17 ms·

A non-moral dilemma about cheating, but it brings up some points (2019)

74 points by luu 6y ago

sajforbes 6y ago
Maybe I'm very cynical, but I think almost anybody would cheat if it was made easy enough and they were given the chance. At the end of the day, people are there to come out with a degree and a good grade, not feel good they didn't take the same opportunity available to others. It'd be trivially easy to entrap students. Say, for example, if the professor put the answer up on Blackboard, seemingly by accident, which came in the form of an incorrect answer to a real exam question. They could then give everyone who gives the wrong answer an XF. I'd wager that would be most people, barring the few smartest who noticed the error. Could you really blame people for wanting to get it right and not handicap themselves relative to the other students? Given that, the university then has a responsibility to make it as hard as possible to cheat. Fail grades for cheating work because they create an incentive to avoid cheating. Except in this circumstance the incentive effect could not work because the student had no idea they'd be able to be caught.
- ekidd 6y ago
  > Maybe I'm very cynical, but I think almost anybody would cheat if it was made easy enough and they were given the chance. This attitude is so strange to me. I would assume that cheaters are a minority of students. (Perhaps a large minority, sadly. I've heard some third-hand stories.) My school had a policy of an automatic 9 month suspension for a first offense. Professors were officially discouraged from exercising any discretion, and they were supposed to report all incidents to the disciplinary committee. For a second offense, the penalty was a permanent expulsion. I did see the system fail a few times when I was there, but it worked a lot of the time.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    having such a severe penalty for the first offense probably causes professors to look the other way if they don't agree that it's reasonable. imo, the severity of the offense can vary a lot. cheating on a homework might not be as bad as cheating on an exam (worth a lot more points), wholesale copying of answers is much worse than getting a little too much help from your study group. as far as how widespread cheating is, that probably depends on the culture at your particular institution. my school had a very strict policy for programming assignments: you were only allowed to discuss them with the instructor, a TA, or in public on piazza. and yet, every time I went into the cs lab, I would see everyone huddled around each other laptops debugging code for the latest assignment. I'm not sure whether they simply didn't understand the rule or didn't realize how obvious it was what they were doing, but essentially everyone in that room was bending the rules a little.
- mxcrossb 6y ago
  > At the end of the day, people are there to come out with a degree and a good grade I’ve been listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, and one thing that struck me is that early philosophers seemed to consider virtue the end goal of philosophy. That is to say, we should care less about if our physics students can do physics, and more if doing physics had made them more ethical human beings. It’s quite a reversal we’ve ended up with...
- jeremysalwen 6y ago
  I don't think anybody would cheat based on how easy it is, but they would based on how common, normal, and socially acceptable they think it is.
- biased_coin 6y ago
  True story: One day, an assistant professor (and a first time teacher) came to class and announced that there would be a "surprise test" on so-and-so day. Not just that, the questions asked would be 5 out of 8 possible pre-announced questions. On the day of the test, the professor wrote the questions on the board and then left the room. Almost every student in the class cheated. Some came with chits to copy from. Some copied from others. Legends though, they came with pre-written answer sheets for each of the 8 questions and attached answers for the 5 questions which were asked.
  - maccard 6y ago
    And in that case, (almost) everyone learns. The people who came with the pre written answer sheets studied, the people who wrote the chits studied, and the people who copied from others presumably learned _something_ in the process. Maybe some didn't, but that's always going to happen
    - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
      I can't agree with this viewpoint at all. If you take a viva of one of these students who came in with a pre-written answer sheet copied from a friend, a vast majority of them would straight up fail. As TA and prof, I have seen cheaters copy word to word, spelling mistakes included, incorrect grammatical structures as is, basic mistakes like 6/2=2 untouched, because they are literally Ctrl-C Ctrl-V with their hands, with no brain involvement whatsoever.
- atq2119 6y ago
  > At the end of the day, people are there to come out with a degree and a good grade, not feel good they didn't take the same opportunity available to others. Some people, yes. Others are there to actually learn something. Either because they're intrinsically motivated to do so, or because they understand that while a degree may help get them in the door somewhere, career success in many fields does depend on actually knowing what you're doing.
  - sajforbes 6y ago
    For those who are there to learn, do you think they would also pass up the opportunity to both learn and improve their grade?
- deleted 6y ago
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- elsjaako 6y ago
  I agree that the university has some responsibility to make cheating hard, and to not entrap people. But I don't see where the responsibility goes from hard to "as hard as possible".
- ben509 6y ago
  There is definitely a point at which anyone will cheat, and one time I met that threshold. There was an Econ exam that I hadn't prepared for, and I got there fully prepared to flunk it. That day there was a problem with the photocopier. We had to fill in a scantron, but they didn't have copies of the exam for everyone. The professor read the questions and answers. And I watched people's heads go down. > At the end of the day, people are there to come out with a degree and a good grade, not feel good they didn't take the same opportunity available to others. This is an age-old question in education: are you trying to learn something, or get the credentials necessary to get a job? I wasn't doing a major in Econ, so the fact that I didn't get much out of the class put me strongly on the side of shrugging that off as "they pretend to teach me, I pretend to learn." But for most of my coursework, I really did want to learn things and get recognition for having done so. > Given that, the university then has a responsibility to make it as hard as possible to cheat. I strongly agree. I know there were guys who cheated in various ways, I watched one guy who went around the labs asking people to do his homework for him. And because universities have allowed degrees to be devalued, I've spent hours in interviews demonstrating basic CS concepts.
knzhou 6y ago
I was lucky to spend my childhood and college years in peer groups where cheating was incomprehensible. Nobody would cheat in a math competition, for instance. That would just be a loud, lame declaration of stupidity. When I went to the other side and started having to enforce the rules, I realized that while the top decile could be trusted, everybody else was suspect, and enforcement of the rules was incredibly hard. What do you do when you grade a string of tests containing the exact same silly mistakes? What about a group of students that suddenly jumps to high performance on one exam and then immediately crashes back down? Remote proctoring is even harder. I once saw a student fabricate an entire school with the aid of his parents, complete with website, address, and fake teacher information, so he and his parents could do the exam together. How are you supposed to vet hundreds or thousands of people like this? I really hope that I get a faculty position where I can just teach low-pressure graduate-level seminars, and never have to learn the answer. Mass education is damn hard.
- naveen99 6y ago
  Educating and testing are separate issues. If you are testing to see what to teach next, and the student cheats, well they just cheated themselves out of learning what you were going to teach if they failed the test.
  - chongli 6y ago
    In isolation, maybe. But in reality students are competing for limited educational resources. Cheating can mean the difference between admission and rejection to courses, majors, scholarships, and matriculation at top schools. It’s no different from cheating in sports. Yeah, the sports cheater is probably damaging their body and potentially harming their natural potential. At the same time, cheating may let them make the team and even the big leagues. That can change a person’s entire career, just as cheating to get into Harvard can.
    - searchableguy 6y ago
      <incoherent rant> Everytime, I end up with the same conclusion. Overpopulation and imbalanced distribution of resources is the root cause for everything wrong with this world. I keep doubting myself. The problem shouldn't be that visible. People don't seem to blame overpopulation... maybe it's not a problem but everytime, it is the problem. Look at education systems of smaller countries. They are way better than what you get as the number of people in your country increases despite bigger spending. Stopping overpopulation shouldn't be hard. We haven't tried anything. How can people be so sure? Why not disincentivise having kids by making it too expensive? Maybe use a tax cut equivalent to someone's wealth so rich people are as much affected as poor people (albeit a bit less in the grand scheme). Free birth control for everyone - poor people in less developed countries are responsible for most kids. Force longer education period so fertility rate goes down by the time people settle down. There are so many ways you can push the average marriage age faster than it is happening naturally now. Why not do it for less developed countries? Isn't it better if there is less suffering collectively in this world? How about paying people to not have kids and adopt? What's the problem with it? Taxes are used for so many other useless things. </incoherent rant> I am okay with downvotes but please provide a reason. I really want to know. Maybe my thoughts are unhealthy.
dooglius 6y ago
Telling students about your anti-cheating measures seems like a health inspector telling restaurants in advance the dates when he'll show up. The problem is that most professors are not going to go out of their ways to employ anti-cheating measures; by catching cheaters, you are doing a service to the larger college community by removing them.
- anitil 6y ago
  Ironically when I worked in a deli, we actually were told the dates the health inspector would turn up. You can imagine the day before was spent cleaning and scrubbing!
  - brigandish 6y ago
