types of homework. They are mainly favored by instructors because they are automatically graded, and they do really little to make you excited about the material. Students recognize and respond to instructor effort (or a lack thereof); if there’s a written assignment every two weeks that students know you are going to take time to grade and give feedback on, then they are significantly more likely to invest the effort to do it well.
I loved having weekly quizzes because they forced me to study at a regular pace.
This author really does not want to confront some plain truths about his students and academia as it exists today.
> My understanding is that students who collect multiple faculty action reports like baseball cards may cease to be continuing students at my institution.
I suspect the institution doesn't give a good goddamn as long as the students wounds are self-inflected and their checks still clear.
> Even the student who sent 15 emails of lies got a second chance.
In a strange way, this article is really a character study about the author, and not at all about cheating. The author is deeply interested in procedure and drama, which makes for amusing storytelling, like a detective that's trying to find a murderer while constantly trying to convince himself that whoever he was, he didn't really mean it.
It is interesting how often he is attempting to detect cheating and plagiarism, even writing his own R scripts, and then says
> TBH, I’m so over trying to deter my students from cheating. There are so many ways I could lock down my courses. Not interested. If real life was about being monitored by proctoring software that spies on you at home and forces you to test under duress, it would be a sad real life.
But then continues attempting plagiarism detection for the rest of the semester, and the next! Maybe he considers it separate from cheating. Slightly baffled by all his behavior. He is quite kind, and expending extraordinary effort over students who are adamant about expending none at all.
Yeah exactly. Extreme cop energy in the writing those scripts and publicly documenting so much of the chat text verbatim. I started out sympathetic to the author, and still am abstractly, that's a hard spot for a teacher to be in.
But it started to feel like the author expected me to find it... titillating? attractively transgressive? Just a gross secondhand voyeurism type thing I didn't like it at all.
Talk to the students or fail them all and move on. I don't think the impulse to invest so much time and technique in this "investigation" should be encouraged.
It resulted in a large amount of the students finally engaging with the material and ultimately caring about the course, though. I don't believe it is healthy to expect that of a professor, but it seemed to work out here.
There is another aspect to cheating that I don't see mentioned. When lazy students become accustomed to cutting corners, they later become a legal liability as postgrads and employees, in terms of, for example, unethical research practices, copyright theft, and so on. I've seen this in my professional career from people who should know better, and I wish they were reprimanded as students rather than causing issues for the organisations that they're a part of.
There are pedagogical reasons to stop students from cheating early on, but it should be prevented for practical real-world reasons also.
It's easy to believe you won't get caught if everybody does it and nobody is reminding you that it's wrong. It can give an impression of unaccountability. I think a simple reminder can put a lot of students straight. Not the hard-core cheaters who are determined to fail, but certainly the much larger group that will get swept up with the cheating if nobody steps in to remind them not to.
Memories come to mind, from students sharing same day exam questions to parents trying to help their son organise the prints of a final assignment he clearly didn’t write (I overheard ‘we need to call him, we paid good money’). Several levels, criminal even, of cheating.
In the end, for most of us, the gc was the group studies and discussing last assignments after results were out. Learning with each other and cooperation is so fundamental.
What I loved most about the story if most people are shown the way, they won’t cheat, and will thrive. makes you wonder if most cheaters just don’t know any better
The teacher seems very interested in student engagement with the material and understanding. Which I can only view as a positive.
-[0]: https://crumplab.com/articles/blog/post_996_5_20_22_assignme...
I took a massive gamble on my high school finals to not only cheat but to steal thousands of tests and exams via malware that I wrote over the course of a year. Its been 10 years since that happened, and reading this I might do a story of how I stole 1 terabyte of data in my final year, and passed all my exams.
They were pretty severe at the institution level about cheating. All Batchelor and Masters thesis are run through multiple fraud detecting software.
People were forced to do a mandatory Academic Integrity course for one semester and they had to sign legal papers in which they assumed the obligation to respect certain rules.
The world needs more people with multi-dimensional empathy.
What do we do to train our more junior coworkers? Tell them to figure it out? Sink or swim? No, we write mountains of documentation, examples, pair program, etc. We actually value consistency and predictability between engineers. We like doing all these things universities tend not to do.
Virtual meetings also induce more fatigue in the participants than normal meetings (researched).
One or two off weeks can derail a whole semester. And professors themselves seem lost in absence of live feedback.
The schedules for live classes are rigid. While at college it is easy to follow them as you're in the same place, but schedules of individual homes vary widely and many students don't have the means to change them to suit the class timings.
I've read the story of a failing teacher, who set up his class in a way which normal sharing of experience and information among classmates would fall under the technical definition of "cheating". In order to "not cheat", students had to artificially isolate themselves, alienate themselves from their classmates. For a person of an earlier generation, who did not take online examples when also being in a group chat on their phone, that may seem like not much of a requirement (and even then I'm not sure.)
The responsibility for this debacle lies squarely on the teacher's shoulders - perhaps with some responsibility on the department/faculty for lack of oversight and guidance regarding expected dynamics for different ways of evaluating student achievements.
Rule of thumb: When most people fail, the failure is systematic.
One must also wonder about the maturity of these students. I'm wondering if, over the past couple of decades, a more childish attitude and behavior is not presented as acceptable for a longer period of time. Suddenly these, well, judging by the chat messages, children, come up against the wall of having to obey a semi-arbitrary rule, or else. It seems like they have not been directed along a path where they could take gradual steps to scale this wall. This is perhaps less of the teacher's responsibility, but he must still realize that's the kind of student cohort he is facing.
He created a testing system that encourages cheating. He made it too easy to cheat, so if one student cheated other students (who are all in competition together) would need to cheat as well less they receive a relatively lower grade.
Then when he detected the cheating he didn’t attempt to minimize the damage. Instead he focused all his time and effort building a solution that nobody needed, and let the main problem escalate to the point where nearly all his students were cheating.
The lecturer should be fired.
The author obviously care a lot about integrity and plagiarism and a lot has been discussed from the author's perspective. I wonder if we can analyze this case study from a game theory angle.
What's the payoff matrix looking like for students in the class at various phases of development?
Were students incentivized to cheat due to the structure of curriculum?
What are the Nash equilibrium scenarios for both professor and students? And how many of them are Pareto optimal?
But then, there is another thing.
Being able to get a degree has become a gate for many jobs. Adding additional courses that are not needed for those jobs may sound good, but it really just prevents some people from getting jobs they could do, but for the inappropriate gate.
Example: adding a mandatory advanced algebra course to a nursing program.
You might argue that a math course helps with abstract reasoning, but you'd be wrong. Passing a math course demonstrates an ability to do a specific kind of abstract reasoning. There is zero benefit for a nurse to be able to do advanced algebra, but many schools now require it. The result is that many people who would be great nurses cannot be a nurse unless they cheat to pass the algebra class. Faced with that decision, do you cheat, or just give up on your dream to be a nurse?
It may be hard for many HNers to comprehend this, but an inability to do advanced math is a thing. For some people, no amount of effort will lead to an understanding of the subject. It's just too abstract. These same people have plenty of other abilities, and are good at many jobs.
Can you blame a student for cheating on such a course, that everyone knows they'll never need to do the job they're going for?
The professor here talks about not wanting to enable the features that make it a worse experience to take the tests, but it's an unfortunate truth that there's just going to be cheating if you're giving assignments and assessments where it's easy to cheat.
(My now deceased PhD committee member griped that I "appropriate the ethnographic gaze" -- that's probably why I raise my eyebrows so much lately.)
The entire class was being lectured on plagarism. They were almost entirely internation students, almost entirely from a specific country, and they almosty entirely manage to misunderstand things only to their benefit.
(It was always an American, not someone from... there... I had to do things like go into my apartment and retreive a Louisville slugger because they were walking off with my neighbor's bike.
(I'm not required to call the police. I can deal with you and let YOU call, get a report number, and hope a detective or whatever decides it's worth the attention of the law. Fool around and find out that even full on cryptoanarchists[1] will step away from they keyboard if you piss them off enough, and if that makes you feel threatened, don't touch physical goods that don't belong to you unless you're willing to risk dying for them.)
[1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/crypto-anarchist-manifesto/
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.
If someone is caught cheating how do I know they didn't cheat in previous classes, but got away with it? Do you really want to go to a doctor who, regardless of if he knows his stuff now, is the kind of person who can live with cheating? As I've grown older and seen more and more people get away with not a moment of weakness, but a deep, unfixable character flaw requiring planning and sustained effort to gain an advantage over people foolish enough to be doing things fairly, it makes me wonder why anyone chooses to tolerate this.
