Am I the Unethical One? | Hacker News Reader

Am I the Unethical One?

dailynous.com

133 pointsHR01368 comments

One thing I want to say here is that "entrapment" isn't a moral principle; it's a legal one, and it isn't universal. We don't get it from English Common Law, where it wasn't widely known before the founding of the US, and was rejected when it did come up. Entrapment is a checks-and-balances balance of power mechanism, not a general rule of conduct.

Furthermore, while we don't reach the question of whether this dummy test constituted entrapment (because it doesn't matter), it's also simply not entrapment under the US legal definition (arguably the most important such definition). In the US, an entrapment defense requires you to (1) admit that you did the bad thing, (2) prove that you were somehow coerced (at least psychologically) into doing that bad thing, and (3) prove that you had no predisposition to doing the bad thing. You're searching for exam questions and memorizing a bogus final exam. You know you're cheating, you know it's wrong, and you do it anyways. You're culpable.

Indeed. Entrapment is such a narrow case and is designed to stop the government from taking advantage of vulnerable people.

If you call someone who has just lost their job and is not able to feed their baby and say if you do this drug deal I’ll get you enough to buy baby food that’s entrapment, assuming they weren’t already involved in the drugs trade and this “crime” would never have happened without the government willing it into existence.

And to be clear on the other end (with requisite IANAL) - If the undercover officer says "You holding? I got cash", it is not entrapment. Simply making a request for a transaction isn't entrapment, even if you're being circumspect. Even if you're aggressive about it - "I know you're holding, give me the drugs, man" - That's not entrapment, especially if they are actually "holding". Entrapment is a narrow defense - The Government forced me to do something I would not otherwise have done. If someone other than the government (and it's agents) coerces you, that's not entrapment (but may be a defense).

This cartoon is a great overview of the legal aspects of entrapment.

https://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-w...

That is great. Thanks for sharing.

Agreed. I'm no moral authority nor expert in ethics but this is pretty cut and dry to me. I think the most important aspect of entrapment (although all are relevant in the legal sense) is the second clause: coercion.

Without being explicitly coerced into doing something "illegal" (cheating in this case) I don't see how there could ever be a case to make that this is immoral. The students are cheating of their own free will. Case closed.

The coercion's implicit.

Ever since these students were 9 years old, everyone around them including (and especially) those in public education have told them that they need to go to college and get a degree or they'd be destitute and living in a ghetto.

Then they get there and college is even more absurd than public school ever was. They sit in a giant lecture hall listening to these people who don't live in the real world with the rest of us talk about things that do not matter (how many credits were for something other than electives or your major when you went?), threatening to flunk them if they can't jump through pointless hoops.

So, they go back to the dorm after class, and do research the best way they know how, and they find relevant study materials. Did he catch them smuggling the answers into class on a phone, or written in microscopic print on the inside of the rims of their glasses? Were they copying someone else's tests? Did they pay a lookalike ringer to sit in on the exam for them?

Hell no. They did what they were supposed to do. They found what they thought were the correct answers, and went over them enough that they could remember them during the test.

Why would anyone bother to go to this trouble? Because they were coerced. They've been coerced since they were children. He doesn't get a free pass because someone else volunteered to do the coercion for him.

I might be a little more forgiving if they were philosophy majors. If that were the case, then presumably they chose this field of study, and the class itself is relevant to that such that they should be putting in more effort... but even in that case, it is sufficient to fail them, because the low scores are their only real failing. Even then they haven't cheated.

I am sorry but you make a real tour-de-force out of how they are the victim of going to a site that is meant to facilitate cheating by looking up answers to exams, not learning.

You learn by knowing the material, and if you know the material, you don’t have to cheat

Now you can come up with all kind circumstances that make it hard on the students, as you do in your comment, but that’s another discussion entirely and imo outside the scope.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that society treating people with university degrees better than those without is harmful in a sociological sense and likely to increase cheating in universities. I'm less sympathetic to individual students actually cheating in the manner described.

The article says the test was take home, meaning in a practical sense, they could access any resources they wanted while taking the test. They did not need to memorize material as your comment suggests, and would have had the opportunity to copy answers.

> Were they copying someone else's tests?

Yes. They were copying what they thought were a previous student's answers to the same test.

> Yes. They were copying what they thought were a previous student's answers to the same test.

It's fucking multiple choice. If they got correct answers, then their answers would be identical to previous student's correct answers, by definition.

If doing that is cheating, then only the first students to ever get those questions on a test could pass it.

There's some sort of widespread mental illness affecting a large percentage of the population, such that apparently so many of you see this as cheating.

You get that, right? If you learn the answers to questions that end up appearing on the test prior to the test commencing, and you put those answers down on the test because you have memorized them (you know them in other words), this can't ever be cheating. That's not what "cheating" means.

Multiple choice is a red herring here. One can equally memorize answers to a non multiple choice test.

If the point of the test is to check that students understand the material, and if students aren't allowed to look at the answers of previous tests ("looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating"), then memorizing the correct answers to previous tests is cheating.

Memorizing the material is the goal! Being an ethics class, I would have anticipated the gaming of the cheater site. When I saw the wrong answers, I would have laughed my ass off and gone on with life.

Memorizing A/B/C/D answers to a particular selection of exam questions is not the goal of any sensible class.

To be clear, you’re saying that memorizing a sequence of multiple choice answers (like ABBCADADD etc…) is not “cheating” and equivalent to properly learning the material? Yeah… I don’t think you’d have many people agreeing with you there. Imagine if that’s how your doctor got his medical degree.

Entrapment and RICO!

So....these students aren't morally failed cheaters, they are just bad researchers who will copy bad information from random Internet sites?

Your honor, I saw this bicycle just sitting there unlocked. If it hadn't been there, I wouldn't have stolen it. It coerced me. I needed a bike.

Give me a break. They cheated. Case closed.

the test... was a take home... they, well, did not have to remember anything, nor recall anything, nor sit down and take a test -- they copied answers from the available source.

this whole comment unfortunately has taken quite a liberty with its defense of the students and perceived "due diligence".

This feels like you're saying all monetary theft should be legal because of inherent coercion in our capitalistic society.

It seems to me that this could be entrapment in the sense that by putting the exam on the site the professor may have created the perception that it was trivially easy to cheat. That could cause a student who normally wouldn't cheat to decide to do so because they felt that it was necessary in order to stay competitive.

A student who normally wouldn't cheat is not going to go site designing for cheaters, and would not be searching for their finals there. Heck, in my entire college carrier I didn't even know such sites existed.

If professor (or TA) made announcement along the lines of "Don't go to Quizlet and don't download my past exams from there", maybe you'd have a point.. but they did not.

Ah, but those sites are often the top Search results if you search for a distinctive phrase from the assignments. The student may not pay for access, but they will certainly be presented with tantalizing snippets of many solutions.

And many of those solutions are bad ones. They may contain B.S., wrong answers, and things students didn't learn with the class resources. If you copy/paste one of the solutions, you may evade detection and earn a "C".

That's not "entrapment". If all it takes for you to commit an offense is the perception that other people are doing it too, you're predisposed and require no coercion, and thus culpable.

Just to be absolutely clear: it doesn't matter; even if it was "entrapment", it's not necessarily unethical. Plenty of western countries don't recognize entrapment defenses. But it's also just not entrapment.

I would disagree about entrapment not being a moral principle (or its related to one at least). At its core it is basically just saying it is wrong to convince people who wouldn't otherwise be evil, to be evil.

However this is case is clearly not entrapment.

Well, it's not that it's wrong to convince people to do evil that otherwise would not (arguably, that is conspiracy and is a crime).

The defense is that it's not okay to punish someone for doing something evil they otherwise would not have done if it wasn't for the punishing authorities explicit actions.

Kind of a 'you can't arrest people for crimes you convince them to do' defense.

Besides the ethics of it, there's a productivity aspect. It's like when the British paid for dead snakes in India and people bred snakes. This means there's no reduction in wild snakes.

If three big dudes encircle a guy in an alleyway and say "you want to buy this stolen car stereo for $40, right?" and then you bust the guy for pulling out his wallet, you have done nothing to reduce the demand for stolen property in your city. You caught the demand, but you also created it. (The feature is a built-in amplifier, but the benefit is not getting your ass beat.)

Agreed - the ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’ doctrine is very similar IMO. Making it possible to use evidence collected illegally means they’ll just do that all the time. So make it useless, so they’ll actually follow the rules.

The exclusionary rule of evidence (of "poisonous tree" fame) is another great example of a legal principle that isn't really an ethical principle, and is anything but universal: most of Europe doesn't have it.

Today I had to submit my final grades for my Java class, meaning I had to grade all the final exams for it last night.

During the exam (which I had to administer remotely this time) I made it abundantly clear that they cannot use any kind of AI assistance for their work. No ChatGPT, no Copilot, no Bing AI, no Google Bard, and also no Googling, etc. I repeated this several times and also wrote it in bold font on the top of the test. I really didn't have any way to enforce this, but I was hoping people would be honest.

I'm pretty sure that most of the students were honest on this; the answers I got generally fine, but had grammatical mistakes and were "basically correct but had light factual errors that are common with people new to programming but aren't bad enough to count as 'wrong'". One student, however, who has submitted broken sentences and broken code the entire semester, managed to suddenly have decent writing skills, decent explanations of everything, and his code was clean and concise.

I'm about 95% sure he used ChatGPT to generate answers to the questions. I tried getting ChatGPT (and Bard and Bing AI) to give me a word-for-word copy of what he submitted, but I couldn't. It got somewhat close, but never an exact match.

Technically, it's possible that he just studied very very hard and his code and grammar improved. It's also technically possible that he used Grammarly to make sure his writing was ok (which was technically against the rules but I wouldn't really consider cheating in a Java class), and so I just had to swallow my pride and grade the test assuming he was being honest.

It's kind of upset me all day; I have worked pretty hard trying my best to be available to students if they have questions, and I worked pretty hard to try and make sure that the final exam was a reasonable level of difficulty. I think most of my students were fine, but one bad apple is enough to really ruin my day.

Whilst it's unfortunate this kid might be cheating the system, I don't think it's worth being upset if they got through. The point of these exams is to allow students to study and learn these topics, which it sounds like they did. It sounds like while maybe you failed in gatekeeping the cheaters (an impossible post gpt task) you have succeeded in the real goal which was to help these kids learn and improve.

Oh I largely agree; I'm kind of learning that you have to view teaching as somewhat more of a "statistical success" than anything else.

It's just one of those things that while you're totally right, the one or two bits of failure kind of nag at me. It's extremely easy to take these things personally (especially for a nascent teacher like me) when in reality I should likely view things as transactional.

A good and reasonable sentiment. It's a very human thing for people who are largely successful at something to fixate unproductively on failures--and in this case you can't even conclusively say that it was a "failure".

I think it's good. This sort of thing will move Universities back to being about teaching and research instead of vending credentials.

I've gone back and forth about how I feel about grades as a whole.

I do feel that by having these tests and grades that it does, indeed, sort of become just a transactional way to "vend credentials" instead of focusing on learning. I also think that often homework and tests aren't great measurements; I was bad about doing homework in college the first time around, and it was frustrating to the professors because I was doing horrible grade-wise, but was extremely active during class and generally did fine on the tests. I was mostly learning the material (at least well enough to get an A on the exams), but because I wasn't submitting my assignments, they would be forced to give me a C or a D.

At the same time, I really haven't figured out a better system. I would be open alternative systems, but I think grades and grading and tests do the best job for the "average case".

Maybe I should email some of my old professors and apologize for the headaches I probably gave them...

> This sort of thing will move Universities back to being about teaching and research instead of vending credentials.

I don’t see this happening unless jobs stop caring about credentials or become more willing accept other forms of credentials.

Of course I’m assuming you aren’t specifically talking about software, which doesn’t have nearly the amount of credentialism as many other fields.

Today you learned a lesson. You will need to add to your course work how GPT can get things wildly wrong. Just a simple example should not be too terribly hard to find. Then plant the seed 'if it has that wrong what else is it getting wrong? It is a good tool of getting the general idea but one you need to audit. This class is where you are going to learn the basics and know when this thing is wrong when you use it' That thing is not going away any time soon.

I actually did say something more or less exactly like that pretty early into the course.

Something to the effect of "ChatGPT is pretty cool, I like it, but it will just make stuff up sometimes in extremely convincing way. It's a tool that's dangerous to newbies and powerful to professionals, and I'm hoping this class will help you get closer to the latter".

Ah good. A very small demonstration probably would drive the point home. It is one thing to hear that but another to see it yourself.

But clearly it gets things right often enough to be worth using to cheat on a test or assignment.

Also, how GPT can get things right, and that if students use GPT (because it's the early days of the graphing calculator all over again but now for code) then the exercise is not "write the code" but "explain the conditions under which this code doesn't work, and why" because if you're taking a programming class it doesn't matter what writes the code, what matters is whether you understand that code. So if you're turning the exercise into a code audit by using GPT, you better damn well be able to explain what problems are left in the code it generated.

> You will need to add to your course work how GPT can get things wildly wrong. Just a simple example should not be too terribly hard to find. Then plant the seed 'if it has that wrong what else is it getting wrong?

People did the same thing for Wikipedia and it was never convincing. And they eventually lost the battle. It's going to require more than that to do the same for GPT.

I wonder if it would be worth it to give some sort of in person feedback to convey (a) you noticed the dramatic improvement (b) you were even worried they might be cheating (c) you decided to give them the benefit of the doubt (d) congratulations on their hard work paying off (e) but if they did cheat they got lucky and if they keep it up it's going to backfire on them one day.

Yeah, I've drafted a few emails that I have not sent stating more or less what you listed, in "decreasingly-pissy" tones.

I think by tonight I'll have cooled off enough to write an appropriate email.

I really don't think this is a good idea.

If I got an email half accusing me of cheating I would complain to anyone who would listen.

Honestly, unless the grade for that class translates into taking something directly tangible from other students, and a "java" class sounds pretty intro, I wouldn't give any thought to it. Cramming for exams and then immediately forgetting everything you hastily memorized is a-okay even though you didn't learn anything either.

A random college class, to me, isn't the kind of thing where cheating really matters. The stakes are low, it's expected that most students will do well, and everyone gets the same degree at the end. If someone wants to sabotage their own education then fine, and if it doesn't bite them later good for them.

Yeah, I'll admit that the problem is somewhat on my end, but I find it very hard not to take these kinds of things personally. I agree that I shouldn't take them personally, but that's easier said than done.

I'm starting to see this come up in coding interviews.

I had one candidate that struggled MIGHTILY on a coding problem that was easy (kept running into syntax errors) but then pulled out an esoteric solution for the second problem in no time flat.

I can't prove that he was cheating but it very highly suggestive that he is.

I hate it, but I'm starting to think I have to do an AI detection question now. It's not hard, just ask someone to do something impossible. However, I don't like the fact that now I need to be "tricky". I've never believed in making coding challenges hard, I just want to see if you can write code.

I saw something similar in a recent interview. I brought in a candidate who did not meet all of the typical resume check boxes, but who had a long history of success on highly technical problems. These type of candidates can bring very new perspectives to our team, but they’re often a long shot in interviews.

In this case the candidate chose to use a language that I don’t know well and they said they weren’t especially familiar with either. Then they struggled a lot to even talk through the question and it was a grind to work through each line of code. I couldn’t offer much help, and they were very clearly unsure at each step.

But when we clicked “run” on the code, we were both surprised to see that it ran on the first try. Not only that, but it already worked for all of the “but what about…” follow up edge cases. And the candidate didn’t know why… “oh, I guess the language just works that way.”

I don’t know if they were cheating, but the entire thing was far outside any other interview experience I’ve ever had — and fits the pattern of what I’d expect an LLM to produce.

this is me using ocaml

Seems like there's a silver lining here. It reinforces the idea that the answer to the problem is not necessarily the important part. When you can trivially provide a correct answer, it places more emphasis on the skill of being able to actually explain and work through the logic as a way to distinguish yourself from other candidates.

You didn't hire them, right?

