Catching a Cheater Online | Hacker News Reader

Catching a Cheater Online

theatlantic.com

27 pointsghosh37 comments

As stated in the article, cheating has mostly to do with the fact that what is being taught is a bunch of crap - and the final product (a college degree) is seen as a piece of paper that grants them access to the next level.

Cheating in academia is exactly the same as piracy: It is a service problem. If classes taught useful information/skills in a non-boring way, cheating would be significantly reduced.

It takes a special kind of myopic/arrogant person to find out that students are cheating on their exams and think that the problem has nothing to do with them.

I can't agree more, I've studied IT engineering, but spending countless hours on fundamental sciences while at the same time knowing that it will have little to no benefit to my actual profession was too big of a torture to endure.

If done right, fundamental sciences make for great learning.

Didn't do that for me on any level whatsoever. I think the biggest miss of academia is inability to catch student's interest. When I started doing actual practical work and see the fruits of my labor - that's when my interest morphed into a feedback loop - that was never ever the case in the university.

It is not the job of a university to motivate its students, they are supposed and assumed to be grown-ups who can motivate themselves to learn things they want to learn.

That'd be a destructive attitude for universities to take.

I guess you got unlucky with your studies and your professors. Glad to hear, that you learned to like learning.

I do agree with this. While in charge of hiring for a data science team, I found that candidates with degrees in hard sciences were more often than not better candidates than the ones with CS backgrounds. Fundamental understanding of mathematics and true problem solving skills go a long way in data science (and computer science of course), and these seem to be tenets of good graduates of Physics programs especially.

If the college degree would only serve to get to the next academic level, things would probably be alright.

IMHO the real issue is that degrees are considered signals for employers - that blows up their value to much, much more than "just" the value of the courses added together.

agree, I was a school drop out and then went on to do a degree in open university, then did my masters in IT and the IT degree would not be awarded to me because I did not have my school completed. (Note I passed in distinction > 70% in every subject of that degree)

>Cheating in academia is exactly the same as piracy: It is a service problem. If classes taught useful information/skills in a non-boring way, cheating would be significantly reduced.

This is true, but only for certain subjects. I largely agree with you when it comes to many Comp-Sci courses. Differential Equations, not so much.

You can't stop 100% of the cheaters, but if your differential equations professor speaks little English and lectures from the book without caring one iota about presentation, then that professor will have higher rates of cheaters. It's about controlling the variable that can be controlled.

The instructors mentioned were not teaching the course this student planned to cheat on, though. And without a revolution in American education, there will never be the students to sustain schools without the notion that there is a credential at the end of the level. Nor will there be any significant proportion of classes that have no unengaged students.

Right, which is why I said it has "mostly" to do with the fact that what is being taught is useless. It's asymptotic, of course - there exists a certain number of people who will cheat on their exams, and that's OK. It doesn't mean we give up and lecture in the most boring style possible, it means we try to improve education and reach the maximum amount of "engageable" students possible.

What you're describing may be part of the issue, I can't argue with that, but come on. There are lots of reasons that people might cheat in classes that they enjoy or that they recognize is useful. I've been lucky enough to have very little cheating in my classes, but it's easy enough to imagine.

Let's say Johnny wants to be a doctor more than anything in the world. He knows that he needs two semesters of Organic Chemistry on his transcript to get in to med school, and that if his grades aren't top notch he won't be able to compete. Johnny likes his Chem prof (and the grading is fair), but he's only managing B-'s on his exams. He sees his dream fading away. Sure, he could say, "Huh. I guess I'm not cut out to be a doctor." But don't you think some students out there would consider cheating under those circumstances?

Or maybe Johnny consciously chose to go to a college that has a strong culture of giving students a "well-rounded" education (by whatever internal definition) and insists that students take a wide variety of classes from different disciplines. That's not Johnny's cup of tea: he just wants a computing degree. He could easily have chosen a different school, but he didn't. Now he just wants to focus on his CS classes, so when he's stuck with a course in English or History he decides to cheat so he doesn't have to think about it. Do you really want to say that's the teacher's fault?

You have a valid point in the first one but in the second case cheating is harmless.

He has no intention of applying the knowledge he would have attained in the classes he cheated on.

Every student should be allowed to choose his own classes with as little requirements imposed by the school as possible.

That's not to say there couldn't be a list of recommendations preferably with an explanation why for students that have no idea what to take but forcing them is a bad idea.

