Prof. calls out student for cheating via Math StackExchange
math.stackexchange.com
math.stackexchange.com
The smart kids are always going to be penalized because the cheating kids are going to ask for help. In other words, this kid got caught. We can discuss if this kid should have known that he was cheating or not (and I believe that there is good evidence that modern kids have a difficult time grasping the idea of original work). That is both a process and a procedure that colleges should teach kids. Ethics 101 should be a required course.
(Then again, Allen and Gates bought DOS from Seattle Computing Products and sold it as their own.)
My problem is the other 50% of the kids that find a friend that can help them, and thereby cheat but have no avenue to be caught.
Simple solution is to have tests in class on a sample of the work done during the quarter/semester. If you can't do this, then you don't understand how to test for knowledge
While this won't stop cheating, it should bring it down dramatically. The best way to slow cheating is to not give an opportunity to cheat in the first place.
Where can I find that good, non-anecdotal evidence?
The following is for anyone who hasn't heard of wikipedia:
Wikipedia is often a good place to begin research. It can often provide a set of words that you can use to look for scholarly works that can provide "good, non-anecdotal data".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_dishonesty
This article features words like: Plagiarism, fabrication, deception, cheating, bribery, sabotage, professorial sabotage, and personation. These may help you in your search for "good, non-anecdotal evidence".
Wikipedia also provides links to "good, non-anecdotal evidence" from time to time, and calls these links "references". These references can often be accessed online, but sometimes require you to access a physical book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_dishonesty#References
The things that you read in wikipedia are not necessarily the truth. Wikipedia has information and mis-information on many topics.
>>>Certainly not all - and probably not most - college students cheated and plagiarized.
It has neither data nor studies. It is Sue Carter Simmons' professional opinion.
That said, I agree with you that modern kids don't necessarily cheat more than non-modern kids do. I agree that parts of theologic's comment were directed at "modern kids" and the teachers of these modern kids. I can see how a reasonable person (you, stdbrouw) could infer that theologic was saying that modern kids have different cheating habits than non-modern kids. I submit that there is another reasonable person (myself) that does not infer that theologic was saying that modern kids have different cheating habits than non-modern kids. Let me explain:
>>> The best way to slow cheating is to not give an opportunity to cheat in the first place
This is the last line of theologic's comment. The proposed "best way to slow cheating" works equally well for modern and non-modern kids, it does not target either group.
The other references to modern kids inherently do not explicitly say anything about non-modern kids. There is no comparison or contrast, which leaves room for you and I to make our opposing inferences.
To be fair, if theologic had said something explicit about non-modern kids, I would tend to agree with your inference.
I can't remember where I read the idea that lack of ownership may be fueling the rise of cheating, and my google-fu is weak tonight.
I like to remind the young ones here, however, that in the old days it was hard to cheat because you had to find a library or a smart friend that would help you. If you were really unlucky, you asked your Dad, who would inevitably give you the wrong answer. It was easier to simply do the work.
Possible counterexample: The absolute best math professor (in terms of success educating, not how fun his classes were) I had was legendary for his exams. They usually only had a couple questions. But 3 hours were allotted to take them - not as take-home exams; he would arrange special evening test sessions. Everyone did the test on a computer in Mathematica. Internet access was not available. Mathematica was necessary; the questions were designed to reflect real-life problems someone in a math-related field might be asked to solve, and like in the real world the nature of the problem was such that doing the actual calculation by hand would not have been practical.
We really needed that time to figure out how to solve the problems. And I think there's no way the professor could have managed exams that tested our knowledge as deeply without creating problems that required that kind of time to solve.
That said, I agree that take-home exams are problematic. As an option for trying to come up with exams that ask students to think rather than just regurgitating knowledge, I think they might once have been quite effective. But they're terribly unsuited to the Google era.
I would think it's still a parents job to guide a kid properly in the realm of ethics, maybe we should place more responsibility of the children onto the parents. (mind you this I'm not touching the fact that they really can't prove the kid is who he is, I'm just referring to the ethics aspect.)
Appeals to false nostalgia are not evidence for your claims.