I'm a pretty good practical programmer, good at noticing potential edge cases, writing code that's changeable without being overcomplicated. This based on feedback across years of professional work.

I also have adhd and literally brain damage and have worked professionally in about a dozen different programming languages. I can't write a for loop or declare a static method or w/e in any of them without googling the syntax or using my editor's hints & autocomplete.

That's fine and all, but not what was happening.

They had google access and editor hints. Further, I start every interview with "please, ask any questions, we aren't trying to trick you we just want to see if you can code." And I mean it. If someone has a minor problem with remembering syntax or how to declare it I don't really care and will happily let them know how to do that.

Heck, I've even had interactions where a candidate was like "I think there's a method that does x for this" in a language I was unfamiliar with, so I googled up what x was and shared it with them mid interview. "Oh yeah, looks like this is what does x for your language".

There was also some pretty weird behaviors with the camera/screen that caused them to need to touch it fairly frequently (I'm guessing to take over keyboard control from the AI software they were using).

What they were doing, repeatedly, though the interview was writing

`a[i]` then having to change it to `a.get(i)` because they were working with a `List` in java. I get maybe doing that once or twice, but in the course of the interview they did it every single time they needed to pull something out of the list. (and each time needed to touch their screen and take a few minutes to correct it). This is why I strongly suspected cheating. It extended a question that normally takes 15 minutes to 35 minutes. Then the question I ask that usually takes ~45 minutes they completed in 15 with an optimal solution that relies on a data structure I literally only learned about because the interview hints for the question are like "Hey, java has this data structure that makes everything easier".

Yeah I get it. This is one of those things that's really hard to convincingly describe online because each individual thing is explainable eg I will write a[i] every time and my format-on-save will change it to List.get(a, i) every newline or whatever.

But you were there and I wasn't and if the overall situation seemed suspicious to you that's evidence at least as strong as any specific thing. Intuition can certainly pick up on weird behavior even if it's hard to explain how after the fact.

This may be an unpopular point of view, but I think in situations like this, you should just pass on them. They are applying to tens of jobs and your company is interviewing tens of candidates, so there's no real reason for either of you to continue this process if they struggled on the easy problem and had questionable reasoning on the hard problem. However, if the candidate could very clearly explain the esoteric solution, there is a good chance that it's just similar to something she has done before and you should not be suspicious.

I am assuming that you had a compiler or IDE in this situation providing a useful error message. If you were whiteboard coding and you were telling the candidate "you have a syntax error but I won't tell you where" (like several folks at a former employer of mine were fond of), you may be the problem, not the candidate.

We ultimately did pass.

> I am assuming that you had a compiler or IDE in this situation providing a useful error message.

Yup. I prefer to give candidates compilers/IDEs and even access to google if they ask about it. Like I said, I'm not trying to trick them or anything, I just want to know if they can code.

> If you were whiteboard coding and you were telling the candidate "you have a syntax error but I won't tell you where"

I'd hate being on the receiving end of that and would never pull that sort of stunt. The software we use allows both sides to edit the code and I pretty regularly will go in and silently fix syntax errors for a candidate so as not to let a compile/refresh loop get in the way of actually solving the problem.

Like, what does "You have a syntax error" even prove? I'd let you write pure pseudo code so long as it makes sense.

I just don't like "mind games" in interviews.

I still make syntax errors all the time.

I've been writing code for pay for more than 20 years and will forget basic syntax and keywords for a language I wrote hundreds of lines in yesterday without other code to crib off of, IDE assistance, and/or reference material (google, whatever). Like, I'll forget if it's "else if" or "elsif" or "elseif" or "elif" or whatever. Or I'll mix up how to access hash/list members. How to designate a constructor. Stuff like that.

Universities are going to have to adjust. That's really all there is to it. It's not that hard for an exam, since you can put them in a properly designed classroom with human monitors. Homework? Projects? Much more difficult.

The current system worked in 1960. Not in 2023, and probably not since the late 1990s, when technology started to make our evaluation processes obsolete.

Exams used to be a larger part of school grades. In my area, they were devalued and the reason that was given was that exams favored males over females.

I would suggest you ask him. Offer him immunity and ask him. For your peace of mind and so that in the future you can be better prepared.

Can I ask what’s the point of testing students in a scenario where they don’t have access to AI tools? As a software developer I use these tools daily, and if I or my colleagues stopped our productivity would suffer - it sounds like the same genre of thinking that leads to having students write out code by hand because using an IDE is “cheating”.

If it would be possible to take a bottom-tier CS student and turn them into a decent programmer using AI tools, the hiring landscape would be /very/ different. These tools aren’t magic, and to me it sounds like the tests are failing at measuring the students competence if they can so easily be gamed by using an AI/old fashioned googling.

Maybe the solution should be to move towards a style of exam/grading that actually measures the competence of the student in a situation closer to what a professional developer will be in, rather than an old fashioned artificial exam setting?

An evaluation for a course should measure how much of the subjects of the course the students learned. It's not a job success simulator, nor a measure of unrelated skills.

So the students are disallowed or discouraged from learning how to use tools like AI in the courses they take?

Student are neither disallowed or discouraged from learning them. The are not allowed to use them during unrelated test.

Why is the test unrelated to learning methods?

Should we give grade students calculators on their tests that ask for the result of 1+1? Or 10x3?

This follows the same logic as banning calculators when teaching people basic arithmetic. When something is a replacement for your learning, it should be banned, and when it is an augmentation, it should be encouraged.

You may think it's ridiculous, but many people today can't calculate a 20% tip or add two prices together without a calculator because the constant use of calculators has caused their arithmetic skills to atrophy. This seems like a silly gripe, except a lot of other skills are built around these basic ones: for arithmetic, the ability to estimate the cost or time taken to do something is all based on tricks you learn when you are trying to learn mental math. Society is not worse off for this (enough of us still know how to do these things), but many people are poorer, both intellectually and monetarily, due to a lack of arithmetic skills. And no, this lost knowledge of arithmetic is not replaced by a knowledge of higher math - it tends to come with a fear of it.

The same applies with text-generating AI. In terms of writing, if you don't learn to write dumb essays about books, skills like learning to construct an argument are much harder to pick up. For people writing code, learning to slog through writing and debugging a doubly linked list (something ChatGPT can reliably generate for you today) leads you to later being able to slog through debugging B-trees or lock-free queues (which ChatGPT definitely cannot write for you).

I think there is a very compelling argument along these lines for low-level courses to ban AI tools. However, higher-level courses probably should allow students to add them to their repertoire, where they are an aid and not a crutch. This follows how mathematicians and engineers learn to use calculators and computer algebra tools, which seems to work well.

I don’t think it ridiculous at all. I’m not sure if your comment was an argument, a counter-argument or just a comment.

>people today can't calculate a 20% tip

Earlier this week, I spent several minutes talking one of my co-workers through how I 'did math in my head' to figure out my half of the 20% tip we were leaving for lunch. Even something as rudimentary as moving the decimal place over one and doubling the result seemed like wizardry to them.

They aren't dumb. They've literally just never thought one second past reaching for a calculator. Which is kind of scary, because it means they have no way of sanity checking any numbers they come up with.

Most people today can't make fire by hand either because we have tools for it.

It's a good thing that the skills involved in making fire by hand don't transfer to disciplines that matter. The same cannot be said for arithmetic and writing.

I know a person who does interviews for programming positions who asks "what is 20% of 20,000?" The ones who are flummoxed by it are no hires. So are the ones who pull up a calculator app on their phone.

A person who knows how to code without access to AI tools means when they have access to AI tools their productivity would increase but they will also be able to point out mistakes, if any, in the generated code.

A person who does not know how to code without access to AI tools means they will consistently push bugs generated by AI, affecting the teams productivity, if any.

If this is the case, wouldn't you expect their grades to reflect this as well due to the generated code answering exam questions having errors?

The exam questions are likely simpler than an entire application would be; using AI to write bubble sort is trivial but getting it to understand the full context of your application is much less so.

ChatGPT can solve most LeetCode questions, but I don't think most people here are ready to replace their junior developers with it.

Not on a class that teaches programming to beginners, no. Would you?

I at least partially share this sentiment for hiring interviews. In that setting, the goal of any kind of coding exercise is to evaluate a persons coding skills in a real-world environment. For something like that, it does not make much sense to hobble the developer by artificially limiting their access to coding resources that are normally employed while on the job.

However, I feel like an academic exam is a bit different. The goal of these exams is to evaluate what students have _learned_. Unless the class was about how to find helpful code examples on SO, it does not make much sense to allow AI/internet-searching during the exam.

    Maybe the solution should be to move towards a 
    style of exam/grading that actually measures the 
    competence of the student in a situation closer to 
    what a professional developer will be in, rather than 
    an old fashioned artificial exam setting?

Most "real world" software development work involves understanding existing code and/or choosing solutions.

AI can help you write a linked list, but can it help you know that you need a linked list vs. a queue or a binary tree? Can it help you to make more architecture-y decisions like deciding whether you need a document database, a traditional SQL RDBMS, or maybe something else?

I'm not in a teaching role but those are the kinds of things I'd like to see examinations cover -- what tool or data structure are you choosing, and why is it the appropriate tool for this specific case?

Or, similarly, can the student understand existing code and fix bugs or make performance improvements?

Bottom line, though: professors should just absolutely accept the reality of AI. Assume all students are using AI tools. Actively mandate or at least encourage their use in order to ensure a level playing field.

And then fail them all because none of them have learned anything.

> Can I ask what’s the point of testing students in a scenario where they don’t have access to AI tools?

It's not just the issue of "what if they didn't have access to ChatGPT?"

Just as an example: ChatGPT is literally the world's biggest bullshitter. It vacuums up vast stores of "data" (note: NOT "knowledge"), and just pulls out words that it thinks could likely follow from previous words given a context.

Quite often is produces silly, or even dangerously wrong, answers. You need to be pretty well skilled in the art to catch it at its bullshit.

It's just like when you hire assistants to do something critical for you. You have to be able to verify their work, or you have to be able to trust them blindly.

Think of it this way. I use a calculator to do less trivial arithmetic. However, knowing how to multiply means I understand what multiplication is rather than just a number that inexplicably appears on the calculator screen.

I've known engineers who did not understand the analytical tools they were using. They misused them constantly.

This is like asking "what's the point of not allowing students to use Google during their Maths exams" or "why bother with English exams when Grammarly exists".

The point is to gain some knowledge yourself. Obviously you'll use new tools and methods later when you eventually get a job, but the point of most courses is to teach you the concepts, not how to command the IDE. Whether you decide to hand-craft assembly code or become professional a Copilot suggestion approver doesn't really matter.

> Can I ask what’s the point of testing students in a scenario where they don’t have access to AI tools?

It's a question of: Are you testing for understanding or ability? Both have their merits, but often the goal is the former. If it were a project, it is generally the latter.

> Can I ask what’s the point of testing students in a scenario where they don’t have access to AI tools?

So that they can tell when the AI tools get things wrong. Which is always.

Basic arithmetic and calculators.

I'm old: when I went to school we weren't allowed calculators "because there'll be a situation where you need to do basic arithmetic and don't have a calculator". I occasionally laugh at this while firing up the calculator app on my phone. We'd have been better off if they'd taught us sign language rather than arithmetic.

Our education system is going to have to adjust to the new reality. Setting an essay task is now the equivalent of learning the times table - utterly redundant (unless you plan on a career writing essays or doing maths).

The most 'fair' math classes (specifically, I'm thinking of algebra and calculus type courses) I have been in, allowed a good in-between. Basically, you were totally allowed to use a Calculator, even one with a built-in CAS, but you -had- to show the in-between steps if you did so on a test.

This was pretty useful in it's own right, as you at least had a way to check your work, and frankly it was extremely useful for helping me solidify knowledge in those fields. [0]

Of course, AI muddles this, since it can explain the steps for you.

That may be the strawman, but that's not the real reason why people ban calculators when you learn arithmetic. The reason is because learning to manipulate numbers in your head abstracts to other things, like learning to estimate and learning to manipulate equations.

Higher-level math classes usually encourage calculators, and graduate-level math classes will often allow Matlab or Mathematica, as long as you can write a short sentence explaining what the computer algebra system is doing. Where I went to school, this was colloquially called "proof by Steven (Wolfram)."

It is a strawman. But I wonder how much better we'd be able to do those other things if we'd been taught to do them with calculators as a tool instead of being forced to do the basic arithmetic in our heads.

If you look at the natural experiment on that in society right now, much worse.

Many people today do math only with a calculator and correspondingly lack any sort of numerical reasoning skills whatsoever, despite having learned both mental math and numerical reasoning in school. That growth of innumeracy coincides with the rise of calculators and computers who do it for you.

Also, students are taught in more advanced classes to use calculators (and later computer algebra systems) as a tool. This comes after they have learned the basics, not as a replacement for the basics.

Writing (hello ChatGPT) and math are like muscles: use it or lose it. If you can't do the basic versions, you can't do the harder stuff either.

See also the ability to read a map...

I'm fascinated by linguistics, and once attempted a degree in Deaf Studies, so yes on the sign language (it's not a language, by the way: it's a class of languages, alongside spoken language, which is another class of languages), but the idea that basic arithmetic is worthless is completely alien to me.

Not worthless, obviously, I was maybe being a tad overblown ;)

But I do think that as we move forward with technological tools for this kind of mental task, that we should embrace them in our education system. If we have to teach every generation from first principles then we won't get them comfortable with the actual tech they'll be using in their lives.

thanks for the clarification on sign language :) One of those things on my bucket list that I keep meaning to learn but never get started on.

So the purpose of academia is teach pupils a subject, that they can the use in real life.

When you're solving the same problems in real life you do have access to all those tools that you banned. Because in real life, if you manage to solve a problem it doesn't matter that much how you solved it.

Sure, if you just Google things and always solve your problems by copy pasting. Your solutions will lack depth, and at some point this will catch up to you.

My point is, cheating is primarily cheating on yourself, and it will catch up to you.

I think this is the framing you should have with regards to cheating.

> Technically, it's possible that he just studied very very hard and his code and grammar improved.

As an early procrastinator (rehabilitated perhaps?) I've had a history of doing very well on finals through cramming.

In your student's case it might very well be more likely they are cheating, but those unlikely but possible students who study extra hard to recover their grades for a final deserve the benefit of the doubt.

How unlikely can academic recovery get? I spent an entire semester completely lost in a second level Macroeconomics course...

... I was able to read and write chapter summaries of a semester and a half of content (about 15 chapters, corresponding to the first level and the second level courses) in a single weekend and aced the exam, with the highest marks in the class.

That was the hardest I've ever crammed in my life and I had trouble speaking in the hours that followed the study session.

I later got a recommendation letter from that prof, totally worth it.

Some students cheat. As an adjunct instructor at the university level, I had similar experiences.

You have to both adjust your expectations and make a significant part of your grading use an in-person one-on-one oral exam or project walkthrough.

It is a huge commitment of time - most professors I know seem to have quietly accepted cheating will be be rewarded because they don't have enough time to verify student performance.

It seems we want to turn universities into McDonalds where we push high numbers, but also pretend they are elite institutions that we can charge premium prices for. This is not going to work well in an age of ever increasing automated intelligence...

Well, lest of course the students sit under the watchful eye of AI in the near future

> I made it abundantly clear that they cannot use any kind of AI assistance for their work

You're swimming against the riptide. If I were teaching coding today, I'd allow, even encourage, use of AI, with some ground rules. Students using AI would have to show their work (i.e. the conversation with the machine).

The content of the prompts and in particular follow-up questions, can demonstrate competence. E.g. situations in which the student spotted that something was wrong in the generated code and made an intelligent hint to the machine to fix it.

Students should be prepared for tomorrow's world, not yesterday's.

By that logic wouldn’t it be ok for grade schoolers to use calculators when they are learning basic math? Sure you can teach someone how to get an answer, but have you actually given them an understanding of the material to be built upon?

Kids should be using calculators in kindergarten. You can discover a lot of curious things about the numbers with calculators. Like when you multiply by 5 and keep doing it, the last two digits are always 25, and the hundreds digit bounces between 1 and 6. You can discover that without a calculator, but it's more time consuming.