Stop wasting students time with useless classes just so you can have a standard set of classes for each field.

In both cases cheating is a sympthom of a larger issue: in case 1, requiring your doctor has an A grade to in organic chemistry is BS.

I don't think that expecting a doctor to do well in o-chem is a bad idea. Why? Organic chemistry is considered by many people to be extremely difficult because it forces those who are really skilled at it to have strong intuitive skills and to practice those skills. And that's definitely something that I want my doctor to be good at: diagnostic and intuition.

The hard work part of orgo is memorization.

The easy part of organic chemistry is taking the first course where you memorize a lot of stuff, but if you move forward to useful things then there's no way to memorize it all which is why you have to actually be intelligent, rather than simply being able to memorize and regurgitate.

My understanding was that Orgo I is often considered the "weeder course" for people on a path for med school. At my university, the last 3rd of the first course was pretty much all memorization that facilitated Orgo II (I know this because I wasn't planning on taking II and decided not to do a great job on the memorization but still did good enough in the class).

That's what I'm saying - memorization is useful enough for basic concepts but it won't help you pass the MCAT.

I'm not saying is a bad idea. I think a doctor has to be smart. But that said, I'm not convinced that my doctor need to know all the nuances of Diels-Alder, and pass OrgChem with top grades.

But, thinking further, I do not really understand how the evaluation is done.

What does that A grade really means? It means he has a grasp of what benzene is, or that I can hire him for doing my syntheses?

The system is very broken. I hope one day we'll have some serious D&D-like rules in our instruction:

   MD: 
       Org Chem >8
       Surgery >14
       Int >16
       Char >14

   OrgChemist: 
       Org Chem >18
       Surgery >4
       Int >15
       Char > 3

As though learning to be trusted to do what you commit to do (whether you love doing it or not) has nothing to do with your career.

Attitudes that completely disregard integrity will completely destroy the value of online degrees. It's a shame.

Then later when you have a boss who is looking over your shoulder at every step to make sure that you're not trying to get away with something... guess who is going to be complaining about trust?

Assuming offline degrees still have any value. Experience seems to outweigh that from what i have seen.

For instance my degree is completely useless just because i have it from a different country.

Luckily that never prevented me from doing what i like regardless.

I might actually bother to take the time get the same degree in the country i currently live in but that's not because that piece of paper has any value it's just because I always enjoyed learning new things.

I completely disagree with this.

While it may be true that if classes were more interesting then cheating would be reduced slightly, that doesn't make it the problem. Similarly, if content creators didn't want any money for their content then piracy would be reduced. But it's pretty obvious that's not a realistic solution.

Calling it a service problem just enables the entitled attitude of pirates and cheaters (you aren't giving me exactly what I want for the price I want, so I'm just going to take it.)

There are classes that are important or required, but may be boring. You think that in life, you will love every single hour of whatever job you end up with? No, of course not. That doesn't entitle you to cheat your way through those classes anymore than you could skip shitty days at work.

Have you taught? I'm pretty miffed at the idea that you think professors should take students that cheat as their own failing.

I can assure you that most professors invest considerable time in trying to make the material interesting, relevant, accessible, etc. And even if they fail, or the course is an "irrelevant" required course, that does not justify cheating.

You must have experience teaching!

I do not, but my wife does. She is a professor of English and she relates stories to me of her classes daily. One thing that helps her classes is that she always explains why they need to learn something, and she never introduces a lesson that doesn't further her own learning outcomes that she has set up (for intro classes she structures such that students are ready for her upper level courses, and for those courses she structures such that students will be able to succeed not only in English but also in other areas as well).

One thing that's very common (check out the CCCC literature on the subject, and as a matter of fact my wife is presenting there this week) is trying to find ways to ignite student engagement. You have thousands of extremely bright people who expend countless hours simply trying to figure out how to make students care. That to me does not point to a failure of teachers. And on that let me recount my own college experience:

I was a shitty student for undergrad. I didn't go to class, I didn't do the reading, I didn't do the work, and I failed all the tests. And this isn't just for classes I dislikes, it was for all of them. There was no specific reason for it though my wife and I were broke the whole time, but really that's just an excuse I told myself. And so eventually I brought my GPA up from a .5 to a 2.6 so that I could graduate (it was very fucking hard to do that, the system is stacked against you mathematically). Then I decided to go to graduate school and I kicked ass and took names. I don't know what changed but I became "the surprise star of the class" (professor's words) multiple times and when I graduated I had a 3.9 (only because by the end I had 3 full time jobs as well as taking a full course load, so I phoned in a final assignment that was worth a huge chunk of my GPA in one class).

