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Quite a read, indeed. As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt t

Quite a read, indeed. As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others. Perhaps that's why I didn't care? Another thing is that college is voluntary, and everyone takes the courses for some perceived gain. If it's just a diploma with high GPA, I let them be. There are also plenty of ways to legitimately score a high grade without really engaging with a course (basically silly ways to study just to pass), which in the end result is not much different from simply cheating (there was no appropriate engaging in the material) — while the main difference is in fairness, that's a moral value that's beyond some random teacher's ability to teach adult students — so I don't see why bother. The main question I have for the author is if they would have offered the same get-out-of-trouble alternative syllabus if they had 10% of the students cheating? Basically, how influential was the proportion of students to be failed in their huge investment in reworking the course? Obviously, they did a bad job with the original syllabus in promoting exactly the behaviour they didn't condone, but one should never discount the thrill humans experience in engaging in risky behaviour (like figuring ways out to cheat which is sometimes more work than studying, but more thrilling — and helping others along the way adds a nice cherry on top).

Scramblejams 4y ago
I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others. Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters, and the grades matter for your future. I know in the program I attended I was up against a fair few who were taking cognition enhancing drugs, others who had exam copies from prior years to help them prep, and a lot of people who copied each others’ homework. It was frustrating to be on a curve with them. I had a few professors who didn’t use curves. It was wonderful. I think curves are in general unethical due to cheating, and feel they’re a sign that a professor hasn’t done the hard work to really zero in on exactly what knowledge the student is expected to master. Open to counterarguments.
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  grades matter for your future Here’s the real problem. Grad programs and/or employers are cheating—-they aren’t doing their own homework.
- adolph 4y ago
  “and the grades matter for your future” There’s the key problem. A vitality curve is a performance management practice that calls for individuals to be ranked or rated against their coworkers. It is also called stack ranking, forced ranking, and rank and yank. Pioneered by GE's Jack Welch in the 1980s, it has remained controversial. Numerous companies practice it, but mostly covertly to avoid direct criticism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
  - ameister14 4y ago
    It's my opinion that Jack Welch was extremely bad for America. He did everything Deming pointed out didn't work long term and focused on profit above all, and got extremely lucky in the financial sector. As soon as the economy soured, his vaunted techniques failed miserably. Worst of all, he trained hundreds of future leaders to follow that model.
    - adolph 4y ago
      I’d agree that a zero-sum weakness-focused approach is maladaptive. Trying to consider the other hand reminds me of question I had at an all-hands last year: “If the only raises are annual review based, does the inflation rate mean that everyone else takes an effective pay cut?” The response hedged on HR doing market adjustments. Maybe Welch was just being realistic? Maybe encouraging folks to change employment until they are in a position in which they excel is the better option long term? I don’t know. There’s a saying “it’s cruel to be kind” and maybe I’m too soft to survive.
      - ameister14 4y ago
        It's not only that, though - if you reward the top 10% of performers and fire the bottom 10%, say, but don't actually make sure that said performance is due to skill and not a degree of randomness you may not improve at all. You also create an attitude of fear which is not conducive to a productive and adaptable environment in the long term. You can get away with it for a while, but it's not a good principle. Get rid of the annual review entirely. Active management is better than passive with guiderails like prodding reviews. I've never been motivated by an annual review nor have I seen it successfully motivate others; have you? The opposite is true in my experience. People fear it and become less productive as it nears, it takes time that would be better spent on other things and it's not personally rewarding for the manager or the worker. If done poorly, it also lowers team unity and especially doesn't work as a reward because people don't recognize the behavior that led to it. If you reward behavior right after it happens, people associate the behavior with the reward. If you wait six months, they don't. They can intellectually but the team impact is lowered. Not to mention if you're individually evaluating a team based on arbitrary statistics you miss the people who hold everything together. Nobody wants to help their teammate if it will cause their teammate to get a raise instead of them. Finally, it causes people to game the system instead of improving their work because the work improvement has less impact on their remuneration. All that to say I don't think the annual review is a good tool.
pvg 4y ago
Another thing is that college is voluntary You voluntarily agree to abide by the academic integrity rules. If you don't want to do that, you can voluntarily go to a different institution with different rules and standards. The goal of the place is learning not pointscoring and cheating undermines that.
- necovek 4y ago
  If you are doing that, why do you care about others not doing it? I went there for learning, and I never felt that was undermined by others' cheating. How does cheating undermine learning for non-cheaters in college? I can see loss of motivation or external pressures (family or scholarship demanding a particular GPA) when you are curve graded, but that means that one cares not only about learning — which is ok, we all care about ranking to some extent, but as long as you recognize that it's a flawed system, you can either focus on that or focus on learning imho. And accepting that someone else cares about grading more than you do (which pushes many into cheating as well). Edit: Oh, and loss of motivation for the teacher, as brought up by the author in the article.
  - pvg 4y ago
    If you are doing that, why do you care about others not doing it? Because there is no way to measure whether the teaching and learning is effective if you just make stuff up. There is no way to do research if you just make stuff up. There is no way to advance human knowledge if you just make stuff up. It's not some convoluted thing, a lot of systems, probably most you encounter in adult life in an industrialized society, depend on essentially voluntary cooperation. That's not to say the way universities work is somehow optimal but again, as you point out yourself, you don't have participate if you think their methods are too poor to bother with.
    - xpe 4y ago
      Well said. To use the economics terminology, there are negative externalities resulting from others cheating.
    - 4y ago
raegis 4y ago
> As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others. Years ago a few students in my class were complaining about cheaters. They were frustrated, and one even accused me of missing "obvious" cheaters. It was embarrassing for me, and brought down morale in the class. I have policed exams more aggressively ever since. In another class, I caught a cheater during an exam (Calculus 2 or 3), and one of his classmates e-mailed thanking me, noting the student cheated his way through the prerequisite class the prior semester. This stuff really matters.
- necovek 4y ago
  Oh, it sure does matter. Like it matters to most every student (teenage or college) how they are perceived by their most popular peers. I.e. it's a human trait to care about things that should not really bother us. What I am saying is that it shouldn't.