If we want to ensure kids can do arithmetic without calculators, we can have exams in which there are no calculators.

You can give them homework problems in which they have to fill in all the work steps of multiplication and long division, e.g.:

       ______
   17 | 2091
       -__
         __
        -__
          __
          __

If you want to ensure that the students know and follow a certain process in obtaining an answer, you can't just test the production of an answer. You have to white box it.

Kids should know time tables to about 12. Beyond that, you can test whether they know the structure of long multiplication and division and such.

“If we want to ensure kids can do arithmetic without calculators, we can have exams in which there are no calculators.”

Which is exactly what the parent was trying to do with a an exam that forbade the use of AI.

Given that this was an ethics course, I think it's interesting/surprising that the professor doesn't seem to be trying to engage with what I'm guessing was the course material in this discussion. "Am I the unethical one" the right question? How about "Under which formulations of normative ethics is my behavior wrong?"

1. Is it _good_ to catch cheating? If these are students who are just checking some distributional requirement box, does it matter if they actually understood the material? Potentially there is harm (delayed graduation, literal costs, etc) from failing students (or having them be subject to some other discipline). Perhaps under a consequentialist framing, catching cheaters isn't good. But does the professor have a deontological obligation to catch cheating, and to make a good-faith effort to have fair outcomes in which students who studied and understood the material receive better grades than cheaters?

2. Is the method of catching cheaters relevant? If catching cheaters is good for consequentialist reasons, isn't any effective means of catching cheaters (which does not cause other harms) also good? Certainly the objection that the professor was dishonest by uploading the bad test sounds like it's from a deontological / rules-oriented view.

1. Absolute good is problematic even for philosophers. Under consequentialist framework, catching cheaters would allow others or yourself to reeducate them, causing a lot of social repercussions, especially if the test contained safety instruction. The consequences of cheating are very complex, and ones of fostering cheating behavior even more so.

2. It is, in as much as you believe AI should provide accurate answers to others or force them to think for themselves instead. The professor is honest in deontological point of view in that they're not lying to a person, but are lying in general. Depending on deontology in question this may or may not be allowed.

You're making it too abstract. The professor's actions are hilarious and fair game by any measure. Bravo, well played. It's such a good idea that I'm surprised its not already commonplace.

As for consequences, thats up to university policy

> I am in discussion with my Chair about exactly what response is appropriate for these students, but a zero on the final is the bare minimum, and an F in the class is likely for some, if not all of those who cheated.

> You're making it too abstract.

A _philosophy professor_ asked a question about _ethics_.

"Fair game" maybe? But we're talking about ethics.

The professor intentionally taught students incorrect information when they were seeking out resources to help them learn the material.

Maybe a student spent 2 days studying those incorrect answers. I don't know if there have been studies on this, but I suspect it's much more difficult to unlearn false information one has absorbed than it is to learn the correct information in the first place.

In other words, the professor experimented on his students in a way that shows he's more interested in determining whether or not they were "cheating" (by his definition) than he is in helping them learn the material in a substantive way, and assessing whether he has adequately taught them.

Any student failing the exam because they studied the poisoned material is just a testament to how much he failed as a teacher.

> The professor intentionally taught students incorrect information when they were seeking out resources to help them learn the material.

No, that is not true. That's your narrative.

> Maybe a student spent 2 days studying those incorrect answers. I don't know if there have been studies on this, but I suspect it's much more difficult to unlearn false information one has absorbed than it is to learn the correct information in the first place.

Furthering of your narrative, and appeal to authority even though the authority is lacking.

> In other words, the professor experimented on his students in a way that shows he's more interested in determining whether or not they were "cheating" (by his definition) than he is in helping them learn the material in a substantive way, and assessing whether he has adequately taught them.

Also, narrative building.

> Any student failing the exam because they studied the poisoned material is just a testament to how much he failed as a teacher.

And here is the outcome of your narrative, you've come to the conclusion that students cheating is actually a failure of the teacher - why? If students cheating was the failure of the teacher, why were other students completely capable of learning the material from lecture and supplemental material? Surely, the number of students failing the course would be 100% if the teacher failed to teach.

We know that's not the case, so your premise is bunk from the get go.

Maybe you could make the argument that the teacher is not good at teaching, or poorly taught their students, but then you'd need to find evidence that the other students who did not cheat had to go through alternative methods to learn/do well in the course. Unless you're the student in the classroom, or the teacher roleplaying in the comments here, I don't think you have that evidence.

So I'll make a value judgement here and say that you're trolling by the canonical sense of the phrase.

Professor had provided class lectures, study guides, textbooks, past homeworks and many other materials. They were all correct, and properly endorsed by professor.

The policy explicitly says "that looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating". Students who ignored _all_ professor-provided materials and went to cheating websites to study answers that are "obviously wrong to anyone who had paid attention in class" got what they deserve.

I feel like you're missing something basic. The professor classifies this as a "cheating site", and his entire article assumes this classification, but the site portrays itself as a study aid. If we skip the editorializing, what the professor actually did was seed misinformation on the Internet to see who would fall for it.

Would you feel differently if he had edited the Wikipedia page for his subject to see which students used it as a study aid?

The equation of "you found this info on the Internet instead of in the approved course material and therefore you're cheating" doesn't seem completely solid to me.

The pirate bay might describe itself as a software sharing website, it’s kind of a moot point what they describe themselves as in that sense.

The students are still responsible for what they take in outside of the materials provided. Wikipedia is even at the best of times not always correct. I see lot of people waving the responsibility of students away.

The students took a chance, knowing fully well what the site is and does, and they got burned. Own it and take the burn.

Reading a copy of a previous test is not considered cheating.

If the site had copies of upcoming tests that would be cheating. But previous tests might as well be considered public knowledge.

I honestly didn’t know it was a cheating site. I use it with my grade school kids to help them, find novel exercises on the topics they’re working on, etc.

I can’t be the only one who uses it as the resource it presents itself to be.

Agreed, also college kids are trained to study old tests to get into college. SAT prep and AP test prep is basically all previous test review.

I think it somewhat depends on how the test was presented on the site. Was it presented as a previous test or was it presented as "top secret" upcoming test? I remember a few college tests that had questions straight from the book example questions. Is it cheating that I remembered them?

> But does the professor have a deontological obligation to catch cheating, and to make a good-faith effort to have fair outcomes in which students who studied and understood the material receive better grades than cheaters?

Most courses are either graded on a curve or the material is adjusted in difficulty to target a certain level of challenge.

When cheaters come in and destroy that curve and inject false signal into the difficulty feedback loop, the non-cheaters suffer from increased difficulty.

So yes, there is some obligation to keep the playing field fair and accurate.

Given that grades can have an impact on real-world outcomes (e.g. admission to a desired graduate program) then it’s possible that allowing cheating can have broad impacts beyond the students. Imagine if you took some 4.0GPA students under the assumption that they actually learned what they claim, then discover that they have no idea what they’re doing because they cheated the whole way.

Also, the mind boggles at the suggestion that catching cheaters is bad because they might face some consequences for their dishonesty.

> Most courses are either graded on a curve or the material is adjusted in difficulty to target a certain level of challenge.

Thankfully not the case where I went to university. The bar was clearly set in the first lecture: If your overall score is 90+%, you get an A. 80-90%, a B, and so on. Doesn't matter what your peers do.

University is (or should be) about learning, not about competition with peers.

When I read the article, my mind was clear: He is not the unethical one. That's assuming no curve. If he is curving, I'm all for any method that messes up the curve, because curves are (generally) a bad idea.

The person you responded to accounts for uncurved classes in their argument, that cheaters in uncurved classes "inject false signal into the difficulty feedback loop".

If the average assignment grades are very high the professor will be inclined to make the assignments more challenging. Cheating disrupts the professor's ability to accurately determine how well their students are grasping the material and adjust accordingly.

> The person you responded to accounts for uncurved classes in their argument, that cheaters in uncurved classes "inject false signal into the difficulty feedback loop".

We both understood the comment very differently. The "inject false signal" is for curved classes. When you have a curve, your grade depends on how well your peers do. If they are cheating and you are not, you are unfairly at risk for a lower grade. In an uncurved class, your grade is independent of whether your peers cheated or not.

> The person you responded to accounts for uncurved classes in their argument, that cheaters in uncurved classes "inject false signal into the difficulty feedback loop". The person you responded to accounts for uncurved classes in their argument, that cheaters in uncurved classes "inject false signal into the difficulty feedback loop".

Ah, I see the confusion. For me, this is just "curving by proxy". By uncurved, I meant: The professor decides what students should learn and be able to do with the material, and designs the exam accordingly. If almost everyone gets an A, then it means almost everyone learned the material adequately. Most of my professors did not modify the difficulty of the course/exams/HW based on how well the students did.

The exceptions were when the whole class did poorly and no one would have gotten better than a C - then they adjusted to ensure some people got at least a B - but usually not based on a distribution. I have taken at least two courses where no one was granted an A, because the professor felt he had made fair exams, and no one met the bar he deemed to be an A.

>The exceptions were when the whole class did poorly and no one would have gotten better than a C - then they adjusted to ensure some people got at least a B - but usually not based on a distribution.

See, that illustrates the problem. If cheating pushes grades up, then the difficulty won't be adjusted, even if no-one would actually have gotten high grades if it wasn't for cheating. The professor might think the test was fine because at least some people got Bs, but what if all those people cheated?

> Imagine if you took some 4.0GPA students under the assumption that they actually learned what they claim

I'm going to stop you right here, my friend. I don't think I or anyone else is going to take on a wet-behind-the-ears new grad and actually expect any substantial amount of competence or knowledge out of them for a real world endeavor. I pissed away a lot of valuable time and effort getting a 3.8 GPA, and it was no help at all in the real world. Hiring managers didn't even remember what it meant.

Once I started my first real tech job after college, it turned out that being the top dumb kid out of a group of dumb kids didn't have any effect on how little I knew about getting things done. I actually learned more and more relevant skills from a couple of years of part time web programming in high school than I did from 4 years in a well-respected university

> I decided to ‘poison the well’ by uploading [to Quizlet] a copy of my final with wrong answers. ... My thinking was that anyone who gave a sufficient number of those same answers would be exposing themselves

I kinda don't get this. Doesn't this also potentially catch students who used Quizlet to study and happened to find this teacher's "poisoned" exam? It seems like there's a pretty decent chance that at least some of the 1/3rd of the students who profess their innocence are telling the truth. Was anything done to account for that, or was it assumed that use of the site is cheating?

> I’m neither a forensic mathematician, nor a cop, so this work took a lot of time that I would have preferred to have spent grading final essays.

If one is willing to admit that they are not a forensic mathematician they can also be willing to admit that they made a mistake with their forensic mathematics. This person seems to have over-assumed a lack of mistakes in their understanding considering the certainty with which they choose to end these academic careers.

Edit:

> As far as Quizlet goes, all I did was go to the website that is designed to facilitate cheating and set up a kind of camera to see who visited it. (emphasis mine)

So they just assume that a person using the website is cheating. One might actually make flash cards based on previous exam questions/answers using said information to be certain that their flash cards are accurate. What if that person was thinking to themselves, "This doesn't sound right, but if that's what's on the test..."?

The answers were purposely wrong though and supposedly obviously so. Something I have seen in every multiple choice test I have ever taken.

I don't think it's possible anyone legitimately studied using easily determined false information. If they did, failing the course seems appropriate anyway.

They're on a website which is telling them that they're getting real exam questions and answers. It's reasonable to expect the questions and answers are not false and make, e.g., flash cards from them.

I'm not so sure I'd agree that failing the course is really appropriate. These people are paying to learn and the teacher provided wrong answers to students who may have legitimately been looking to study. Of course, 2/3 of the students admit it, so it's moot in those cases; at least some of those who claim innocence may have a reasonable claim.

Making flash cards from the exam's answer sheet is somewhat hard to defend on it's own. But when you're getting tested for your knowledge of a subject, and you make flash cards from an exam's answer sheet with blatantly incorrect answers that demonstrates a lack of knowledge, I have a hard time feeling sympathy.

To oversimplify, it's hard to defend a CS exam where a student selects (D) here and their excuse was that a flash card told them to do it:

How would you import a module in javascript?

A) import * from 'foo'

B) from 'foo' import *

C) import { * } from 'foo'

D) for i in `seq 1 10`; do echo "$i"; done

Note, there are a tonne of questions upstream from this like the validity of requiring these students to be taking this class, and requiring them to take this exam, and this format of testing students, etc. But keeping the question of whether the student's outcome was reasonably impacted by the decision to replace the answer sheet with a fake answer sheet on Quizlet, I have a hard time believing it did.

I don't specifically disagree that the student should have failed the course when they clearly do not understand the material. I know that's contradictory to what I said above; from one perspective (the university's; rule-based) they should fail and from another (the one for which I am arguing) they should not.

> whether the student's outcome was reasonably impacted

Here's where I have a hard time. It's very easy for the outcome to change from a failed test to a failed academic career. The method by which the professor determined who was cheating is dubious enough that it may have caught non-cheaters (from an ethical perspective; assume that the person who found the test on the website is genuinely intending to study the material which they believe is correct). I guess it's moot from the university's perspective if it's against their cheating policy. But on this ethics topic, I'd have to argue for the professor to have more doubts about their decision.

I see your point about a student attempting to pass the exam, studying the incorrect material, and failing the course. However, I see that situation as morally equivalent to the following scenario:

Sam has been having trouble understanding their evolutionary biology coursework all semester. It's coming close to the final and they are frantic to find any help they can get. Finally, they encounter the Answers in Genesis website and use it to make a set of flash cards. They drill those flash cards relentlessly in their best effor to learn the material. Come the final, Sam answers every question with "God did it and evolution is a lie".

I will agree with you that Sam has not behaved unethically and has not cheated on the exam, just as you believe that some students did not cheat on the ethics exam. That said, I do not believe that Sam should pass the final, as they have no understanding of the material. Even though Sam has put hard effort into studying, they have studied the wrong material and put zero effort into vetting their sources, so they deserve to fail the course.

Do you believe that Sam deserves to pass the course or am I missing an important difference between my hypothetical and the actual events?

They (at least the hypothetical ones who were not cheating in this philosophical sense) should not be allowed to pass the final and should not be expelled from the university for what they did. Admittedly, that enters the realm of personal opinion; the university’s policy is that a student using such a resource is cheating. The teacher also seems to be considering a lighter punishment so I don’t expect this case will carry any such injustices. (Really, I expect most or all of the students were cheating in the moral sense. The possibility that one wasn’t makes me question the policy.)

That being said, there does seem to be a certain assumption about the intentions of any student who would use this service. It’s not hard for me to imagine someone who has to and wants to bust their ass learning getting caught up in unfortunate circumstances (like the stress of wanting to pass a final causing the poor decision to use this study resource coinciding with their teacher poisoning said resource coinciding with the aforementioned stress causing them not to question the incorrect information they found ultimately resulting in their expulsion for otherwise not-necessarily-unethical behavior) because it’s assumed the professor was adequately tricky with their questions.

(Maybe I just need an hour off work to explain myself properly on a Friday.)

These days I find it fairly risky to think that it's reasonable to believe just anything you read on the internet because a website says so.

The academic integrity policy can forbid access or use of test solutions. A student who studied from that resource isn't innocent.

You want to tune your policies so that students will bring that extra test that was lost in the printer tray back to you.

> A student who studied from that resource isn't innocent.

I guess it's more understandable if that's the position being taken. However, that makes me want to ask a different question: why is that bad? A student who uses said resource to study for the test during usual study hours but walks into the test without any extra material is taking the test on their own merit.

Because the test can't reasonably cover all of the course material in depth. The idea is that the test takes a representative sample of the course material, so your understanding of the material on the test is indicative of your understanding of the course material overall. Specifically studying the material you know is on the test invalidates this premise, and by extension the results of the test

I'm going to assume you're giving this hypothetical student the benefit of the doubt, so we can discard the "ACCACA DABACCA" version of test prep (Which is what the professor in the linked article is alleging) https://youtu.be/0cyS4HZ_Dxc?t=56

With that out of the way: Why is it bad for a student to study for a test from an unofficial test bank?

