Hacker News Reader

I get where you're coming from, but I tend to lean more towards the teacher's approach. The big problem in this class was that there was a culture of cheating -- it was the norm, and anyone who joined the WhatsApp group was automatically pulled into it. I imagine many of the students who did cheat would not have done so if it didn't fall into their lap like that.

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.

How long do you think a "culture of cheating" will survive if it's punished severely? Not very long. That's part of the point.

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.

There are many studies that show that harsher punishments don't reduce crime, infact they make people act in very extreme ways once they realize they have already been caught. What you want is revenge since you seem to be a student who never copied , unfortunately revenge is no way to run a society(Pro-tip rehabilitation is the way to run society). Personally I think degree hold too much weight on one's future and I have little to no respect for them so cheating in a quiz is no big deal.

Many of the students in this article showed very clearly what they thought about their "rehabilitation": just another system to be gamed with lip-service and as little effort or change as possible. They won't treat it as anything else unless it hurts. I'm sorry, but you can't seriously propose to remove all punishment and be taken seriously. And I also don't think you can even seriously argue that failing a student for a class is too severe, either. It's not even necessarily denying them the degree, as long as they stop fucking cheating. That's your goal too, right?

Fine I agree with everything you have just said, its just that there was so much venom in your message before it seemed all you wanted was revenge and not interested in what the most optimal solution was. Second chances are important , had they cheated in an exam fail them but a multiple choice quiz done online with multiple retries possible at best deserves a zero. The reality though is too many of them were cheating to all be failed (speaking practically), what are you going to do, have the class with double the students next year ? If anything they should be failed for adding their teacher to the group chat and trying to cheat as a collective lol.

Yeah, well, part of the venom is because the "optimal solution" is both easy and obvious but institutions are still too cowardly to implement it. (Again, the point is to make this a consistent thing, not wait until you reach the point where 75% of the class is blatantly cheating.)

Your moralizing and virtue signalling is missing the point.

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.

"Clear guidelines" or standards were not the issue here. They were directly copying answers from each other. There is no chance anyone honestly thought this was ok. That goes triple for the ones plagiarizing their apology letters.

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.

> "Clear guidelines" or standards were not the issue here. They were directly copying answers from each other.

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.

I heard you the first time. I've been in those classes. It's still irrelevant to this case.

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.

I think the situation is more complex than just "we must assume they don't care about learning ... just fail the bastards." I think it's more important to first understand what were the social, environmental, cultural (and otherwise) causes of this behavior.

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.

> 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.

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.