    As your example shows, it's not such a bad thing to announce measures because they can have the side effect of raising standards. Used alongside the odd random visit I would imagine this to be incredibly effective.
    - Supermancho 6y ago
      That's not what the example "shows". The standards aren't raised, but lowered. First, let's just agree on some terminology health codes are the "standard". If you only clean before an inspector arrives (and you are sure that that's the only time to do so) your standard is lower on average over periods of time or altogether, depending on the offense. If you don't know when the inspector is going to arrive, you are incentivized to keep to the code at all times, which is the reason you aren't supposed to know.
      - brigandish 6y ago
        > Used alongside the odd random visit I would imagine this to be incredibly effective. You missed this bit.
- btrettel 6y ago
  When I was a teenager I worked at a Shell gas station. Once I had a customer who asked about the advantages of using Shell nitrogen-enriched gasoline. I didn't know anything about it and found their question really odd. As I recall, they came back later and revealed that they were a secret shopper for Shell, and we failed the random inspection. All because of a question that no real customer ever asked in my experience. ;-) My boss didn't care, fortunately.
reeealloc 6y ago
I'm not a teacher, so maybe I should just stay out of it, but I'm of the opinion that teachers should try to help cheaters the same way they help failing students. Cheating is really just a proxy for failure, so why not just treat it the same as failing? That being said, some kinds of cheating don't deserved to be punished. The given scenario is bad for the cheater, but some students put so much effort into writing notes to cheat with that they just end up doing the amount of effort required to pass.
- cgearhart 6y ago
  Cheating is only rarely a proxy for failure. It has been my experience as a TA and instructor that cheating is more often considered an “accelerator” or “advantage” than an act of desperation. It’s not something that can be solved by academic support because the most brazen cheaters usually feel entitled to cheat—they view it as equivalent to doing the assigned work because it reaches the same end (a passing grade). For example, the student in the linked article admitted cheating, but had no contrition about it.
  - deleted 6y ago
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- getlawgdon 6y ago
  No. Cheating is not a proxy for failure. They are in fact much more frequently inverse to one another. Cheating is intentional circumvention seeking reward. Failure is an outcome that comes more frequently from low effort, unethical effort, or honest effort with low capacity or skill.
klyrs 6y ago
In big courses at my university we'd print 4 colors of exams, with 2 actual versions. It was a little extra work upfront, but we almost never had to deal with cheaters. Bottom line, my job was to teach, grade homework and proctor exams. The last thing I want to do is play piggie -- I don't wanna stay up at night worrying over my student getting expelled / deported. The easiest way to keep focused on my actual job is to take some precautions that make cheating feel risky to the students. So I really don't understand the other professor in this anecdote. Your students are stressed, sometimes as a result of bad life choices, sometimes as a result of external issues like family death&drama, sometimes as a result of sadistic asshole professors... typically it's a combination of the above. So for each 200-person exam, you'll frequently have students for whom this is literally the worst week of their brief and sheltered lives. They might make a choice they'll regret. So you have a choice: add risk to scare all but the very most dedicated cheaters (and fuck those kids), or lay a trap for the vulnerable kids that the skilled cheaters will skate through.
- battery_cowboy 6y ago
  I had a professor that printed in like 3 colors, and each exam had a different code on it, like 'X3-67' so we thought he made several versions (of course it was graduate math and he told us we would all get an A in we showed up and participated so we wouldn't have cheated anyways). Later we compared our exams after the course ended (because he kept them until then and would just review the problems we missed with each of us in office hours) and they were all the same problems :)
crankylinuxuser 6y ago
I think it's a false premise. The purpose of learning is to understand the topic at hand. But school's purpose isn't for learning, primarily. It's for accreditation and getting a paper saying you learned certain things. And then you use that paper to get a better job, make more money, and get things like retirement and health insurance. (It used to not be that way - things changed after the GI bill... but I digress.) If the school was non-profit and did as such, failure would not be wasted money or a permanent grade against you. Failure would only be lost time... But that's not how it is. Failure haunts you the whole time. The negative grades stay in the form of ever-approaching GPAs. But if you buy more classes, you can buy the average a slightly bit higher IFF you get better grades than the average. The moral dilemma is that schools are using the threat of continuous harm of failure(GPAs) and harm to the pocketbook over taking a class and not doing well in it. Schools and their teachers aren't on the hook for bad teaching. It makes sense when possible to use other methods to make sure your grades and wallet aren't harmed. I believe it would be different if schools were actually on the hook for teaching what you paid them to do. That calculation would certainly change - we wouldn't have "weeder" classes... Well, not in anywhere near the same way. (Wonders just how much schools make on failing students. I'm sure there's an Atlantic or Vice writeup in that question.)
- totetsu 6y ago
  Indeed, the real problem is that content of courses are not aligned to the goals and interests of students. Higher Education is used as a filter in many countries. Student's know the game.
btrettel 6y ago
The comments here are interesting. My experience has been that cheating is too much trouble to deal with, but I can see that's others have had more success. Might depend greatly on the personalities involved. Once I was a TA for a class and a student came to me asking for a regrade on part of one exam. They claimed that I unfairly gave them zero on a particular problem. I looked at it and yes, I did give them a zero. But I never give zeros on a larger problem unless nothing or almost nothing is written down. I think that I'm quite generous for gibberish even. There is no way I would have given this student a zero for this problem if he had what was present at my office hours. I told him that I believe he is trying to cheat by doing the problem after the exam. I didn't report him but I did make it clear that I didn't believe his story. The student went to the lecturer, who was furious with me. The lecturer said that I had no clear evidence that he didn't do the problem; me saying that I never give a zero unless the problem is not attempted wasn't good enough for the lecturer. I spoke with my advisor, who said that to avoid problems like that he puts a line through any problems that were not attempted. The lecturer didn't like the line solution after I graded the next exam. He was furious with me again. He told me "You don't trust your students!" I don't trust some students, sure. Since putting the line through empty parts I haven't had anyone claim anything similar, though. The lecturer was apparently so disappointed with me that he told my advisor to kick me out of his research group (or something along those lines). I didn't learn that until years later. My advisor told me at the time that the lecturer had a reputation for being a jerk to his TAs, so I figure my advisor just thought this lecturer wasn't worth listening to. (To his "credit", the lecturer had another issue with me that he got furious over: He had a very particular system for writing grades on exams. As I recall on the back page on one of the top corners he wanted the total points received written over the total on the exam. On about 5 out of about 100 exams I wrote the wrong denominator by accident; the numerators were correct in all instances as far as I recall. Now, I'm sorry to have made this mistake but it wasn't on a number that mattered and it was only on a small number of exams. This issue combined with the cheating is all rather minor and not worth raging over.) I did keep putting lines through empty parts when grading, at least after I stopped TAing for this class. But this experience made me reluctant to give a zero for cheating, much less report the student to the university.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
_bxg1 6y ago
Site is impossible to read on mobile. It doesn't just overflow the screen by default, it prevents zooming-out.
battery_cowboy 6y ago
Grades are useless in the face of cheating, so just tell everyone they'll get to choose their own grade at the end, then they'll focus on learning and even if everyone chooses an A, who cares? Does the A mean anything today? I've met 4.0 students in hard college courses that were terrible in the workplace and I've met 2.1 students who had a political science degree be awesome software developers, so the only reason that number exists is to make people feel good.
abellerose 6y ago
Maybe I'm naive but I believe cheating can be eliminated by allowing students to have a notecard when taking tests and where they're allowed to write down formulas or whatever is necessary for them individually before the tests. I know a misconception exists in education "about memorization being something every student can perform optimally for succeeding" in getting top marks. That ignorant belief is simply not the case for everyone and I find it cruel we penalize children that could have succeeded if they're allowed to use their organization skills optimally. Otherwise they're hindered by their genetics or neglectful/abusive home-life that resulted in development issues with memory. I know I'm not alone as a programmer using a trusty note taking app for multiple things I rather not memorize. Obviously I don't use it for syntax of the language I'm writing. Thus, brings me to my last point of how students will still be unable to cram all the subject material on a notecard and for completing a test within the time limit given. That makes it so the student gains a real life useful skill of organizing and breaking down material being taught. Further helping the longterm understanding than just memorize a few nights before the test and all is forgotten later depending on the subject being taught.
- lainga 6y ago
  We got that in signal processing. Two sides of one sheet of engineering paper, anything you can fit, prof gets to examine it as you enter the exam. Some people would put their sheets through the printer and go for 8pt font... I used pencil
  - sgerenser 6y ago