It's really stinking hard to write a good test question. It needs to be possible, clear, and not exactly* like problems you've done in class and homework. There are a few exceptions to this for "canonical" problems/derivations. Capacitance of parallel plates, for example.

It's very different if a student chooses a problem to study, and that problem is on the test, versus a student who is given a problem to study that is from the test. For example, if I give a "derivation of cylindrical capacitor" in my test prep packet, and a student looks at that and also studies the spherical and parallel plate geometries, that's great for them! They thought deeper about what was going to be on the test, and directed their attention accordingly.

Everything you say might be true. But it seems that the only "studying" that really stuck was when they went to quizlet. Read the rest of it where most of them admitted to cheating -- which probably means pulling it up and copying the answer.

Cheating is rampant in general and a lot of people bend over backwards to rationalize it.

In short, they were given numerous valid resources and chose chose not to use them. Then they went completely outside the class and used unverified information in place of learning the material.

Assuming it wasn't an "open internet" test, then there is nothing wrong with this.

Out of all those people studying all those wrong answers author doesn't mention a single one of them bringing it up during office hours. I'm assuming they didn't. They all thought they were getting away with something and had an edge over actually studying. They were wrong.

> They all thought they were getting away with something and had an edge over actually studying.

My point is that these people didn't (necessarily) do something wrong. The only reason they had to think they were doing something wrong is that the rules say they're doing something wrong.

If a professor provided the questions and answers for flash cards to be made, is that functionally different from the students getting such information from a third-party? It's "cheating" from a rules-based definition but I don't see how a person is necessarily not learning from that.

>It's "cheating" from a rules-based definition

Is there any other kind of cheating?

Assuming there's a reason for a rule, an action might not go against that reason even if it goes against a literal interpretation of the rule. In such a case, it should be determined that there's no reason to be against the action.

The ostensible reason to be against cheating is that it devalues the degrees the university gives out if it can't be trusted that a person earned said degree through merit. I'm saying that a person who found the exam and learned from that material isn't going against this reason to be against cheating; they did, in fact, pass the exam on their own merit. At least, I don't see why I should consider it differently.

It's clear from the story that no "learning" from the exam occurred. Students just copied the answers. Remember, this is a multiple choice exam, so this means question 42 - D, question 43 - A, etc -- nobody is looking up what this even means. According to the teacher, the answers should obviously wrong to anybody who knows the material.

Although it's very funny that this happened on an ethics course, the "is it ethical to cheat on an exam if you learned the material" question doesn't even apply here imo

> It's clear from the story that no "learning" from the exam occurred. Students just copied the answers.

I don't see this so clearly. It seems to me that this is assumed. Why do you think it is so clear that this is what the students did?

They did not, in fact, pass the exam on their own merit; they failed it miserably. Furthermore, in situations where they find the correct answers to the questions that will be asked, or even just the specific questions that will be asked, and then passed the exam, they would not have demonstrated that they could do so on their own merit, as an examination can only be a smallish sample of the knowledge they are expected to have in order to justify a passing grade.

In this case, they cannot even appeal to that perennial cheater's excuse: "what matters is being able to get the right answer, not how I got it." Here, they demonstrated utter incompetence at that task! Their knowledge was so impoverished that they could not even identify blatant errors.

The point of an exam is that it’s a crude instrument to determine a students mastery of the subject matter. If that is not discernible because some students were able to memorize answers vs. others that actually learned the content what’s, the value of the exam is diminished.

Yeah, it entirely depends on the timeline of the poisoning.

If the bad results were uploaded just prior to the exam, and the results were cloned, people likely cheated. I think this trap is fine. Hopefully he had his bad results pulled afterwards too, so the site only contained flawed data during the exam period.

If the bad results were uploaded several days prior to the exam we run the risk of people studied, and couldn't fathom why their answers didn't match the "official results", but learned the wrong result was the correct answer. It may have stuck in their heads simply because it was an unexpected answer. Perhaps these people didn't even go back to the site during the exam at all, but the weird results from the studying phase were what they could recall.

In this second case, the trap isn't good at all. It may have caused people to recall the incorrect answers learned from study, not from cheating during the exam. This is a horrible thing to do to your students. It may have caused some people to doubt themselves during study, and pushed them to cheat during the exam because they clearly didn't understand something. This is unfortunate. Prof and student share some blame here. How to classify this case is difficult. Without the poisoned study material, these students may have actually known the material, felt confident, and aced the exam. We'll never know.

Thank you, this is what I was trying to describe. I don't intend to argue this necessarily happened (I'd expect it probably did not), just point out the possibility. It doesn't seem to me the professor really did enough to determine the actions of these students and there is potentially good reason for them to believe the 13 or so students who claim to have not cheated. Certainly the "one student who is right ‘on the bubble’" could be given more benefit of the doubt.

I guess it's moot given the actual policy against looking up tests without the professor's permission. I can see how it's a shortcut to find the correct answers without necessarily understanding the material. But I still see a reasonable perspective that the professor's decision potentially caught people who were genuinely intending to learn.

>Hopefully he had his bad results pulled afterwards too,

Also remember anything you put on the internet is forever... Pretty much this guy may be doing the 'bullshit generation problem' we are starting to accuse AI of doing.

From TFA:

> My University has an academic honesty policy that explicitly says that looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating (Although had I know it would be this much of an issue I would have been explicit about that in my syllabus as well, rather than just linking to the policy, an oversight I plan to correct going forward.)

If they went to Quizlet and viewed previous tests, yes, they were cheating by definition. No assumption necessary.

The article explicitly states that the school policy disallows the use of previous tests without the professor’s approval. So any use of the test as a study aid is cheating.

To me looking up old exams is normal, it's not even remotely cheating, heck it may even be expected. Saying a website that lists old exams is 'ostensibly' a study aid seems disingenuous. Poisoning said site with wrong information is just making things harder for the students which is the opposite from what a teacher is supposed to be doing.

However what I don't understand is why that even mattered.

Were the students just learning the questions and answers by heart to regurgitate them on the final exam? If they had any understanding at all they should have caught on, but even if they didn't they would simply demonstrate their lack of understanding, it is not dishonest.

Or did they get to fill in the answers unsupervised somewhere? Because if they were left unsupervised with access the web then this is likely just the tip of the iceberg, they could more easily cheat by discussing the questions with each other.

Edit: Reading more carefully it was a take-home exam apparently, which seems to have consisted of multiple-choice questions that are largely the same each year. I can vaguely see how looking up old exams would invalidate it as a test, but if your test is invalidated by normal exam preparation is it the exam's fault or the student's?

It was an online course and the exam was online too.

For all he knows, the students went to a site with study materials to prep for a test. His policy of disallowing students to refer to prior tests was not even explicit in the syllabus, but behind a link. If this policy were clear upfront - absolutely, reference to outside materials is inappropriate and there should be consequences. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to impose these consequences after the fact based on a reference to a reference.

Based on his post, my assessment is that the prof is lazy and an asshole. Maybe there are other relevant factors that would change my analysis, but I have to think this is the version of the story that puts the prof in the most favorable possible light, so….

For all he knows, the students went to a site with study materials to prep for a test.

Generally previous exams are good for checking that you understood a topic but you can not really study a topic only from past multiple choice tests. If they had studied the topic and gained some understanding, they would have noticed that the answers are wrong. Even just looking at two different past exams would probably reveal that something is off.

I had a similar reaction. I was surprised that this school's policy forbids looking at old exams. I checked my alma mater's policies and they do not. Students openly sought out copies of old exams from upperclassmen or from repositories kept by a few cliques/clubs. Some professors themselves provided a collection of old tests so everyone had easy & equal access.

I guess an important difference is going for engineering, it was trivial for professors to change numbers & details from year to year so old tests could aid study but not provide answers.

>To me looking up old exams is normal, it's not even remotely cheating, heck it may even be expected.

When I was at uni in the early 90's, several of my professors handed out older versions of their tests so that we could see the shape of the thing and prepare. We all appreciated it, too.

Yeah, I feel the same. Where I went to university, printing, scheduling and proctoring exams was a central university function, and it was university policy to publish hard-bound copies of exam papers - including for courses no longer offered - going quite a long way back in the university library (both for students use, and for future academic study). Lecturers / course coordinators have no say on whether this happens.

Students would commonly complete multiple past exams going back years, and anyone struggling with a question could ask a tutor about it in one of the labs (so that they actually learn the underlying principles).

A lecturer re-using an exam question verbatim in that environment would be considered reckless.

It sounds like the rules are different a Sacramento State University - perhaps to facilitate verbatim reuse of questions (which sounds like sacrificing educational quality for lecturer convenience). I do think, however, that this is exposing poor educational practices that reflects negatively on the university and the lecturer as much as on the students.

Honestly, it's kinda wild to me that the final(!) is just multiple choice questions, and that it's similar enough to the one last year that you can cheat by looking at previous exams? That's just a badly designed course, feels like the students are the ones getting scammed here...

I have done 2 ethics courses during my education at a Dutch 'Hogeschool' (honestly not sure how this maps to US education wikipedia says 'Vocational university'). I did a specific design ethics course and a broader ethics course as part of a philosophy minor, and in both of them you had to write papers or apply the things you learned to a case study. There were some little tests with multiple choice, but they often had additional questions where you had to explain your reasoning.

Maybe there is a language difference here, but I would expect something more involved from a course given by a professor at a university, or is this a course for people who are in high school or something.

Heh, and the professor is polluting the info space too... That is if other parties are taking this fake test out of it's multiple choice format and using the answers as data for other sources. You know, in the same ways bots steal information from recipes and mix them on pages to try to get ad hits. You start building chains of misinformation based on unethical behavior.

Why even go through the process of accusing them of cheating? If the fake answers were all wrong, just grade the test honestly and the cheaters will get what's coming to them without any ambiguity or additional overhead on his part.

I would just ignore any problematizers who question the ethics of testing students' honesty. I think those people are silly and should rightly be ignored, except to mock them. But that's probably why I'm not a philosopher.

I would be tempted to do the same, and not say anything about it. It would be interesting and informative to see how the cheaters responded.

It is not something one could do every time, however, as it will become known that the actual questions (though with incorrect answers) could be found on the web.

As an extension, after the exam publicly declare the poison-pill answers to deter the next semester's batch.

Would that start an arms race causing the students to work harder to find the right answers? Mission accomplished.

Because the punishment for cheating is not a poor grade but severe discipline (typically suspension or expulsion), the bad grade was for not learning the material in class.

At my previous university, this would constitute as blatant plagiarism.

Plagiarism was punished by a "three strikes and you're out" principle. If you got caught more than twice over the three years bachelor course, you got kicked out and couldn't start the same program for a few years. You also had to explain (or defend, but rarely anyone ever got accused on false grounds) your transgression to the graduation board, with the possibility of worse punishment if you were particularly blatant about the whole thing. Obviously, you immediately failed the course you were caught on as well.

This system worked well. Cheating was rare and students appropriately shot down team members that would suggest any type of plagiarism. So, why go through the process of accusing them? Because cheating deserves worse than just a bad grade, in my opinion.

Three strikes actually seems pretty lenient

It wasn't just for cheating, though. Any form of plagiarism was punished this way.

In one exercise, we had to set up a website (basic HTML/JS/CSS stuff). To fill up this site with content, one student translated an entire other website without clear credit (there was a little link on the bottom of the index but that was about it). Despite the focus of the course having nothing to do with the content, that was a strike.

Another student I knew got a strike got one because in the first report they had to write in a group, one of their team members copied some text from Wikipedia and didn't tell anyone. That probably worked in high school, but it sure didn't work here! The entire group got a strike on their record for that, not even two months into their education.

If you were cheating particularly badly, there could be more consequences than "just" a strike. I doubt they'd let you get away with looking up answers to test questions.

In contrast, at my current university, cheating is rampant. Entire courses with known mass cheating had no measures taken because that would affect too many students. It's terrible and if things don't change I wouldn't be surprised if degrees would lose accreditation at some point.

Got it - yeah if you’re issuing strikes for minor infractions as well that’s a whole lot less lenient.

There are two goals: Encourage learning, and discourage cheating. A low grade doesn't necessarily do the former.

It also depends how the overall course grade is structured. In my undergrad, it was common that the final exam was not an outsized portion of your grade. A number of courses pegged it at 10% - meaning if you did really well throughout the semester, you could just not study at all, get a 25% score on the final (i.e. fail the final), and still get an A.

Aside: I loved those courses - work hard to get in a good position, and chill during the finals. The professors also wanted to encourage continual effort and learning, and making the overall grade be heavily dependent on the final would discourage that.

>If the fake answers were all wrong, just grade the test honestly and the cheaters will get what's coming to them without any ambiguity or additional overhead on his part.

Failing that one exam (especially if they got some of the questions right despite cheating on others, so, for example got a 50% grade on the exam) may have allowed some of them to still get a passing grade in the course, the penalty for cheating may be worse:

I am in discussion with my Chair about exactly what response is appropriate for these students, but a zero on the final is the bare minimum, and an F in the class is likely for some, if not all of those who cheated.

(and some schools may have additional penalties in the form of academic probation or even expulsion)

A teacher at my university was fired for failing students who were caught cheating in an introductory CS class. The ones in charge didn't like that he was causing a disturbance. They would rather have had the cheaters get away with it. The system is broken.

That is indeed some disproportionate reaction to just failing some students in introductory CS class. (So much that I feel there must be more to the story.)

> The system is broken

This is truer than it sounds. The very design of Examinations itself is broken in most places. It shouldn't be possible by design to cheat in my opinion.

"Open-book" exams are harder to set, but I think the whole cheating-prevention infrastructure is harder, costlier, and pointless.

Even open book exams can be gamed. There are whole industries set up around enabling in-exam communication (e.g. concealed subvocal mics/headphones) and outsourcing schoolwork.

It is definitely possible to design assessments on which cheating is difficult. For example, oral examinations or personalized per-student projects or exams. The problem is that this style of personalized assessment fundamentally does not scale past a few dozen students in a classroom.

You want a classroom that small, it's going to cost you. Just instructor salaries for would run each student 10-30k per year, and that's before paying for infrastructure (classrooms, tech, offices) and (admittedly not always useful) administration.

> Even open book exams can be gamed

Of course, yes, nothing's perfect. But Open book exams are far better bargain than what the most popular method of exams is as of today.

Would "open book" include access to Google search and to ChatGPT?

Smaller class sizes is definitely a huge boon for everybody involved. I went to a mid-sized private uni, where a large class size was maybe in the low 30 students range, and many were closer to 10-15, and the experience was dramatically better than my friends at other universities got. Professors knew the vast majority of us by name, and had at least an approximate idea of your grasp on the course material.

Cheating was solved with a pretty straightforward approach: don't make it trivial to cheat (re-using test questions, question-bank multiple choice tests, etc) to keep the honest students honest, then trust the students. If someone's caught violating that trust, send them to the business school. (I don't know what they did with cheaters in the business school. I assume promote them)

Our best computer networks teacher from secondary school decided to leave following complaints from parents, who believed that the tests were too difficult. As I remember, about 3/4 of our class had a tough time. Honestly, the tests weren't all that hard. I suspect there was some crowd effect taking place, which resulted in people collectively giving up. This turned out to be a significant blow to the standard of our education. The subsequent teachers were neither as knowledgeable, nor as effective in teaching the subjects.

> The system is broken.

That may be university-by-university thing. I briefly managed an academic department at an old, highly-ranked university. Professors regularly caught cheaters and there was never any question that they would fail the course. The only question was whether the incident was mild enough that they would be permitted to try again next semester or severe enough to leave the university.

The administration supported us 100% as this was seen as essential to defending the value of the degree conferred on the other students. Without some kind of standards we'd eventually become just another degree mill.

