9 ms·

I hate to be a cynic here but I feel like education should be engineered in a manner that either : (A) assumes cheating will take place whenever possible and c

I hate to be a cynic here but I feel like education should be engineered in a manner that either : (A) assumes cheating will take place whenever possible and create curriculum , assignments, quizzes and exams with this in mind. (B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest.

nr2x 4y ago
(C) don’t use exams, period.
- realitysballs 4y ago
  You might call (C) and extension of (A) . Avoiding all pedagogical tools that can be systematically cheated on , is an effective way to reduce cheating.
  - nr2x 4y ago
    It’s the only way.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Give exams in a room, proctored, on paper, at a scheduled time. Open book/open note -- like real life. Everyone takes it at the same time. If you aren't there (without a good reason) you fail.
      - nr2x 4y ago
        The deeper point is an exam is a very poor proxy for actual learning to start with. The fact is profs by and large don’t give a shit about teaching quality, let alone learning, and most want to toss up an exam on the learning platform, get grades submitted before the deadline, and move on.
        TulliusCicero 4y ago
        > The deeper point is an exam is a very poor proxy for actual learning to start with. It's far from perfect, but it's better than the alternatives, and various organizations and people and powers-that-be reasonably want some kind of measure of whether someone actually learned something in a class/degree.
        jdshaffer 4y ago
        A lot of professors would prefer to skip exams that become a part of your grade. However, we (I teach at a college) are REQUIRED to at least give a final exam and are REQUIRED to have that as a part of their grade. sigh I'd much rather teach and talk and enjoy with my students, but, alas, the design of most universities box us in at different levels (and let's not even get started on the "must publish research" side of teaching). Just my $0.02.
        nr2x 4y ago
        I used to teach myself, but thank god I didn’t have that level of meddling.
      - Sirened 4y ago
        that just makes it harder. Students have been cheating on in person exams since the dawn of time. You get people texting in the exam, people going to the bathroom and looking up answers, students paying other students to take the exam for them, and on and on and on. There is no exam that can't be cheated on. I'm sure that if I weren't so good at school and had significantly fewer morals, I would have been _great_ at cheating on exams
- t-3 4y ago
  Exams should be fine as a condition of entry, advancing grade rank, or graduating, but teachers need to be spending the majority of their working time teaching, not ranking and scoring and having to deal with all the overhead of grading. Evaluating whether or not a student has bothered to learn can wait until they attempt to claim a diploma or certification.
  - nr2x 4y ago
    Which is why credentialism and learning are very different things.
cgriswald 4y ago
There are two problems with (B). The first is that however you disincentivize it at the local level, the greater society incentivizes it by pairing earning a degree (as opposed to gaining knowledge) with greater earnings. The second is that people will still get away with cheating.
colechristensen 4y ago
Universities shouldn’t be credential factories. Get rid of grading and nobody cheats. Have a separate entity do the verification or make graduation more like PhD defense.
- alar44 4y ago
  I'd argue that's exactly what they're for. If it's for "pure" education or something with no grades, it's just a glorified library that sells expensive books.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Some people learn better when instructed, classes bring structure needed by all but the most self motivated, and some things are very difficult to learn without engaging with instructors and fellow students. The thing university seems to do the most these days is weed out people that don’t have the resources or ability to navigate the game put together which doesn’t have that much to do any more with education. A liberal education was by definition intended to make one free, now university is quite a lot about initiating people into wage slavery by putting them in serious debt and only graduating people who are good enough at following rules in complicated somewhat pointless exercises. It is unclear if this process is shaping or shaped by our economy.
    - alar44 4y ago
      Can we drop the wage slavery and crazy college debt garbage? You can get a fine education at any number of state schools that won't put you $250k in debt. I really don't feel sorry for people who attend Ivy league schools and rack up debt like that. They know exactly what they're getting into. I didn't complete college and am making more than many of my peers who did and are still paying off debt 20 years later. If you can't navigate college hand holding, you'll be fucked in the real world. I believe college is currently serving it's function.
      - SantalBlush 4y ago
bradleyjg 4y ago