Who wants to get a degree from a university that knowingly and willingly passes students who cheat, but just makes them retake the course or in this case do what sounds like essentially extra credit. But rather than prevent people from participating in systems they have demonstrated are not trustworthy enough to participate in, we just give them a stern lecture and extra work, or an asterisk in their hall of fame record, or make them say they're very sorry.
If a student believes that they can get away with cheating, and isn't going to get a good grade otherwise, it's completely logical to cheat, from the perspective of self-interest.
If a teacher believes that they can put a cheater on the right course, and convince them to stop cheating, it's completely logical to take the opportunity to do that.
Meanwhile, the academic integrity policies for a college are designed to catch cheaters that would otherwise slip through the cracks, while still giving people a chance to change their ways. If you expel people for cheating once, you put the burden on each single professor--you're making them the judge, jury, and executioner, so to speak. That makes their job more difficult, because they have to weigh much more serious consequences for cheaters in their class. So you give individual professors discretion, but collect their findings for review by an academic integrity board.
This seems like an effective system.
There is just so much bad behaviour in society that we have come to accept it.
I could be wrong but I don't think this happens that often. If you cheated enough not to understand what was going on in calc 1 may god rest your soul as 2 and 3 are going to be downright impossible. For those types of classes you need to mostly understand the material even have a chance at cheating successfully.
I recommend Robert Miles on YouTube for a few lessons on the challenges of creating friendly/aligned AIs. (And why your hope here is somewhat ludicrous).
I feel that working on that kind of AI that emulates animals with true autonomy etc. in the short term is a very bad idea, and totally unnecessary to get most of the benefits of general purpose AI.
However, realistically, most people do not recognize this, and even the ones that do, many will pursue this dangerous type of ultra humanlike autonomous AGI. So it's going to happen.
In the long run it will be better for the evolution of intelligent life. In the short run it will probably be a disaster for humans.
In pro bodybuilding, steroids are nominally illegal, but essentially every pro bodybuilder uses them, the physique necessary to be competitive in pro contests is not achievable without them, and the people running bodybuilding shows deliberately make no effort to enforce this rule.
In that kind of context it's hard for me to say the "cheaters" are doing anything wrong in any practical sense. Nobody involved actually believes in the rule they're breaking.
I think cheaters in other arenas can rationalize away to themselves that their context is equivalent to the bodybuilding context I described above.
Culture and social arrangements evolve implicitly at first, and are only later encoded. Of course, the modern homo bureaucraticus might do well to be reminded of this.
You can safely assume many did, because every time teachers check for cheating and plagiarism, they find a lot, and they rarely look for it.
> Who wants to get a degree from a university that knowingly and willingly passes students who cheat
Anyone who considers it a necessary step in life, and doesn't care about the consequences.
It's totally shitty, and it's the consequence of letting so many people in, while at the same time incentivizing schools for throughput and making life hard for the staff. Then you get at a point where nobody cares anymore, and everything gets smothered under a layer of understanding.
The article demonstrates it. The author of the article is also making the right noises: "I learn more from my students than they learn from me", and similar bullshit. He also doesn't teach a hard course: it seems to be a cogsci intro. Yet he's under pressure not to flunk everyone, and offers some of the easiest ways out: writing a single multiple choice question. And since that didn't make them pass either, they had to rewrite some blathering statement about academic integrity. It's really about letting them pass, under the guise of caring for students, and teaching.
I guess it differs. Here a student caught cheating is expelled for 6 months and have their student grants withdrawn.
Analysing social media for evidence of violating academic integrity isn't some thin you get paid for.
Personally, I wouldn't. Why waste what little time I have left each day? Not to mention, whatever grade they get, whether they cheated or not doesn't matter, I'd still get paid at the end of the day.
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 students. I was in pain while reading the article.
The moment she saw what she thinks was cheating, she should have confronted the students. And frankly: why shouldn’t the students help each other? Why did everybody have to learn in solitude?
She herself told the students that the midterm would consist of the same quiz questions. Of course you are trying to gather those along with the right answers.
Apparently, she was short on resources (no TA) and put the burden of that problem on the self regulation of her own students. I am ashamed that this calls itself academic teaching.
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 literally just posting questions from their exams and asking what the answer was.
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.
> And frankly: why shouldn’t the students help each other?
Because they're not helping each other in a way that isn't cheating. You may as well say that stealing is borrowing.
> Such a huge amount of cheating is a clear indication that the whole system is flawed.
The system isn't supposed to be defendable against large scale cheating because if there are that many cheats then those people should not be included in the system, which is why they should be failed (and probably kicked out). That is the defence.
Regardless of the legitimate discussion on cheating, why would a lecturer have access to student phone numbers, either directly or after asking the student affairs office to link them to names? The further I got in the article, the more it seemed like Reddit-style creative writing.
It can be done by varying a bit the parameters of the question for each student and I am sure AI based solutions for producing a lot of questions are possible
In oral exams, it's obvious whether you know the material or not.
It may appear more time-consuming, but considering there is no need to grade or worry about cheating, you may come out ahead.
The downside to oral examinations however is you can't really grade curve them.
Which is a beautiful thing, but also not what the faculty wants.
The faculty grades mostly because they want to cull the chaff from the hardest working grad student candidates.
They aren't after pure comprehension, they want hard workers.
They gave a randomly selected question to me and I had 30 minutes to prepare a solution (alone in back of classroom). I provide solution which took 10 minutes then 20 minutes was additional theory questions.
For each student, it took the professor 30 minutes. So for 100 students you can do it in 5 hours.
I believe the professor was John Thome.
Maybe this is the way it has to be. Self-taught people with impressive portfolios start becoming more and more attractive while well-qualified people become less and less attractive - or even suspect.
You can see the start of that here sometimes. It is sometimes suggested programmers become like "real engineers" by increasing regulation and requiring a certain level of education.
I mean the fact that we are having a serious discussion about forgiving trillions of dollars of debt for this statistically already quite privileged population shows they have to power to pull it off.
A plurality of that plurality has a higher education degree from an institution that isn't world famous - including myself. I don't feel at all threatened by self taught people, honestly I was not a great student and consider myself partially self taught anyway.
Race, religion, county of origin, urban or rural, sexuality, union or scab, favorite sports team, etc
I don't see why educational attainment is any different. The only part that is missing in the software industry is a scarcity of resources and the shift described in the grandparent comment and those behaviors will happen at scale.
University education has lost a lot of its appeal, that's correct, some sort of tragedy of the commons. But that part of "Self-taught people with impressive portfolios " is hilarious, navel gazing to the max. Nobody would deal with a self-taught cardiologist or structural engineer.
IIRC in many jurisdictions you can sit the exam to become a lawyer without having a degree or anything. The degree more acts as a series of preparation classes for the very very difficult process of passing the bar.
In this situation, cheating in mid terms becomes a bit pointless. As long as the final exam is done with strict security (easier for a one off event), the qualification means something.
So maybe that's what we want for cardiologists and structural engineers.
Replacing scientists with political activists and learning with political activism in Universities just magnified this phenomenon.
This will make the people with knowledge and ability and desire to do work 100x more precious.
And the markets are rewarding the hard work and knowledge, not anything else.
I am trying to instill in my small kids the desire to learn and the ability to work. It will be a hard fight because I will sometimes have to fight against school, politics and the current norms of some parts of the society. But my duty as a parent is to try to prepare them for the future, to make them winners.
Apprenticeships could combine some classroom instruction with some actual doing.
Now you remove most of the incentive for cheating- the classroom stuff is directly relevant to you because you’re going to have to use it shortly, maybe today. It’s no longer the grade that’s important; it’s the knowledge.
The benefit of actually learning the material becomes immediate and concrete. Tthere won’t be any opportunity for cheating when you’re in front of people actually expecting you to do the thing; you either can or you can’t. And your livelihood now depends on it.
The university system is hopelessly busted in so many ways. There is no way to fix it. But there are other ways to get knowledgeable, productive professionals.
I think the apprenticeship model is awesome, and also available through bootcamps + internships.
Given all the recent deterioration of discourse, maybe the university should start with a remedial "how not to be a liar and a cheat".
There must be a technical solution to the cheating problem.
Many years ago I taught an intro to programming course. For the grading I built a randomized online test - students would have one hour to answer a number of programming questions using a terminal in the computer lab, and would get their grade as the test progressed with the final grade after the last question. It worked both at freeing up my time for grading, and eliminating cheating.