What surprised me most was how many students who never finished the degree (not just cheating -- some just got job offers and decided not to stick around) still listed the degree on their resume/CV. The problem is that many companies now call the school to check as part of their hiring process, and the school would inform them that they had enrolled but had not been granted the degree. In retrospect I wish I had instituted a policy of letting the ex-student know in those cases, because I'm not sure if hiring companies tell them and I wonder how many people think they're just unlucky or something.

Faked degrees happen all the time, sometimes in very prominent circumstances. E.g.

> MIT Admissions Dean Resigns After Fake Degrees Come to Light

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/4/26/mit-admissions-...

I once worked as a part-time visiting lecturer in CS.

I routinely got assignments handed-in that students had evidently copied from one-another. More than half of the students were handing in copied work. In at least one case, they hadn't even botherd to change the name at the top. Usually they had the sense to change variable- and function-names, but not always.

As a newbie lecturer, I asked my colleagues what to do. They said: "You can fail them. You'll be accused of racism (most of the students were brown-skinned). They will appeal; you'll then have to sit on exam boards through the summer, which is unpaid for a visting P/T lecturer. There's a good chance the school will overrule you, because these are paying overseas students."

"Or you can tell them that you've noticed the 'sharing' that's been going on; that collaboration and sharing is encouraged, but that they must never do it in marked assignments."

I adopted the latter course of action.

Being a part-time visiting lecturer is a crap job.

Honestly if people are working together to do assignments that's not the end of the world. IMO you probably learn more doing it that way.

If people are selling answers that's a different story, but that's what in person exams are for.

I remember when I was taking software development classes in 2003/4, when I was finishing my computer science degree.

I helped a buddy of mine out on one of the projects by basically writing it for him. I re-wrote my project in a completely different style.

We both got 100%.

If you are going to cheat, do it right and actually show some imagination and creativity.

Once AI starts grading papers you'll have to be more clever than that.

Like re-code your project in another language and then back again.

The linked article and this entire discussion is addressing the ethical issues that surround grading, originality, and plagiarism. How is AI going to be able to apply the "correct" ethical code when all of us can't seem to agree?

It's been two decades since I took an ethics class, but here's my stab:

Kant would call this unethical because he argued against any philanthropic impetus towards lying. Of course he would also call the misrepresentation by the students to be unethical.

Utilitarianism has trouble dealing with cheating because any single act of cheating seems to cause benefits for the cheater greater than the damage a single cheater does. Rule-based utilitarianism attempts to resolve this by considering that if too many people cheat, the negative outcomes to the school then outweigh the sum of the individual advantages of those cheating (particularly since any performative aspects of getting a high grade go away when it becomes well known that many people cheated to get those grades). Many people argue that rule-based utilitarianism just devolves to utilitarianism since no two situations are ever identical.

I never really quite grokked virtue ethics, but it seems to me that if the professor is upright and is acting with the intent of helping the students who didn't cheat (by raising their grade relative to cheaters) then this would probably get a stamp of approval.

Moral relativism would acknowledge that his actions will be deemed immoral by his students (who just want to pass the class, and feel attacked and deceived by this), but moral from the point of view of a teacher who is required by their position to come up with some form of practical assessment for a class of nearly 100 students.

> Utilitarianism has trouble dealing with cheating because any single act of cheating seems to cause benefits for the cheater greater than the damage a single cheater does.

It clearly doesn't? There's no sensible mechanism by which someone cheating to get a higher grade will help them, except by hurting someone else. The main dream of the cheater is to get some kind of rewarding job later based on the strength of their transcript, instead of some other guy who would otherwise have been doing that job, and who (if you think the grades prior to cheating had any usefulness at all) would most likely have been better at the job.

It's hard to be able to predict in advance exactly who will be harmed by any given act of cheating, but that isn't a problem for utilitarianism.

Unless the outcomes to all students involved are zero-sum, it's not hard to have a model in which a single student getting an artificially higher grade through some unfair mechanism is a net utility gain. It was one of the arguments specifically presented in my intro-to-ethics class (though it was not cheating, it was a student asking their professor (who was a utilitarian) to give them a slightly higher grade; for pure utilitarianism the mechanism that results in inflating the grade is irrelevant).

From my experience working at a university (in the foreign language department), I found a number of students who put a large effort into "getting out of work". I was astonished at the number who put more effort into avoiding work than it would have taken to get an A.

If I were in this professor's case, I'd just mark the answers wrong, and in the future upload more wrong answers. The students who use these sorts of online dumps aren't the ones who study and will beg at the end of the semester for some sort of extra-credit. If it were necessary, perhaps have a second gradebook where the number of "exactly the same wrong answer as the bait" were kept.

> From my experience working at a university (in the foreign language department), I found a number of students who put a large effort into "getting out of work". I was astonished at the number who put more effort into avoiding work than it would have taken to get an A.

It's funny when that happens, I used to do this in 7th or 8th grade when we were doing home exercises in touch typing. All the typing tasks were given from a textbook that was the same for everyone in the country, for a few years at least. Over 2 years of classes, I had probably spent more time scouring the internet for the solution rather than type it myself. The search was however always more entertaining than the exercise and taught me how to use the web. And I still learned how to touch type.

I was about the same age when I discovered my school's touch typing program saved your results as a raw text file on a shared drive---I didn't actually learn to type well until a few years later

I don't think the honeypot is necessarily unethical, but giving a take-home multiple choice final exam for a philosophy course seems like several levels of bad pedagogy.

Agree. I don't know what a multiple-choice philosophy exam even looks like. I did a Philosophy BA, and all the exams and assignments were essays. The non-exam assignments were all discussed in seminars.

Yes, he is unethical. He didn't just catch students cheating. He actively sabotaged the cheaters. He says he placed a (metaphorical) camera to catch the cheaters, but if he didn't pay attention to it they would have failed anyway because he planted wrong answers for them to find. Thinking about it now, he could have just graded them with the wrong answers and left it at that (a different ethical question), but it seems he was determined to "get" them, call them out, and punish.

To be clear, I'm not supporting the cheaters. There are two wrongs here. "Am I the unethical one?" should instead read "am I unethical?" to avoid any discussion about which is worse. Suppose I went on the site and uploaded wrong answers, thereby clearly sabotaging cheaters. Clearly that would have negative consequences for those students and one might ask why would I do that.

Exactly. Whether he intended to or not, he - HIMSELF - put two different, equally authorially-dominant, sets of answers into the wild and expected students to pick the best one in what can only be described as an unauthorized (afaik?) social experiment.

Fuck the students who thought "wait, this seems like...way wrong. I feel like he said the exact opposite in class...? But, I mean, this IS the test that I'm looking at, so I guess I'm just misremembering...", is the apparent sentiment. At least he caught the obvious cheaters, right?

Those latter students would have been taught in high school not to trust sources without some sort of verification. Trusting that a non-verified, random upload to a cheat/study site is accurate shows lack of critical thinking skills, at best.

> equally authorially-dominant

say what? One is on the official school site, in the lectures and notes from class. Second one is an anonymous upload at the weird unofficial site which does not even have university's branding.

If the students can't tell those two apart, they are in deep trouble and should not be in college.

I'm inclined to agree. If you're actively putting out misinformation, that's always bad. It feels a bit "entrapment"-ey.

Sort of tangential, but I have always thought teachers/professors who put "trick" questions on tests to be sort of assholes. It's fine if it's an extra credit thing and isn't going to take away from the final grade, but when you write a question that literally everyone in the class gets wrong, I think that says a lot more about your communication or teaching ability than the students.

Why is it unethical to be determined to call out and punish cheaters? When I was in college, we had like an academic honesty pledge that made it clear we would get kicked out of school if they caught us cheating. It's not uncommon (or, I think, unethical) to punish cheating in academic programs.

He sabotaged the cheaters. It's a bit different than just catching them and issuing the usual punishment. I think there is room for debate around the distinction, but from an ethical point of view one should avoid gray areas, and this guy actually teaches ethics - to this class.

Yeah I agree that's the interesting question, but I think "it's bad to want to punish people who cheat" is the wrong take, in general.

He did not sabotage them - the usual punishment is at minimum a zero on the relevant assignment/test/etc., and frequently extends to outright failing out of the class. Scoring worse on the test due to their cheating is irrelevant as it'll be reduced to a zero.

From an ethical point of view, he has done these students, the university, and the world at large a huge favor.

Are you trying to teach kids to not cheat? Or are you trying to teach them how to conceptualize, illustrate (if not demonstrate), and structure ethics such that they can make critical and thoughtful deductions or contributions to the field?

Because, if it's the former: great job, Ranger Rick. You definitely used a method that will root out cheaters and give them some (small/limited) incentive not to cheat anymore.

But, if it's the latter, you've failed your students in every respect. It's not even a clean example of the ethics of cheating, because you've tipped the scales in ways that affect multiple variables, instead of just one.

Neither of which is ethical or unethical in the vacuums of consideration that any subject remains neutral in. But if the context is that it's a philosophy class, I would expect the teacher teach me philosophical ethics and let the chaff fall where it may, rather than try to "prove" some nebulous idea of what it means to "know" something, and why one method of being able to 'prove' it is inferior to some other method. Put simply: I'm in this class to learn. If you're giving me the information and then I pass the test, that's your entire responsibility. Whatever third parties are doing - so long as it's not infringing on you - is not relevant. Not to your class and my grades. Sorry you're one of THOSE teachers, but learning isn't a test. It's a lifelong pursuit and you can't force people to pursue what they're A) not interested in or B) deft enough to use digital memory for.

I think both? At least, when I was in school, I thought one of the first-order lessons they were trying to teach us was to not cheat, while also teaching us other things.

Yeah, but WHY would they want to teach you not to cheat? It's not a virtue, in and of itself (cheating has to be defined for each context it's in so "don't cheat" is like saying "don't be bad"). They teach you not to cheat because if you cheat, you won't know the answer when you need it.

If you're a doctor, and don't know the answer to a question when you need it, you might kill someone. A lawyer has problems there, too. There are great values in keeping people from relying on deferred knowledge, in a great many applications.

I just don't see how philosophical ethics - especially not a mid-level course - benefits from those same lessons/limitations. If a software developer isn't expected to know every language pattern; only how to look up the patterns they need, when they need them, then why would then be disallowed from doing that on a test? A better test would target different metrics than "correct answer" or "incorrect answer". The same thing applies here. You can do software dev without being able to pass an "internal knowledge only" test. You can be productive with ethical philosophy without being able to pass an "internal knowledge only" test.

So yes, both is the goal. What I'm getting at is that both SHOULDN'T be the goal. In a lot of cases. Most, I'd hazard to guess.

That's not why they teach you not to cheat. That's why they teach doctors (and other kinds of students) that they need to memorize some things in order to have fast recall without requiring a reference.

But they teach you not to cheat because cheating is bad, on its own terms. The purpose of education is not just to teach facts, but also to teach young people how to be net-positive members of society. (This is why society subsidizes education.) Teaching not to cheat to get ahead falls within that part of the curriculum.

Nothing I said implies I think education only teaches fact. Obviously I believe the contrary, as evidenced by my comments. As far as education teaching people how to be net-positive members of society, I agree that's what the education we subsidize is intended for, but that doesn't apply to this situation. A mid-level psychology course at a higher learning institution. If you honestly think that the GOAL of that course is to teach children not to cheat, I think you're grossly mistaken. First and foremost by the fact that not all students are "young people". And then by the fact that we have other courses, even in higher learning institutions, that deal with teaching the students ethics. In the other classes, as with all other areas of life, you're just expected to employ the ethics of the society. It's a meta-reinforcement of those lessons, but the reinforcements are not the lessons of the other classes. If a student fails in their ethics classes due to their ethical decisions, that makes sense. If a student fails math with the right answers but the wrong "ethics", that doesn't make sense. Unethically sourced math answers can still provide the solutions to problems. Just ask NASA.

So then, if a professor of an unrelated or tangentially related field takes it upon themselves to make a lesson out of what should be a meta-reinforcement, in a field that they readily admit that they are unprepared to work in or do data analysis for, that is not a reasonable source of ethical education. Especially not when done without prior social experiment approval and safeguards.

There are two different questions: 1. Are these the right rules? and 2. Should students be taught to follow well defined rules?

You're almost entirely talking about #1, and I totally agree. The vast majority of classes should not forbid looking stuff up because it is an artificial constraint that doesn't reflect the reality outside school.

But I think #2 is also important. I know it's passe, especially in the silicon valley milieu that we swim in here, but I think "not following rules you personally think are stupid is good" is a bad lesson for students to learn.

(FWIW: I thought the opposite when I was a student, but I was a short-sighted idiot when I was a student.)

> But they teach you not to cheat because cheating is bad, on its own terms. The purpose of education is not just to teach facts, but also to teach young people how to be net-positive members of society. (This is why society subsidizes education.) Teaching not to cheat to get ahead falls within that part of the curriculum.

That is highly debatable. Cheating most often affects the cheater, if anything, because when they need a skill they pretended to have, they'll fail at real-life tasks. But nobody else is affected by cheating.

> Cheating most often affects the cheater, if anything, because when they need a skill they pretended to have, they'll fail at real-life tasks. But nobody else is affected by cheating.

Except the people standing on the bridge designed by the civil engineer who cheated, or getting radiation therapy from a machine programmed by a cheating software engineer, or being treated by a doctor who cheated in med school.

Cheaters getting degrees from an institution that's supposed to produce high-quality graduates is bad for the value of that degree, which is bad for the institution, anyone else who went there, and anyone who relies on that degree as a signal that the graduate has the skills they're supposed to have.

Also, the lesson is broader than this. In the real world, "cheating" is fraud. The lesson I'm saying educational institutions have a valuable social role in teaching is: follow the rules. I know that's naive and passe, but it's also important and a lesson most people actually learn well, to all our benefit. People who think they are entitled to cheat and get away with it are bad for society.

> The purpose of education is not just to teach facts, but also to teach young people how to be net-positive members of society. (This is why society subsidizes education.)

If only this were true. If you read the history of education, it was generally invented to create compliant factory workers that were adjusted to rigid schedules and strict authorities. (Its not a coincidence that so many schools are named after robber barons. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, etc) University used to be a bit different, but now that everyone is expected to go and its about vending credentials it's arguable that creating well rounded individuals is at best an occasional bonus.

I don't think this is actually at odds with my point. The robber barons didn't want workers who would cheat them.

Thank you for this comment. It's fascinating how everyone else in this thread seems to view education as a tool purely to acquire qualifications rather than for actually learning anything. I wonder if this is a US thing that has come about as the result of education becoming a financial instrument.

I honestly think it's more of a reactionary thing. Cheating is bad. That's a pretty uncontroversial statement. Whatever the criteria for "cheating", if we're all agreeing that you did it, that's bad and deserves 'correction'.

Once you're there, there's not a lot of reason to go further. "Did he cheat? Yes? Then he bad." Easy peasy, next topic of consideration. Why spend more time on something that has a simple answer?

In this scenario, the students did what would have unequivocally been a "cheat", in generations past. They looked up answers and used them to prove knowledge. That's what every person who ever failed a math test for cheating did.

So, again, even going deeper, this is cheating, plain and simple. No need to wade in any further, when you've already given the benefit of the doubt.

Of course, this not being math, and technology replacing the need for such conventions in math are both important considerations that change the context. But, you have to give it now a third thought before you even get to this point, and of course, here's where things are quite subjective. I bet people would still pretend that knowing math is important for whatever corner of life they inhabit ("I work construction and geometry makes you a pro", "gotta be able to calculate tips", "you'll get killed on contracts with tricky rates"). Most would also quickly concede that if they were just taught how to get to interfaces (apps/websites/etc) that solve those problems, that would be effective as well (even if they couldn't help adding "but knowing is faster/better/convenient/etc"). And so, not only are we dealing with subjectivity and historical bias, but now also a confirmation bias. And all of that is on top of the authority bias that a lot of people START with ("the authority said don't do it; the students did it; they should fail."

So, personally, I don't chalk up to indoctrination/conspiracy/malice anything that can be assumed to be myopia/selfishness/fear/distrust/etc. Humans are capable of the formers, but far more susceptible to the latters. That said, I'm never going to defend the US educational system, so I'm not disagree with you.