    In middle school I had a social studies teacher that allowed a 3x5 note card for tests. Put it in my laser printer and printed my entire few pages of notes in 4pt font.
  - unishark 6y ago
    The real value is it makes you view the materially critically and condense it. You're almost cheating yourself by cramming too much on there. Plus of course it puts everyone on the same page with people who are going to sneak in cheat sheets anyway. They always are there.
lmm 6y ago
> 2) Tell: Dealing with cheating distracts from our mission of teaching so best to be preventative so it does not happen. The implicit assumption here is that telling the students is more effective prevention than not telling them. I don't think that's true, at least on a wider scale; secret anti-cheating countermeasures and rigorous punishment are surely going to be better than published countermeasures.
iovrthoughtthis 6y ago
You can’t cheat at learning. You can only cheat at a game, which is what the accreditation system we call education is. If we stopped making it a game, without points to earn and rewards for points, people wouldn’t cheat. That aside, I think the act of cheating is a call for help, even if the callee doesn’t realise it. The pressure to do well coupled with a persons lack of self confidence or self belief come together to make cheating a reasonable route. If you believed you could never get x, that getting x would massively improve your life, social status, parents acceptance etc you might be prepared to do anything to get x. Not everyone though, some are probably just resigned to never getting x. They too are calling for help imo. But we weren’t talking about them.
- zappo2938 6y ago
  The kids at Stuyvesant who cheated are now bankers and lawyers -- depends what they were learning to do. I figure if the invested the same energy in studying than cheating they would have had equal grades.
  - mtsr 6y ago
    Equal grades, but less relevant job experience, maybe.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    How serial was their cheating? Just curious, odd to hear this about top students.
    - deleted 6y ago
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- cies 6y ago
  > You can only cheat at a game You can only cheat rules/agreements/contracts. No rules, no cheating. I'd agree that learning has no rules. There are some natural laws I guess, like the "forgetting curve", but those cannot be cheated (hence natural laws). > I think the act of cheating is a call for help Or a lack of respect for the rules, or sheer curiosity. Maybe there are more reasons.
econcon 6y ago
Life is a open book exam. You are free to take any idea from anywhere, spin it around and make use of it. And really what's the point of getting grade/scores in school, when we can teach kids to collaborate with each other and create great new things. Not everyone will be good at math, not everyone will have same drive to study physics. But everyone of us might find smth interesting in a project. We shouldn't be pitting students against each other.
- choeger 6y ago
  Sure and the next time you have a surgery the surgeon might be really, really bad at cutting inside you, but passed their exams because the other students helped out a lot. Honestly, an exam should control the success of learning, nothing more. Passing an exam should always finish a course or topic. Failing an exam, though, should be quite normal and just lead to more repitition.
  - lonelappde 6y ago
    I'd rather at surgeon be good at surgery than good at history and calculus. But the current system in the USA will put the history calculus person in the OR.
p4bl0 6y ago
> If the student had been a coherent thinker, he probably wouldn't have needed to cheat. This is a key point, but it may not be formulated the right way. Here is my take on it, as I explain it to my students: If you are able to cheat so well that I can't catch you, it means you don't actually need to cheat. Corollary is that if you need to cheat and you do, I will see it, because you'll be bad at that too.
- eru 6y ago
  > If you are able to cheat so well that I can't catch you, it means you don't actually need to cheat. Well, it depends which skills you want to test with your exam..
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  are your students studying to be Ninjas? Otherwise I don't see how needing to cheat to pass Spanish Language as an example would translate to not having the cheating skills to do so.
  - p4bl0 6y ago
    That would be awesome, but no, they're studying compsci. Most of what I grade is code. It's quite difficult to hide that you have copied code from elsewhere, in particular when you're not able to understand — let alone explain — how it works.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      I guess this is another difference between the academic and business worlds then, often I ask people why something is the way it is and they start using some a mixmash of jargon pulled from design patterns, agile manifesto, and business goals of some sort. I don't necessarily think it's because they have copied the code and they don't know how it works, I just think they don't know how to speak straightforward about code or are afraid of looking stupid and as a result I either have to accept stuff is the way it is, write down what they said and go try to decipher it at my leisure, or gird myself for battle.
stared 6y ago
I think that not telling students about different versions of tests is better for deterrence. Of course, not if applied once, but each test they will think twice before copy&paste of an answer. ... Cheating is a form of deception. The person in the story wanted to cheat an exam, and then later - manipulate OP that they are the victim. One shouldn't fall for that.
- wodenokoto 6y ago
  > I think that not telling students about different versions of tests is better for deterrence. No. Deterrence is not putting up a hidden camera. Deterrence is when you tell people the area is monitored by cameras. People will slow down their car when they know the police is around, not when they don't know. If you want to catch cheaters, you set up anti cheating. If you want deter cheaters, you warn them about anti cheating measures.
  - stared 6y ago
    Well, if you monitor a street, people slow down in this particular area and go back to their speeding once they leave the designed area. If students know which exams have extra measures, they won't cheat on them, and will get a free pass everywhere else. If you don't, sure - at first there is no deterrence, but later (after a few students get failed and exposed for cheating), it will deter others from trying.
m463 6y ago
I learned a lot reading the book "the honest truth about dishonesty" by dan ariely. He did a whole bunch of really interesting experiments, like self-reporting how many you got wrong on a test before it is fed into a shredder and similar. fascinating book. How many of you work exactly 8 hours a day with your employer?
- pridkett 6y ago
  Not quite a fair comparison because most software engineers are salaried, not hourly (at least in the United States). I’m trying hard to think about what cheating would be in the software world. Here’s a few things that I see: * Grabbing an open source package without a license check * Pushing to production without running all the integration tests (or worse, just SSHing into production) * Accepting a PR without actually reviewing the code * Writing code without unit tests Its hard for me to come up with these - most involved skirting controls, which were usually there for a reason. Data science seems much more obvious: * Lying about performance on the test set * Using highly correlated features which leads to instability * telling people the model has broader applicability than it does (e.g. a speech to text model was trained on complaint phone calls and claiming it can be just as good for in person meetings) This could be because I spend more time in the ML world, but I’m curious what other people think.
  - zxcmx 6y ago
    In my experience the primary way knowledge workers get into trouble is over-reporting progress on a task, then half-assing it at the end or making excuses. This might be due to procrastination, personal issues, distraction, other job pressures, lack of direction / guidance on the task or many other reasons, some of them good. The problem is succumbing to the temptation to report progress when there really hasn't been any.
    - umvi 6y ago
      > The problem is succumbing to the temptation to report progress when there really hasn't been any. Just today at stand up I said I was going to "wrap up" a story I had been working on for several days. In reality I have not written a single line of code, so by "wrap up" I meant "start and finish coding". Here's how I rationalized it though: It's not like I've done nothing, the past few days I've been mentally digesting the story and trying to figure out how all the pieces fit together. I've been researching different solutions online, reading through GitHub and StackOverflow. I thought about it a lot, even when not at work (i.e. in the shower or laying in bed). Now that I think I've fully worked out the solution in my mind, actually coding it is the easy part. Sometimes I hit a snag, but more often than not, I can just iteratively breeze through the implementation. - I like to solve
deleted 6y ago
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bsldld 6y ago
Isn't cheating a symptom of the failure in how the education system works? This^ very interesting video of Ken Robinson produced by RSA was recently posted by someone on this forum. It diagnose this problem very well. Trying to put kids in a system that is boxed due to constraints of age, time, subjects and grades is very harmful for the real development of individual kids. Kids understand this and get disengaged from the system but still have to force themselves to follow along because they are not provided with an alternative. ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  Look, we live in the real world with scare resources distributed to different needs, one of them education. It is sad that a lot of times students will have suboptimal teachers and teaching. Even at the best schools and universities in the world, there will be certain parts which will be taught badly. Secondly, in the real world, some high value creating jobs can be extremely tedious and boring. And in the real world, some things you need to learn to do either these boring jobs or even interesting jobs, can be very boring. As an educator, I am all for making education better (like a lot), but for the above reasons, parts of education will always be boring. And I understand that some students will cheat because of this boredom. But what I observe is that the rate at which students cheat is much higher than the fraction of their education that is boring or badly done. Students cheat because it is easier than working hard, students cheat because it is cool to cheat and brag about it, students teach because they don't care about learning at all.
blensor 6y ago
