5 ms·

Visualization of cheating in education

26 points by rafaelc 16y ago

pgbovine 16y ago
haha i LOVE the upper-right reason (storing answers on calculator) ... kids learn the benefits of caching early-on! why re-compute when it's much more efficient to do a cache lookup?
- earcar 16y ago
  Recomputing (formulas) is actually a pretty useful skill to have in almost all science classes, so you can store the least possible amount of formulas in your head and still do very good at exams, unless they have very short time limits. And it's way more fun than cheating.
klochner 16y ago
did i miss the visualization?
csallen 16y ago
>> We all know the old adage about cheaters only cheating themselves. Unfortunately, the reality is that leaving academic dishonesty unchecked creates a pattern of abuse, hurting the credibility of the entire institution. Students cheat because we have academic systems that reward those who cheat without getting caught. Instead of asking how we can catch people, maybe we should be asking why students cheat in the first place. I mean these aren't just unmotivated high school dropouts -- they're honor students, college students, etc. By the articles own admission, 80% of high achieving students admit to cheating. Hell, I went to MIT and cheating was even rampant there. Why aren't students motivated to learn? Why is it that even good students don't feel short-changed when they cheat for the answers instead of learning the material? When you try to answer questions like that, you'll think less about catching cheaters, and more about reforming our ineffective, outdated, traditionalist educational systems.
- rafaelc 16y ago
  >> "Why aren't students motivated to learn? Why don't they feel short-changed when they cheat for the answers instead of learning the material?" Great point. We're certainly talking about the symptoms here, and I agree with you that the core problem is why aren't students motivated to learn and how we can reform a very traditional education system. We're going to tackle this in upcoming blog posts -- in the meantime, can you send me an email? Contact info in my profile... thanks!
- jamn 16y ago
  100% agree. I usually found the problem sets were usually really hard. Much harder than the actual exams. Most study groups that I had seen simply consisted of one person that found the questions very easy, and a group of people that scrambled to write down the responses, even if they didn't understand them. I always found it hilarious (not really, in fact I always thought it was really unfair) that psets would be so hard, and I would do relatively poorly compared to the almost full score everyone got. On the other hand, when the exams came about, the averages were usually extremely low, with exams that should be a piece of cake for someone who can actually figure out the pset questions. As a Teaching Assistant, I saw this situation even more clearly. As part of an assignment, students had to write an algorithm in pseudocode. We didn't publish a very well defined syntax for the language. However, interestingly, like half of the students came up with identical syntax, including instructions we had never discussed and that weren't even conventional. After finding several pset copies that were simply identical to each other, the professor decided that simply sending them an e-mail was enough of a punishment. I find that insulting for those who actually try hard and expect their grades to be an accurate reflection of their standing in the class.
- fendrak 16y ago
  For many I think it comes down to one number: GPA. When companies screen applicants who don't meet minimum GPA requirements and most measures of performance are based solely on the grades put down on paper, there is little incentive to actually learn the material, and a lot of incentive to simply earn a better "high score".
- pge 16y ago
  Perhaps I'm naive, but I went to another institution of higher learning just down the street from MIT. I was physics major, and I was not aware of any cheating among my peers. Again, perhaps I was oblivious, but my impression was that high performing students were not cheating, whereas there was a lot of cheating among lower performing students. This pattern made sense to me at the time, because it seemed that the students that wanted to learn challenged themselves, took hard classes, and wanted to do their own problem sets and actually learn the material (we were all card carrying nerds and proud of it!), not just get a good grade for the sake of some future reward.