Automated randomized testing in all types of classes (not just an intro class where this task is much simpler) would go a long way towards solving the cheating problem.
There, a problem for all you to solve.
These chats exist in every course in every college course and the students who don’t join them either because they’re honest or don’t have the right friends have no chance of graduating with a decent GPA.
The problem is lazy professors and TAs creating assignments and quizzes that are easy to grade. Essays and papers are harder to grade than multiple choice quizzes but they also prevent students from cheating.
Do your damn job and cheating won’t be a problem.
Another common proposal is to give individual assignments to each student, but it is usually impossible to make equally difficult assignments, so this approach is not very fair. It also does not work when students are paying other people to do the assignments for them, which has become a huge problem over the last few years with the commercialization of cheating through various platforms.
Sir Ken Robinson has a lot to say about the education paradigm and why it should be changed, and in what ways. He appeared on TED[1][2], too, since then, and probably elsewhere as well.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX78iKhInsc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
If a teacher told me that the work was open book, open notes, open internet, I might legitimately believe that I could openly talk to people about it. Probably not for an exam, but for a low-stakes, "check your knowledge" type of take-home quiz? Maybe.
I'm not sure if this is a generational divide or if the author's description of the rules was unclear, but I wonder if some students legitimately didn't realize they were cheating.
> Also, by the way, I should say that the quizzes were entirely open book and open note. All of the course material was online and freely available to the students. The quizzes were individual assignments, and students were not supposed to help each other by sharing questions or answers.
That seems clear enough, so assuming the syllabus said something similar, I'm fairly confident that the students did know they weren't supposed to be doing what they were doing. Also, if they thought they weren't doing anything wrong, then they wouldn't have been so worried about a snitch.
You're not thinking through the problem like the interviewer implies and asked for. You're replaying inputs, like a bot programmed to beat a level in Mario.
If they're looking to hire a good Mario player, you're misrepresenting yourself with that technique. The pixel perfect glitch you nail on every screen has nothing to do with your actual ability when you get the role.
I wrote a JavaScript that would get injected into the page with a quiz using the GreaseMonkey extension. It would go over the questions on the page, do a fuzzy search against my database that I compiled, and put the top 5 best matches next to each question. The library had its limitations, but it would take care of things like words being in a different order or a couple of words missing. I improved it by adding additional transformations to the question. Things like removing any non-letter characters but being careful to handle things like dashes and apostrophes in some cases; removal of the stopwords; stemming.
That would usually take care of about half of the questions. Sometimes, more than 90%. I would then spend the rest of the quiz time manually answering the remaining questions. Since this course was an open textbook, I would have one giant text file that would contain every single text that appeared during the course. It was allowed to look into any course material while taking the quiz. The end result of this is that I would get 98+% of the answers correct in almost every single course I took.
We also had written assignments which I always honestly completed while carefully following the citation rules. No clever tricks here.
I graduated with 10% in my university and was on the honors list. I never thought of what I did as cheating because I never collaborated with others. I never disclosed what I did and how I did it. I think that people who did those quizzes did them in a way that allowed me to do what I did.
Many of them just ended up cancelling the results for those exams outright.
As my HS profesor used to say.. “Locks were created to prevent honest people from stealing, thieves will just break whatever lock they find.”
The goal is not to discourage cheating by punishment but rather to understand the incentives and address them.
I don’t understand the perspective of an educator who doesn’t expect cheating, and then instead of shutting down the chat immediately, keeps it open the whole semester in some fucked up moralistic detective game.
I truly feel like this was probably a boring class and the opposite of engaging. A very one sided view, we don’t see the student’s perspective at all, outside of the cheating.
The solution? Let's finally evolve from schooling and let's forget that schools and universities exist. Let's open source degrees and make them much more compelling. Let's do everything online. Let's create collaborative labs in VR.
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
Bruh. During the remote-only pandemic? Sounds like you were a lazy professor. I get that it's hard to do work, but this is obvious stuff. Give your students easily cheatable assignments and it's no surprise that they cheat.
Then he muted it for a couple of months and resumed after accidentally discovering a violation. Then didn't act immediately but waited and observed more violations.
It was eye-opening. I had a miserable pandemic, juggling childcare and online school for my kids with my own job. But this colleague had gotten interested in CS somewhat late in college and had only had a few in-person CS classes before the switch to online. In the colleague’s words, “quality declined a lot then.”
There’s a new cohort of college students who’ve been given a terrible education, and have a lot of loans to pay off. I don’t condone the cheating in TFA, but the professor seems to have a formalist rigidity to academic honesty while teaching a course online in a way that’s almost designed for cheating. And rather than admonishing students when he became aware of what was happening he spent time (days? weeks?) analyzing the chat while the behavior continued.
I empathize a lot with students who’ve just been through a terrible educational experience. The effort this prof has put into plagiarism detection could arguably have been better spent on improving course materials and grading mechanisms to render cheating rare/ineffectual.
One of the first year courses in an undergraduate degree ought to be in academic integrity.
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.
I urge you to entertain the idea, that some students, unfortunately, were there not by choice, but merely "passing through".
Consider this a problem with the educational system itself, not students having a personal grudge with your subject or self.
Finally, no offense intended, but I urge you to reconsider your strong loyality to the (sprry, probably misquoting) "academic code of conduct" and filling out reports about your misbehaving students. Replacing idealism in favour of pragmatism might suit everyone's needs better :)
P.S. Sounds like yur students would gratly benefit form some education in the field of OPSEC :)
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.
I have to say the school really let the instructor down. An instructor should not have to fill 70 forms.
"I didn't do it, but if I done it..."
It certainly made for good learning material.
Surely the reputation and integrity of the institution comes before the rights of a dishonest person.
Perhaps more effort should be in catching the cheats and removing them?
"They are not in university to get knowledge, they are here to receive papers that say they are qualified for job xy"
Particularly reading this, the whole enforcement of anticheating becomes a privacy nightmare. I do not want my students to learn that putting root kits on PCs is OK (for proctoring) or that archiving potentially private chat messages without consent (I am in Europe, so GDPR applies) is OK.
At the same time students have to learn how to use stackoverflow or copilot effectively. So I want to teach them that initial copying is OK if you fully understand the result and that often doing it yourself from scratch is better to achieve it.
I know we talking about slightly different things, but grading based on multiple choice seems to be at the core of the problem.
I'll go further and say that if you're not ready to out cheaters in your classes, you have no business teaching
Maybe preventing a person that does not understand differential equations from being a doctor, English teacher, event manager ...
„I literally do not give one flying fuck.“
The person who cheats, will give no f** about your opinion either.
The prefontal cortex does not finish developing until age 25 or thereabouts. This is why it is logical and necessary to punish young people differently from the way we punish adults.
"Cheating is not acceptable or excusable, ever, period."
Children develop the ability to lie and cheat around 3 or 4 years of age, although they are very unskilled at it and initially tell lies that are not believable. I think we agree that we can accept and excuse 4-year-olds who lie and cheat, because it will take much longer for them to develop ethics and morals.
The question then is, how do we taper off the acceptance and excuses? Perhaps we agree that it's acceptable at age 4 and unacceptable at age 25, but what about 18? Perhaps people at age 18 still need to learn ethics and morals?
It seems like such a shame to destroy somebody's academic career if there are ways to save it.
And that’s fine, maybe it’s all they want
> Most of us don't want to be in school, its just a necessary evil to get that all important paper
I get what you mean, and had a similar sentiment during my years at university. I deeply regret this now though. I could have transitioned to a studies I‘m more interested in, or dropped out after the Bachelor‘s and started earning money earlier.
Kinda want to plagiarize this response to bring it full circle
He mixed training data (pool of quiz) with test data.
By the second midterm, he changed the approach to catch the cheaters.
Traditionally we used closed book exams where mechanical engineering students have to solve series of problems. Stressful and encouraging of learning a lot by rote, these have never been liked any anyone. But they offer a level playing field for students in a perverse way. Many new students have not sat similar state exams either and were given estimated grades.
Many of us switched quickly to lecturing on Zoom and giving midterm exams via online quizzes with Brightspace or Blackboard VLEs. That meant open book exams where we have no ability to proctor (due to GDPR apparently).
The capability of setting up complex randomised exam questions was limited too. Brightspace only supported numerical questions based on simple algebraic expressions and would silently truncate an moderately long equation that previously passed checks.