I once had an electrical engineering exam and had the textbook brazenly lying open on my desk and trying to find something. The teacher made his rounds through the class, me assuming that he just hadn't noticed. After the third round when he walked by he put his hands on the book and said "If you haven't found it by now you might as well stop". That's it, no repercussion. That's something I will remember for the rest of my life. I do believe that people will always try to find an easier solution for a problem, that does not mean the punishment has to be too excessive. If you notice that cheating attempts get out of hand take correctional steps before hand, by for example taking them in shifts to increase space between the students, and interrupt cheating attempts when they happen. Just using draconian measures to try and make everyone behave is a lazy solution for a social problem.
- ipunchghosts 6y ago
  This is a joke right?
  - blensor 6y ago
    A joke in what way? I am not familiar with US exam standards but I stand by my opinion that there are better ways to deal with cheating than harsh disciplinary measures. That's also the way I preferred it with my students.
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  - TwoNineFive 6y ago
    No. This is how some cheaters actually think. Nothing matters as long as they don't face consequences. They always have some excuse, and if this one doesn't work that one does. It doesn't matter what the excuse is as long as it works for them and they don't have to face up to the fact that they are doing something wrong. Then there's just the ones who know they are cheating and are just okay with it. That's your grade A evil there which comes in two varieties: The ones who pretend they don't know, and the ones who do it openly. So you have your cheaters who do it openly. The ones who lie about cheating. And the ones who have lied to themselves.
gwd 6y ago
So here's a plausible expansion of the scenario described: The student actually does the problem on his own sheet, and does it correctly. But he then just happens to glance over at his neighbor, who he knows is actually really good, and sees a completely different answer. Concerned, he spends a bunch of time going over the problem, and can't figure out where he went wrong, nor how the other student got the answer they did. So, in a fit of self-doubt, they copy the other student's answer. I can see how, in that situation, a student might feel like things were unfair: They did try to do the question themselves, and if they'd known there were different exams, they would have just stuck with their own answer. Of course, in the story as repeated, the student didn't say anything about trying to do the problem themselves first. But you can certainly imagine that happening; so that comes down on the side of, "Tell your students about nearly-identical problems."
- suyjuris 6y ago
  I do not think that this make it better for the student. They still cheated, only instead of acquiring the actual answer they obtained the information whether their answer was correct. (Based on their knowledge of the situation.) So they acted unethically to gain an advantage, but instead sabotaged themselves.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  Thing is, it literally does not matter if the neighbors exam was the same or different - they intentionally made a decision to cross the taboo line and act in an unacceptable, punishable manner. "just happens to glance at his neighor" and his answers is unacceptable, and it's fair to punish acting on that information. It does not matter if they tried doing it themselves. It does not matter which answer was right. It matters that they decided that copying is an appropriate response, which is was not. If the student considers "So, in a fit of self-doubt, they copy the other student's answer." as plausible course of action instead of automatically discards it as unacceptable, then this is a behavioral issue that needs to be addressed and corrected; and addressing and correcting that behavior is arguably more important than whatever they learn or don't learn in that course. The whole point of this "dilemma" is that if the student feels that this is unfair then this indicates a fundamental mistunderstanding of the criteria. To fix this, it might be useful to have a followup test for all the students in this class with the following questions: What circumstances justify copying another student's answer: A) Seeing a different answer than yours; B) That other student being really good; C) It being a full moon; D) None of the above, nothing justifies copying another student's answer. If anyone - especially the culprit - answers anything than D then they should be blocked from taking any tests until they complete some program on the University rules and ethics. If after this incident the student feels that they have a reason that justified their copying, then they're wrong and need to be educated until they know the correct answer. And if they refuse to accept that there is no valid justification and that they must obey the no-copying principle no matter what justification they have, then it's reasonable to expel them from the university.
sriram_malhar 6y ago
It didn't seem like much of a dilemma to me. If it appears that it was a clear case of cheating, then the only response to the student is that they shouldn't have to be told not to cheat. Where's their inner moral compass? How severe should the penalty be? I give an instant oral quiz, and if it looks like they could have solved the problem anyway, I let them off with a warning.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  The dilemma posed was should educators prioritize detering cheating or catching cheating The severity of punishment, student morality, ect are context only. hence "A non-moral dilemma about cheating"
vorpalhex 6y ago
Speaking from a really longterm idealized answer, the answer is "both". You should communicate to the students that you take several measures to make cheating difficult like passing out multiple versions of the same exam. You should also mention that you're consistently inconsistent. Sometimes you have 4 exam kinds, sometimes just 2. You do your best to mention it, but you know, people forget things. Forgive an unkind analogy, but when you're training a dog you don't want to reward it _every_ time. You actually want to be inconsistent with rewards so that it doesn't intentionally stop the behavior the first time it doesn't get a reward. The goal is to train students to not cheat by communicating that the cost of cheating is very high. At the same time, actually hunting down possible cheaters is hopefully not valuable - there's always some freeloaders but they should be at a low enough percentage to not influence very much.
credit_guy 6y ago
In academia, professors are quite concerned with cheating right now, when all teaching happens online. Some professors are considering using software to randomize the exams, so no two exams are identical. This obviously increases the grading effort. Some are asking students to take a pledge, like "I solemnly swear to not google the problem". Some are just trusting the students to not cheat. There's no easy and universal solution. Ideally, technology could solve the issue, but it's not that easy to identify and implement a technology solution in a matter of weeks.
DavidVoid 6y ago
If the goal is to gather as many valid evaluations of the students' knowledge as possible, then the students should be made aware that there are multiple versions of the tests. Students who might have tried to cheat if all the tests were identical would probably not attempt to cheat if they knew that there were multiple versions. By reducing the frequency of cheating you increase the frequency of valid evaluations of students' knowledge, and that should be the goal of testing I think. Making it easier for students to cheat just makes the tests more and more of an evaluation of the students' morals, not of their knowledge about whatever the test supposed to be about. TL;DR: Sometimes "opportunity makes the thief", so telling students that there are multiple versions should reduce the amount of cheating by making them aware of how difficult cheating would be.
jeffdavis 6y ago
Cheating is a form of fraud. It's both just and practical to prevent those who use fraud as a strategy from establishing positions of responsibility. There are two questions: Should it be the job of teachers to catch cheaters? If not teachers, who? How do you salvage "borderline" cases where someone cheats but may not use it as a life strategy (at least, not yet)?
specialist 6y ago
What does game theory say about academic cheating? The hardest grade I ever earned was from my peers. Teacher let us choose our own project teams. We competed against other teams, which comprised most of the grade. Then team members graded each other to apportion the grade. (Teacher retained discretion to account for the human condition and fairness. For example, "most improved" students would get high marks.) The remarkable thing was kids are brutal towards cheaters and freeloaders. Almost like it's hard wired. -- The Logic of Collective Action has prescriptive game theoretic strategy for freeloaders and defectors: require collective bargaining. Governance remains among the hardest of problems. Cheaters, freeloaders, thieves, bad faith, fraud, and so forth. Peer review in the sciences is currently innovating. Share your data, show your work. Good government (progressive) style movements begat transparency, accountability. Who, if any one, is innovating in scholastics?
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fargle 6y ago
Here's how I see it: - You've absolutely no duty to warn students up front. If this is done, it's because it's a good idea on your terms. - You have a duty to actively fight and punish cheaters. This is because that kind of cheating "steals" value and/or time from students that don't cheat. The honest students expect the rules to be enforced as part of the "contract" they paid for. To not enforce it strictly is theft by the cheaters and contributory negligence by the school. - It might be good for honest students, the "wobblers", and the educators to warn, in vague unspecific terms. Young students might be expected to make mistakes and need to learn meta-things like "cheaters don't prosper" too. Like: "This course is hard. If you cheat, we WILL catch you. this is what will happen..." - It might be good for students and the educators to have graduated penalties. Something like, first offence: fail the exam. 2nd offence XF. 3rd offence expulsion. This should be clearly documented. Lack of contrition may result in escalation. Again, meta-lessons for the more, erm, stubborn. - "fool me once, shame on me". "fool me twice..." - All of the above being stated, I do NOT believe in "zero tolerance" policies. Fairness cannot be had without judgement. - After stern warnings, make sure the students get the toughest test first and get the chance to drop the class if they can't "hack it" without cheating. And tell them this when they get caught.
ccvannorman 6y ago
Cheating is best left to politicians and billionaires, so that if and when they get caught, nothing can be done.