--I suppose since I used the word properly I invited an argument of quality. I did mainly mean to refer to to the who and not the how well though.
Your mistake lies in assuming that parents before were somehow a better source of "ethics" than parents now. History books are always exceedingly kind to prior generations.
Not really sure where you're going with this.
Google bought most of its docs suite and sells it as their own. The bought their analytics and claim it as their own.
Doesn't pretty much any company that buys another company sell the acquired products under own banner at some point?
>"how do you know who posted the question? In this forum anyone can post under any name...".
The prof replied (as an answer, not a comment):
>"Anyone stupid enough to cheat is stupid enough to use their own name."
http://math.stackexchange.com/a/257156/23944
Since it will most likely be deleted by the mods very soon (merely because its not a mathematical answer), here is the screenshot
So, to be fair, we don't know if the prof is using his real name or it's just a friend of the OP trying to pull a prank. We'll probably never know.
Darn. You'd think if there's anyone who could be trusted to not affirm the consequent, it would be a math professor.
Then at class, the students do their homework, with the teacher helping and grading the work.
I'm really intrigued by this, and think there is a future for this method, given how technology has progressed.
I'm not sure at what point it got "flipped" around to the current state where students expect to learn the material in lecture and then study their notes, but attempting to flip it back seems like a good idea.
Do you think assignments are designed this way because of an "industry business model"?
This would barely even make sense if you were discussing private/charter schools.
But at the same time does it mean its open season on cheating via the internet? There has to be some middle ground. How to go about that, i have no idea.
Is it wrong to ask for help?? In the professional world, being able to communicate and collaborate in finding an answer is more usefuel than doing it all by your own.
On the other side:
If what you want to do is to develop in your brain the mental models to do math. then you need to do your homework... is like triying to get in shape, it's ok to have a personal trainer but he can't lift weights for you.
Asking a concrete, directed question meant to understand part of the problem and get him "unstuck" would probably have been fine and expected.
As a professor, it's good to give your students opportunities to develop in both ways. And for a variety of reasons (some good, some bad), it's more or less necessary to test and grade both types of learning, too. So if a student violates the explicit rules set forth for an exam (which I assume was the case here) by swapping one type of learning for the other, that displays a clear lack of integrity.
You're right to ask whether the hoops are the right hoops or at the right hight.
But, if we're limiting ourselves to how he asks for help: Did he search for help and try to solve it himself? Did he ask partial questions on the specific part that he was stuck on and try to solve the rest?
http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/256822/product-of-tw...
EDIT: it was deleted
On one hand, students, employers and lecturers all agree (I think) that allowing students to do larger projects, over a period of time, allows them to better show their strengths and tackle interesting problems.
On the other hand, without locking people in a room with nothing but a pen for 3 hours or so, it is very difficult to check they aren't getting someone else to do all their work for them.
Of course, this probably won't work for students that don't want to be in the class anyway, but that wasn't a problem in AP calc.
It's a problem if you're trying to operate an industrial-scale student-assembly-line of a course. Which I'll grant is how most courses do operate today.
But it's increasingly clear that that's a really bad way to organize education anyway.
So we need to rethink the way we structure education and credentials.
Why is there an incentive to cheat like this? Frankly, because most of the hoops a student jumps through during their education really don't impart any lasting measurable value. What fraction of educational content is still usable in the average student's brain ten years after they learned it? Very little.
Mostly this comes down to the rigid and one-size-fits-all way we teach most things. Learning is orders of magnitude more effective when the learner has a personal motivation for why they want to learn something and how they intend to apply it in their life -- factors that are frequently missing from our traditional classroom model.
The real value in school is the meta skills. Learning how to learn. Today we expect students to get those as a side effect of learning a bunch of pointless (to them personally) stuff, but more often than not they pick up the wrong set of meta skills: they learn how to cram information just long enough to regurgitate it for the test and then forget it forever.
If you want people to learn the really valuable meta skills, you need to let them practice those meta skills in domains the students actually care about.