The use of WhatsApp groups is extremely common in general by students and we all knew this would allow easy cheating on exams. So while we randomised question order and used random variables where possible, most academics felt preventing students from moving back and forward through questions was cruel and was typically avoided. Where it was used was vocally opposed by students.
As we look back at what worked and didn’t I think the consensus is that midterms will remain online and we will return to big exam hall finals.
This year I ran my online exam on campus. I booked a few sizeable rooms and split the students across them. It seemed to limit non-independent work.
Interesting, wonder if this is easier than Lumin
> I was also weirdly empathizing with how hard it would be to cheat in my course. I was sad and angry about the cheating, but in terms of the process they would use to cheat, I knew it would be harder than normal and I could empathize with the difficulties they were experiencing.
> I don’t like cheating in my classes, and I respond to it when it happens. This was the first time when 75% of the class was cheating way beyond the pale for half a semester. My first inclination was to fail everybody. Aside from all the ways that I can be empathetic, there was a lot of evidence in the chat that students were blowing off the course and making a mockery of the whole thing. But, the brash language in the chat could also be covering up difficult issues students were facing in their lives that were preventing them from committing to their studies. Cheating isn’t an answer, but it happens. Just like how playdough goes through the extruder when you make pasta with the toys from fisher price. Metaphors.
> ...
> The point is I had no intention of zooming into class, failing 75% of my students, and calling them all a bunch of cheaters in the middle of a pandemic…even though a bunch of cheating happened and all that. And, no I’m not that soft. It’s just, I’m not the police. Education isn’t a form of punishment. I’m trying to get students to engage in my course. Failing them all isn’t a solution.
This person sounds like they have perhaps an excess of empathy.
This wasn't a case of people getting behind on one or two things and cheating to catch back up, in which case I could understand the leniency. It was 75% of the class trying to cheat their way through essentially the entire course.
That said, there's certainly worse qualities to have in a professor than the patience of a saint. Their alternative syllabus idea later on is neat, though to me it feels weird to respond to what's essentially a lack of effort with a massive effort of your own.
> The first category of student emails was the “I did it email”. There were also “I did it and I’m sorry I did it emails”. And, stuff in between, like not necessarily sorry. All of these emails contained students pleading with me not to ruin their GPA, or how they have never done any thing like this before, and they were really stressed out, and they would never do this again. Some of them seemed heartfelt.
Well, I'm sure they were very heartfelt about being sorry they got caught. How many do you think would have been feeling sorry if they'd gotten away with it scot free?
You still haven't really shown how this is a problem with his integrity, you're just using the word in a sentence.
Designing an exam that can be so trivially gamed to get 100% is irresponsible.
You cannot blame the students for taking the optimal sequence of actions to maximize their chances of a perfect grade while minimizing their chances of a bad grade.
If a professor joined a group chat, without any corrections to what was being shared, "no news is good news" would be the assumption.
Trying to read this was embarrassing.
> So you join the chat, say nothing for months, and then pull the rug out from under your students?
They pulled the rug out from themselves. Don't wanna fail? Then don't cheat.
If my professor (now, seemingly) anonymously stays in a group chat without providing input...how can that be considered ethical, either?
Sure, and they had no problem with the non-cheating discussion going on.
> If my professor was in a group chat, I would assume that what was going on was kosher if nothing was being said.
Okay? I don't see how this conflicts with the article.
What should have happened?
A. The cop tells the skateboarders, "just so you know, you're technically not supposed to be doing this. If you do it again, I'll have to take action."
B. He suddenly arrests the skateboarders for trespassing, much like a sting operation.
The professor needed to say something. Period.
I mean, sting operations are a real thing, so...?
In your example it sounds stupid because obviously trespassing to skateboard is such an inconsequential crime. A cop should either should immediately tell people or just not give a shit, because who cares?
Within the context of a university, students cheating their way through every exam is obviously a bigger deal than trespassing for the purpose of exercise.
That said, I agree that just immediately telling people (and then paying closer attention to possible cheating thereafter) is probably the better route, but in the article, they stated they didn't notice the cheating going on until it'd been going on for a while, because they just hadn't paid attention to the chat group.
The professor could've handled things better if they'd been more aware and responsive from the start, but still, the lion's share of the blame rests with the people who chose to cheat.
The cop is always visible, the sign is clearly posted, but they still trespass. Most got less-than-minimum sentences anyway.
Evidence to the contrary could be, for example, that this class was very different from a typical class in some way, etc.
1. Course was created to scale so cheating is super easy and harder to spot without side channel (common pool of multiple choice questions).
Author fixed this, which deserves huge thumbs up. Also making course more interesting is great and I would love if all teachers reflected this. Punishing students without changing course would probably did not solve anything.
2. Technical course students have zero clue about technology they use but they completely trust it.
It looks like they do not care about learning how thinks work. Probably they are there just for a degree. Imagine hiring someone like that, freshly from college, without experience and not willing to learn anything.
(A) assumes cheating will take place whenever possible and create curriculum , assignments, quizzes and exams with this in mind.
(B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest.
It's far from perfect, but it's better than the alternatives, and various organizations and people and powers-that-be reasonably want some kind of measure of whether someone actually learned something in a class/degree.
I'd much rather teach and talk and enjoy with my students, but, alas, the design of most universities box us in at different levels (and let's not even get started on the "must publish research" side of teaching).
Just my $0.02.
Get rid of grading and nobody cheats.
Have a separate entity do the verification or make graduation more like PhD defense.
If it's for "pure" education or something with no grades, it's just a glorified library that sells expensive books.
The thing university seems to do the most these days is weed out people that don’t have the resources or ability to navigate the game put together which doesn’t have that much to do any more with education. A liberal education was by definition intended to make one free, now university is quite a lot about initiating people into wage slavery by putting them in serious debt and only graduating people who are good enough at following rules in complicated somewhat pointless exercises. It is unclear if this process is shaping or shaped by our economy.
I really don't feel sorry for people who attend Ivy league schools and rack up debt like that. They know exactly what they're getting into.
I didn't complete college and am making more than many of my peers who did and are still paying off debt 20 years later.
If you can't navigate college hand holding, you'll be fucked in the real world.
I believe college is currently serving it's function.
Testing is a distraction from their core values. And a crutch for handling the poor student to teacher ratio.
Except college/testing doesn't rank meritocratically. It reproduces our existing structural hierarchies in the next generation. It would be simpler and more honest to give the kids of rich parents fast track internships.
When undergraduate education goes well, the students will be interested in the material and motivated to learn it, both on their own and through working on collaborative projects with other students. Then testing and grading, while not necessarily eliminated, become less important in the students’ minds and cheating becomes only a minor problem.
Creating an environment conducive to that kind of learning, though, can be very difficult, especially with large classes, heavy teaching loads, and subjects and curricula that are perceived as requiring passive knowledge acquisition rather than active engagement and exploration.
I will retire next year after teaching for seventeen years at a large university in Japan. Cheating has sometimes occurred, both in my own classes and in the classes of a large first-year writing program I used to manage. But because the classes were mostly project-based, with students writing and revising in stages over the course of the semester and sharing their drafts with each other in class, and because the average class size has been only about fifteen, the amount of cheating has been small and manageable. I’ve been lucky.
> Testing is a distraction from their core values.
That's all fine, but nobody cares about your diploma if it was issued by a school that didn't test you.
So either we accept the modern role of the university, and fund them properly so they can do their task (and restrict the number of students), or reject it and go back to the old ways: you studied philosophy, congrats, but your father was a mason, here's your trowel.
I'm not sure what you mean by "old ways". The setup you describe is the one we already have. Family connections and money are key to getting a leg up.
The only people who actually care about your college grades are HR reading resumes for your first job, literally that’s it.
> The only people who actually care about your college grades are HR reading resumes for your first job, literally that’s it.
It's not about grades, it's about passing the requirements for a diploma. And the fact that only HR cares about it (in your rather corporate view of the labor market) is because everybody else assumes that the hurdle has been taken. They don't care about the diploma per se, just that you have a bunch of useful skills. Either HR tests you thoroughly (and they don't have a clue, so that's out of the question), or they rely on a system like the current one. Or do you think that a sociology degree qualifies you as a carpenter?
It’s easy to do—don’t issue any credentials. It’s just that the very lucrative businesses don’t want to do that because they know exactly what they are selling and it ain’t education.
