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While a grad student at TX A&M CS, I rolled out a grading rubric (for a couple of intro courses) which required the students to pass individually each of the ho

While a grad student at TX A&M CS, I rolled out a grading rubric (for a couple of intro courses) which required the students to pass individually each of the homework, quiz, and exams, separately, to pass the course. This nipped HW cheating in the bud by the 3rd semester, because the students knew that you couldn’t game the system by maximizing HW grades to bring up exam & quiz grades. Exams & quizzes were autogenerated from a set of parametric problems, and put in random order on the print out — made side-by-side and answer-sheet cheating basically impossible. Faculty weren’t as charmed with the cratered grades, though.

tmpz22 6y ago
Are there any downsides to removing the potential for students to compensate poor test and quiz scores with strong homework and take-home work? I remember having some terrible graduate instructors at the University of Oregon who clearly had 0 desire to teach and routinely expressed frustration when first year students could not keep up with their doctorate level notation and language styles. Most students passed by a hair thanks to homework and quizzes, mixed with study groups and studying topics which weren't covered properly in the class. Had it not been for a heavy weight on HW (about ~35% IIRC) most of the class would have failed. And cynically that homework weight must've been intentional - they knew there was a problem with their course instruction and they covered up presumably high fail rates by bumping HW grading... The problem with evaluating large groups of people is that many will fall through the cracks, not due to malice but because there is no one-size-fits all solution. Yeah you can improve cheating metrics but how many non-cheaters, good qualified students who put in the work, were also negatively affected by your grading rubric? 0? 1? 100? 1000? Unknown? And as a corollary this bleeds right into tech recruiting where scores of qualified candidates are put through a song and dance routine which arbitrarily and sometimes biasely culls for no valid reason other then being a day that ends in y.
- ska 6y ago
  > Are there any downsides to removing the potential for students to compensate poor test and quiz scores with strong homework and take-home work? It facilitates cheating in a way that's almost impossible to counteract. The other way around works though, where you work hard to make sure your final exam isn't something they can cheat on, then allow that to overide or pull up the other grades. This isn't really helpful for people with high test anxiety but it does help. You can't get this stuff perfect, but you can make sure the result is at least fair.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  I had a similar experience. Once we realized that these same graduate assistants were treating some folks to a different standard, a group of us got together and basically forced them to grade us the same way. It was bullshit, we were all neck deep in debt paying some incompetent to not teach us, and then haze us with capricious grading and classroom policy.
- thechao 6y ago
  Weeeelllll... it depends on how you calculate it. Minimum course credit grade was a "C" and total A-C were unaffected; or, at least, in the noise. There was some motion from D-to-F, which affected total GPA average for the course. Honestly, I don't remember the magnitude of the change. These courses had 600+ students in them. I'm also certain they stopped a lot of this when I stopped teaching. The "cheaters" would get caught, later, anyways.
hiq 6y ago
> required the students to pass individually each of the homework, quiz, and exams, separately, to pass the course How was the final grade determined? min(HW, Quiz, exams)?
- fedorareis 6y ago
  Not OP, but it could still be an average (either weighted or not) and have a requirement to pass certain things to be eligible to pass. One of my core CS classes had the requirement that you had to complete at least 1 project, complete all daily assignments, and pass at least 4 of the 6 lab tests. However the overall grade for the class once you met those requirements was just an average like it was for my other classes.
vasco 6y ago
> Faculty weren’t as charmed with the cratered grades, though. Maybe focus more on the teaching and less on the testing.
- Google234 6y ago
  Maybe grade inflation is a thing?
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  Faculty get jobs at universities to research, not to teach. The less time spent on teaching the better.
hn_asker 6y ago
This heavily biases in favor of lone wolves in college. I was one myself. I'd say we are rare. Most people are social and learn by collaborating with others. It's the more natural approach. Evolution has groomed us to be social after all.
- warlog 6y ago
  Collaboration to learn isn't penalized. Just the collab to cheat part.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Depends on the incentive schemes too. Back when I was an undergrad studying Applied CS, we[0] had a really friendly, cooperative attitude - we would help each other learn, do homework together; people who turned out to be good at a particular topic would often compile guides and learning material and FAQs for everyone else. Late in my studies I discovered this was seen as a highly unusual thing about our sub-faculty[1]. Other faculties had much more competitive, every person for themselves attitude. It turns out, the driving factor was that our sub-faculty had different rules about scolarships: you had to cross a threshold of high grades on a given year to be eligible for one, and the amount of money you got was purely determined by your grade average. Everywhere else, scolarships were limited to top % best students. Where everyone else competed and kept their hard-won knowledge to themselves, we'd routinely assist each other, so that everyone could get a shot at getting the scolarship. I hear that after I graduated, they normalized the incentive scheme to % top students everywhere, and that new Applied CS groups got as unfriendly as everyone else was. -- [0] - All years studying Applied CS in our sub-faculty[1], not just my year. Don't know what the proper English term for it is, in Poland we call it "kierunek" (literally: direction), vs. "rocznik" meaning a class of a particular year studying on a "kierunek". [1] - Not sure what's the right term for this either. Our faculty had essentially two branches that dealt with overlapping fields of study; as I was graduating, they ended up splitting into two separate faculties.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Huh. Your comment makes me think. I wonder if some of the push-back on standardized testing is partly because students cannot chea— I mean rely on “social collaboration”? (Not ALL of the pushback, of course. But part of it..)
CJefferson 6y ago
I'm suprised people were so opposed to it, that kind of system is standard in all UK Universities I've taught in.
- noodlesUK 6y ago
  This has been my experience as well.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  At my university in the U.K. evaluation was almost entirely done with exams at the end of the year. For undergrad, the exams had questions from all the courses so one could choose whichever questions one wanted to answer (this meant each course only turned up in the exams for one year. Also I did a subject which didn’t require anything like labs). It meant homework was an opportunity for difficult questions to be used for teaching rather than a test for knowledge—the only thing preventing one from skipping homework was the shame one would experience turning up to go through the solutions and discussion without having made attempts. One could also choose how collaborative to be with the problems and discuss them with peers. The downside was that there was a lot of pressure on exams and if you were ill on exam week you’d be SOL (also no resits because why not). And some people just don’t perform to their true ability under exam conditions (though to be fair the university selected for it with entrance exams.)
Teever 6y ago
What's fascinating to me is about all of this is that techniques like the ones you implemented and others are all that is needed to eliminate cheating. It's the kind of stuff that is analogous to the protocols developed by the air industry in the mid 20th century that has almost eliminated entire classes of error that could result in loss of life from flying. It is especially troubling because post-secondary education is a sort of cornerstone of all other human endeavours so the cascading effects of people cheating and not learning the material that they need to be better at their jobs influences lives just as much as a plane crashing. The silly part is that post-secondary education is something that is far older than the flight industry yet no such standardization of controls over testing / grading have been implemented. It seems like it's almost a choice. > Faculty weren’t as charmed with the cratered grades, though. Yeah. it's a choice.
- fallingknife 6y ago
  The scientific research that goes on in post secondary education is the cornerstone. The academic setting is just the way we do it now and can, and I would argue should, change. Grad students could just as easily be junior employees if the same work were done in the private sector and would be financially much better off for it.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  > It is especially troubling because post-secondary education is a sort of cornerstone of all other human endeavours so the cascading effects of people cheating and not learning the material that they need to be better at their jobs influences lives just as much as a plane crashing. This is insane. Most people never attend university and do plenty of productive work. Most people who do attend university never work a day in the field they did their degree in. Most people who do work in the field they did their degree in never use the large majority of what they leaned there. On top of this a large majority of professionally relevant material is learned on the job. The reason that there’s no real effort to check people aren’t cheating is because school isn’t primarily about learning, it’s about ranking and sorting.
  - noitpmeder 6y ago

