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I was in the grad program at a top 5 stats program. Cheating was rampant. I discovered this in a 2nd semester grad level math stats course. There were 4 prob
by earl 16y ago
I was in the grad program at a top 5 stats program. Cheating was rampant. I discovered this in a 2nd semester grad level math stats course. There were 4 problems on the test, and one of them could only be solved either by being much smarter than me or by getting kind of lucky and very quickly divining the right, tricky way to factor the product of some characteristic functions. I thought it was very non obvious. When the class discussed the test there was a bimodal distn of scores on that question; 3 students, including me, got 1/2 credit and everyone else got 0 or full credit. I asked a classmate how in the hell he figured out the problem in the very tight time limit for the test. He basically told me that last year's test -- not distributed by the professor -- had almost an identical problem on it. Once you'd seen the right way to factor the characteristic function the problem was trivial. Pretty disappointing.
- crystalis 16y agoForgive my statistical ignorance, but isn't this form of cheating easily remedied by substituting a different class of characteristic functions? If a different class of functions doesn't exist, it seems like your classmates just had better study material. (I'm thinking about a calculus test with a previously unseen e^x. Wouldn't knowing the answer from looking at a previous year's test be more akin to 'learning' than 'cheating'?)
- protomyth 16y agoLots of organizations on campus (e.g. greeks) collect tests from their members and file them. This "helps" their members do better on tests. The situation you describe is basically one of the outcomes of organization resources vs personal resources in higher education. Sometimes, it can work against the student. Particularly if the student doesn't attend class (low-level blow off class) and the teachers / method changes. I TAed an intro to programming course for non-majors. My fellow TA and myself created new tests for the class (it went from GWBasic to QBasic). A couple of students from one of the fraternities attended the 1st day of class and then the first test (missing the homework programs). I handed out the first test and got the following reaction: "This isn't the right test!". Oh well.