In all of those cases it had nothing to do with my professors. They were kind, entertaining, generous with their time, and worked very hard to try to keep me engaged. The turn around came when I decided to take ownership of my education and of my career afterwards.

Yep, and I guarantee you that unless she is teaching only electives she has students who would rather not have to take her class.

I was a professor of Physics for a decade.

I worked hard at it, was considered excellent and lively and all the good stuff. I also did what your wife does. Yet, there are students who didn't want to be there, pure and simple.

Sometimes it takes a little wisdom imparted by time to know what you should like, and many students don't have that maturity yet.

Beyond that, I think some people don't accept that sometimes they will need to do things they don't like (i.e. work hard to do well in a "boring" required course). This may also come with age, but I think it's a more common attitude than in previous generations.

I hope everyone can find things to do in life that they love. But with anything, there are always going to be things you hate: changing diapers as a parent, some "boring" courses as a student, dealing with cheaters as a teacher...

When credentials become more about permission than proficiency, you'll get corruption instead of competence.

Sometimes learning isn't fun though. Just like anything else any learning of real value does often involve a grind. Being able to stick with something boring/difficult is probably the most important skill realized from getting many degrees.

The methods they're using to catch 'em are interesting:

From a Guardian article linked to in the OP: "Special software that recognises students' typing speeds and rhythms is used to verify identity, preventing somebody else from taking an assessment on their behalf."

Reminds me of a post I saw on HN a couple days ago about a company that used "stylometry" to reveal J.K. Rowling was the author of a book she'd written under a pen name and had applied the same techniques to determine Newsweek had the wrong Nakamoto.

Scary times when not only our browsing history and online activity is being tracked but also the very essence of our communication styles too.

And by "scary", I mean awesome :)

I've never bothered cheating. If a class bored me, I wouldn't bother. I took the hardest classes that I could, and was happy if I learned something even if the grade wasn't perfect.

That said, I do get why people do it. So much incentive is put on grades, rather than what you know. And it many cases, it is arbitrary. You get good grades for spitting back what the teacher wants, even if they are no smarter than you. (There are great teachers out there, but the mean teacher's standardized test scores are less than the mean student entering college)

While I get it, it really pissed me off when I saw it in action. Especially in grad school. I wanted to say, "Come on, grades don't matter in grad school. Do you really need to cheat?" Sometimes it was telling someone "I'm just auditing the class, can I have your notes and homework answers from last year?" Other times it was sitting for the same exam twice in different sections. When I saw it happen, I could never trust the person again.

"If a class bored me, I wouldn't bother. I took the hardest classes that I could, and was happy if I learned something even if the grade wasn't perfect."

Very much matches my experience, in school at the tail end of the first tech bubble. I'd say "I'm taking X, Y, and Z because they sound interesting," and others would say "but those sound hard, I'm taking A, B, and C, because I've heard they're an easy A." Always bothered me a bit.

"You get good grades for spitting back what the teacher wants, even if they are no smarter than you."

There are certainly bad teachers, and occasionally that's due to stupidity, but I object to the notion that "teacher being smarter than you" is important. Hopefully they know more about the material, but even if they know less but a substantially different set than you know you have plenty to learn from them, and if they are skilled at teaching they might be quite useful even without that.

Having said that, I recall being quite annoyed when a teacher tested on the particular mnemonic devices she'd presented rather than the things they were supposed to help us remember...

It wasn't until I got to AP Computer Science in school that I had a teacher that knew the material. From 4th grade up until then the teachers were faking it. I guess that's why I am biased on this point. :-)

I hear you on the pneumonics. Better to learn the essence.

When I was high-school age, there wasn't any AP Computer Science, though I was taking intro CS courses at the local community college from someone who more or less got it. I hadn't suffered through tons of teachers trying to teach me CS without grokking it before that (though occasionally after...), but I can guess at the kind of sensitivity that might produce. I certainly don't claim that lack of deep familiarity is a virtue! I just claim that it's not always as big a hindrance as one might think (depending...).

"When Students cheat on exams it's because our School System values grades more than Students value learning." - Neil deGrasse Tyson

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