As far as whether any "lasting measurable value" is imparted by these sorts of exercises, I can say that at my workplace I've seen more than one freshout who clearly hadn't made it through college without significant assistance from Stack Overflow and other people's blogs. None of them lasted very long.
Perhaps knowing how to solve problems for yourself isn't necessary to get a college degree nowadays, but it's surprising how useful it can be in a career where you solve problems for a living.
But that's not the point of my post. I'm asking why somebody who clearly doesn't care about learning this bit of math feels the need to go through the motions in the first place. It's a suboptimal way to learn anything.
I can't say for sure why that might be, but I could speculate on it for days. Perhaps they never really understood the point of school in the first place. Perhaps they were seeing so much success at Googling their way through school that they were never given any reason to suspect they might not be able to get away with Googling their way on through the rest of their lives. Perhaps they knew how dependent they had become on being hand-held through everything by others, but didn't know how to escape that pattern.
shrug All I know is that at this point, if I were to find out that there were a university that had a policy of flunking students for asking, "Is this going to be on the exam?" I would immediately write a letter to HR suggesting that we aggressively recruit graduates of that program.
If they use their fraudulent credential to get a job and then perform well, then the material really was pointless and the system really is a big show without substance. I can hardly fault someone for gaming such a system.
On the other hand, if they fail miserably because they lack relevant skills, then they didn't really prosper from their cheating.
You're overcomplicating things to push your agenda. There's an incentive for a dishonest student to cheat because it's significantly easier than actually doing the work.
A student is unlikely to cheat on a topic they really love, but the value of learning something isn't judgeable on that basis. A lot of things I questioned the value of at school have come in handy, and I only left 2 years ago.
I agree that a big value of school is the ability to learn and reason, but students don't know best.
That's only true if cheating gives you the same benefit as actually doing the work.
In many fields (especially science/technology/engineering/math), I would argue that the cheater doesn't capture much benefit. It's pretty easy to verify their abilities and see that they don't know what they're doing. In these areas, even where the credential is necessary it is not sufficient.
On the other hand, there are cases where it seems that a cheater is just as capable of doing the work. Where that's true, it calls into question the wisdom of using such credentials in the first place, since mastery of the material ends up being uncorrelated with performance.
> but students don't know best.
True, but that's only a problem if we assume learning is a one-shot thing. If learning is a continuous, iterative process then there's plenty of chances for the learner to self-correct based on real-world experience. That's one reason I went off on my "agenda" about why education in general needs to change.
Because there will always be some amount of "incentive" to cheat to reach any reward with the minimum amount of effort.
If the cheater who fails to learn anything is rewarded with a successful career, what does that say about the real value of the material he didn't learn? If he gets a job based on his credential and then performs well, then the material really didn't matter, and so we as a society are wasting vast amounts of time and money subsidizing education that doesn't matter.
On the other hand, if the cheater is going to get found out by his lack of skill, he won't achieve a reward and his cheating is irrational and self-defeating, and not something we need to worry about. It's self-punishing behavior.
The impostor will still gain a privilege from their ill-gotten degree and claims of expertise in a subject, even if the coding-related job screens them out. Those charismatic persons may also receive their jobs because of cronyism/nepotism, their lack of skillset given a pass because of the credentials.
Worry is a loaded term. I didn't worry about the cheaters when I was getting my degree, but I would still prefer to see them removed from the system, once found.
Otherwise this does not mean anything more than "somebody better be confessing, but I am not sure who".
(The fact that there was a an attempt on the question does not bode well for this guy, but again, that could be faked too... right?)
At that point, it is probably easier to just study, learn the material and do it yourself.
I just cannot fathom how people could be truly pulling off these sort of stunts and can sleep soundly at night. At some point if you're an idiot you have to accept it and either do something different or buckle down and work harder.
The same way they do it in the corporate world, I imagine.
If the question matches 100% and the user's name also matches someone in the class 100% it would probable be enough, but thats just me speculating.
The only reason the prof asked for the confession is because otherwise he has absolutely nothing.