74 points by luu 6y ago

Maybe I'm very cynical, but I think almost anybody would cheat if it was made easy enough and they were given the chance. At the end of the day, people are there to come out with a degree and a good grade, not feel good they didn't take the same opportunity available to others. It'd be trivially easy to entrap students. Say, for example, if the professor put the answer up on Blackboard, seemingly by accident, which came in the form of an incorrect answer to a real exam question. They could then give everyone who gives the wrong answer an XF. I'd wager that would be most people, barring the few smartest who noticed the error. Could you really blame people for wanting to get it right and not handicap themselves relative to the other students? Given that, the university then has a responsibility to make it as hard as possible to cheat. Fail grades for cheating work because they create an incentive to avoid cheating. Except in this circumstance the incentive effect could not work because the student had no idea they'd be able to be caught.

ekidd 6y ago
> Maybe I'm very cynical, but I think almost anybody would cheat if it was made easy enough and they were given the chance. This attitude is so strange to me. I would assume that cheaters are a minority of students. (Perhaps a large minority, sadly. I've heard some third-hand stories.) My school had a policy of an automatic 9 month suspension for a first offense. Professors were officially discouraged from exercising any discretion, and they were supposed to report all incidents to the disciplinary committee. For a second offense, the penalty was a permanent expulsion. I did see the system fail a few times when I was there, but it worked a lot of the time.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  having such a severe penalty for the first offense probably causes professors to look the other way if they don't agree that it's reasonable. imo, the severity of the offense can vary a lot. cheating on a homework might not be as bad as cheating on an exam (worth a lot more points), wholesale copying of answers is much worse than getting a little too much help from your study group. as far as how widespread cheating is, that probably depends on the culture at your particular institution. my school had a very strict policy for programming assignments: you were only allowed to discuss them with the instructor, a TA, or in public on piazza. and yet, every time I went into the cs lab, I would see everyone huddled around each other laptops debugging code for the latest assignment. I'm not sure whether they simply didn't understand the rule or didn't realize how obvious it was what they were doing, but essentially everyone in that room was bending the rules a little.
mxcrossb 6y ago
> At the end of the day, people are there to come out with a degree and a good grade I’ve been listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, and one thing that struck me is that early philosophers seemed to consider virtue the end goal of philosophy. That is to say, we should care less about if our physics students can do physics, and more if doing physics had made them more ethical human beings. It’s quite a reversal we’ve ended up with...
jeremysalwen 6y ago
I don't think anybody would cheat based on how easy it is, but they would based on how common, normal, and socially acceptable they think it is.
biased_coin 6y ago
True story: One day, an assistant professor (and a first time teacher) came to class and announced that there would be a "surprise test" on so-and-so day. Not just that, the questions asked would be 5 out of 8 possible pre-announced questions. On the day of the test, the professor wrote the questions on the board and then left the room. Almost every student in the class cheated. Some came with chits to copy from. Some copied from others. Legends though, they came with pre-written answer sheets for each of the 8 questions and attached answers for the 5 questions which were asked.
- maccard 6y ago
  And in that case, (almost) everyone learns. The people who came with the pre written answer sheets studied, the people who wrote the chits studied, and the people who copied from others presumably learned _something_ in the process. Maybe some didn't, but that's always going to happen
  - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
    I can't agree with this viewpoint at all. If you take a viva of one of these students who came in with a pre-written answer sheet copied from a friend, a vast majority of them would straight up fail. As TA and prof, I have seen cheaters copy word to word, spelling mistakes included, incorrect grammatical structures as is, basic mistakes like 6/2=2 untouched, because they are literally Ctrl-C Ctrl-V with their hands, with no brain involvement whatsoever.
atq2119 6y ago
> At the end of the day, people are there to come out with a degree and a good grade, not feel good they didn't take the same opportunity available to others. Some people, yes. Others are there to actually learn something. Either because they're intrinsically motivated to do so, or because they understand that while a degree may help get them in the door somewhere, career success in many fields does depend on actually knowing what you're doing.
- sajforbes 6y ago
  For those who are there to learn, do you think they would also pass up the opportunity to both learn and improve their grade?
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elsjaako 6y ago
I agree that the university has some responsibility to make cheating hard, and to not entrap people. But I don't see where the responsibility goes from hard to "as hard as possible".
ben509 6y ago
There is definitely a point at which anyone will cheat, and one time I met that threshold. There was an Econ exam that I hadn't prepared for, and I got there fully prepared to flunk it. That day there was a problem with the photocopier. We had to fill in a scantron, but they didn't have copies of the exam for everyone. The professor read the questions and answers. And I watched people's heads go down. > At the end of the day, people are there to come out with a degree and a good grade, not feel good they didn't take the same opportunity available to others. This is an age-old question in education: are you trying to learn something, or get the credentials necessary to get a job? I wasn't doing a major in Econ, so the fact that I didn't get much out of the class put me strongly on the side of shrugging that off as "they pretend to teach me, I pretend to learn." But for most of my coursework, I really did want to learn things and get recognition for having done so. > Given that, the university then has a responsibility to make it as hard as possible to cheat. I strongly agree. I know there were guys who cheated in various ways, I watched one guy who went around the labs asking people to do his homework for him. And because universities have allowed degrees to be devalued, I've spent hours in interviews demonstrating basic CS concepts.

knzhou 6y ago

I was lucky to spend my childhood and college years in peer groups where cheating was incomprehensible. Nobody would cheat in a math competition, for instance. That would just be a loud, lame declaration of stupidity. When I went to the other side and started having to enforce the rules, I realized that while the top decile could be trusted, everybody else was suspect, and enforcement of the rules was incredibly hard. What do you do when you grade a string of tests containing the exact same silly mistakes? What about a group of students that suddenly jumps to high performance on one exam and then immediately crashes back down? Remote proctoring is even harder. I once saw a student fabricate an entire school with the aid of his parents, complete with website, address, and fake teacher information, so he and his parents could do the exam together. How are you supposed to vet hundreds or thousands of people like this? I really hope that I get a faculty position where I can just teach low-pressure graduate-level seminars, and never have to learn the answer. Mass education is damn hard.

naveen99 6y ago
Educating and testing are separate issues. If you are testing to see what to teach next, and the student cheats, well they just cheated themselves out of learning what you were going to teach if they failed the test.
- chongli 6y ago
  In isolation, maybe. But in reality students are competing for limited educational resources. Cheating can mean the difference between admission and rejection to courses, majors, scholarships, and matriculation at top schools. It’s no different from cheating in sports. Yeah, the sports cheater is probably damaging their body and potentially harming their natural potential. At the same time, cheating may let them make the team and even the big leagues. That can change a person’s entire career, just as cheating to get into Harvard can.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    <incoherent rant> Everytime, I end up with the same conclusion. Overpopulation and imbalanced distribution of resources is the root cause for everything wrong with this world. I keep doubting myself. The problem shouldn't be that visible. People don't seem to blame overpopulation... maybe it's not a problem but everytime, it is the problem. Look at education systems of smaller countries. They are way better than what you get as the number of people in your country increases despite bigger spending. Stopping overpopulation shouldn't be hard. We haven't tried anything. How can people be so sure? Why not disincentivise having kids by making it too expensive? Maybe use a tax cut equivalent to someone's wealth so rich people are as much affected as poor people (albeit a bit less in the grand scheme). Free birth control for everyone - poor people in less developed countries are responsible for most kids. Force longer education period so fertility rate goes down by the time people settle down. There are so many ways you can push the average marriage age faster than it is happening naturally now. Why not do it for less developed countries? Isn't it better if there is less suffering collectively in this world? How about paying people to not have kids and adopt? What's the problem with it? Taxes are used for so many other useless things. </incoherent rant> I am okay with downvotes but please provide a reason. I really want to know. Maybe my thoughts are unhealthy.

dooglius 6y ago

Telling students about your anti-cheating measures seems like a health inspector telling restaurants in advance the dates when he'll show up. The problem is that most professors are not going to go out of their ways to employ anti-cheating measures; by catching cheaters, you are doing a service to the larger college community by removing them.