tmpz22 6y ago

Are there any downsides to removing the potential for students to compensate poor test and quiz scores with strong homework and take-home work? I remember having some terrible graduate instructors at the University of Oregon who clearly had 0 desire to teach and routinely expressed frustration when first year students could not keep up with their doctorate level notation and language styles. Most students passed by a hair thanks to homework and quizzes, mixed with study groups and studying topics which weren't covered properly in the class. Had it not been for a heavy weight on HW (about ~35% IIRC) most of the class would have failed. And cynically that homework weight must've been intentional - they knew there was a problem with their course instruction and they covered up presumably high fail rates by bumping HW grading... The problem with evaluating large groups of people is that many will fall through the cracks, not due to malice but because there is no one-size-fits all solution. Yeah you can improve cheating metrics but how many non-cheaters, good qualified students who put in the work, were also negatively affected by your grading rubric? 0? 1? 100? 1000? Unknown? And as a corollary this bleeds right into tech recruiting where scores of qualified candidates are put through a song and dance routine which arbitrarily and sometimes biasely culls for no valid reason other then being a day that ends in y.

ska 6y ago
> Are there any downsides to removing the potential for students to compensate poor test and quiz scores with strong homework and take-home work? It facilitates cheating in a way that's almost impossible to counteract. The other way around works though, where you work hard to make sure your final exam isn't something they can cheat on, then allow that to overide or pull up the other grades. This isn't really helpful for people with high test anxiety but it does help. You can't get this stuff perfect, but you can make sure the result is at least fair.
Spooky23 6y ago
I had a similar experience. Once we realized that these same graduate assistants were treating some folks to a different standard, a group of us got together and basically forced them to grade us the same way. It was bullshit, we were all neck deep in debt paying some incompetent to not teach us, and then haze us with capricious grading and classroom policy.
thechao 6y ago
Weeeelllll... it depends on how you calculate it. Minimum course credit grade was a "C" and total A-C were unaffected; or, at least, in the noise. There was some motion from D-to-F, which affected total GPA average for the course. Honestly, I don't remember the magnitude of the change. These courses had 600+ students in them. I'm also certain they stopped a lot of this when I stopped teaching. The "cheaters" would get caught, later, anyways.

hiq 6y ago

> required the students to pass individually each of the homework, quiz, and exams, separately, to pass the course How was the final grade determined? min(HW, Quiz, exams)?

fedorareis 6y ago
Not OP, but it could still be an average (either weighted or not) and have a requirement to pass certain things to be eligible to pass. One of my core CS classes had the requirement that you had to complete at least 1 project, complete all daily assignments, and pass at least 4 of the 6 lab tests. However the overall grade for the class once you met those requirements was just an average like it was for my other classes.

vasco 6y ago

> Faculty weren’t as charmed with the cratered grades, though. Maybe focus more on the teaching and less on the testing.