Your point about it being an authority bias is really interesting and in line with a lot of the political views I encounter on this venture capital forum. It might also tie in a bit to the US disposition towards punitive vs rehabilitative imprisonment.

Everyone is very quick to suggest brutal punishment for the people who have contradicted the will of the authoritative system, but people aren't really so interested in discussing both why they've done so, and the societal consequences of that disobedience. And even then, not considered the impact on the individual being punished; many people seem to be wishing permanent banishment from the university system for cheating in what is probably a random side unit elective class.

Cheating is extremely common, so much so that students cheat during an ethics exam. People overwhelmingly find justifications for their actions, and cheaters are no exception.

From the comments in this thread you can draw the obvious conclusion: many people here justify cheating because they are cheaters themselves and they don’t want to acknowledge cheating is shameful.

I think you have to verify that cheating did not occur in order to verify if they have learned the ethics espoused by the course. Tests function to prevent those who have not understood the course material from claiming they have. In that situation verification of truthfulness is required before you can verify their skills

That assumes that a student is incapable of understanding the ethics without being able to practice the ethics. I think you would have a high bar in proving that to be the case. A lot of people do shit they, personally, find unethical, so long as they can square it with their own contexts of exceptions.

The provided test tries to have it both ways, but that's invalid. If they are supposed to be learning the answers to the questions on the test, they can prove that even if they looked those answers up. But if the test is to not look up answers and then they get a score reflecting their ethics, then the class is meant to make more ethical students; not to have more people understand the answers to the questions on the test.

At best, you could make the case for the ethical test being a component to the class. Give it a rigorous score, just like you do for any other answer on the test (pass/fail seems reductive, in this scenario, but it's reductive for a lot of tests answers, so whatever. bless the teachers who give partial points). But verifying what a student KNOWS does not, in any way, involve what ACTIONS they take.

You make a lot of good points and it's made me think that there is a fundamental assumption that tests are useful. I think that that is not the case. As you said this test attempt to both validate knowledge and ethics and ends up invalidating itself. It seems to be a flaw intrinsic to this style of test.

I have taken some very well constructed tests. They were not takehome and only one was multiple choice (it was a systems class so it became sets of binary answers which became more than multiple choice). I think that ensuring the integrity of answers in necessary for gaging learnings from a test like this but that need, as you've implied, would indicate that the test is the wrong tool

I think you're right in that most test aren't useful for what they are trying to assess. And that you can't validate anything that you can't trust the integrity of.

But I think the takeaway is that "critical application" is what constitutes a valuable test. In math, that just means "can you use the procedures of mathematics correctly, resulting in the correct answer?" But in, say, English, memorization has very little value. A valuable test would be in testing whether or not a student can match events in a dramatic story to, say, modern real world events and critically discuss the similarities and differences. And, unfortunately, writing that out clinically and expecting a student to both understand it and be able to do it on command while under pressure of failure is not exactly conducive to positive results. So English tests really shouldn't look anything like Math tests, once you get past the point of memorizing definitions.

The same is true of all disciplines. Tests should be generated (and often updated) based on what is currently useful to the discipline in a real and practical sense, at a fundamental level, and then on a more philosophical or exploratory sense once you get into higher learning.

With all due respect, this is nonsense. This is a teacher and a human being that exists and works within a system. You seem to be one of those people who thinks that teachers are some kind of supernatural, super-powerful heroes of humanity who have the responsibility on their backs to be larger than life. This guy has to apply exams; it's not something he wants, it's what he needs to do in the system. And he has to grade 96 of them. And he is a human being. Do you know what it would take to assess 96 students in the way you are describing?

Plus, cheating or not cheating is an ethical matter, not a pedagogical one. He is not trying to teach anyone not to cheat. The expectation of not cheating comes as a pre-requisite of any formal education. He has the social duty to capture cheaters because if not he is failing the society and system who have given him the responsibility to not only educate, but to certify someone's skills. If the cheaters get out there with a diploma in their hands, certified by him (and his institution), he has failed those who believe in that diploma's validity.

Everything you said about learning being a lifelong pursuit that can't be forced, etc. are personal pursuits which are independent and orthogonal to this teacher's formal responsibilities in the educational system.

I think it amusing and I don't have a problem with what he did, but I guess I don't really understand why teachers get so fired up about the subject in the first place. If people are in the class to fill out a general education requirement or something and otherwise don't care about the topic or will never use it again, why get so vigilant about it? And the students that do want to continue in philosophy would just be punishing themselves by cheating.

It's unfair to the students who don't cheat, and makes it hard to correctly calibrate the difficulty of exams.

It’s literally his job to care about that. Chances are the students in his university classroom got their place in competition and other people weren’t so lucky. Plus everything else the previous reply said and also in mine.

No it's not, it's his job to teach people that want to learn. If uninterested people that are forced to be there drift through without creating a fuss, who cares?

Let me ask you people something. Of the college graduates that have been out longer than 2 years, what do you actually remember about non-major classes? My guess is: basically nothing. It's a waste of everyone's time. I don't support cheaters because at the end of the day you agreed to the rules, but I'm not upset that people break dumb rules to save their own time.

Grading on a curve also strikes me as bad. Either you know it or you don't. If I score 50% in the class, but 60% of the class cheated so I pass based on the curve.. is that a good thing?

I’m not quite sure why you’re bringing up grading on a curve as it’s not mentioned above.

But anyway, it’s tricky to set different exams with the exact same difficulty. So the alternatives to some degree of curving are:

(i) accept that the exam may vary significantly in difficulty from one year to the next, or

(ii) use the same exam every year.

There is no perfect option.

I was assuming that calibration of difficulty implied some sort of curve. I'm admittedly not a teacher so there's much I don't know, but I don't really understand why difficulty would be a useful metric, which is what I was getting at. The only useful metric is if they can apply the knowledge somehow.

To the original point, if someone cheats, they weren't interested in the first place, so why were they there? Likely they were coerced. I just think this effort of "gotcha"ing people that don't give a shit about the subject in the first place might be better spent either showing them why they should care, or working with the people that are actually interested. What could this professor alternatively have done with his time compared to this, which is a headache of dealing with these people that are going to have to, bitterly, retake this class, or worse, leave school altogether? What was accomplished here?

>I was assuming that calibration of difficulty implied some sort of curve.

No, it just means "last year's exam seems to have been a bit too difficult, so I'll make this year's a bit easier" (or vice versa). Curving means that you assign grades based on a student's performance relative to the others in the class rather than on their absolute score on the test.

>but I don't really understand why difficulty would be a useful metric,

If you really don't understand how it's possible for an exam to be too easy or too difficult, then I'm not sure what to say. The exam is intended to differentiate between students who've mastered the material, students who understand the basics, and students who learned nothing. To do that it has to be difficult enough that people who skipped half the classes† can't get full marks, but also easy enough that not everyone fails it. Even these basic boundary conditions on a good exam can be quite tricky to satisfy in some cases.

†Not that I care about people skipping classes per se. I just mean that typically they'll have significant gaps in their knowledge of the material.

> I decided to ‘poison the well’ by uploading [to Quizlet] a copy of my final with wrong answers. (The final is 70-80 questions, all multiple choice, 5 options each.) Most of these answers were not just wrong, but obviously wrong to anyone who had paid attention in class. My thinking was that anyone who gave a sufficient number of those same answers would be exposing themselves, not only as someone who cheated by looking up the final online, but who didn’t even pay enough attention in class to notice how wrong the answers were.

I think that’s reasonable. I would even consider expelling students who did this; specially in college, specially in an ethics course.

I work in a small university with local students that are aggressively average, if not a bit below that. Especially when it comes to writing a thesis, our expectations are extremely low, and the success rate is abysmal (something like 30% of the students in a year will actually defend their theses). If a student can reach something like, say, 10 people to do a usability test, we are extremely happy and will pass them with a smile on our faces.

This year one of my students claimed to have done a user experience test with 30+ people, all of which came in person to his house during a period of 4 days. This is extremely unlikely, not to say absurdly unrealistic. If he had done it via Zoom I might maybe believe, but in person? Sorry, but no. I asked him what did his parents think of it, and magically they were both travelling that specific week. Then I asked him to scan and send me the signed consent forms for each participant; he promptly said "ok, coming!" then about 8h later I got a bunch of signed scans. Not sure what to do anymore, I guess he'll have his thesis.

> This year one of my students claimed to have done a user experience test with 30+ people, all of which came in person to his house during a period of 4 days. This is extremely unlikely, not to say absurdly unrealistic.

I'm not familiar with conducting a user experience test. Why is this so unbelievable? (Also, the rest of the story is kinda hilarious; there will definitely need to be some standards and process changes in academia.)

depends on the situation but generally most people aren't that enthusiastic to be your UX guinea pigs, and it isn't that much fun to administer the same test so many times in a single day (think of how bored your optometrist sounds as they ask you which lens is better). I worked at a shop that had a target of 3-5 users for any given UX testing because usually it starts to get repetitive after that - you tend to hit the diminishing returns portion of the curve.

So if you assume that the UX tests were short (20-30 minutes) you're still talking ~15 total hours spent on UX testing, or two full work days. That would be a surprising amount of time.

As someone else said, it's conceivable that they ran very short studies on a large number of people in the context of having a party or a couple of small gatherings, but it does seem unlikely overall.

Just to recap: very generously, a college student with money to spend (that might sound like a joke but I consider fortunate circumstances) convincing people that it’s worth their time to sit through a usability test actually going through with it “for the lulz”. The part about a person being willing to do a bunch of work to avoid doing a bunch of work makes sense (typical “mental gymnastics”) but it kinda falls apart at 30+ real people legitimately agreeing. It’s ironic that a single-digit amount is just as useful; that’s even a more believable lie.

(And this real-life scenario where every request is answered with “Coming right up!” and a convincing “successful” completion of the request just cracks me up. My sympathies go out to the people to whom this is a genuine problem.)

Thanks for explaining!

You have to get people to actually come to your house voluntarily in the middle of the week to sit down and do some boring stuff in your computer. And it all just clicked with everyone’s schedules in four days. I usually can’t get people to even answer a 5-minute online form, let alone get them to drive to my house. Maybe he’s just popular (which he isn’t, by the way; and a confessed previous cheater.)

> This year one of my students claimed to have done a user experience test with 30+ people, all of which came in person to his house during a period of 4 days.

Is it possible that maybe he thrown a big party (or a series of parties) and asked the folks there to try his stuff? Not sure what is the length and depth of the usability test in question, but if it is a short questionnaire that might work? But I see where your suspicion is coming from.

I believe in Occam’s Razor, so I’d say no. This guy was already caught cheating before, also.

This surprisingly remind me of the last to birthday parties I organized for myself. Unexpectedly I managed to get much more people together than I expected. Simply by actually trying to ask as many people as possible. I was really happy about this. Both times.

Maybe that student was doing the same. Simply asking a lot of people. And other studends usually do not. I find it really hard to overcome my own shyness in this regard. And I wouldn't consider myself particularly shy. I assume a lot of people simply do not try asking enough people in order to get a decent amount of them to join.

Of course that guy might be simply cheating, but I just wanted to share the story.

> Not sure what to do anymore,

Scan the signatures and reverse image search them. Or look one or two of the people up on facebook and ask them whether they did the study.

To add: If it turns on this is legit, ask him how he did it so that you can advise others on what to do for their theses.

Surely the guy just wrote a bunch of random signatures. Otherwise it would be obvious that they weren't captured by the same device.

I don't believe it's easy to make up 30 different signatures without them having similar style.

In middle school, I put a lot of time into a paper for a history class, at least three times what anyone else did (probably more). I got a B for the class. The teacher said it felt like the paper was copied, because the writing was "too professional" and that middle school students don't write like that. The teacher was wrong. I just happened to have worked really hard because the topic was interesting to me.

Are there rules about investigation? In general, if someone makes a claim, it invites testing.

The consent forms are likely friends, so calling to ask questions about the experience should give you an idea of what to believe.

The outcome can be your decision. Meet with the student and tell them their degree is in jeopardy and use it as a teaching lesson, or prove to them that they can get away with believable lies as long as no one has the courage to catch them. Your colleagues should have some insights, as well.

> who recently caught 40 of the 96 students [...] cheating

That 40 is reported suspected, by one individual. The same individual claims that only 2/3 of those were admitted at time of writing.

Also, suspicion was by only a 1:100 coincidence probability standard of evidence, and by some imperfect metric. IMHO, that threshold would be too low to "prove" guilt in such a potentially serious matter (negative mark on student record, reputational damage among college social and professional networking peers, and potentially including suspension or expulsion).

He says that only one student was at roughly the hundred to one level, so he thought that one might be honest. The rest were at the billion to one level.

He also said that he is talking to others about what he should do. It seems like he very sensibly is using this as a starting point rather than accepting his work as the final verdict

> Also, suspicion was by only a 1:100 coincidence probability standard of evidence, and by some imperfect metric.

...only? In a sample size of 96, what's the value in analysis beyond that level?

No, this seems pretty solid to me. The math to do this is routine freshman statistics stuff, something every practicing scientist knows. The assumptions just require that wrong answers be roughly evenly distributed across the choices (e.g. you could construct a test where everyone who was wrong would be led to choice C and rarely B or D, but that's a little pathological; and regardless it's something that would be evident in the data set and seems not to have been).

I mean, standards vary but I'll bet in most jurisdictions 100:1 odds count as "beyond a reasonable doubt" for jury instructions in criminal trials. At the very least you'd bring the trial, which is what happened here. If I know there's only a 1% chance I'm wrong, it's absolutely valid for me to accuse you of cheating.

> I'll bet in most jurisdictions 100:1 odds count as "beyond a reasonable doubt" for jury instructions in criminal trials.

IANAL, but I sure hope that 100:1 chance, standing alone, doesn't meet the bar for "beyond a reasonable doubt".

To me, a 1% chance of an accusation being false is definitionally "reasonable doubt".

...I have no idea where I heard this, but for some reason I was under the impression "beyond a reasonable doubt" meant ~95% confident. (Whereas "preponderance of evidence" meant >50% confident.)

Per Wikipedia, the original framing is Blackstone's ratio from the enlightenment, where he used 10:1. Real courts don't put numbers on this, of course, but that's the thinking that produced the philosophy. Basically: no, given the level of innaccuracy we already know to be present, I think it's very clear that a sincerely-believed 99% confidence will send someone to jail pretty much anywhere in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_doubt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

The quoted sentence I objected to was the sloppy writing, conflating of "suspected" with "caught". I think "caught" would be read by most readers as implying guilt.

Suspected at 1:100, certainly. Quietly confronted and questioned at 1:100, sure. Convicted at 1:100, absolutely not.

I'm not sure this is the best analogy, but imagine that, for every 100 people in society, 1 of them is wrongly convicted, at random. Further imagine that this lottery happens repeatedly, so that even more than 1 in 100 end up getting hit. That sounds like a miserable society in which to live.

Headline: "80 million people worldwide caught cheating" just in the first round.

Actually, I can't seem to get the maths to work. Isn't it just the Binomial distribution? Each question has 5 options so the probability of 'success' is 1/5 and so to get 19 questions 'specifically wrong' out of the 45 planted questions by chance is just (1/5)*19 * (1-1/5)*26 * 45!/(19!26!) = 1 in 2588 but in the article it is 1:100. What am I doing wrong ?

Here's my best guess: 19 is the cutoff point for a binomial test [1] where the probability of at least that many answers to match those in the honeypot test goes below 0.01. But this holds only if you assume p=0.25.

Why would you use 0.25 instead of 0.2? I guess it would make sense if you only looked at wrong answers - that is, you wouldn't be asking "what's the probability of your answers matching those on the fake test" but rather "what's the probability of your wrong answers being wrong because you used the fake test". Since you are only looking at wrong answers, your probability is 1 in 4 instead of 1 in 5.

[1] At least, according to this calculator: https://www.socscistatistics.com/tests/binomial/default2.asp...