(B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest. It’s easy to do—don’t issue any credentials. It’s just that the very lucrative businesses don’t want to do that because they know exactly what they are selling and it ain’t education.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  The honest students actually value being told if they understood correctly. I guess the most inveterate cheaters wouldn't care, but most students are at least somewhat hopeful they've actually learned, and the summative assessment process is feedback for those students. It so happens that looking after the mechanics of (computer based) university examination is part of my current role. We do have some mechanisms in place that are intended to make it harder to cheat, but ultimately some students will cheat and one of the interesting things is watching the reaction of a young colleague who went from those exams (a year ago) to his current job, at this same university. For example there are signs outside every exam room prominently warning students that the university owns video cameras and they are being watched while doing exams. It's true, but of course the main reason we're watching isn't to catch cheaters but to anticipate problems the room's invigilators are about to call us about. Are we watching to see if that girl is wearing a short skirt because she's written notes on her own thighs? Are we watching to see if the Fitbit on that guy's wrist has been modified to display relayed multiple choice answers? No, we're watching because the room has 85 green "OK for this exam: BIOL1024 Genetics" screens and one orange "Pre-check failed. DO NOT USE" screen and in a minute the retired administrator herding students into the room is going to remember that we said Orange = Bad during training and call us about it, by the time they do we want to know why it has an orange screen, whether that room is actually booked for 86 students so that they can't just leave the machine unused, and where else on campus we can put one extra student if we need to move them pronto. We aren't trying to actually fix it, because that's likely to take hours, and we have minutes or sometimes seconds. One of the most valuable uses of those cameras doesn't actually involve seeing anybody, cheater or not, student or not, at the end of the day if there's one PC which stubbornly claims to still be doing an exam, is it really? If the room is empty, maybe even dark, then the answer is that despite instructions to students and invigilators they left a machine logged in, running an exam, and just walked out of the room. On the other hand, if there's still people stood in the room looking at the PC, well, radios work both ways, lets find out why the hell they aren't finished.
maxloh 4y ago
I grew up in East Asia and (B) just isn't possible here. Since we were little, we were requested by our parents to get a good grade in examinations in order to, eventually, get into a good college. We were told that graduating from a good college brings ourselves/the family a better quality of life, but the "benefits" part stops here. People don't care about those knowledges that are not likely to make us money one day. Most of us just study for a better paying jobs. The society doesn't care about the process, but the outcome, evaluated by the momey in our bank account.
- chii 4y ago
  if cheating to get the piece-of-paper-with-your-name-on-it gets you a better job, without the actual requirement of knowledge, then the blame goes to the employers who solely use a piece of paper for credentials and not knowledge/capability tests.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    Sure, we just have to restructure a significant portion of our educational pipeline and employment/hiring process and figure out what to do about a trillion or two of debt to do this, piece of cake. This is not really an issue that affects anyone outside a handful of individuals getting their first job - once you have an employment history, the fact that someone was willing to pay you money for a couple years is a pretty solid signal that you were doing at least an OK job, and you'll have coworkers with similar reputational signals who can also attest to this. (although tbh I think references as a hiring signal are going away - referrals to an open position within the referrer's company are still a golden ticket but nobody cares that you have three friends at some unrelated company who will say that you're not a total shitbird, they can already tell that from the fact that you worked there 2 years and weren't fired and it's trivial for someone to "forge" a reference if it's not. References, like suits in the office, were a boomer thing and in the latter years were a symptom of a highly employer-favored labor market. Skilled workers can now write their own ticket and even in the broader labor market nobody cares about references when employers can't hire enough employees to keep product on the shelf. A whole lot of stupid, artificial barriers that never should have existed are coming down, and references are one of them.) Anyway, this is a lot like the "it's unjust that under-21s can volunteer or be drafted to die for their country but can't drink!!!" argument - yup, it's true, that's unfair as hell, but nobody who's over the age of 21 gives a single shit about remedying it, since it doesn't affect them. In "agile" terms, it's a ticket where there is definitely improvement that is possible in this area, but no business case to upend everything and do the improvement. Once you have that first job under your belt... nothing that came before really matters. When was the last time an interviewer asked a senior engineer about a GPA? Unless it's an ivy-tier they frankly don't even care where you went, Bumfuck State University is just as good as Podunk State University. Nor does the Widget Factory care about whether you had a degree in English or Basketweaving when they are considering you for the position of forklift operator. It's an issue that solely matters to the people getting their first job, and once you're hazed, you're "in the club" and it stops mattering, unless you're such a complete and utter fuckup that you're getting fired repeatedly. They do care a lot that you worked at a big name company, or