anitil 6y ago
Ironically when I worked in a deli, we actually were told the dates the health inspector would turn up. You can imagine the day before was spent cleaning and scrubbing!
- brigandish 6y ago
  As your example shows, it's not such a bad thing to announce measures because they can have the side effect of raising standards. Used alongside the odd random visit I would imagine this to be incredibly effective.
  - Supermancho 6y ago
    That's not what the example "shows". The standards aren't raised, but lowered. First, let's just agree on some terminology health codes are the "standard". If you only clean before an inspector arrives (and you are sure that that's the only time to do so) your standard is lower on average over periods of time or altogether, depending on the offense. If you don't know when the inspector is going to arrive, you are incentivized to keep to the code at all times, which is the reason you aren't supposed to know.
    - brigandish 6y ago
      > Used alongside the odd random visit I would imagine this to be incredibly effective. You missed this bit.
btrettel 6y ago
When I was a teenager I worked at a Shell gas station. Once I had a customer who asked about the advantages of using Shell nitrogen-enriched gasoline. I didn't know anything about it and found their question really odd. As I recall, they came back later and revealed that they were a secret shopper for Shell, and we failed the random inspection. All because of a question that no real customer ever asked in my experience. ;-) My boss didn't care, fortunately.

reeealloc 6y ago

I'm not a teacher, so maybe I should just stay out of it, but I'm of the opinion that teachers should try to help cheaters the same way they help failing students. Cheating is really just a proxy for failure, so why not just treat it the same as failing? That being said, some kinds of cheating don't deserved to be punished. The given scenario is bad for the cheater, but some students put so much effort into writing notes to cheat with that they just end up doing the amount of effort required to pass.

cgearhart 6y ago
Cheating is only rarely a proxy for failure. It has been my experience as a TA and instructor that cheating is more often considered an “accelerator” or “advantage” than an act of desperation. It’s not something that can be solved by academic support because the most brazen cheaters usually feel entitled to cheat—they view it as equivalent to doing the assigned work because it reaches the same end (a passing grade). For example, the student in the linked article admitted cheating, but had no contrition about it.
- deleted 6y ago
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getlawgdon 6y ago
No. Cheating is not a proxy for failure. They are in fact much more frequently inverse to one another. Cheating is intentional circumvention seeking reward. Failure is an outcome that comes more frequently from low effort, unethical effort, or honest effort with low capacity or skill.

klyrs 6y ago

In big courses at my university we'd print 4 colors of exams, with 2 actual versions. It was a little extra work upfront, but we almost never had to deal with cheaters. Bottom line, my job was to teach, grade homework and proctor exams. The last thing I want to do is play piggie -- I don't wanna stay up at night worrying over my student getting expelled / deported. The easiest way to keep focused on my actual job is to take some precautions that make cheating feel risky to the students. So I really don't understand the other professor in this anecdote. Your students are stressed, sometimes as a result of bad life choices, sometimes as a result of external issues like family death&drama, sometimes as a result of sadistic asshole professors... typically it's a combination of the above. So for each 200-person exam, you'll frequently have students for whom this is literally the worst week of their brief and sheltered lives. They might make a choice they'll regret. So you have a choice: add risk to scare all but the very most dedicated cheaters (and fuck those kids), or lay a trap for the vulnerable kids that the skilled cheaters will skate through.

battery_cowboy 6y ago
I had a professor that printed in like 3 colors, and each exam had a different code on it, like 'X3-67' so we thought he made several versions (of course it was graduate math and he told us we would all get an A in we showed up and participated so we wouldn't have cheated anyways). Later we compared our exams after the course ended (because he kept them until then and would just review the problems we missed with each of us in office hours) and they were all the same problems :)

crankylinuxuser 6y ago

I think it's a false premise. The purpose of learning is to understand the topic at hand. But school's purpose isn't for learning, primarily. It's for accreditation and getting a paper saying you learned certain things. And then you use that paper to get a better job, make more money, and get things like retirement and health insurance. (It used to not be that way - things changed after the GI bill... but I digress.) If the school was non-profit and did as such, failure would not be wasted money or a permanent grade against you. Failure would only be lost time... But that's not how it is. Failure haunts you the whole time. The negative grades stay in the form of ever-approaching GPAs. But if you buy more classes, you can buy the average a slightly bit higher IFF you get better grades than the average. The moral dilemma is that schools are using the threat of continuous harm of failure(GPAs) and harm to the pocketbook over taking a class and not doing well in it. Schools and their teachers aren't on the hook for bad teaching. It makes sense when possible to use other methods to make sure your grades and wallet aren't harmed. I believe it would be different if schools were actually on the hook for teaching what you paid them to do. That calculation would certainly change - we wouldn't have "weeder" classes... Well, not in anywhere near the same way. (Wonders just how much schools make on failing students. I'm sure there's an Atlantic or Vice writeup in that question.)

totetsu 6y ago
Indeed, the real problem is that content of courses are not aligned to the goals and interests of students. Higher Education is used as a filter in many countries. Student's know the game.

btrettel 6y ago

The comments here are interesting. My experience has been that cheating is too much trouble to deal with, but I can see that's others have had more success. Might depend greatly on the personalities involved. Once I was a TA for a class and a student came to me asking for a regrade on part of one exam. They claimed that I unfairly gave them zero on a particular problem. I looked at it and yes, I did give them a zero. But I never give zeros on a larger problem unless nothing or almost nothing is written down. I think that I'm quite generous for gibberish even. There is no way I would have given this student a zero for this problem if he had what was present at my office hours. I told him that I believe he is trying to cheat by doing the problem after the exam. I didn't report him but I did make it clear that I didn't believe his story. The student went to the lecturer, who was furious with me. The lecturer said that I had no clear evidence that he didn't do the problem; me saying that I never give a zero unless the problem is not attempted wasn't good enough for the lecturer. I spoke with my advisor, who said that to avoid problems like that he puts a line through any problems that were not attempted. The lecturer didn't like the line solution after I graded the next exam. He was furious with me again. He told me "You don't trust your students!" I don't trust some students, sure. Since putting the line through empty parts I haven't had anyone claim anything similar, though. The lecturer was apparently so disappointed with me that he told my advisor to kick me out of his research group (or something along those lines). I didn't learn that until years later. My advisor told me at the time that the lecturer had a reputation for being a jerk to his TAs, so I figure my advisor just thought this lecturer wasn't worth listening to. (To his "credit", the lecturer had another issue with me that he got furious over: He had a very particular system for writing grades on exams. As I recall on the back page on one of the top corners he wanted the total points received written over the total on the exam. On about 5 out of about 100 exams I wrote the wrong denominator by accident; the numerators were correct in all instances as far as I recall. Now, I'm sorry to have made this mistake but it wasn't on a number that mattered and it was only on a small number of exams. This issue combined with the cheating is all rather minor and not worth raging over.) I did keep putting lines through empty parts when grading, at least after I stopped TAing for this class. But this experience made me reluctant to give a zero for cheating, much less report the student to the university.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

_bxg1 6y ago

Site is impossible to read on mobile. It doesn't just overflow the screen by default, it prevents zooming-out.

battery_cowboy 6y ago

Grades are useless in the face of cheating, so just tell everyone they'll get to choose their own grade at the end, then they'll focus on learning and even if everyone chooses an A, who cares? Does the A mean anything today? I've met 4.0 students in hard college courses that were terrible in the workplace and I've met 2.1 students who had a political science degree be awesome software developers, so the only reason that number exists is to make people feel good.

abellerose 6y ago

Maybe I'm naive but I believe cheating can be eliminated by allowing students to have a notecard when taking tests and where they're allowed to write down formulas or whatever is necessary for them individually before the tests. I know a misconception exists in education "about memorization being something every student can perform optimally for succeeding" in getting top marks. That ignorant belief is simply not the case for everyone and I find it cruel we penalize children that could have succeeded if they're allowed to use their organization skills optimally. Otherwise they're hindered by their genetics or neglectful/abusive home-life that resulted in development issues with memory. I know I'm not alone as a programmer using a trusty note taking app for multiple things I rather not memorize. Obviously I don't use it for syntax of the language I'm writing. Thus, brings me to my last point of how students will still be unable to cram all the subject material on a notecard and for completing a test within the time limit given. That makes it so the student gains a real life useful skill of organizing and breaking down material being taught. Further helping the longterm understanding than just memorize a few nights before the test and all is forgotten later depending on the subject being taught.