The likelihood of a student being "framed" is a lot lower than the likelihood of the student just being stupid and expecting not to get caught. When bringing this up before the university ethics board the student will have to do more than argue that anybody could have registered under their name. There will probably need to be some proof that somebody else did it. If you think otherwise, wait until you or somebody you know winds up on the wrong side of a university ethics panel. You'd be surprised how very little it takes to get in trouble and how difficult it can be to get out of trouble. A friend of mine got brought before an ethics panel for hacking, by simply sending the IT staff an email about a page with a vulnerability. Nothing was exploited and nobody was told about it except one person in the IT department. It took five profs arguing against the absurdity of the proceedings to get the sentence reduced from being kicked out to "just" one semester of probation.
In short, the prof doesn't need the confession. The student would be wise to write one and play up that this is their first time cheating. Trying to fight this like a legal battle will only make the school that much more eager to kick the student out.
There may well be data held on the Uni computer network, for example that would help to prove who the culprit is to a high enough degree too - eg an account ID matched with IP of math.stackexchange.com around the time the question was asked.
Would grep-ing a classes logs for the timestamps of accesses to "math.stackexchange.com" be too great an infringement to guard against fraudulent activity.
It's probably only tortuous but still fraud in the process of obtaining a degree is a pretty serious offense in Uni terms.
>>>That's no justification to sabotage a math Q&A site.
I assume you mean: [learning a valuable lesson about the internet is] no justification to [knowingly post an incorrect answer to] a math Q&A site.
I disagree, and I think that the justification the OP mentioned is an excellent one, for one very specific type of sabotage (posting an incorrect answer). I will try to paraphrase their justification:
Someone who reads an answer on a math Q&A site and does not check to make sure the answer is correct will learn "a valuable lesson about the internet" if the answer turns out to be incorrect.
I assume that the lesson could be that "thinking that an idea is true doesn't make that idea true true". A more specific lesson about math could be "check your work". In my mind, these lessons are both valid justifications for the one specific type of sabotage mentioned. Some people believe that checking your work strengthens your math skills, so the people who checked to see if the answer was correct or incorrect may have improved their math skills as well.
That being said, this would be an effective way to screw over someone else, if you signed up with their name and plastered these types of questions all over the internet. The first thing that any HR rep is going to do when considering a job application is searching for the persons name. If this type of garbage comes up, that resume will probably be instantly tossed into the bit bucket.
Do History professors do this? I mean a math problem is something you might be unlikely to find on the internet, but I'm guessing wikipedia knows when the battle of Gettysburg took place.
If you are allowing for "open book" but not "open internet" give the test in class and set their book on the table.
A teacher provides two services: teaching (obviously) and evaluate students to let them know how well they are prepared to pass an official exam.
So cheating or not cheating here is a non-issue except for the student that clearly doesn't know what he's doing. And the the teacher who seems enjoys playing the sheriff's role could be ridiculous, except he doesn't know what he is doing either.
That's a pretty sad story, actually.
But in honesty what did the professor expect from students who are given take home exams? That they won't go online and look for answers?
Are you saying that you would go online and look for answers? If so, why do you believe that's an acceptable way to conduct yourself? If not, why do you believe that the professors students are any different?
I don't think this student was asking for help so much as asking someone to do the work for him, but I'll keep it in mind either way.
Hmmmmmmmmm
So if the professor cannot guarantee that no-one is cheating,then any marks obtained for that exam/homework/whatever are completely meaningless.
Yeah, that's not a great idea. It's generally pretty straightforward to tell, especially for CS (more so than mathematics, but the same principles apply).
I once had a not-so-bright student IM'ing someone in Chinese asking for a solution right in front of me during office hours. Sure, I can't read Chinese, but I can definitely recognise formulae and code.
In a well run class the same person should be grading your homework and exams throughout the semester. I used to find it really obvious when somebody was 'borrowing' something.
I'd love to hear you explain that to a partner after being caught red-handed. Of course, many people DO just this after being caught cheating. Blame the partner, blame "the system", blame everything but themselves. It's immature and destructive.
No one enjoys having cheaters around them, bringing them down, don't you think that the professors would rather have cheat-proof exams to offer their classes as well?
Well, you can, but it involves you not being a student.