that you made large contributions or substantially matured your skills/experience at a smaller company. They do care a lot that you appear knowledgeable around the role they're trying to hire you into. They do care a lot that you can problem-solve and learn the parts you don't know. References, degrees, and universities mostly stop mattering after a couple years and definitely stop mattering by the 10-year mark. Again, I'm not saying you're wrong at all - and actually the whole system of making people go tens of thousands of dollars into debt for something that is basically only used to get you your first job and never matters again, is obviously problematic. But once again there's not really a way to remedy that, even if you banned asking about degrees entirely, employers are still going to find some similar signal, and it's going to hugely piss off all the people who are now $50k in debt for something they can't even use in an interview process. Which is guaranteed, 100%, the reason that 99.9% of people went to get a degree. Yeah, education makes you a more well-rounded person, and it should be somewhere between "absolutely minimal costs subsidized hugely by the public" and "actually giving people a stipend to attend" (as in many european countries), because in the long term they are more than going to pay that back in taxes anyway, and we all benefit from having an intellectual workforce that can think critically and is less susceptible to misinformation campaigns/etc. But the reality is right now most people who go to college do so because it's a necessary gatekeeper to pass for you to get a good job. We need some kind of reform though, this trajectory just doesn't seem sustainable. People have been pushing "trade school"/"coding bootcamp" approaches for years and it just hasn't stuck, there needs to be reform of the college system itself. But that's not remotely politically possible given the broad dysfunction of the american system. Of course, there is certainly some "foundational" education around core computer-science and software-engineering concepts, and breadth of exposure to people with at least minimal competence in their fields (it's not always great, but neither is the broader job market) around various technologies and concepts that would need at least a multi-year "trade school" approach and not just a "coding boot camp" to replicate. It's not all bad either. But I think at this point everyone acknowledges we have a big problem and a bad trajectory.
memling 4y ago
> (B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest. When I was in college, the rule in our department was that if you failed the final, you failed the course.
sharkweek 4y ago
Vivid memories of my high school literature teacher reading Cliff’s Notes and ensuring her tests covered things not discussed in the notes…
TulliusCicero 4y ago
> (A) assumes cheating will take place whenever possible and create curriculum , assignments, quizzes and exams with this in mind. If college degrees themselves held no real value, and the purpose of a college education in terms of career was to prepare you for a comprehensive exam, I think you'd see radically different behavior. Grades would no longer matter, or even exist, so cheating your way through a class would seem pointless. Creating a comprehensive exam that meaningfully tests a college degree's worth of education seems like it'd be near impossible though.
Lanolderen 4y ago
Kinda agree though B seems impossible. I used to study at an "elite" uni going for ~40% failed on the important exams to filter students and you bet everyone I knew was studying exclusively from previous exams and cheating when possible. This led to us being able to solve exam questions extremely quickly and cleanly but we often had no idea what the solution actually meant. Some people were studying "normally" at first but they'd then get shafted in the exam because they'd have spent lots of time on material that's not graded in the end and would inevitably switch to the meta approach since understanding the material better doesn't mean much if you're barely surviving.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
barrysteve 4y ago
The guiding principle behind B evaporated. People don't go to university for higher universal meaning anymore. They go to get knowledge they can trade for a better living. A goal directed attitude has taken over, as described by Erwin Chargaff. https://mobile.twitter.com/blamlab/status/1297270051746258945/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/blamlab/status/129727005174625894...
jackson1442 4y ago
Strongly agree with (A). As a current college student, the most interesting assignments are the hardest to cheat on. That is, I’d strongly prefer an exam where I can write an essay to show my understanding of a topic to a series of multiple choice questions where I just regurgitate the lectures. Unfortunately, most of my professors reuse old content verbatim (usually content they didn’t even write themselves in the first place) and put it in the easiest to grade format possible (multiple choice/auto graded math). My CS classes are concerningly light on actually writing code.
acwan93 4y ago
I like A) simply because sometime during college I became a terrible test taker. I realized that I'm very good at projects and actually understanding the concepts, but I couldn't articulate that in the traditional exam or problem sets. When it came time to anything that involved presentations or demonstration of a project, I was exceptionally better at the topic. Maybe it was a better way of learning since I was more engaged, or the types of professors that heavily believe cheating is going to happen any way and try to mitigate it actually give a damn.