alanh 16y ago
The graphics are stolen without credit to the sources. For example, the calculator is the iOS v2 calculator icon: http://www.macenstein.com/images/2010/iphone_calculator_icon.jpg http://www.macenstein.com/images/2010/iphone_calculator_icon... Where I come from, that’s plagiarism. Edit: Why would you downvote this comment? It’s hard to gloss over an “oversight” of plagiarism on an article about plagiarism.
- rafaelc 16y ago
  Sean's adding graphic citations in addition to the data references already there. Thanks for the heads up.
  - rafaelc 16y ago
    Those citations are up there now. Thanks again for the heads up.
TGJ 16y ago
I cheated once on a Spanish test in 8th grade. I was kicked out of basketball for the next rest of the year. When I look back at why I cheated the simplest reason was that I did not study for the test. The reason that I did not study was because I was being forced to take the class. If I had wanted to take the class, I would have never cheated because I would have wanted to learn. I think people want the rewards for accomplishments but not the accomplishment itself. That's why people cheat.
- chrischen 16y ago
  Students cheat because the institution doesn't tell them to learn. Institutions tell them to get high grades. And students, being cunning smartasses they are, say "fine, I will get high grades," and thus they proceed to cheat because it is the easier way to get high grades and/or pass tests. If instead schools simply said you're here to learn, and God (aka the natural laws of the universe which are unbreakable) will determine whether or not you "pass" in life, then no one would cheat (or can cheat, for that matter).
  - rick888 16y ago
    "Students cheat because the institution doesn't tell them to learn. Institutions tell them to get high grades. And students, being cunning smartasses they are, say "fine, I will get high grades," and thus they proceed to cheat because it is the easier way to get high grades and/or pass tests." Those students are lazy and they will most likely bring that laziness to their job. Yes, it's easy to just cheat and get good grades, but the grades are supposed to be the result of your hard work. I know people in high school that loved to cheat and find the easiest way to pass whatever test they were taking. 10 years later, many of them have low-paying factory jobs and are still living with mom and dad. If I hacked into my school's computer system and gave myself all A's, it doesn't make me any smarter in Calculus (one of the subjects where I changed my grade). You could go out and buy a trophy that says that you made MVP of your softball league, but isn't the point to earn it? Students being smartasses only proves that humans will take the past of least resistance. "If instead schools simply said you're here to learn, and God (aka the natural laws of the universe which are unbreakable) will determine whether or not you "pass" in life, then no one would cheat (or can cheat, for that matter)." That's like saying: If we stop arresting people, we won't have any more criminals. How are we going to judge people on how much they have learned if not on concepts and material from their lessons?
shelfu 16y ago
My question is why do we treat students differently in exams than we do in classes? When I was going through K-12, there was no collaborative work, we sat at our own desks, did our own work, and although cheating was there, there was a significant portion of students that did not cheat. The people that struggled were quickly noticed, and either given extra help or told that they need to work harder etc. Fast forward to today. My daughter, Grade 7, sits in a "pod" instead of in a row. Essentially all work is either collaborative or copied from the one person that knows what's going on. The people that don't know what's going on can coast. Quizzes are in the pods. non-final/midterm exams are in the pods. Why, given the level of cooperation that we've drilled into them since Grade 1, are people surprised that students copy off each other, use other peoples homework to get their answers, etc etc.

