Comment by Anonymous9723 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Anonymous9723 | Hacker News Reader

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I decided to post this anonymously. I am a professor at a major CS program in the united states. And we have a very serious cheating problem with indian students. It's clearly cultural. We also see cheating at a fairly high rate among the chinese and students from a handful of middle eastern countries, but the indian students are way out in front: it drives our indian faculty nuts.

It seems that indian students have instilled in them a drive to help pull one another out of the abyss. This is probably a noble, and perhaps critical, characteristic for survival in a third world country. But for exams and particularly projects in US institutions, it translates directly into a high degree of unethical plagiarism and cheating. It damages the reputation of the department and the diplomas of our non-cheating students. We do not know what to do about it.

I used to hold up the American students as the example to follow, since for decades they have had instilled in them basic notions about the ethics of cheating. But that's changing too: the millennials cheat at a much, much higher rate than Americans did before. Helicopter parenting? Changes in school culture? I don't know, but we have a big, big problem there as well.

* Edit. Just to make it clear for those who would like to say "well, the Americans do it too now". While it's true the millennials cheat a lot more than Americans did in the past, it's still a very small fraction of the rate we're seeing in the indian students.

I was a (top 1%) student all the way through high school in the Indian education system, and our oppressive educational environment makes it far too stressful to perform within our parents' expectations. Even the top students collaborated with each other and "cheated" to ease the stress on ourselves. We also felt bad for weaker students who were struggling with material and being left further and further behind, without being given any time to actually understand the material, having to spend all the time memorizing stuff they didn't get so they could spew it out on exams, and would help them out too.

Tired of that system, I went on to attend Olin College of Engineering [0] in the US, the complete opposite end of the spectrum. I wrote a grand total of 1 time-constrained, closed-text written final exam in my 4 years there. Not a student, myself included, ever "cheated" at Olin, even though I had developed a habit of taking whatever means necessary to score higher on exams.

I realized that the reason why cheating didn't make sense at Olin was because everything I could have wanted to do to score higher was already allowed. I think the real solution is to build team-oriented finals and exams, with peer evaluation taking a sizeable chunk of the grade distribution, such that there is no longer an action that can be considered "cheating". In the real world, whether it's academia or industry or research, you are allowed to do anything that doesn't harm someone else to reach the answer you seek. I don't see why collaboration between students should be discouraged. Plagiarism is a different issue, and that can be addressed differently.

[0] http://www.olin.edu

I don't get it. Call them out. I hated dealing with the cheating at my school. I hated that their GPA got them the same considerations as mine.

The worst part was the lazy faculty that did nothing. I built a bit of a reputation around publically reprimanding students in class when they acted like brats. This was not my job and it alienated me from much of the of the student body.

Unfortunately I had to do it because my class would have never moved forward. So I guess it's not just my school? Professors have lost control all over and simple things like cheating have some kind of grey area?

FYI: Mostly Americans at my school.

I don't know how it works in the US, but in the UK foreign students pay much higher fees than domestic students and are a significant source of revenue for universities. There may be pressure on academic staff not to jeopardise this arrangement by calling attention to cheating.

There are significant problems with cheating in UK universities too, particularly (but not only) with international students [1].

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/4...

The reason Indian students collaborate so much is because the way Indian education system works, hustling students survive better. Students who can read, share and gather information with peers always tend to do better than lone geniuses.

Also, the population ensures that there aren't enough resources for everyone. So, everyone learns to share. A lab project? Share!! You want to do a survey? Form a group and do it. Want computing resources? Share it with others in that time slot. Participating in competitions? All of them are team based competitions.

This is a cultural difference. Nothing else. Also, it's not like all the Indian kids are homogeneously helping each other. They all have their own cliques and many students don't want to share their solutions with other students (Indian or not). Many want to find a better solution.

The solution is simple (something the CS reps in my school implemented with great success). Make homework and (some) tests incredibly hard and encourage team work.

Some of the programming projects we had were so complex that the class had shared forums where we would solve problems right under the nose of the TAs and the prof with full visibility. So, while the code would be individually written, problem solving in the abstract can be a team effort.

An example of how to make them harder would be to deliberately introduce bugs in a codebase that you deployed for a homework. This teaches them how to find solutions and debug.

Sure, some students will chill until the last moment and try to gather answers from friends. But, most students who worked their ass off would never share their solutions (mostly to get themselves up the bell curve). A lot of students will try to make their solutions better by improving on the shared common answer but never revealing it to anyone but the grader.

For exams, we had open book, open laptop, full internet access tests. In those tests, all students would log into chat box to discuss answers. But the questions were tricky and needed speed to solve. So, being on the chat just made sure students are wasting time. The only people who could finish those tests were students who knew what they were doing.

I know this is not ideal in the US. But its a strategy (if used sparingly) that works really well. To be honest, it makes students be super prepared and study real hard so that they can complete tests faster, yet know that they can rely on their friends to get them some info if they happen to forget it.

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