It so happens that looking after the mechanics of (computer based) university examination is part of my current role. We do have some mechanisms in place that are intended to make it harder to cheat, but ultimately some students will cheat and one of the interesting things is watching the reaction of a young colleague who went from those exams (a year ago) to his current job, at this same university.
For example there are signs outside every exam room prominently warning students that the university owns video cameras and they are being watched while doing exams. It's true, but of course the main reason we're watching isn't to catch cheaters but to anticipate problems the room's invigilators are about to call us about. Are we watching to see if that girl is wearing a short skirt because she's written notes on her own thighs? Are we watching to see if the Fitbit on that guy's wrist has been modified to display relayed multiple choice answers? No, we're watching because the room has 85 green "OK for this exam: BIOL1024 Genetics" screens and one orange "Pre-check failed. DO NOT USE" screen and in a minute the retired administrator herding students into the room is going to remember that we said Orange = Bad during training and call us about it, by the time they do we want to know why it has an orange screen, whether that room is actually booked for 86 students so that they can't just leave the machine unused, and where else on campus we can put one extra student if we need to move them pronto. We aren't trying to actually fix it, because that's likely to take hours, and we have minutes or sometimes seconds.
One of the most valuable uses of those cameras doesn't actually involve seeing anybody, cheater or not, student or not, at the end of the day if there's one PC which stubbornly claims to still be doing an exam, is it really? If the room is empty, maybe even dark, then the answer is that despite instructions to students and invigilators they left a machine logged in, running an exam, and just walked out of the room. On the other hand, if there's still people stood in the room looking at the PC, well, radios work both ways, lets find out why the hell they aren't finished.
Since we were little, we were requested by our parents to get a good grade in examinations in order to, eventually, get into a good college.
We were told that graduating from a good college brings ourselves/the family a better quality of life, but the "benefits" part stops here. People don't care about those knowledges that are not likely to make us money one day. Most of us just study for a better paying jobs.
The society doesn't care about the process, but the outcome, evaluated by the momey in our bank account.
This is not really an issue that affects anyone outside a handful of individuals getting their first job - once you have an employment history, the fact that someone was willing to pay you money for a couple years is a pretty solid signal that you were doing at least an OK job, and you'll have coworkers with similar reputational signals who can also attest to this.
(although tbh I think references as a hiring signal are going away - referrals to an open position within the referrer's company are still a golden ticket but nobody cares that you have three friends at some unrelated company who will say that you're not a total shitbird, they can already tell that from the fact that you worked there 2 years and weren't fired and it's trivial for someone to "forge" a reference if it's not. References, like suits in the office, were a boomer thing and in the latter years were a symptom of a highly employer-favored labor market. Skilled workers can now write their own ticket and even in the broader labor market nobody cares about references when employers can't hire enough employees to keep product on the shelf. A whole lot of stupid, artificial barriers that never should have existed are coming down, and references are one of them.)
Anyway, this is a lot like the "it's unjust that under-21s can volunteer or be drafted to die for their country but can't drink!!!" argument - yup, it's true, that's unfair as hell, but nobody who's over the age of 21 gives a single shit about remedying it, since it doesn't affect them. In "agile" terms, it's a ticket where there is definitely improvement that is possible in this area, but no business case to upend everything and do the improvement. Once you have that first job under your belt... nothing that came before really matters. When was the last time an interviewer asked a senior engineer about a GPA? Unless it's an ivy-tier they frankly don't even care where you went, Bumfuck State University is just as good as Podunk State University. Nor does the Widget Factory care about whether you had a degree in English or Basketweaving when they are considering you for the position of forklift operator. It's an issue that solely matters to the people getting their first job, and once you're hazed, you're "in the club" and it stops mattering, unless you're such a complete and utter fuckup that you're getting fired repeatedly.
They do care a lot that you worked at a big name company, or that you made large contributions or substantially matured your skills/experience at a smaller company. They do care a lot that you appear knowledgeable around the role they're trying to hire you into. They do care a lot that you can problem-solve and learn the parts you don't know. References, degrees, and universities mostly stop mattering after a couple years and definitely stop mattering by the 10-year mark.
Again, I'm not saying you're wrong at all - and actually the whole system of making people go tens of thousands of dollars into debt for something that is basically only used to get you your first job and never matters again, is obviously problematic. But once again there's not really a way to remedy that, even if you banned asking about degrees entirely, employers are still going to find some similar signal, and it's going to hugely piss off all the people who are now $50k in debt for something they can't even use in an interview process.
Which is guaranteed, 100%, the reason that 99.9% of people went to get a degree. Yeah, education makes you a more well-rounded person, and it should be somewhere between "absolutely minimal costs subsidized hugely by the public" and "actually giving people a stipend to attend" (as in many european countries), because in the long term they are more than going to pay that back in taxes anyway, and we all benefit from having an intellectual workforce that can think critically and is less susceptible to misinformation campaigns/etc. But the reality is right now most people who go to college do so because it's a necessary gatekeeper to pass for you to get a good job.
We need some kind of reform though, this trajectory just doesn't seem sustainable. People have been pushing "trade school"/"coding bootcamp" approaches for years and it just hasn't stuck, there needs to be reform of the college system itself. But that's not remotely politically possible given the broad dysfunction of the american system.
Of course, there is certainly some "foundational" education around core computer-science and software-engineering concepts, and breadth of exposure to people with at least minimal competence in their fields (it's not always great, but neither is the broader job market) around various technologies and concepts that would need at least a multi-year "trade school" approach and not just a "coding boot camp" to replicate. It's not all bad either. But I think at this point everyone acknowledges we have a big problem and a bad trajectory.
When I was in college, the rule in our department was that if you failed the final, you failed the course.
If college degrees themselves held no real value, and the purpose of a college education in terms of career was to prepare you for a comprehensive exam, I think you'd see radically different behavior. Grades would no longer matter, or even exist, so cheating your way through a class would seem pointless.
Creating a comprehensive exam that meaningfully tests a college degree's worth of education seems like it'd be near impossible though.
I used to study at an "elite" uni going for ~40% failed on the important exams to filter students and you bet everyone I knew was studying exclusively from previous exams and cheating when possible. This led to us being able to solve exam questions extremely quickly and cleanly but we often had no idea what the solution actually meant.
Some people were studying "normally" at first but they'd then get shafted in the exam because they'd have spent lots of time on material that's not graded in the end and would inevitably switch to the meta approach since understanding the material better doesn't mean much if you're barely surviving.
A goal directed attitude has taken over, as described by Erwin Chargaff.
https://mobile.twitter.com/blamlab/status/129727005174625894...
That is, I’d strongly prefer an exam where I can write an essay to show my understanding of a topic to a series of multiple choice questions where I just regurgitate the lectures.
Unfortunately, most of my professors reuse old content verbatim (usually content they didn’t even write themselves in the first place) and put it in the easiest to grade format possible (multiple choice/auto graded math). My CS classes are concerningly light on actually writing code.
When it came time to anything that involved presentations or demonstration of a project, I was exceptionally better at the topic. Maybe it was a better way of learning since I was more engaged, or the types of professors that heavily believe cheating is going to happen any way and try to mitigate it actually give a damn.
It's also completely unfixable because the solutions you propose (which are obvious) don't scale.
To understand this you only have to look at education through history. A long time ago college education was for a very tiny (well connected) section of society. Conceptually think of it as the aristocracy keeping themselves on top. Teaching staff ratio is high - small classes, lots of attention.
Naturally education slowly opens to the masses. (GI Bill etc). So now there's a scaling problem. Much lower staff ratio, and a need to improve productivity. Think multiple choice, not essays. Lecturers don't know the names (never mind abilities) of Individual students.
Your suggestion is both good, but impractical. There aren't enough people qualified to teach the way you have in mind, and even if there were the student could not afford them.
We can offer a college education for the masses, we can give every college student an indepth real "education", but we can't do both.
Although interestingly the _student_ who approaches a course with zeal, and engages teachers in every possible opportunity, will get the most out of the experience. In other words today the quality of the education rests on the student, not the teacher.
Did they even know they were cheating? Maybe they thought it was okay?
It’s not a victimless crime.
Many university courses have minimum requirements to get into. Eg Engineering, Medicine, etc. Cheating to inflate your grades will result in people who didn’t cheat missing out on, or having less chance of, being accepted into their desired degree. Which they worked honestly for, without cheating.
And why should any young person think that? Just observing the world around them definitely says the opposite.
Well, also I would strongly prefer my doctor, pilot, surgeon etc not to be there just because they cheated in exams, but because they know what they're doing.