26 points by rafaelc 16y ago

haha i LOVE the upper-right reason (storing answers on calculator) ... kids learn the benefits of caching early-on! why re-compute when it's much more efficient to do a cache lookup?

earcar 16y ago
Recomputing (formulas) is actually a pretty useful skill to have in almost all science classes, so you can store the least possible amount of formulas in your head and still do very good at exams, unless they have very short time limits. And it's way more fun than cheating.

klochner 16y ago

did i miss the visualization?

csallen 16y ago

>> We all know the old adage about cheaters only cheating themselves. Unfortunately, the reality is that leaving academic dishonesty unchecked creates a pattern of abuse, hurting the credibility of the entire institution. Students cheat because we have academic systems that reward those who cheat without getting caught. Instead of asking how we can catch people, maybe we should be asking why students cheat in the first place. I mean these aren't just unmotivated high school dropouts -- they're honor students, college students, etc. By the articles own admission, 80% of high achieving students admit to cheating. Hell, I went to MIT and cheating was even rampant there. Why aren't students motivated to learn? Why is it that even good students don't feel short-changed when they cheat for the answers instead of learning the material? When you try to answer questions like that, you'll think less about catching cheaters, and more about reforming our ineffective, outdated, traditionalist educational systems.

rafaelc 16y ago
>> "Why aren't students motivated to learn? Why don't they feel short-changed when they cheat for the answers instead of learning the material?" Great point. We're certainly talking about the symptoms here, and I agree with you that the core problem is why aren't students motivated to learn and how we can reform a very traditional education system. We're going to tackle this in upcoming blog posts -- in the meantime, can you send me an email? Contact info in my profile... thanks!
jamn 16y ago
100% agree. I usually found the problem sets were usually really hard. Much harder than the actual exams. Most study groups that I had seen simply consisted of one person that found the questions very easy, and a group of people that scrambled to write down the responses, even if they didn't understand them. I always found it hilarious (not really, in fact I always thought it was really unfair) that psets would be so hard, and I would do relatively poorly compared to the almost full score everyone got. On the other hand, when the exams came about, the averages were usually extremely low, with exams that should be a piece of cake for someone who can actually figure out the pset questions. As a Teaching Assistant, I saw this situation even more clearly. As part of an assignment, students had to write an algorithm in pseudocode. We didn't publish a very well defined syntax for the language. However, interestingly, like half of the students came up with identical syntax, including instructions we had never discussed and that weren't even conventional. After finding several pset copies that were simply identical to each other, the professor decided that simply sending them an e-mail was enough of a punishment. I find that insulting for those who actually try hard and expect their grades to be an accurate reflection of their standing in the class.
fendrak 16y ago
For many I think it comes down to one number: GPA. When companies screen applicants who don't meet minimum GPA requirements and most measures of performance are based solely on the grades put down on paper, there is little incentive to actually learn the material, and a lot of incentive to simply earn a better "high score".
pge 16y ago
Perhaps I'm naive, but I went to another institution of higher learning just down the street from MIT. I was physics major, and I was not aware of any cheating among my peers. Again, perhaps I was oblivious, but my impression was that high performing students were not cheating, whereas there was a lot of cheating among lower performing students. This pattern made sense to me at the time, because it seemed that the students that wanted to learn challenged themselves, took hard classes, and wanted to do their own problem sets and actually learn the material (we were all card carrying nerds and proud of it!), not just get a good grade for the sake of some future reward.

alanh 16y ago

The graphics are stolen without credit to the sources. For example, the calculator is the iOS v2 calculator icon: http://www.macenstein.com/images/2010/iphone_calculator_icon.jpg http://www.macenstein.com/images/2010/iphone_calculator_icon... Where I come from, that’s plagiarism. Edit: Why would you downvote this comment? It’s hard to gloss over an “oversight” of plagiarism on an article about plagiarism.

rafaelc 16y ago
Sean's adding graphic citations in addition to the data references already there. Thanks for the heads up.
- rafaelc 16y ago
  Those citations are up there now. Thanks again for the heads up.

TGJ 16y ago

I cheated once on a Spanish test in 8th grade. I was kicked out of basketball for the next rest of the year. When I look back at why I cheated the simplest reason was that I did not study for the test. The reason that I did not study was because I was being forced to take the class. If I had wanted to take the class, I would have never cheated because I would have wanted to learn. I think people want the rewards for accomplishments but not the accomplishment itself. That's why people cheat.

chrischen 16y ago
Students cheat because the institution doesn't tell them to learn. Institutions tell them to get high grades. And students, being cunning smartasses they are, say "fine, I will get high grades," and thus they proceed to cheat because it is the easier way to get high grades and/or pass tests. If instead schools simply said you're here to learn, and God (aka the natural laws of the universe which are unbreakable) will determine whether or not you "pass" in life, then no one would cheat (or can cheat, for that matter).
- rick888 16y ago
  "Students cheat because the institution doesn't tell them to learn. Institutions tell them to get high grades. And students, being cunning smartasses they are, say "fine, I will get high grades," and thus they proceed to cheat because it is the easier way to get high grades and/or pass tests." Those students are lazy and they will most likely bring that laziness to their job. Yes, it's easy to just cheat and get good grades, but the grades are supposed to be the result of your hard work. I know people in high school that loved to cheat and find the easiest way to pass whatever test they were taking. 10 years later, many of them have low-paying factory jobs and are still living with mom and dad. If I hacked into my school's computer system and gave myself all A's, it doesn't make me any smarter in Calculus (one of the subjects where I changed my grade). You could go out and buy a trophy that says that you made MVP of your softball league, but isn't the point to earn it? Students being smartasses only proves that humans will take the past of least resistance. "If instead schools simply said you're here to learn, and God (aka the natural laws of the universe which are unbreakable) will determine whether or not you "pass" in life, then no one would cheat (or can cheat, for that matter)." That's like saying: If we stop arresting people, we won't have any more criminals. How are we going to judge people on how much they have learned if not on concepts and material from their lessons?

shelfu 16y ago

My question is why do we treat students differently in exams than we do in classes? When I was going through K-12, there was no collaborative work, we sat at our own desks, did our own work, and although cheating was there, there was a significant portion of students that did not cheat. The people that struggled were quickly noticed, and either given extra help or told that they need to work harder etc. Fast forward to today. My daughter, Grade 7, sits in a "pod" instead of in a row. Essentially all work is either collaborative or copied from the one person that knows what's going on. The people that don't know what's going on can coast. Quizzes are in the pods. non-final/midterm exams are in the pods. Why, given the level of cooperation that we've drilled into them since Grade 1, are people surprised that students copy off each other, use other peoples homework to get their answers, etc etc.