"1% false positive rate => 99% confidence about a positive signal" is a really intuitive step to take, but you should be careful because it turns out to be horribly wrong in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

(Perhaps not in this case but in general this can get you into trouble)

Though personally I'd say that it's quite likely that the p=0.01 threshold falsely flagged a non-cheater, which to me says it is too lax.

The 1/100 chance is assuming that students choose all answers with equal likelihood, but supposedly these answers were obviously wrong. If the probability of accidentally choosing the obvious wrong answer drops even by a few percent, that would significantly decrease the likelihood of innocence.

Add me to the list of people who see nothing wrong with this. If he didn't encourage or incentivise his students to cheat in any way (and in fact actively warned them against it) then the idea that this was some sort of entrapment is laughable.

The only room for ambiguity I can see is the arbitrary 1% threshold. If there was a student just over the line then it's plausible that they were honest but unlucky here. Given the consequences of being tagged as a cheater both for this exam and beyond I would want much lower odds of a false positive and I'd certainly feel obliged to give a borderline case the benefit of the doubt.

But if it was clearly understood that this kind of behaviour constituted cheating and innocence is a billion to one shot? Throw the book at them. Anything less is unfair to every student who didn't cheat.

Right. He's made this harder for himself than he needs it to be.

The honeypot is fine. If it were me I'd warn the class that I've seeded the internet with bullshit answer keys, and while I'll never be able to prove you used one of them, you'll probably fail if you do. And leave it at that.

Instead he's guessing a threshold, and can't really be sure if someone that insists they didn't cheat is lying or not, with high stakes. It's a bad situation for all involved.

Kinda reminds me how Genius proved Google was scraping lyrics from them.

Cannot find for the life of me what could be possibly unethical about this. If anything, it’s very, very educational.

Also seems fine to me. I'm not even sure why anyone would be defending the cheaters by making this out to be unethical.

Reminiscent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

It's a decent exercise in ethics to point out what could be unethical about it. If you only consider the goal (catching cheaters) it's easy to convince yourself it can't possibly be unethical, but you shouldn't disregard the methods.

- Publishing wrong answers to a previous exam could confuse students who were simply looking up old exams to study.

- Identifying 'cheaters' as anyone who had a less than 1% chance of arriving at the answers randomly. This is wrong for 2 reasons, one is that they aren't answering randomly the other is that even assuming they are answering randomly you'd falsely accuse at least 1 student of wrongdoing on average.

- Not sure if a teacher has a moral duty to make good tests, but if they do then reusing multiple choice questions on a complex topic like ethics isn't ideal.

> - Publishing wrong answers to a previous exam could confuse students who were simply looking up old exams to study.

In any decent institution which does exams, an example exam sheet with questions similar to what you’re going to get, or even one of actual old exams, is usually published for just this purpose.

Sniffing around the sites the express (or commonly agreed upon) purpose of which is enablement of cheating, on the other hand, reveals the intent.

So, nope.

The claim that Quizlet is solely designed for the purposes of cheating is unfounded in my opinion. It doesn't look like it at first glance anyway.

I'm not even sure what a website designed to enable cheating would look like to be honest, but that's because I have no expectation that I'd be able to access the internet during an exam, and because I consider any study of related materials fair game before the exam begins. You'd have to get an answer sheet of the actual exam up front before I start to consider it iffy.

On the case presented I have to say, the professor is being unethical. Looking up questions and answers to previous exams is practically studying. The point is to know the subject matter not to read it through a specific source or in a specific format.

He should stop being lazy and vary the questions every year. If after a few years there is a body of previous exams covering the entire subject matter, then great the students "cheating" will be studying the entire course in Q/A format.

I (perhaps incorrectly) inferred that they copied from the site during the take-home exam, which is clearly cheating.

Ah, I missed the take home aspect. Then yes that would be clearly cheating.

It's not evident to me that knowing particular questions and answers in a multiple choice test is equivalent to knowing the subject matter. If these were essay or short-answer exams I might feel differently (though being able to copy-and-paste would make actually reading the correct answers, much less understanding them, optional).

At the universities I'm familiar with, looking up and using previous exams (not provided by the teacher) is explicitly considered cheating.

back in my day — which really wasn’t very long ago — profs used to google their exams before administering them. if they found results (like this), they would simply administer a different (new) exam.

it’s work: it might mean maintaining a pool of questions double the size of your exams ready to go at any moment, but it’s a decent way to just not have to worry about this.

the response, hopefully unsurprisingly, is that past students would circulate their exams under the table. every big frat maintained a dropbox (or megaupload, at the time) of scanned exams, with links shared only to the frat members.

i actually did study for exams. i wasn’t in a frat but one day a friend from a frat showed up to our study session with some “practice exams” for us. i learned about these scans and worked some grease to get access to these files for a good 4-5 different frats.

if doing homework is prep for the exam, then working through past exams is even better prep for the exam. having access to realistic exams was a huge leg up for me, even when the questions didn’t overlap. the best profs were aware of this and just published their previous exams on their course webpage to level the field. yeah, it’s extra work to write a new exam every year but that’s just what you do: especially if doing so encourages your students to study!

So if they accessed the quizlet during the test it certainly seems like cheating.

However if students were studying by rote memorization of basically any resource they can get their hands on, then i could see this happening without the students realizing that the website had answers from the test (yes rote memorization is a bad way to learn, but that never stopped undergrads). Like to what level is a student expected to investigate the source of study material?

Is it cheating to study off of past exams? I really don't understand the professor's perspective here.

I think there’s a difference between looking at an old exam and its answers, figuring out why each was right and wrong, and learning from it, and just finding an exam online and using the answer key as your answer in a test because you couldn’t be bothered learning.

The interesting part here is that at least some of the students might have thought it was an old exam from the same course, used it for studying, learned totally nonsensical answers, and then gotten confused in the actual final. Evidently not all of them straight-up copied the answers, or they would have gotten much higher scores. This is apparently still a violation of his institution's academic honesty policy, but there are interesting questions about what happens if he e.g. poisoned one member of a study group who went on to teach bullshit to the other members, giving them a higher chance of picking the wrong answers and putting them over the threshold without ever knowingly cheating.

Of course this is irrelevant, as the p<0.01 test gives an up to 62%[0] chance that someone in his class of 96 students could be falsely accused of cheating, and is unethical in itself. Apparently one student managed to be right on the threshold, which the professor has chosen to interpret as "the student possibly cheating" rather than "me possibly ruining my student's academic life for no reason by choosing a test with lots of false positives and applying it to a class of 96 students".

[0] 1-(0.99^96), and though the real chance is probably a lot lower if the questions are obviously wrong, it's still a stupid threshold to choose

To some extent yes. By studying the exams, you're learning how to answer the test questions instead of actually understanding the material.

And what is definitely cheating is to search for past exams while you have the current exam in hand and start copying down answers.

For all of my major exams in the UK, we were encouraged to study by practising on old papers and my score would have been abysmal if I hadn't. So not being allowed to look at past exams feels strange to me too.

Unrelated to the details of this case, but my school had an official, department associated organization/club called the Society of Software Engineers that would run study sessions for CS, SE, and related courses that the students would have to take. They also took in old exams from students to create a knowledge base that you could study against. The rule was that you weren't allowed to leave the room.

It was an interesting grey spot since most professors were all for using old exams to study, but some weren't (I don't think they liked writing new exams every semester, but I wouldn't either). Some would give threats for giving your exams to this university recognized academic club, but they'd black out names upon receiving them so there wouldn't be any proof that it was you (at least easy proof).

It was an interesting case there but most staff were all for it. Making that old data available to future students, but in a more restricted way seemed fine to me, and it absolutely helped me study, but I wonder what others would think of that situation.

It is at the universities whose policies I'm familiar with, yes. At both universities I have attended it was included in the policy alongside all the typical cheating and plagiarism rules.

It strikes me as odd that the prof picked 1/100 as the threshold for accusing students of cheating. That seems far too low for a class of 96 students. It's very possible that one or more students were falsely accused. I get that they tried to pick the "worst" answer as the cheated one, but still.

I had a prof that did something like this. It was back in the 80s, so no internet. Instead, because it was a large class, he had to give the mid-terms to different parts of the class. He would make all the tests look similar, but with small differences. If the right wrong answers turned up, he would fail the student. (I hope that makes sense.)

At the end of the semester, he explained what was going on. The course was required for the degree (EE), you had to have a C or above to pass, and it was a bear. He said right out, the course was designed to cull the heard.

A few students were outraged. I'm not surprised by the reaction Merriam got. Speaking for myself, I was indifferent to what he had done, though I didn't speak up. I think he should ask the students that he determined hadn't cheated what they think.

This feels harsh because if the tests were similar but with small differences then getting the right wrong answers seems likely to happen anyway. Also, he went the extra step and outright failed the student but I'm not sure why that extra step was justified, surely the cheaters were automatically going to get very poor marks.

>> He said right out, the course was designed to cull the heard.

That seems unethical too. Students are paying to learn material. Professors are ostensibly there to teach it. Making it extra hard seems to go against that.

I guess it depends on how obviously wrong the given answers were. At my university it was allowed and encouraged to practice for exams using old exams. I could see someone having studied that way and assuming the fake answers must be correct.

Nah, the professor isn't in the wrong. A study guide was provided, the school disallows looking at other tests, and he told the students not to cheat-- and the consequences. I don't agree that there is nuance here.

I took a number of philosophy courses in college, and do not remember ever seeing one with multiple-choice questions on an exam. Although I deeply sympathize with those who do not wish to read undergraduates' prose, still I think that this comes with the instructor's job.

I think the instructor was wrong, as a matter of manners at least, perhaps as a matter of responsibility. Suppose one of his students suspected someone employed by a cleaning service, on no particularly good grounds. What would he think of that student leaving a $20 on a table under some papers, in the expectation that it might be stolen?

Am I the only one here who thinks the prof's statistical reasoning, which is being waved at as proof, is really, really bad?

And I mean, aside from the whole typical fallacy of treating a p-value as a statement on posterior probability.

Have you ever taken a certification exam, such as one from CompTIA? They're traditionally held at testing centers, though there is an online option today.

The testing center is a high-security proctored environment. I come to the counter, I present ID to be verified. They have convenience lockers; I empty my pockets and put my keys, wallet, phone, watch, everything goes into the locker. Then they verify that and I sign in, acknowledging that I must bring nothing into the testing lab. My photograph is taken, and I may be issued a writing-tablet and stylus for taking notes during the test.

I enter the testing lab, and typically there were only a handful of people in a room with two dozen stations. There are cameras on the walls and probably microphones too. There was not typically a proctor in the room, but they could enter at any time. If I had trouble with technical issues, or I finished the test, I would raise my hand or stand up, but I had to stay put, and I couldn't lean over to anyone else and whisper or have a conversation.

This was commonly the same method to proctor students taking standardized entrance exams or finals. I took a final exam in a disability office that was slightly less formal, but with the same requirements of bringing nothing in, and being monitored by camera.

There is a good deal of controversy, now that students test from home, whether students should be monitored by spyware that "proctors" their exams and uses AI to flag possible cheating. But that's just part of the landscape, isn't it?

I was once 'caught' providing alcohol to a minor at a sting event at a 7-11. The 16-18 year old came up to me, with his 16-18 year old gf, while I was browsing a Redbox kiosk and asked me very politely to buy him alcohol. I said "no way, sorry". A minute later he asked a guy behind me waiting, also politely and was told no. I left. Drove 3-4 minutes away. I felt bad. I stopped at a store, got him a 6 pack, and drove back and gave it to him. The sting operation was not ready for this scenario. I drove away. 2 minutes later 3 cop cars surrounded me and ordered me out of my car. Long story short, I talked to a lawyer about potentially trying to get off on an entrapment defense. He said I MIGHT have a chance because I said no at first and left. And that something about the scenario made me come back even though my impulse was to say no. He even reached out to someone (DA?) regarding the case. When I went for the initial hearing where I planned to reschedule for a hearing with a lawyer, all charges were dropped. Is this because they realized it almost was entrapment in a way? I'll never know.

I think it's perfectly fair for the prof to catch students who are cheating this way.

how would they have performed if they tried to cheat but didn't find the poisoned answers? would they have had to come up with answers on their own? suppose they cheated for 10% of the answers but had to give honest effort on the remaining 90% and just made the cut?

i don't think it's very clear cut or obviously perfectly fair.

> how would they have performed if they tried to cheat but didn't find the poisoned answers?

I don't think this matters. Cheating was against the rules and a cheater demonstrates a failure to adhere to a social contract and voluntarily waives their right to be assessed the same with those who did follow the rules. At least there are avenues for a cheater to have another attempt, even if they have to move to another institution.

Their hypothetical score is irrelevant, as they will be receiving a zero due to cheating. In your hypothetical scenario they are still cheating, in which case their improved score would also become a zero.

no, because it was undetectable they were cheating, so their grade could have been passing.

> I ran a binomial analysis and found the likelihood that someone whose answers matched on 19 out of the 45 planted questions had about a 1:100 chance of doing so

This is just bad math. Take a question (A), there are 5 possible answers, using his analysis the probability of a student picking the same answer as the cheating answer is 1 in 5. But let's say the question is hard, and of the 5 possible answers, 2 are highly plausible, so plausible in fact that the students always go for 1 of the 2. Now, if the cheating answer is one of the plausible answers the probability is low, but if it's one of the plausible answers, then it's high. And more specifically, if the cheat answer is correct - what's the probability the student got it right? Well what you should be doing is take the other 55 non-cheating answers, calculate the probaility of correctness and then use that as the probability. The "1/100" threshold is overwhelmingly determine by how he selected the answers on the leaked answer sheet, and you can't say it just average out with such a small sample.

Modelling the whole thing as random choosing is just sloppy maths.

> Most of these answers were not just wrong, but obviously wrong to anyone who had paid attention in class.

Already accounted for per the article.

No it's not, he says some of the answers were obviously wrong, but he did the binomial analysis on 45 questions. If you plant 45 answers in a 80 answer test and they're mostly obviously wrong then the students who cheat are going to fail either way, so it can't really be true that they were wrong. And if the answers were very obviously wrong then the probability of choosing the wrong answer for each would be much higher than assuming a 20% chance of matching the fake answer. So the whole 1in 100 is highly questionable.

To put it another way, let's say he planted only wrong answers, and we have an idiot student that always gets the questions wrong. Now the probability of matching the planted answer has clearly jumped, right?

On the flip side, if the planted answers are right, and in general you expect your class to pick correct answers (ie, they're going to pass) then the probability they pick the same as the cheat answer could be as high as 90%

It isn't. "Most of these answers were not just wrong, but obviously wrong", according to the teacher. The chances of picking the worst possible answer is lower than 0.2. If the .01 threshold is fair? It isn't if you assume that someone tried to pass the test by filling out the whole thing at random. If the students tried to pass by choosing the correct answer, >= 19 obviously wrong answers out of 45 seems fair enough.

I'm not saying the conclusion they're cheating is wrong - in fact the threshold is way to generous, but fundamentally the statistical model he's picked just isn't a good fit.

What model would you propose? You don't know the likelihood in advance, do you?

The only thing that could have been added (that I can think of!) is that the likelihood of cheating is not memoryless, as the binomial process assumes, but rather that a cheater would not copy a few answers, but very many. So the chance that a cheater picks the bad answer is > 0.2, the chance that someone who doesn't know the answer = 0.2, and the chance that someone who does < 0.2.

But given the fact that we don't know the correct probabilities, nor the scale of cheating, and not even how often people take a random guess, makes the model a decent starting point, IMO, for getting a first estimate.

After all, the teacher is not researching stochastic models of cheating, but just grading papers.

I'm not sure there's a completely thorough way of proving cheating on a single measure of a relatively short test. If I wanted something more thorough I'd probably compare the mean score on the non-cheat questions vs the score on the cheat questions though. Let's say you provide the correct answers on the "leaked" test. If the score on the leaked questions is significantly higher than the score on the unseen questions then you can confidently say there was some cheating. At that point you'd probably interview the candidates on their tests rather than throw accusations.