lainga 6y ago
We got that in signal processing. Two sides of one sheet of engineering paper, anything you can fit, prof gets to examine it as you enter the exam. Some people would put their sheets through the printer and go for 8pt font... I used pencil
- sgerenser 6y ago
  In middle school I had a social studies teacher that allowed a 3x5 note card for tests. Put it in my laser printer and printed my entire few pages of notes in 4pt font.
- unishark 6y ago
  The real value is it makes you view the materially critically and condense it. You're almost cheating yourself by cramming too much on there. Plus of course it puts everyone on the same page with people who are going to sneak in cheat sheets anyway. They always are there.

lmm 6y ago

> 2) Tell: Dealing with cheating distracts from our mission of teaching so best to be preventative so it does not happen. The implicit assumption here is that telling the students is more effective prevention than not telling them. I don't think that's true, at least on a wider scale; secret anti-cheating countermeasures and rigorous punishment are surely going to be better than published countermeasures.

iovrthoughtthis 6y ago

You can’t cheat at learning. You can only cheat at a game, which is what the accreditation system we call education is. If we stopped making it a game, without points to earn and rewards for points, people wouldn’t cheat. That aside, I think the act of cheating is a call for help, even if the callee doesn’t realise it. The pressure to do well coupled with a persons lack of self confidence or self belief come together to make cheating a reasonable route. If you believed you could never get x, that getting x would massively improve your life, social status, parents acceptance etc you might be prepared to do anything to get x. Not everyone though, some are probably just resigned to never getting x. They too are calling for help imo. But we weren’t talking about them.

zappo2938 6y ago
The kids at Stuyvesant who cheated are now bankers and lawyers -- depends what they were learning to do. I figure if the invested the same energy in studying than cheating they would have had equal grades.
- mtsr 6y ago
  Equal grades, but less relevant job experience, maybe.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  How serial was their cheating? Just curious, odd to hear this about top students.
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cies 6y ago
> You can only cheat at a game You can only cheat rules/agreements/contracts. No rules, no cheating. I'd agree that learning has no rules. There are some natural laws I guess, like the "forgetting curve", but those cannot be cheated (hence natural laws). > I think the act of cheating is a call for help Or a lack of respect for the rules, or sheer curiosity. Maybe there are more reasons.

econcon 6y ago

Life is a open book exam. You are free to take any idea from anywhere, spin it around and make use of it. And really what's the point of getting grade/scores in school, when we can teach kids to collaborate with each other and create great new things. Not everyone will be good at math, not everyone will have same drive to study physics. But everyone of us might find smth interesting in a project. We shouldn't be pitting students against each other.

choeger 6y ago
Sure and the next time you have a surgery the surgeon might be really, really bad at cutting inside you, but passed their exams because the other students helped out a lot. Honestly, an exam should control the success of learning, nothing more. Passing an exam should always finish a course or topic. Failing an exam, though, should be quite normal and just lead to more repitition.
- lonelappde 6y ago
  I'd rather at surgeon be good at surgery than good at history and calculus. But the current system in the USA will put the history calculus person in the OR.

p4bl0 6y ago

> If the student had been a coherent thinker, he probably wouldn't have needed to cheat. This is a key point, but it may not be formulated the right way. Here is my take on it, as I explain it to my students: If you are able to cheat so well that I can't catch you, it means you don't actually need to cheat. Corollary is that if you need to cheat and you do, I will see it, because you'll be bad at that too.

eru 6y ago
> If you are able to cheat so well that I can't catch you, it means you don't actually need to cheat. Well, it depends which skills you want to test with your exam..
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
are your students studying to be Ninjas? Otherwise I don't see how needing to cheat to pass Spanish Language as an example would translate to not having the cheating skills to do so.
- p4bl0 6y ago
  That would be awesome, but no, they're studying compsci. Most of what I grade is code. It's quite difficult to hide that you have copied code from elsewhere, in particular when you're not able to understand — let alone explain — how it works.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    I guess this is another difference between the academic and business worlds then, often I ask people why something is the way it is and they start using some a mixmash of jargon pulled from design patterns, agile manifesto, and business goals of some sort. I don't necessarily think it's because they have copied the code and they don't know how it works, I just think they don't know how to speak straightforward about code or are afraid of looking stupid and as a result I either have to accept stuff is the way it is, write down what they said and go try to decipher it at my leisure, or gird myself for battle.

stared 6y ago

I think that not telling students about different versions of tests is better for deterrence. Of course, not if applied once, but each test they will think twice before copy&paste of an answer. ... Cheating is a form of deception. The person in the story wanted to cheat an exam, and then later - manipulate OP that they are the victim. One shouldn't fall for that.

wodenokoto 6y ago
> I think that not telling students about different versions of tests is better for deterrence. No. Deterrence is not putting up a hidden camera. Deterrence is when you tell people the area is monitored by cameras. People will slow down their car when they know the police is around, not when they don't know. If you want to catch cheaters, you set up anti cheating. If you want deter cheaters, you warn them about anti cheating measures.
- stared 6y ago
  Well, if you monitor a street, people slow down in this particular area and go back to their speeding once they leave the designed area. If students know which exams have extra measures, they won't cheat on them, and will get a free pass everywhere else. If you don't, sure - at first there is no deterrence, but later (after a few students get failed and exposed for cheating), it will deter others from trying.

m463 6y ago

I learned a lot reading the book "the honest truth about dishonesty" by dan ariely. He did a whole bunch of really interesting experiments, like self-reporting how many you got wrong on a test before it is fed into a shredder and similar. fascinating book. How many of you work exactly 8 hours a day with your employer?

pridkett 6y ago
Not quite a fair comparison because most software engineers are salaried, not hourly (at least in the United States). I’m trying hard to think about what cheating would be in the software world. Here’s a few things that I see: * Grabbing an open source package without a license check * Pushing to production without running all the integration tests (or worse, just SSHing into production) * Accepting a PR without actually reviewing the code * Writing code without unit tests Its hard for me to come up with these - most involved skirting controls, which were usually there for a reason. Data science seems much more obvious: * Lying about performance on the test set * Using highly correlated features which leads to instability * telling people the model has broader applicability than it does (e.g. a speech to text model was trained on complaint phone calls and claiming it can be just as good for in person meetings) This could be because I spend more time in the ML world, but I’m curious what other people think.
- zxcmx 6y ago
  In my experience the primary way knowledge workers get into trouble is over-reporting progress on a task, then half-assing it at the end or making excuses. This might be due to procrastination, personal issues, distraction, other job pressures, lack of direction / guidance on the task or many other reasons, some of them good. The problem is succumbing to the temptation to report progress when there really hasn't been any.
  - umvi 6y ago
    > The problem is succumbing to the temptation to report progress when there really hasn't been any. Just today at stand up I said I was going to "wrap up" a story I had been working on for several days. In reality I have not written a single line of code, so by "wrap up" I meant "start and finish coding". Here's how I rationalized it though: It's not like I've done nothing, the past few days I've been mentally digesting the story and trying to figure out how all the pieces fit together. I've been researching different solutions online, reading through GitHub and StackOverflow. I thought about it a lot, even when not at work (i.e. in the shower or laying in bed). Now that I think I've fully worked out the solution in my mind, actually coding it is the easy part. Sometimes I hit a snag, but more often than not, I can just iteratively breeze through the implementation. - I like to solve

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bsldld 6y ago

Isn't cheating a symptom of the failure in how the education system works? This^ very interesting video of Ken Robinson produced by RSA was recently posted by someone on this forum. It diagnose this problem very well. Trying to put kids in a system that is boxed due to constraints of age, time, subjects and grades is very harmful for the real development of individual kids. Kids understand this and get disengaged from the system but still have to force themselves to follow along because they are not provided with an alternative. ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

abdullahkhalids 6y ago
Look, we live in the real world with scare resources distributed to different needs, one of them education. It is sad that a lot of times students will have suboptimal teachers and teaching. Even at the best schools and universities in the world, there will be certain parts which will be taught badly. Secondly, in the real world, some high value creating jobs can be extremely tedious and boring. And in the real world, some things you need to learn to do either these boring jobs or even interesting jobs, can be very boring. As an educator, I am all for making education better (like a lot), but for the above reasons, parts of education will always be boring. And I understand that some students will cheat because of this boredom. But what I observe is that the rate at which students cheat is much higher than the fraction of their education that is boring or badly done. Students cheat because it is easier than working hard, students cheat because it is cool to cheat and brag about it, students teach because they don't care about learning at all.