nr2x 4y ago

realitysballs 4y ago
You might call (C) and extension of (A) . Avoiding all pedagogical tools that can be systematically cheated on , is an effective way to reduce cheating.
- nr2x 4y ago
  It’s the only way.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Give exams in a room, proctored, on paper, at a scheduled time. Open book/open note -- like real life. Everyone takes it at the same time. If you aren't there (without a good reason) you fail.
    - nr2x 4y ago
      The deeper point is an exam is a very poor proxy for actual learning to start with. The fact is profs by and large don’t give a shit about teaching quality, let alone learning, and most want to toss up an exam on the learning platform, get grades submitted before the deadline, and move on.
      - TulliusCicero 4y ago
        > The deeper point is an exam is a very poor proxy for actual learning to start with. It's far from perfect, but it's better than the alternatives, and various organizations and people and powers-that-be reasonably want some kind of measure of whether someone actually learned something in a class/degree.
      - jdshaffer 4y ago
        A lot of professors would prefer to skip exams that become a part of your grade. However, we (I teach at a college) are REQUIRED to at least give a final exam and are REQUIRED to have that as a part of their grade. sigh I'd much rather teach and talk and enjoy with my students, but, alas, the design of most universities box us in at different levels (and let's not even get started on the "must publish research" side of teaching). Just my $0.02.
        nr2x 4y ago
        I used to teach myself, but thank god I didn’t have that level of meddling.
    - Sirened 4y ago
      that just makes it harder. Students have been cheating on in person exams since the dawn of time. You get people texting in the exam, people going to the bathroom and looking up answers, students paying other students to take the exam for them, and on and on and on. There is no exam that can't be cheated on. I'm sure that if I weren't so good at school and had significantly fewer morals, I would have been _great_ at cheating on exams
t-3 4y ago
Exams should be fine as a condition of entry, advancing grade rank, or graduating, but teachers need to be spending the majority of their working time teaching, not ranking and scoring and having to deal with all the overhead of grading. Evaluating whether or not a student has bothered to learn can wait until they attempt to claim a diploma or certification.
- nr2x 4y ago
  Which is why credentialism and learning are very different things.

cgriswald 4y ago

There are two problems with (B). The first is that however you disincentivize it at the local level, the greater society incentivizes it by pairing earning a degree (as opposed to gaining knowledge) with greater earnings. The second is that people will still get away with cheating.

colechristensen 4y ago

Universities shouldn’t be credential factories. Get rid of grading and nobody cheats. Have a separate entity do the verification or make graduation more like PhD defense.

alar44 4y ago
I'd argue that's exactly what they're for. If it's for "pure" education or something with no grades, it's just a glorified library that sells expensive books.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Some people learn better when instructed, classes bring structure needed by all but the most self motivated, and some things are very difficult to learn without engaging with instructors and fellow students. The thing university seems to do the most these days is weed out people that don’t have the resources or ability to navigate the game put together which doesn’t have that much to do any more with education. A liberal education was by definition intended to make one free, now university is quite a lot about initiating people into wage slavery by putting them in serious debt and only graduating people who are good enough at following rules in complicated somewhat pointless exercises. It is unclear if this process is shaping or shaped by our economy.
  - alar44 4y ago
    Can we drop the wage slavery and crazy college debt garbage? You can get a fine education at any number of state schools that won't put you $250k in debt. I really don't feel sorry for people who attend Ivy league schools and rack up debt like that. They know exactly what they're getting into. I didn't complete college and am making more than many of my peers who did and are still paying off debt 20 years later. If you can't navigate college hand holding, you'll be fucked in the real world. I believe college is currently serving it's function.
    - SantalBlush 4y ago

bradleyjg 4y ago

(B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest. It’s easy to do—don’t issue any credentials. It’s just that the very lucrative businesses don’t want to do that because they know exactly what they are selling and it ain’t education.