I'd argue that the unethical bit is knowingly publishing incorrect information, especially in an educational setting. If there's a chance that someone learned deliberately false information that they will then attempt to apply in a practical setting, then you're effectively sabotaging them. He did say that it was obviously wrong if you had been paying attention, but what if you missed a class or two?

> in his online Introduction to Ethics course cheating on a take-home final exam.

Sounds funny that an ethics class gets heavy cheating. But it might be a required or elective course that students don't take seriously, or it might be disproportionately Philosophy majors (which major might get more than their share of frosh starting to wield off-the-wall ethical rationalizations).

> Sounds funny that an ethics class gets heavy cheating.

Good observation - got me thinking. I see lots of suggestions here about requiring ethics training/classes for developers, so it made me wonder-- can ethics be effectively trained into a person predisposed to behave unethically if consequences for the behavior don't exist?

Edited for clarity and moved under the right comment

One problem doing this for tech is that we've normalized so much bad behavior.

For example, go back 30 years, and make ordinary software spy on its users, or otherwise act against users' interests, and I think you'd be seen as evil and possibly criminal.

One promising thing, though, is that college students might still be be more open to confronting issues of ethics and morality. (Though often it's only "Revolutionaries till graduation", because of sheltered circumstances or social fashion.) But college is a bit late, and students are already being driven to mercenary behavior by e.g., competition for FAANG jobs (like I used to mainly hear about desperate/ruthless behavior by some pre-meds). Ideally, we teach better values from early age, including by example.

> can ethics be effectively trained into a person

Maybe. But that's not what an ethics class is for; it's for learning about ethics, it's not for learning how to be ethical.

This is unethical, but not for the reasons given. It's unethical because it favors the pre-internet status quo of cheating within one's social circle. It was well known at my university that fraternities and sororities kept libraries of old exams. A policy that catches only internet cheaters is a policy that advantages socially connected cheaters over individual cheaters.

Our uni's CS students kept an online catalogue of past exams/answers/cheat-sheets so it was somewhat democratic for it's time :) Tho I guess you had to know it exists to find it first.

> It's unethical because it favors the pre-internet status quo

Don't agree. You're saying that if I can't catch all the cheaters, then I can never call anyone out for cheating. That's a licence to cheat.

Cheating is bad, for the same reason corruption is bad; once it's accepted that it's allowed, then anyone who doesn't cheat/take and give bribes, then everyone who plays by the rules is at a disadvantage. Corruption is a disease that spreads if you don't stamp it out.

Also: cheating on tests is an insult to the intelligence of the examiner. The cheaters are laughing at him. If you don't call out cheaters, then the whole idea of getting a graded result becomes meaningless; you might as well simply give every student that actually paid their fees an 'A', and do without exams.

BTW, I think it's irrelevant that it's an ethics exam. You don't study Ethics to become more ethical. You study it to learn about the philosophy of ethics.

I'd rather avoid the question about ethics in this case. Is it ethical to accept payment for teaching? Is it ethical to charge as much for as (some of) US univerities do? Is it ethical to devise a test in such a way that a number of students will certainly fail? Is it ethical to prevent students from cheating? You can bend the word just as long until it means something like "might it cause any harm at all?"

But if you ask yourself: why do the students take this course, you can think the reason is to learn something. If they want a piece of paper that proves that, they can't cheat. If you --cynically-- assume that students only take the course to get their diploma with as little effort as possible, then cheating is allowed.

As long as schools want to teach something, they should stay away from online or take-home exams and essays. If they want something else (and usually the motivator here is money), the value of their education will drop.

To a certain extent, I wonder if the real problem is the focus on tests and memorization. In the real world, "knowing" something means you can apply it to a project. I "know" guitar if I can play multiple songs well, not if I can easily tell you how to form the first inversion of c major 7 in a specific tuning or something. I could be a savant on tests and not be able to play Wonderwall. I know programming if I can write good working code, not if I can answer trivia about C++ virtual tables.

My point being in the real world people look things up all the time, IE, cheat. Ability to memorize for an arbitrary test is a bad measure of the ability to apply learning.

Also admittedly its been a while since i've been in school, but in my day (like 10 years ago), a take home final was not considered a serious thing. I think that happened maybe once or twice and it was because the final barely mattered.

I love the irony that the students were cheating in an Ethics class.

As for entrapment, it's no different from leaving your front door unlocked being entrapment for thieves (it isn't). The cheaters are adults, know what cheating is, know they cheated, and know what the consequences are. No sympathy. Give them all an F for the course.

Reminds me of the (very) old Woody Allen joke:

"I cheated on the Philosophy exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me."

I was interviewing a candidate a couple of months ago, and as part of the assessment they were required to write a bat and ball game in Javascript, in advance of the interview.We would go through the code during the interview and I would ask them how it might be modified / extended in various ways.

This candidate produced a reasonable, functional bat and ball game in a couple of pages of Javascript code, and I had high hopes for the interview. But as soon as I tried to delve into the code with the candidate, it became clear they had no idea what half of it was doing. I suppose they got chatGPT to write it for them, or something. Was disappointed and vaguely annoyed to have wasted my time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36087175

'nocoiner mentioned in a sublevel comment that the syllabus was not very clear about not referencing old course materials:

>His policy of disallowing students to refer to prior tests was not even explicit in the syllabus, but behind a link. If this policy were clear upfront - absolutely, reference to outside materials is inappropriate and there should be consequences.

If you want to catch students cheating, you should be clear with them beforehand what constitutes cheating.

Can anyone explain the maths that he did because my calculation give different results. Isn't there only a 1 in 2588 chance of a student 'guessing' 19 'answers' out of 45 where there are 5 options for each answer? Whereas the article states that it is 1 in 100 ? (actually he writes 1:100 which is odds, so it is 1 in 101?) Don't we just use the Binomial distribution, so: Prob = 45!/(19!26!) * (1/5)*19 * (1 - 1/5)*26 It's really bugging me that I can't get the maths to work.

Despite the rules of the university I wouldn't think looking up past tests is wrong or cheating. But I don't see anything wrong with what the teacher did. And personally I think he should just let the results stand. It sounds like the students missed up to half the questions (or more)

Where's your head aaaaat. Where's your head at? You are unethical because at some point you decided it's not about teaching them, it's about catching them. I think you should take a minute to think about what your role actually is. Time is limited. Spend it on what matters.

The argument for these ethics classes being mandatory in the CS curriculum is that they will prevent unethical behavior in industry. The article demonstrates the classes aren't even effective at preventing unethical behavior in the same classroom they're taught in. Waste of time.

While I've always had a negative outlook on the modern school system due to my own experiences, I fail to see how the answer to the title could be anything but "yes".

I've seen this many times before, where a teacher seems to fail to realize that their students don't just have their own exam to prepare for; they have to prepare for many other exams at the same time, all the while struggling to balance their study time with their responsibilites at home, their social life and possibly their part-time job at the same time.

So when an answer sheet is just readily available online, there aren't many students who wouldn't choose to spend a few hours memorizing the answers so they have a little more breathing room for other (possibly more difficult) exams.

The statements about how this teacher apparently feels oh-so stressful about this situation that he purposefully created himself, all the while dismissing any and all critique from people because they aren't "teachers of any kind" feels very childish and leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.

Ok, let's not inconvenience the students anymore with studying then since they're so busy. We should just award them a degree after 4 years of being in the unversity's register.

My point is that expecting time-pressed students to ignore freely available answer sheets is like expecting a hungry horse to ignore a carrot dangling in front of them.

There is nothing wrong with removing their ability to cheat, but purposefully uploading answer sheets and then getting angry that students made use of them isn't. In fact, it's not just wrong: it's ethically wrong.

I think the "anger" is merited since the students (1) cheated when they were clearly told not to and (2) marked answers that were "obviously wrong" which implies that not even a modicum of effort was invested in demonstrating knowledge.

The "busy" argument is a poor one. We're all busy. Part of gaining an education is learning how to manage your time. As a professor myself, I know for a fact that most students manage their time poorly, yet many students will still pull the "busy" argument when it simply doesn't apply. Rather, just admit to procrastinating. Either way, the outcome is the same (poor performance).

To sum up my sentiments to cheaters... "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes."

“40 of the 96 students” caught cheating. No comment on the rest of the article but damn, that is an unbelievable number. If that is a representative amount of cheating for college, then it’s completely unrecognizable academic landscape from when I experienced it.

I once wanted to be a university professor. Stories of rampant cheating at some schools make me think it would've had to have been somewhere with a more honorable culture.

I've heard of some schools where supposedly the students take the honor code very seriously.

If you have at least a masters degree (bachelors in some states), it's not terribly difficult to get an adjunct lecturer job. You're generally committed for a whole semester, but that's basically it.

> When he confronted those students about this, most of them admitted they had cheated; the consequences for their grades are still being determined

> I tell all my students what will happen if I catch them cheating

How do those two statements go together?

"If you get caught cheating, there will be serious consequences, ranging from X to Y. The decision will be made by the board together with the ethics committee."

Typically the university itself handles consequences for cheating, plagiarism, etc. Repeated issues often leads to the student being expelled.

1/100 is too large of a cutoff imo. If you have a class of 96 students, there's a decent chance that an innocent student gets flagged for no reason. I hope he lets the student on the bubble off the hook.

If things today are similar to they were ~10-15 years ago when I was in college, deciding not to cheat was actually pretty tough. So many people were cheating in every class I was in I felt like I was handicapping myself by not also doing it. I had to actively ignore obvious cheaters in a lot of situations since our honor code indicated that if you saw it, and did not report it, you could be in similar trouble, so I had to give myself plausible deniability. Very stressful. I guess I could have tried just burning it all down and reporting every instance I saw, but that felt like inviting trouble and way more hassle than it was worth to just keep my head down.

If your exam can be cheated on, you're doing exams wrong.

He's not unethical, just lazy. He should make better tests, and update them every term.

He doesn't need to frame the questions the same way each year.

The professors action in isolation was unethical by virtue of purposefully misinforming a public resource. But the primary fault for outcome lies with the students.

But the pedagogy could be improved if trying to reduce instances of cheating. The trap wasn't just the professors intentful actions; doing a take home final was also cheaters bait. Perhaps even how the quizes, class, and assignments were ran were also cheaters bait and creating cheating habits. If the idea is to teach people to be ethical in practice through discipline and not just simply about ethics, it really shouldn't be a lesson only experienced at the point when repercussions for failing are extreme and extend beyond the effected situation.

Though I'm not sure fixating heavily on cheating marks is the right way to frame the problem of trying to improve performance, understanding, and confidence in a subject... It feels like some portion of the cheating of the institution, is self inflected due to the orthodoxy of the institution itself.

In my opinion, teaching should not involve taking tests at all. Students should be offered optional tests for self-assessment and for professional certification. Otherwise, focus on teaching. I see no real educational merit to it, and a lot of heartache for teachers and students.

He did the right thing.

Nope, not unethical.

Expel every single one of those students.

Nah you're valid

Obviously yes. Ignore the question of whether this is entrapment (legally of course it isn't, morally idk).

He's intentionally spreading misinformation online to save himself time writing a new exam. How could this possibly be ethical?

Here's my problem with what the professor did, and my problem whenever a professor tries to get "clever" to catch a whole class cheating -- it's selective enforcement.

My problem is that the incentives at school mostly encourage students to cheat. They have learned, class after class, semester after semester, that cheating is widespread and that therefore the only way to get a fair reward-to-effort ratio is to cheat.

Then, they happen to get unlucky by taking a particular class a particular semester, they get caught, and get punished. Yet 99% of the other students at the institution never get caught.

That's not fair. That's not just. What isn't right here is for a professor to go on a private crusade that isn't aligned with the university's enforcement policies generally.

I'm all for it if the university wants to stamp out cheating completely, so anti-cheating measures are utilized in every class, so 85% of cheaters ultimately get caught, and students overwhelmingly stop cheating. Then it's a level playing field again.

But a situation where the university's official policies are against cheating yet their minimal and lax actions allow it to flourish, and then one professor decides to punish just a tiny number who get bad luck... there's nothing fair, just, or ethical about that.

EDIT: there seems to be some deep misinterpretation of what I said in some replies. Perhaps this analogy will help: there's a 55 mph speed limit in a state, but everybody knows that everywhere in the state cops don't stop you unless you're going over 65. Except for one village where the cops ticket everyone going just 56, and because locals know but nobody else does, all town revenue comes from speeding fines and the locals pay zero local taxes. Does anybody here this that is fair? Think that is just?

The principle here is that it's unethical to enforce policy/laws to such a small extent that they fail to deter behavior in general, but still punish a small group of people who are simply unlucky. Either strengthen enforcement so it deters, or don't enforce it at all. Because sporadic enforcement that fails to deter is the worst of all possible outcomes. There's nothing just about it whatsoever.

Nonsense. "Everyone does it" is a lousy defense, and all laws are selectively enforced.

They cheated. Period.

Nonsense back at you. Because laws that are selectively enforced to an extreme degree are unjust. Period.

Tons of students cheat. The solution is effective policy at an institutional level to actually deter cheating overall, not to catch a tiny subset of individuals that accomplishes nothing in the broader picture.

It's called "setting an example." Like catching a few speeders on the freeway: deters the rest.

> accomplishes nothing in the broader picture

not quite nothing. Those bad students got caught.

But it's not setting an example if it doesn't deter the rest, that's the point.

There's nothing good about punishing students if the punishment is too infrequent to deter. And one profesor acting alone isn't enough to deter.

Pure conjecture.

If the Chicago cops catch two murderers, that's several people who don't get shot. Even if they don't catch ALL of them.

Wow... we can't catch every criminal so we should just allow everyone to commit crimes.

Every class I took in college made at least some attempt to prevent cheating but it can certainly be tough. Not every subject even lends itself to evaluation by in class exam - especially when the point is to teach people how to research the subject. To suggest that simply because schools are unable to catch every act they should essentially give up is the most backwards answer I can think of.

Absolutely not. Nowhere did I say if we can't catch "everyone" then catch no one. I literally gave an example of catching 85% as good policy. 50% is more than fine too, and even much lower depending on the situation.

In fact, it's the very opposite -- I said if we're already catching almost nobody (think 1%) then incentives have been set up in a deeply unfair way.

I added an "edit" to my comment that hopefully explains further. The point is to deter broadly. If that's not happening, then policy is total failure already. Because the point is deterrence, not individual cruelty.

I don't think the enforcement is all that selective - any time I took an exam in a large hall, there were professors and TAs pacing around on the lookout. In smaller settings, it might have been just the professor but they all seemed to be trying to enforce the code. Many people may slip through the net but that's different than selective enforcement. If the rules have been communicated, I see no problem having a severe penalty as a deterrent.

Also, you may consider that it's because you're a cheater that you think everyone else is doing it. I made it out of a couple elite colleges with a good GPA and no cheating.

Your proposal is to castigate those who take a step in the right direction simply because they are out of step with the rest. This is, to put it gently, not how we get a better world.

No, it's that those who want to take a step in the right direction to coordinate to create a uniform policy.

Because that is how to get a better world. People all doing their own thing in different directions is not how to improve things. It's when people are acting together to enforce in the same way.

Are students to blame when they're receiving hugely mixed messages?

Yes. Right and wrong are invariant under incentives to do the wrong thing. That's why we call them right and wrong, rather than optimal or not.

You will never get everyone moving in the right direction if you dogpile the first one to take a step. In practice, these changes almost always require someone to do it on their own before anyone else takes the idea seriously.

Except that different people call different things right and wrong. There are no absolute rights and wrongs, people disagree deeply over ethics.

Which is why you need to work on convincing people to come around to your idea. Then you can implement it through university policy, law, etc.

We didn't come up with speed limits because a bunch of people decided to drive slower on their own and then the idea caught on. No, we came up with arguments as to why speed limits save lives, made it legislative policy with enforcement mechanisms, and then it works.

Effective change is coordinated. People going rogue on their own gets you nowhere.

Except no one actually disagrees that cheating is wrong, including the cheaters, so none of that "convincing others" stuff is relevant here. I don't know why you and so many other people in these threads want to pretend cheating is ethically complicated. It's not.

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