Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

So I think the teacher missed the main point of his own essay:

"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.

I don't think your interpretation is supported: it's not that the course was "too hard" without cheating, the cheating began at the outset.

Which is one of the most interesting takeaways for me. What this guy was dealing with was a cultural problem - a toxic culture had developed in the temporary group/space.

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.

Not only was the course not "too hard", the author give plenty of indications that the course is actually pretty easy. The quizzes everyone was cheating on were open-book. At one point, a student in the group chat recommended that people look things up in the course textbook:

"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.

From the author:

"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 this meant for social purposes, more than academic ones

He did find a better system, I recommend reading the article in depth.

As much as the OP claims they take cheating seriously and as an opportunity to engage with students and have them learn amongst other noble undertakings.

I think they just really enjoy catching people cheat and see how far it goes. Sort of masochistic tbh

I’d like to add, that supposed “superstar” student who read the chat to learn the other class info and left to not read the cheating… “sent no texts”.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com