tialaramex 4y ago
The honest students actually value being told if they understood correctly. I guess the most inveterate cheaters wouldn't care, but most students are at least somewhat hopeful they've actually learned, and the summative assessment process is feedback for those students. It so happens that looking after the mechanics of (computer based) university examination is part of my current role. We do have some mechanisms in place that are intended to make it harder to cheat, but ultimately some students will cheat and one of the interesting things is watching the reaction of a young colleague who went from those exams (a year ago) to his current job, at this same university. For example there are signs outside every exam room prominently warning students that the university owns video cameras and they are being watched while doing exams. It's true, but of course the main reason we're watching isn't to catch cheaters but to anticipate problems the room's invigilators are about to call us about. Are we watching to see if that girl is wearing a short skirt because she's written notes on her own thighs? Are we watching to see if the Fitbit on that guy's wrist has been modified to display relayed multiple choice answers? No, we're watching because the room has 85 green "OK for this exam: BIOL1024 Genetics" screens and one orange "Pre-check failed. DO NOT USE" screen and in a minute the retired administrator herding students into the room is going to remember that we said Orange = Bad during training and call us about it, by the time they do we want to know why it has an orange screen, whether that room is actually booked for 86 students so that they can't just leave the machine unused, and where else on campus we can put one extra student if we need to move them pronto. We aren't trying to actually fix it, because that's likely to take hours, and we have minutes or sometimes seconds. One of the most valuable uses of those cameras doesn't actually involve seeing anybody, cheater or not, student or not, at the end of the day if there's one PC which stubbornly claims to still be doing an exam, is it really? If the room is empty, maybe even dark, then the answer is that despite instructions to students and invigilators they left a machine logged in, running an exam, and just walked out of the room. On the other hand, if there's still people stood in the room looking at the PC, well, radios work both ways, lets find out why the hell they aren't finished.

maxloh 4y ago

I grew up in East Asia and (B) just isn't possible here. Since we were little, we were requested by our parents to get a good grade in examinations in order to, eventually, get into a good college. We were told that graduating from a good college brings ourselves/the family a better quality of life, but the "benefits" part stops here. People don't care about those knowledges that are not likely to make us money one day. Most of us just study for a better paying jobs. The society doesn't care about the process, but the outcome, evaluated by the momey in our bank account.