Scramblejams 4y ago

I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others. Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters, and the grades matter for your future. I know in the program I attended I was up against a fair few who were taking cognition enhancing drugs, others who had exam copies from prior years to help them prep, and a lot of people who copied each others’ homework. It was frustrating to be on a curve with them. I had a few professors who didn’t use curves. It was wonderful. I think curves are in general unethical due to cheating, and feel they’re a sign that a professor hasn’t done the hard work to really zero in on exactly what knowledge the student is expected to master. Open to counterarguments.

bradleyjg 4y ago
grades matter for your future Here’s the real problem. Grad programs and/or employers are cheating—-they aren’t doing their own homework.
adolph 4y ago
“and the grades matter for your future” There’s the key problem. A vitality curve is a performance management practice that calls for individuals to be ranked or rated against their coworkers. It is also called stack ranking, forced ranking, and rank and yank. Pioneered by GE's Jack Welch in the 1980s, it has remained controversial. Numerous companies practice it, but mostly covertly to avoid direct criticism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
- ameister14 4y ago
  It's my opinion that Jack Welch was extremely bad for America. He did everything Deming pointed out didn't work long term and focused on profit above all, and got extremely lucky in the financial sector. As soon as the economy soured, his vaunted techniques failed miserably. Worst of all, he trained hundreds of future leaders to follow that model.
  - adolph 4y ago
    I’d agree that a zero-sum weakness-focused approach is maladaptive. Trying to consider the other hand reminds me of question I had at an all-hands last year: “If the only raises are annual review based, does the inflation rate mean that everyone else takes an effective pay cut?” The response hedged on HR doing market adjustments. Maybe Welch was just being realistic? Maybe encouraging folks to change employment until they are in a position in which they excel is the better option long term? I don’t know. There’s a saying “it’s cruel to be kind” and maybe I’m too soft to survive.
    - ameister14 4y ago
      It's not only that, though - if you reward the top 10% of performers and fire the bottom 10%, say, but don't actually make sure that said performance is due to skill and not a degree of randomness you may not improve at all. You also create an attitude of fear which is not conducive to a productive and adaptable environment in the long term. You can get away with it for a while, but it's not a good principle. Get rid of the annual review entirely. Active management is better than passive with guiderails like prodding reviews. I've never been motivated by an annual review nor have I seen it successfully motivate others; have you? The opposite is true in my experience. People fear it and become less productive as it nears, it takes time that would be better spent on other things and it's not personally rewarding for the manager or the worker. If done poorly, it also lowers team unity and especially doesn't work as a reward because people don't recognize the behavior that led to it. If you reward behavior right after it happens, people associate the behavior with the reward. If you wait six months, they don't. They can intellectually but the team impact is lowered. Not to mention if you're individually evaluating a team based on arbitrary statistics you miss the people who hold everything together. Nobody wants to help their teammate if it will cause their teammate to get a raise instead of them. Finally, it causes people to game the system instead of improving their work because the work improvement has less impact on their remuneration. All that to say I don't think the annual review is a good tool.

pvg 4y ago

Another thing is that college is voluntary You voluntarily agree to abide by the academic integrity rules. If you don't want to do that, you can voluntarily go to a different institution with different rules and standards. The goal of the place is learning not pointscoring and cheating undermines that.

necovek 4y ago
If you are doing that, why do you care about others not doing it? I went there for learning, and I never felt that was undermined by others' cheating. How does cheating undermine learning for non-cheaters in college? I can see loss of motivation or external pressures (family or scholarship demanding a particular GPA) when you are curve graded, but that means that one cares not only about learning — which is ok, we all care about ranking to some extent, but as long as you recognize that it's a flawed system, you can either focus on that or focus on learning imho. And accepting that someone else cares about grading more than you do (which pushes many into cheating as well). Edit: Oh, and loss of motivation for the teacher, as brought up by the author in the article.
- pvg 4y ago
  If you are doing that, why do you care about others not doing it? Because there is no way to measure whether the teaching and learning is effective if you just make stuff up. There is no way to do research if you just make stuff up. There is no way to advance human knowledge if you just make stuff up. It's not some convoluted thing, a lot of systems, probably most you encounter in adult life in an industrialized society, depend on essentially voluntary cooperation. That's not to say the way universities work is somehow optimal but again, as you point out yourself, you don't have participate if you think their methods are too poor to bother with.
  - xpe 4y ago
    Well said. To use the economics terminology, there are negative externalities resulting from others cheating.
  - 4y ago

raegis 4y ago

> As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others. Years ago a few students in my class were complaining about cheaters. They were frustrated, and one even accused me of missing "obvious" cheaters. It was embarrassing for me, and brought down morale in the class. I have policed exams more aggressively ever since. In another class, I caught a cheater during an exam (Calculus 2 or 3), and one of his classmates e-mailed thanking me, noting the student cheated his way through the prerequisite class the prior semester. This stuff really matters.

necovek 4y ago
Oh, it sure does matter. Like it matters to most every student (teenage or college) how they are perceived by their most popular peers. I.e. it's a human trait to care about things that should not really bother us. What I am saying is that it shouldn't.