Is it ethical to wrangle students through inane, dull exercises that seem practically designed to kill their curiosity and desire to explore knowledge?
In that situation, would it not seem more ethical to get past the exercises in the quickest, least-damaging way possible to be able to do more fulfilling things in life?
Or is doing exercises a moral obligation, regardless of their ill effects on the student?
That's a discussion worth having. "You know, like a psychopath" short-circuits that.
You mean like what they are going to have to do when they actually start working?
You can always discuss the fact that the exercises are bone chillingly boring with the professor, and potentially you don’t even have to do them because all your score comes from the test.
But at the end of the day, if your professor/boss tells you to do the boring stuff, you either do it, quit, or get fired.
Cheating only kicks the can down the road to a failed career and possibly even criminal behavior. Best path for a student with that attitude is to drop the course or push through it and reevaluate their educational choices.
If you only care about yourself and not the impact on others. Cheating is not a zero sum game. You are depriving others, and are committing fraud.
Perhaps the least damaging way would be to seek professional help to better yourself so you can cope with any “ill effects” you get from doing “inane, dull exercises”.
Or finding a course or career that doesn’t require you to endure activities you don’t want to do. Running your own business maybe.
What I was saying was amoral and psychopath-like was the act of "excluding ethics from the picture". You have reacted as if I'd said that the person I responded to had those qualities. Sorry I wasn't clearer, to avoid that apparent misunderstanding.
Your questions seem puzzled, irritated, as if I obviously have no common sense or understanding of what life's like, and you've had to instruct me in the basic realities, like a condescending teacher to an unlearning novice. I'm not sure what I said that suggests that. I would've thought it would be uncontroversial, a mere repeating of the dictionary definition, to suggest that to exclude ethics from the picture when acting in life is amoral, and like a psychopath.
…On the other hand, a big part of the reason I ended up with that set of goals is that it worked well for me when I was young, for both practical and emotional reasons I won't waste your time with. So I won't claim to be holier-than-thou. And I don't feel entitled to judge people for having different principles.
Want people to stop cheating? Fix the incentives. Stop using a points evaluation system, and curves. The professor in this article managed to redesign his assignments to more or less make cheating difficult, and suddenly it was less of a problem. Imagine that!
The students on the next semester used DMs, as the end of the article points out, and the professor didn't care, which means that the amount of cheating for that semester was unknown and hence, not less of problem. Unless that is, you're the professor and seem unwilling to punish cheats, or you're one of the students who cheated.
Cheating is a form of fraud, and fraud is a crime.
Doesn’t this logically lead those that don’t want crime and cheating to clamp down hard on these acts to discourage them? Ie should we have harsher punishments? Expel students? Convict students?
And these are the kids that are supposedly so much better than the old boomers and they're cheating like it is a reflex.
Many classes also had students not showing up if it was clear that they were not going to need to be in class to know the subject material. If you could read it from the book and the professor was straight forward with their testing - students wouldn’t show. It was a waste of time to go to the lectures because often these professors were absolutely terrible. You were just better off reading the book because you’d be less confused by that.
Tbh - college is a giant scam in the way many people think of it as a way of “learning”. For myself and many of my peers - it was purely a transactional procedure. We needed the credentials and we needed good grades in those credentials. Everything else was secondary.
Optimizing for “learning” is such a joke in our capitalistic winner takes all economy. Give me a break. I’m not a Rothschild ffs.
Many of us are still quite competent. The “professors” were just horrible.
He got off to the power here, and you can tell.
What? I'd be bothered with my own stupidity if I felt I couldn't get a good grade without cheating. I put in a minimal amount of time/effort in university where the subject matter didn't interest me, but always did fine without cheating.
Those with integrity are very clearly perceived as the handicapped in modern America.
Nowhere is this more clear than cryptocurrency and gun reform.
For how long? I assume you're in the west. Look around and tell me – how long?
>Or, students can hire people to do their assignments (cough, help them with their homework as a legit tutor).
I totally get his point about moral integrity from a bird's eye view: cheating, plagiarizing and any fraudulent behavior especially in a academic setting has immense destructive repercussions by affecting the credibility of whole fields and with it all the academic careers around it and must be stopped/discouraged at the outset. OPs perspective:
>Let’s start with me, I’ll be the category. I have prior experience with pre-pandemic academic integrity violations. There’s no time for a prequel. But let’s say I’ve been called an obsessive plagiarism detective. Plagiarism really irks me. It irks me so bad I wrote my own R package to detect plagiarism.
My radical approach to that was early on to stay clear of any form institutionalized teaching despite some lucrative job offerings.
Of course a lot of students contacting me are looking for a quick fix, outright asking me to solve their assignments or in some cases ready to pay me royally for just being available online on their exam. The amount of effort, thought and resources put into "cheating", "finding easy ways" ... is vastly and comically disproportionate to the simple tasks given to them. As an entry point to conversation, now, I really enjoy hearing those stories and every student has unique tales to offer.
Because I encourage my students to be brutally honest about their learning progression without fear of shame, judgment etc. in this light they get at least a chance to realize that ultimatley in the long run "cheating" is first and foremost a disservice to themselves and once it is internalized it is difficult to get rid of (paraphrasing: you yourself are the easiest person to fool). But instead of moralizing at this point (mea culpa ...) I actually offer them ways to transform and invest some of their habitual cheating impulse/energy into actual wit[0](deep entrenched into the culture). This part is tricky and highly dependent on their current level of understanding, attention span and motiviation. Basically I trick them into math tricks (i.e. "novel ways" to solving/reframing problems) finetuned to their response this ideally evolves to a ping-pong game, even if it is just say 5min out of 45min, we are now actually gaining momentum ;)
There is no way I could pull that off in front of a class of more than 5 people and I have to be picky because some really are highly resistant to open themselves up for learning and prefer to find "easier ways": memorizing, cheating ...
Given the circumstances, incentives, set up of the tests/exams and the teacher himself being able to be in the group, I mean with a bit of game-theoretical reasoning: the undertow of cheating is pretty irresistible. This makes up for a great story with second chances, human motivations and insights about our current state of affair regarding the educational system.
This was before everything was automated - In our C++ course, we had weekly assignments that were done in the lab and we were expected to turn in a printout of the code (this will be important) along with a 3.5" disk with the source and executable. I never had any difficulty completing the assignments and would regularly help others debug their code. One day, a student I had helped previously asked if they could just have a copy of my code so they could compare it to theirs. I declined as kindly as I could and they left, slightly dejected, but not nothing that would have been an immediate red flag.
Remember those printouts? Well, it was not uncommon for one to complete the assignment, prepare their printout and deliverables, then find a bug or two during some last-minute debugging prior to submission. So into the recycle-bin goes the printout.
Well, turns out that this particular student had seen me drop a copy of my code into the bin and they proceeded to retrieve it and copy the code verbatim... bugs and all... And they then submitted it while I was still preparing my corrected submission.
I was later called into the professor's office for a meeting with her and the program coordinator and accused of plagiarising the other student's assignment. I denied it, of course. They gave a long speech on the seriousness of academic integrity and said that if I came clean, they would go easy. I explained there must have been some mistake - you got the wrong guy! But they were quite confident with their findings, which they proceeded to share with me. To say I was shocked when presented with the evidence would be the understatement of the century. I knew immediately what had happened and I knew I could prove my innocence. But I was still beyond pissed. I was pissed at the student who cheated me, and I was pissed at the prof and admin for falsely accusing me.
Fortunately for me, I still had a copy of the old printout in my binder as well as on my network drive - conveniently labelled "v.1.0". I was also able to produce my corrected "v.2.0" and explained exactly where the bugs were and how I fixed them. I then suggested they speak to the other student and ask them to explain how their code works and if they could identify the bugs.
After being confronted with this new evidence, the other student confessed - they had taken my printout from the recycle bin because they knew I always got full marks on the code. But I guess they had also assumed I always got it right on the first try.
The other student was offered the opportunity to drop the class and re-take it next semester rather than receive an F. However, it was later revealed that they had been pulling the same stunt in other programming classes as well. I don't know much about what happened after that but I didn't see them around next semester.
I didn't expect an apology from the student - although that would have been proper. But the fact that neither the professor nor the program coordinator apologised, or even admitted any mistake, never sat right with me.
This article was a great read. Prof seems like he did his best. Fuck cheaters.
