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Strange to see them trying to fix this with technology at all. Cheating is a social problem. Universities survive just fine giving out take-home tests and tru

Strange to see them trying to fix this with technology at all. Cheating is a social problem. Universities survive just fine giving out take-home tests and trusting students not to cheat. Honor codes work, even when there is an actual useful reason to cheat. But on a site like Khan Academy, where the end goal is to learn something useful, all the user is doing is cheating themself out of the thing they signed up to get. Let them go nuts. If they want to go through a course, but go out of their way to avoid actually learning anything, that shouldn't cause the site owner any grief whatsoever.

vdaniuk 11y ago
Individually, cheating is an user experience and design problem. Did you ever play an engaging, interesting game, used a cheat code for more resources/lives and game instantly stops being interesting even if you don't use cheat codes any more? This happened to me multiple times. Experiences of others is similar. "go out of their way to avoid actually learning anything, that shouldn't cause the site owner any grief whatsoever." Obviously, Khan Academy staff has a different take on this problem and that's great. Online education should strive to cater to cheaters, too.
mafribe 11y ago
Honor codes work As a working university teacher, I have to disagree with this somewhat. Cheating happens of a massive scale, I'd say at least 1/3 of all coursework I have graded involved some degree of cheating, and I've seen cases where clearly everybody in the course had copied from one person (who had an ingenious but false solution). Whenever I discuss this with former students, they think 1/3 is too low. When I give out coursework, it shows on sites like rent-acoder.com. One meets people who make a living out of writing dissertations for rich students. The universities accept this tacitly for two reasons. 1. They need the income from the students. If they'd fire every student caught cheating, they'd go bankrupt pretty quickly. 2. It's an extreme amount of administrative work for the professors to deal with. In my experience, I need to invest a day's worth of work per cheating student, all things considered. I really have better things to do in life. To put it pithily: the students pretend not to cheat, and the universities pretend not to notice. This is nothing new, students have been cheating since time immemorial, the world keeps on spinning ... there are lot's of stories about cheating in what may be the oldest exam system in the world, the Chinese Imperial examination. (As an aside, if you want an alround fascinating story that involves the Imperial examination, check out the history of the "Taiping Rebellion".)
- martin-adams 11y ago
  I guess this also means the university is indirectly cheating when they publish statistics about the grades their students get. As you say, the incentive and resource for the university to do something about this just isn't there.
  - mafribe 11y ago
    the university is indirectly cheating when they publish statistics about the grades their students get. Not really as long as they don't guarantee that grade X guarantees a specific skill level. Clearly there is a usable correlation between grades and skill, but it's not super reliable, whence coding tests, interviews, requirements for n years experience, and so on.
- eep_opp 11y ago
  I agree with you. Cheating was and probably still is very huge on my campus. Honor systems don't work and many of my professors didn't care. Very few people talk about what it feels like not to cheat and why students do it. So here goes: I made it through college without cheating. My university actually managed to scare me from doing so with freshmen orientation. I focused on studying and making sure I took advantage of walk-in hours and student teachers. For a while I thought everyone was doing this. Then, as weeks passed in each semester the students got more and more brazen. During my years of school I was outright asked to share my test (sometimes during a test), I was offered payment and I was made to feel ostracized when I didn’t “help”. It sucked. The worst part came when I would meet other honors students and find out how they got their high scores. I was surprised at how many of them cheated, to what degree they would cheat and how little they knew about their course work. This is when I found that there was no incentive not to cheat. Honors students got scholarships and were often given some very good internship opportunities. Why would anyone not cheat? No one cares if you do. You’ll have an easier time. It doesn’t hurt your career. It also does wonders for your social life. My final two years I pretended to have low scores on tests so as not to be asked to help cheat. I kept my grades a secret and would often not look at graded papers in class. I stopped talking about any of my classes with anyone that was in my major.
S4M 11y ago
> But on a site like Khan Academy, where the end goal is to learn something useful, all the user is doing is cheating themself out of the thing they signed up to get. Let them go nuts. If they want to go through a course, but go out of their way to avoid actually learning anything, that shouldn't cause the site owner any grief whatsoever. Yes, especially since Khan Academy can't totally prevent cheating. For example, one can always create two accounts, one that is used as a draft to get hints and the second one that will enter the correct answer after the hints have been showed to the first account.
nadams 11y ago
> Cheating is a social problem. I want to quote Sir Ken Robinson [1]: > They have spent ten years at school being told that there is one answer – it’s at the back…and don’t look, and don’t copy, because that’s cheating. I mean, outside schools, that’s called collaboration. I don't think cheating is the big picture problem. I think it's how we think of are tests. Imagine a test designed in such a way that you couldn't cheat - or even that collaboration was ok - what would it look like? Could it be an open note/open book test? The way I give tests to my students is open book/open note but not open neighbor. I do this because I'm realistic - memorization is not comprehension and whatever they did memorize will be lost 5 minutes after class ends (they have N other subjects that they need to memorize material for - even though I teach a core class they have much more important things to worry about). My tests are long and short answer but not hard - so if you have been comatose for the lectures you won't do well (I have had people fail my tests...). Some teachers have the one notecard rule and think that they are clever tricking the students to memorize the material - they aren't. You may retain some more information - but it's still the core of the problem memorization != comprehension. Yes I understand some fields do require memorization - such as history or the medical profession. But people don't need to memorize the bubble sort or the binary search algorithms - it's been done a million times and if anyone ever needed it for their career a quick google search would reveal this site [2]. Yes they need to understand it - but they don't need to memorize it. [1] http://edtechnow.net/2012/01/20/sir-ken-robinson/ http://edtechnow.net/2012/01/20/sir-ken-robinson/ [2] http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Binary_search http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Binary_search

vdaniuk 11y ago

Individually, cheating is an user experience and design problem. Did you ever play an engaging, interesting game, used a cheat code for more resources/lives and game instantly stops being interesting even if you don't use cheat codes any more? This happened to me multiple times. Experiences of others is similar. "go out of their way to avoid actually learning anything, that shouldn't cause the site owner any grief whatsoever." Obviously, Khan Academy staff has a different take on this problem and that's great. Online education should strive to cater to cheaters, too.