Google234 6y ago
Maybe grade inflation is a thing?
barry-cotter 6y ago
Faculty get jobs at universities to research, not to teach. The less time spent on teaching the better.

hn_asker 6y ago

This heavily biases in favor of lone wolves in college. I was one myself. I'd say we are rare. Most people are social and learn by collaborating with others. It's the more natural approach. Evolution has groomed us to be social after all.

warlog 6y ago
Collaboration to learn isn't penalized. Just the collab to cheat part.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Depends on the incentive schemes too. Back when I was an undergrad studying Applied CS, we[0] had a really friendly, cooperative attitude - we would help each other learn, do homework together; people who turned out to be good at a particular topic would often compile guides and learning material and FAQs for everyone else. Late in my studies I discovered this was seen as a highly unusual thing about our sub-faculty[1]. Other faculties had much more competitive, every person for themselves attitude. It turns out, the driving factor was that our sub-faculty had different rules about scolarships: you had to cross a threshold of high grades on a given year to be eligible for one, and the amount of money you got was purely determined by your grade average. Everywhere else, scolarships were limited to top % best students. Where everyone else competed and kept their hard-won knowledge to themselves, we'd routinely assist each other, so that everyone could get a shot at getting the scolarship. I hear that after I graduated, they normalized the incentive scheme to % top students everywhere, and that new Applied CS groups got as unfriendly as everyone else was. -- [0] - All years studying Applied CS in our sub-faculty[1], not just my year. Don't know what the proper English term for it is, in Poland we call it "kierunek" (literally: direction), vs. "rocznik" meaning a class of a particular year studying on a "kierunek". [1] - Not sure what's the right term for this either. Our faculty had essentially two branches that dealt with overlapping fields of study; as I was graduating, they ended up splitting into two separate faculties.
Robotbeat 6y ago
Huh. Your comment makes me think. I wonder if some of the push-back on standardized testing is partly because students cannot chea— I mean rely on “social collaboration”? (Not ALL of the pushback, of course. But part of it..)

CJefferson 6y ago

I'm suprised people were so opposed to it, that kind of system is standard in all UK Universities I've taught in.

noodlesUK 6y ago
This has been my experience as well.
dan-robertson 6y ago
At my university in the U.K. evaluation was almost entirely done with exams at the end of the year. For undergrad, the exams had questions from all the courses so one could choose whichever questions one wanted to answer (this meant each course only turned up in the exams for one year. Also I did a subject which didn’t require anything like labs). It meant homework was an opportunity for difficult questions to be used for teaching rather than a test for knowledge—the only thing preventing one from skipping homework was the shame one would experience turning up to go through the solutions and discussion without having made attempts. One could also choose how collaborative to be with the problems and discuss them with peers. The downside was that there was a lot of pressure on exams and if you were ill on exam week you’d be SOL (also no resits because why not). And some people just don’t perform to their true ability under exam conditions (though to be fair the university selected for it with entrance exams.)

Teever 6y ago

What's fascinating to me is about all of this is that techniques like the ones you implemented and others are all that is needed to eliminate cheating. It's the kind of stuff that is analogous to the protocols developed by the air industry in the mid 20th century that has almost eliminated entire classes of error that could result in loss of life from flying. It is especially troubling because post-secondary education is a sort of cornerstone of all other human endeavours so the cascading effects of people cheating and not learning the material that they need to be better at their jobs influences lives just as much as a plane crashing. The silly part is that post-secondary education is something that is far older than the flight industry yet no such standardization of controls over testing / grading have been implemented. It seems like it's almost a choice. > Faculty weren’t as charmed with the cratered grades, though. Yeah. it's a choice.

fallingknife 6y ago
The scientific research that goes on in post secondary education is the cornerstone. The academic setting is just the way we do it now and can, and I would argue should, change. Grad students could just as easily be junior employees if the same work were done in the private sector and would be financially much better off for it.
barry-cotter 6y ago
> It is especially troubling because post-secondary education is a sort of cornerstone of all other human endeavours so the cascading effects of people cheating and not learning the material that they need to be better at their jobs influences lives just as much as a plane crashing. This is insane. Most people never attend university and do plenty of productive work. Most people who do attend university never work a day in the field they did their degree in. Most people who do work in the field they did their degree in never use the large majority of what they leaned there. On top of this a large majority of professionally relevant material is learned on the job. The reason that there’s no real effort to check people aren’t cheating is because school isn’t primarily about learning, it’s about ranking and sorting.
- noitpmeder 6y ago