Also, "cheating" may be viewed as "not re-inventing the wheel" (someone already made the proof for this theorem, just copy paste it from your smartphone), "not doing the same work twice" (your neigboor just solved the equation, why re-solve it ? ), and "using the fastest, most reliable solution" (your neigboor is better than you in Maths, just take his answers). This is similar to taking a library (ex : deep-equal) or framework (nextjs) or service (carrds, netlify) instead of doing it yourselves.
I agree that, the issue is mostly not the student but the school (and society):
1. Does the student really need to remember historical dates, or Maths equations, when nowadays he can just google them in 10sec ? (Aka : unnecessary use of memory)
2. Does the student really need to understand the notion by himselves ? For example, I don't know how to use quaternion myself, buy I know how to work with, in Unity. I also don't care about Pythagore theorem proof, I know it works, that's all I need (all Maths lover will condemn me).
The thing is that we believe that school focus on teaching. They don't. They are called schools, but behave a lot more like evaluation (grading) centers. And mostly evaluate (grade) memorization and servitude btw, not actual understanding.
To be clear, evaluation (grading) is what you in job interview and for pilot, to make sure he knows how to fly the plane.
Is evaluation a part of learning ? It is. But not the same type of evaluation.
"I am able to make a small game like ping pong from scratch ?" - evaluate yourselves, test your skills. If you have success, it means learning phase is completed. The main differences are that : - You do it for yourselves, not for someone or something else (employer, school, teacher, parents, certification organism). If you cheat, you have 0 gain out of it. Cheating in a pure learning environnement make no sense. If students cheat, it means your environnment contains more than just learning.
Testing yourselves, to know for yourselves, if you have got an understanding of a notion. Is part of learning.
Without grading, a test become just a way to confirm to yourselves your knowledge. This is part of learning, and cheating on that make no sense, because you fool only yourselves.
School mix both learning and grading, it shouldn't.
In chinese, copying and learning are the same word.
Also, "cheating" may be viewed as "not re-inventing the wheel" (someone already made the proof for this theorem, just copy paste it from your smartphone), "not doing the same work twice" (your neigboor just solved the equation, why re-solve it ? ), and "using the fastest, most reliable solution" (your neigboor is better than you in Maths, just take his answers). This is similar to taking a library (ex : deep-equal) or framework (nextjs) or service (carrds, netlify) instead of doing it yourselves.
I agree that, the issue is mostly not the student but the school (and society):
1. Does the student really need to remember historical dates, or Maths equations, when nowadays he can just google them in 10sec ? (Aka : unnecessary use of memory)
2. Does the student really need to understand the notion by himselves ? For example, I don't know how to use quaternion myself, buy I know how to work with, in Unity. I also don't care about Pythagore theorem proof, I know it works, that's all I need (all Maths lover will condemn me).
The thing is that we believe that school focus on teaching. They don't. They are called schools, but behave a lot more like evaluation (grading) centers. And mostly evaluate (grade) memorization and servitude btw, not actual understanding.
To be clear, evaluation (grading) is what you in job interview and for pilot, to make sure he knows how to fly the plane.
Is evaluation a part of learning ? It is. But not the same type of evaluation.
"I am able to make a small game like ping pong from scratch ?" - evaluate yourselves, test your skills. If you have success, it means learning phase is completed.
When evaluation is part of learning: - You do it for yourselves, not for someone or something else (employer, school, teacher, parents, certification organism). That is called intresic motivation (vs extrinsic). - There may be or not be grading, but only you care about grading.
The employer doesn't care about how you grade to the tests he send to you, what he care about is that you've got the skills he need. And grading is just a means for that.
Everything the school does should be a means for making someone a good person for the society, a happy person, a person that can contribute to the society (a phrasing more large than employable).
What I have seen in my scolarity, is students and teacher focused on "passing exams", "getting good grades". But completly forgetting exams and grading "means to".
In a pure teaching environnement, grades and exams only purpose is to give a learning status indication to the student.
In school (in France national education), they also serve to give you right/priority on school entrances. And serve as social status indicator (the dumbs and the smarts).
Cheating in a pure learning environnement make no sense. If students cheat, it means your environnment contains more than just learning.
When you create extrinsic motivation (carrot and stick), it override intrinsic motivation. And you end up with student doing the homework ONLY if it is graded (carrot) or if not doing it is punishable (stick). And not because it give them a learning opportunity.
Schools (I am still referring to France national education) believe that humans dislike learning. This is false. Babies loves learning. School is teaching us that learning should be hard and painful.
If you do teaching, you don't need a carrot or a stick, because authentic learning is fun by itselves !
(I don't want to make this text longer, but this make me question if schools are just doing big mistakes, or if they have been designed in a way that favour something else than learning (eq : have there been malicious intention ?)).
There are sort of three groups at play here, although the boundaries are fuzzy. Some are truly there to learn, in which case there's not much motivation to cheat. Some are there to get a degree because of its implications in the job market, but don't cheat (for better or for worse). And some are there for the piece of paper and will do whatever it takes to get it. I don't fault these people: maybe they have to maintain a certain GPA for a visa or scholarship, or maybe they got COVID and an inflexible professor told them as of 2022 it's "policy" not to offer extensions "just" because of COVID. At least, I wouldn't fault cheaters were it not for the knock-on effects.
Part of me says the faster we dilute the value of a degree (by granting them to people who cheat their way through) the faster we get rid of the wasteful, cost-disease-ridden, elitist status quo for universities (at least in the US) as the amount of entropy afforded to a prospective employer by the presence of a degree drops to zero. But I also want all the work (and $$$) I have put into getting a degree to mean something. Every time someone cheats their way through a course and, despite their degree or GPA, is less competent on the job because of it, they marginally decrease the school's reputation: if the last person with those credentials wasn't actually that good, why would the next? I'm not sure how much this is happening yet, but I think it will increase in the future if cheating remains easy and common. Even discounting "degree seigniorage", if a professor grades on a curve, obviously students that don't cheat will be at a disadvantage. It's not really correct to say "cheaters don't affect you, just focus on your own work."
So why not have everyone cheat? First of all, some people actually want to learn something. Second of all, I think most people would like it less than I if universities and their degrees lost their cultural and economic cachet. Finally, I can't believe I have to say this, but cheating is inequitable: some are better at cheating than others. In the past (and probably still today, but what do I know) this was frats with banks of past assignments and tests. In the last few years, it goes as in the article: someone makes a group chat, though if they have an ounce of sense they won't post a link to it in a chat the professor is monitoring, at least if they intend to cheat through it. Invites spread organically from student to student or from DNS-like "hub" chats where people can ask for invites to any class's group chat. It would be really bad for cheaters if professors were on the "hub", able to join every class's group chat, so invites to the "hub" are guarded more zealously. Obviously they'd never be shared in a Zoom chat or other official platform, so online students (most of them, in 2020 and 2021) are left out. Offline, less socially connected people are less likely to get invited. Personally, even putting morals aside, I would not have been able to cheat if I wanted in the past few years. Cheating was everywhere, but I was anxious enough as it is actually doing the work; the added anxiety of cheating and maybe getting caught (especially in such a dramatic way as in this post!) would have been untenable. Maybe I should demand exam answer keys as a Section 504 accomodation...
This has been going on for decades in Asia (which is why Chinese students cheat so much), and now America is finally here as well.
Academics like to wax poetic about how students are "only cheating themselves" and "losing out on the educational opportunities", but the reality is much more mercenary and down-to-earth: Either you pass this hurdle by hook or by crook, or you spend the rest of your life flipping burgers. It's not a hard choice.
Once you have the piece of paper (regardless of how you got it), you're in the club. So the goal is to obtain that piece of paper by any means necessary.
I’m no sinologist, but isn’t this off by at least an order of magnitude if not two? The imperial civil service exam is famous after all and the Chinese culture is millennia ancient. The incentives for cheating have been around for a very long time.
Yes, but the assumption is you're passing with the knowledge in your head. Having the career knowledge is what in theory allows you to get the job, and then not flip burgers. I'm not sure how students end up thinking it's literally the number of your grade that makes the difference.
Maybe it differs from career to career, because I guess some careers it's a matter of getting your foot in the door and that's it. With more technical careers it's already the case your grade is not as important as demonstrating expertise in the first few months on the job.
Because it literally is true. Students aren't stupid; they know that higher education is largely a sham, and that the number they get and the prestige of the institution is what makes the difference (beyond simply having the paper - which is the most important part of course) in their entry level to the middle class or upper-middle-class workplace. The actual content of their education is largely irrelevant for most places that require it. Only the number matters.