mafribe 11y ago

Honor codes work As a working university teacher, I have to disagree with this somewhat. Cheating happens of a massive scale, I'd say at least 1/3 of all coursework I have graded involved some degree of cheating, and I've seen cases where clearly everybody in the course had copied from one person (who had an ingenious but false solution). Whenever I discuss this with former students, they think 1/3 is too low. When I give out coursework, it shows on sites like rent-acoder.com. One meets people who make a living out of writing dissertations for rich students. The universities accept this tacitly for two reasons. 1. They need the income from the students. If they'd fire every student caught cheating, they'd go bankrupt pretty quickly. 2. It's an extreme amount of administrative work for the professors to deal with. In my experience, I need to invest a day's worth of work per cheating student, all things considered. I really have better things to do in life. To put it pithily: the students pretend not to cheat, and the universities pretend not to notice. This is nothing new, students have been cheating since time immemorial, the world keeps on spinning ... there are lot's of stories about cheating in what may be the oldest exam system in the world, the Chinese Imperial examination. (As an aside, if you want an alround fascinating story that involves the Imperial examination, check out the history of the "Taiping Rebellion".)

martin-adams 11y ago
I guess this also means the university is indirectly cheating when they publish statistics about the grades their students get. As you say, the incentive and resource for the university to do something about this just isn't there.
- mafribe 11y ago
  the university is indirectly cheating when they publish statistics about the grades their students get. Not really as long as they don't guarantee that grade X guarantees a specific skill level. Clearly there is a usable correlation between grades and skill, but it's not super reliable, whence coding tests, interviews, requirements for n years experience, and so on.
eep_opp 11y ago
I agree with you. Cheating was and probably still is very huge on my campus. Honor systems don't work and many of my professors didn't care. Very few people talk about what it feels like not to cheat and why students do it. So here goes: I made it through college without cheating. My university actually managed to scare me from doing so with freshmen orientation. I focused on studying and making sure I took advantage of walk-in hours and student teachers. For a while I thought everyone was doing this. Then, as weeks passed in each semester the students got more and more brazen. During my years of school I was outright asked to share my test (sometimes during a test), I was offered payment and I was made to feel ostracized when I didn’t “help”. It sucked. The worst part came when I would meet other honors students and find out how they got their high scores. I was surprised at how many of them cheated, to what degree they would cheat and how little they knew about their course work. This is when I found that there was no incentive not to cheat. Honors students got scholarships and were often given some very good internship opportunities. Why would anyone not cheat? No one cares if you do. You’ll have an easier time. It doesn’t hurt your career. It also does wonders for your social life. My final two years I pretended to have low scores on tests so as not to be asked to help cheat. I kept my grades a secret and would often not look at graded papers in class. I stopped talking about any of my classes with anyone that was in my major.

S4M 11y ago

> But on a site like Khan Academy, where the end goal is to learn something useful, all the user is doing is cheating themself out of the thing they signed up to get. Let them go nuts. If they want to go through a course, but go out of their way to avoid actually learning anything, that shouldn't cause the site owner any grief whatsoever. Yes, especially since Khan Academy can't totally prevent cheating. For example, one can always create two accounts, one that is used as a draft to get hints and the second one that will enter the correct answer after the hints have been showed to the first account.

nadams 11y ago

> Cheating is a social problem. I want to quote Sir Ken Robinson [1]: > They have spent ten years at school being told that there is one answer – it’s at the back…and don’t look, and don’t copy, because that’s cheating. I mean, outside schools, that’s called collaboration. I don't think cheating is the big picture problem. I think it's how we think of are tests. Imagine a test designed in such a way that you couldn't cheat - or even that collaboration was ok - what would it look like? Could it be an open note/open book test? The way I give tests to my students is open book/open note but not open neighbor. I do this because I'm realistic - memorization is not comprehension and whatever they did memorize will be lost 5 minutes after class ends (they have N other subjects that they need to memorize material for - even though I teach a core class they have much more important things to worry about). My tests are long and short answer but not hard - so if you have been comatose for the lectures you won't do well (I have had people fail my tests...). Some teachers have the one notecard rule and think that they are clever tricking the students to memorize the material - they aren't. You may retain some more information - but it's still the core of the problem memorization != comprehension. Yes I understand some fields do require memorization - such as history or the medical profession. But people don't need to memorize the bubble sort or the binary search algorithms - it's been done a million times and if anyone ever needed it for their career a quick google search would reveal this site [2]. Yes they need to understand it - but they don't need to memorize it. [1] http://edtechnow.net/2012/01/20/sir-ken-robinson/ http://edtechnow.net/2012/01/20/sir-ken-robinson/ [2] http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Binary_search http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Binary_search