blensor 6y ago

I once had an electrical engineering exam and had the textbook brazenly lying open on my desk and trying to find something. The teacher made his rounds through the class, me assuming that he just hadn't noticed. After the third round when he walked by he put his hands on the book and said "If you haven't found it by now you might as well stop". That's it, no repercussion. That's something I will remember for the rest of my life. I do believe that people will always try to find an easier solution for a problem, that does not mean the punishment has to be too excessive. If you notice that cheating attempts get out of hand take correctional steps before hand, by for example taking them in shifts to increase space between the students, and interrupt cheating attempts when they happen. Just using draconian measures to try and make everyone behave is a lazy solution for a social problem.

ipunchghosts 6y ago
This is a joke right?
- blensor 6y ago
  A joke in what way? I am not familiar with US exam standards but I stand by my opinion that there are better ways to deal with cheating than harsh disciplinary measures. That's also the way I preferred it with my students.
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- TwoNineFive 6y ago
  No. This is how some cheaters actually think. Nothing matters as long as they don't face consequences. They always have some excuse, and if this one doesn't work that one does. It doesn't matter what the excuse is as long as it works for them and they don't have to face up to the fact that they are doing something wrong. Then there's just the ones who know they are cheating and are just okay with it. That's your grade A evil there which comes in two varieties: The ones who pretend they don't know, and the ones who do it openly. So you have your cheaters who do it openly. The ones who lie about cheating. And the ones who have lied to themselves.

gwd 6y ago

So here's a plausible expansion of the scenario described: The student actually does the problem on his own sheet, and does it correctly. But he then just happens to glance over at his neighbor, who he knows is actually really good, and sees a completely different answer. Concerned, he spends a bunch of time going over the problem, and can't figure out where he went wrong, nor how the other student got the answer they did. So, in a fit of self-doubt, they copy the other student's answer. I can see how, in that situation, a student might feel like things were unfair: They did try to do the question themselves, and if they'd known there were different exams, they would have just stuck with their own answer. Of course, in the story as repeated, the student didn't say anything about trying to do the problem themselves first. But you can certainly imagine that happening; so that comes down on the side of, "Tell your students about nearly-identical problems."

suyjuris 6y ago
I do not think that this make it better for the student. They still cheated, only instead of acquiring the actual answer they obtained the information whether their answer was correct. (Based on their knowledge of the situation.) So they acted unethically to gain an advantage, but instead sabotaged themselves.
PeterisP 6y ago
Thing is, it literally does not matter if the neighbors exam was the same or different - they intentionally made a decision to cross the taboo line and act in an unacceptable, punishable manner. "just happens to glance at his neighor" and his answers is unacceptable, and it's fair to punish acting on that information. It does not matter if they tried doing it themselves. It does not matter which answer was right. It matters that they decided that copying is an appropriate response, which is was not. If the student considers "So, in a fit of self-doubt, they copy the other student's answer." as plausible course of action instead of automatically discards it as unacceptable, then this is a behavioral issue that needs to be addressed and corrected; and addressing and correcting that behavior is arguably more important than whatever they learn or don't learn in that course. The whole point of this "dilemma" is that if the student feels that this is unfair then this indicates a fundamental mistunderstanding of the criteria. To fix this, it might be useful to have a followup test for all the students in this class with the following questions: What circumstances justify copying another student's answer: A) Seeing a different answer than yours; B) That other student being really good; C) It being a full moon; D) None of the above, nothing justifies copying another student's answer. If anyone - especially the culprit - answers anything than D then they should be blocked from taking any tests until they complete some program on the University rules and ethics. If after this incident the student feels that they have a reason that justified their copying, then they're wrong and need to be educated until they know the correct answer. And if they refuse to accept that there is no valid justification and that they must obey the no-copying principle no matter what justification they have, then it's reasonable to expel them from the university.

sriram_malhar 6y ago

It didn't seem like much of a dilemma to me. If it appears that it was a clear case of cheating, then the only response to the student is that they shouldn't have to be told not to cheat. Where's their inner moral compass? How severe should the penalty be? I give an instant oral quiz, and if it looks like they could have solved the problem anyway, I let them off with a warning.

s1artibartfast 6y ago
The dilemma posed was should educators prioritize detering cheating or catching cheating The severity of punishment, student morality, ect are context only. hence "A non-moral dilemma about cheating"

vorpalhex 6y ago

Speaking from a really longterm idealized answer, the answer is "both". You should communicate to the students that you take several measures to make cheating difficult like passing out multiple versions of the same exam. You should also mention that you're consistently inconsistent. Sometimes you have 4 exam kinds, sometimes just 2. You do your best to mention it, but you know, people forget things. Forgive an unkind analogy, but when you're training a dog you don't want to reward it _every_ time. You actually want to be inconsistent with rewards so that it doesn't intentionally stop the behavior the first time it doesn't get a reward. The goal is to train students to not cheat by communicating that the cost of cheating is very high. At the same time, actually hunting down possible cheaters is hopefully not valuable - there's always some freeloaders but they should be at a low enough percentage to not influence very much.

credit_guy 6y ago

In academia, professors are quite concerned with cheating right now, when all teaching happens online. Some professors are considering using software to randomize the exams, so no two exams are identical. This obviously increases the grading effort. Some are asking students to take a pledge, like "I solemnly swear to not google the problem". Some are just trusting the students to not cheat. There's no easy and universal solution. Ideally, technology could solve the issue, but it's not that easy to identify and implement a technology solution in a matter of weeks.

DavidVoid 6y ago

If the goal is to gather as many valid evaluations of the students' knowledge as possible, then the students should be made aware that there are multiple versions of the tests. Students who might have tried to cheat if all the tests were identical would probably not attempt to cheat if they knew that there were multiple versions. By reducing the frequency of cheating you increase the frequency of valid evaluations of students' knowledge, and that should be the goal of testing I think. Making it easier for students to cheat just makes the tests more and more of an evaluation of the students' morals, not of their knowledge about whatever the test supposed to be about. TL;DR: Sometimes "opportunity makes the thief", so telling students that there are multiple versions should reduce the amount of cheating by making them aware of how difficult cheating would be.

jeffdavis 6y ago

Cheating is a form of fraud. It's both just and practical to prevent those who use fraud as a strategy from establishing positions of responsibility. There are two questions: Should it be the job of teachers to catch cheaters? If not teachers, who? How do you salvage "borderline" cases where someone cheats but may not use it as a life strategy (at least, not yet)?

specialist 6y ago

What does game theory say about academic cheating? The hardest grade I ever earned was from my peers. Teacher let us choose our own project teams. We competed against other teams, which comprised most of the grade. Then team members graded each other to apportion the grade. (Teacher retained discretion to account for the human condition and fairness. For example, "most improved" students would get high marks.) The remarkable thing was kids are brutal towards cheaters and freeloaders. Almost like it's hard wired. -- The Logic of Collective Action has prescriptive game theoretic strategy for freeloaders and defectors: require collective bargaining. Governance remains among the hardest of problems. Cheaters, freeloaders, thieves, bad faith, fraud, and so forth. Peer review in the sciences is currently innovating. Share your data, show your work. Good government (progressive) style movements begat transparency, accountability. Who, if any one, is innovating in scholastics?

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fargle 6y ago

Here's how I see it: - You've absolutely no duty to warn students up front. If this is done, it's because it's a good idea on your terms. - You have a duty to actively fight and punish cheaters. This is because that kind of cheating "steals" value and/or time from students that don't cheat. The honest students expect the rules to be enforced as part of the "contract" they paid for. To not enforce it strictly is theft by the cheaters and contributory negligence by the school. - It might be good for honest students, the "wobblers", and the educators to warn, in vague unspecific terms. Young students might be expected to make mistakes and need to learn meta-things like "cheaters don't prosper" too. Like: "This course is hard. If you cheat, we WILL catch you. this is what will happen..." - It might be good for students and the educators to have graduated penalties. Something like, first offence: fail the exam. 2nd offence XF. 3rd offence expulsion. This should be clearly documented. Lack of contrition may result in escalation. Again, meta-lessons for the more, erm, stubborn. - "fool me once, shame on me". "fool me twice..." - All of the above being stated, I do NOT believe in "zero tolerance" policies. Fairness cannot be had without judgement. - After stern warnings, make sure the students get the toughest test first and get the chance to drop the class if they can't "hack it" without cheating. And tell them this when they get caught.

ccvannorman 6y ago

Cheating is best left to politicians and billionaires, so that if and when they get caught, nothing can be done.