And cheating isn't the only symptom of this problem; grade inflation is another. Both students and faculty are responding rationally to the unspoken truth. To NOT cheat is to increase the risk of living a life of poverty. To NOT inflate grades is to condemn more of your students to that life. Honor codes only mean something in places where everyone is of similar privilege.
As the metric becomes less indicative of reality, the smart people find more creative ways to game it.
But you must get the job first and you generally get a job with a resume. Doesn't matter what is in your head. You better have enough on a one page piece of paper to make people believe you know it. A grade is one piece of evidence you can use for that.
I have a masters and never have I been asked for it for work (either for credentials or because I actually needed the advanced topics in it). Grades never ever been on the table.
As soon as those questions leave the classroom, they will be passed around in group chats. That’s why exams remain relevant. If a student averages 95% on their assignments, but shows up to the exam and can’t solve ∫sin x dx like they had supposedly done a hundred times on their own, then they’re probably cheating.
The math exam which I wrote was also very demanding and had a very tight time limit. There wasn’t any time to compare results with a group chat or use tools like wolfram alpha. Either you knew how to solve the exercises or you didn’t and failed.
You repeat this process every year for 10 years and now you have 200 questions. The next professor comes in and does the same but now also has 200 questions + answer guides.
With some basic programming you could make it automatically change the numbers (to "friendly" numbers that break up into round numbers) and have an infinite pool of challenging quiz, midterm, and final questions. If everyone gets different questions they cannot cheat by sharing answers. Only by sharing approach.
Apart from some high-tech cheating, I'd say it was a reasonably cheat-proof class. I don't know how applicable that model is to calculus though.
Putting a multiple choice test online and expecting students to not take advantage of this examination method is very naive.
What you are describing in an incredibly labor-intensive process. If you want to restructure education so no teacher ever has more than 8 students and 2 classes a semester (and tuition is $100k/yr)... maybe you can make this work.
In the real world, where a teacher has 3 sections of 30 students, "just make exciting and engaging material!" is honestly an asinine statement. You can't spend 2 hours evaluating each student's homework assignment.
Give a quiz that can be completed in your own time over the course of a week. That sounds more like an assignment to me. So... the cheating was violating the rule that it can't be done cooperatively? If I'm cheating by asking other students about an assignment then I think I cheated on everything.
And, of course, I did not. My answers to assignments were my own, but, often, I collaborated with other students to understand the questions, or to develop an idea of how to approach finding the solutions, or to clarify issues that were unclear.
And, always, to make sure I got the right answer. Because if I didn't, it meant that I did not understand something and I needed to go back over the material to work out what that was. Any other approach would have rendered school valueless.
This is the normal process of education. You can tell that I did not cheat because my work and my answers were unique. If I submitted an image of someone else's work, that would be obvious.
Ah, but wait! I think I see. If the answers are multiple choice, that doesn't work.
But why are they multiple choice? To make it easier and cheaper for the school. Your inflation of the profit margin on my education makes me a cheater because you can't tell if I did the work myself? That sounds about right.
I think academic integrity is eroded more by the profit motive than by the Jesuitical definition of cheating in the article.
Even though I went to what are considered some the best schools, the greatest insult to academic integrity was always the faculty, because most of them didn't know the subject they were teaching, faked it, and didn't care.
And when I see many of the students who didn't cheat coming out of school not knowing shit from Shinola, I have to wonder why it matters? You get out what you put in, so who cares if people violate an arcane rule that says, "this, this here is an assignment; but that over there, that thing that looks identical to this in every way, that's a quiz, so don't talk to your friends about it or we'll nip your promising young academic career in the bud. Understand?"
The only lesson here is that you need to cheat better.
But the whole meat of this enormous post is the professor having a massive power trip while toying around with the students, reading every message they post without them knowing.
He knew this cheating was happening pretty early on. He was writing R scripts to cross-reference all the group chat participants to the individuals involved. He wrote up all those reports and then still goes ahead with the second midterm. He obviously took pleasure in examining how they were acting; he has dozens and dozens of individual chat messages pasted into that post complete with his snarky little comments about them:
> “nah i aint cheat i took that exam at 7 and did it alone still failed” (hmmm, let me cross reference this claim with your texts in the chat at 7…)
> “if i find out who snitched we got a problem fr” (I had to report this student to judicial affairs)
There are more and more. The professor is clearly relishing each of these little pieces of evidence, filling out all of those forms, and watching the students squirm and panic as he tells them he knows they're cheating:
> There was no way I was going to keep a straight face, plus I wanted to see what happened on the chat, so I video muted myself (bad internet connection day).
It's borderline sadistic. He could have ended the whole debacle at any point, be he chose to spend dozens of hours poring over this chat and examining the students' reactions to what he was doing. Especially given the conclusion where he put in options for all or most of the students who cheated to redeem themselves - at least partially.
The only constructive piece of this entire post is the end where for the second asynchronous version of the course, he adjusts its design and content to be more engaging and conducive to online learning. The rest is just an obsessive power trip.
So… your students were… studying? This isn’t cheating. There’s more in the article that clearly frames these quizzes as learning reinforcement and permissive in how the students take them. The students were doing what was intended: studying the material and preparing for the exam that matters. Good for them. Shame it got missed in the zealous pursuit of a pervasive cheating racket.
> The author framed students embracing their own educational structure as cheating
Secondly they delayed what really mattered, pointing out that students were putting in a lot of effort to accomplish something just as farcical as what the teacher was doing. Passing a course without learning anything. Because of the self importance off professors and institutions students are given the impression that grades matter. Then they do stuff like this.
Instead the Prof could have immediately said holy crap everyone I just realized I've been logged into chat all year, most of you have been cheating badly, and some of you are getting nothing from this course.
So now we're going to talk about online privacy, security hygiene, and time effort tradeoffs. My goal is for you to be less stupid and better informed when you leave this class.
Then they could go back and find the students who hadn't done any work (other than cheating) and drop them from the class.
FFS teach kids don't play games.
The moral indignation that I'm seeing in the comments about this issue is just silly as the students are just acting the way humans act. Especially given the fact that most students are in their late teens or early 20's.
Cheating is just human nature, especially that some people see a degree a gateway to success or even as survival (no degree no job, no job no food). And as survival machines, like all beings, people will do whatever it takes to get a degree, including cheating least of all.
While college is an academic institution that is supposed to be about acquiring knowledge, the fact that almost every well paying job requires a degree perverses the incentives leading it to be a place where you get a diploma so you can move on with your life.
So should we just tolerate cheating, with all this in mind? No, I think the burden of preventing cheating should be on the schools themselves to design testing in a way that makes cheating harder than actually learning the subject and to make learning more engaging even for those who are there just to get a diploma. This is hard of course.
An even better solution would be to fix our current system that creates these perverse incentives. But that is even harder and I can't even phantom how that would be done.
It was inappropriate for this instructor to join the chat and silently surveil their students. When they saw the students exchanging information like that the first time after forgetting about it, they should have posted a warning on the thread and left.
Some of the energy of analyzing their students cheating would have been better spent looking at how to make the assessment of learning more resistant to a student sharing a screenshot of a question.
Why? It allowed him to gather evidence of who was invoiced and provide them with a second chance. And apparently it really helped students in the next course to be more honest.
To be honest I think academic integrity policies are stupid. Colleges administrators are living in a pretend world that doesn’t exist where they think the kids are there because they care and dont just want the piece of paper they are paying 200K for so they can go get a job in the real world and start paying down their debt.
Im so incredibly past giving a shit about cheating in college.
If there is a policeman, the onus of enforcement lies on the policeman. The teacher plays this role by giving a grade. Any teacher that allows cheating is encouraging it.
The system is absolutely fucked.
It's exactly this. I didn't cheat in college, I've always hated cheaters, plus obviously I didn't want the risk of potentially being caught. People I was friends with in my CS degree, to my knowledge, didn't cheat either. Maybe they were cheating and I just didn't notice or something, but I think it's unlikely.
When I was an undergrad TA for our intro CS class, we did have to deal with some cheaters, but not that many. Either it's because it's BYU, where the level of honesty is higher (I'd lose stuff all the time, and even laptops would show up at the lost and found), or we just sucked at finding the cheaters.
That's awful and not my experience.
> To be honest I think academic integrity policies are stupid
What's the point of waiting four years to give cheaters a degree? If they're not going to learn anything it's a complete waste, just hand it to them when they pay the lump sum.