chii 4y ago
if cheating to get the piece-of-paper-with-your-name-on-it gets you a better job, without the actual requirement of knowledge, then the blame goes to the employers who solely use a piece of paper for credentials and not knowledge/capability tests.
- paulmd 4y ago
  Sure, we just have to restructure a significant portion of our educational pipeline and employment/hiring process and figure out what to do about a trillion or two of debt to do this, piece of cake. This is not really an issue that affects anyone outside a handful of individuals getting their first job - once you have an employment history, the fact that someone was willing to pay you money for a couple years is a pretty solid signal that you were doing at least an OK job, and you'll have coworkers with similar reputational signals who can also attest to this. (although tbh I think references as a hiring signal are going away - referrals to an open position within the referrer's company are still a golden ticket but nobody cares that you have three friends at some unrelated company who will say that you're not a total shitbird, they can already tell that from the fact that you worked there 2 years and weren't fired and it's trivial for someone to "forge" a reference if it's not. References, like suits in the office, were a boomer thing and in the latter years were a symptom of a highly employer-favored labor market. Skilled workers can now write their own ticket and even in the broader labor market nobody cares about references when employers can't hire enough employees to keep product on the shelf. A whole lot of stupid, artificial barriers that never should have existed are coming down, and references are one of them.) Anyway, this is a lot like the "it's unjust that under-21s can volunteer or be drafted to die for their country but can't drink!!!" argument - yup, it's true, that's unfair as hell, but nobody who's over the age of 21 gives a single shit about remedying it, since it doesn't affect them. In "agile" terms, it's a ticket where there is definitely improvement that is possible in this area, but no business case to upend everything and do the improvement. Once you have that first job under your belt... nothing that came before really matters. When was the last time an interviewer asked a senior engineer about a GPA? Unless it's an ivy-tier they frankly don't even care where you went, Bumfuck State University is just as good as Podunk State University. Nor does the Widget Factory care about whether you had a degree in English or Basketweaving when they are considering you for the position of forklift operator. It's an issue that solely matters to the people getting their first job, and once you're hazed, you're "in the club" and it stops mattering, unless you're such a complete and utter fuckup that you're getting fired repeatedly. They do care a lot that you worked at a big name company, or that you made large contributions or substantially matured your skills/experience at a smaller company. They do care a lot that you appear knowledgeable around the role they're trying to hire you into. They do care a lot that you can problem-solve and learn the parts you don't know. References, degrees, and universities mostly stop mattering after a couple years and definitely stop mattering by the 10-year mark. Again, I'm not saying you're wrong at all - and actually the whole system of making people go tens of thousands of dollars into debt for something that is basically only used to get you your first job and never matters again, is obviously problematic. But once again there's not really a way to remedy that, even if you banned asking about degrees entirely, employers are still going to find some similar signal, and it's going to hugely piss off all the people who are now $50k in debt for something they can't even use in an interview process. Which is guaranteed, 100%, the reason that 99.9% of people went to get a degree. Yeah, education makes you a more well-rounded person, and it should be somewhere between "absolutely minimal costs subsidized hugely by the public" and "actually giving people a stipend to attend" (as in many european countries), because in the long term they are more than going to pay that back in taxes anyway, and we all benefit from having an intellectual workforce that can think critically and is less susceptible to misinformation campaigns/etc. But the reality is right now most people who go to college do so because it's a necessary gatekeeper to pass for you to get a good job. We need some kind of reform though, this trajectory just doesn't seem sustainable. People have been pushing "trade school"/"coding bootcamp" approaches for years and it just hasn't stuck, there needs to be reform of the college system itself. But that's not remotely politically possible given the broad dysfunction of the american system. Of course, there is certainly some "foundational" education around core computer-science and software-engineering concepts, and breadth of exposure to people with at least minimal competence in their fields (it's not always great, but neither is the broader job market) around various technologies and concepts that would need at least a multi-year "trade school" approach and not just a "coding boot camp" to replicate. It's not all bad either. But I think at this point everyone acknowledges we have a big problem and a bad trajectory.

memling 4y ago

> (B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest. When I was in college, the rule in our department was that if you failed the final, you failed the course.

sharkweek 4y ago

Vivid memories of my high school literature teacher reading Cliff’s Notes and ensuring her tests covered things not discussed in the notes…

TulliusCicero 4y ago

> (A) assumes cheating will take place whenever possible and create curriculum , assignments, quizzes and exams with this in mind. If college degrees themselves held no real value, and the purpose of a college education in terms of career was to prepare you for a comprehensive exam, I think you'd see radically different behavior. Grades would no longer matter, or even exist, so cheating your way through a class would seem pointless. Creating a comprehensive exam that meaningfully tests a college degree's worth of education seems like it'd be near impossible though.

Lanolderen 4y ago

Kinda agree though B seems impossible. I used to study at an "elite" uni going for ~40% failed on the important exams to filter students and you bet everyone I knew was studying exclusively from previous exams and cheating when possible. This led to us being able to solve exam questions extremely quickly and cleanly but we often had no idea what the solution actually meant. Some people were studying "normally" at first but they'd then get shafted in the exam because they'd have spent lots of time on material that's not graded in the end and would inevitably switch to the meta approach since understanding the material better doesn't mean much if you're barely surviving.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

barrysteve 4y ago

The guiding principle behind B evaporated. People don't go to university for higher universal meaning anymore. They go to get knowledge they can trade for a better living. A goal directed attitude has taken over, as described by Erwin Chargaff. https://mobile.twitter.com/blamlab/status/1297270051746258945/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/blamlab/status/129727005174625894...

jackson1442 4y ago

Strongly agree with (A). As a current college student, the most interesting assignments are the hardest to cheat on. That is, I’d strongly prefer an exam where I can write an essay to show my understanding of a topic to a series of multiple choice questions where I just regurgitate the lectures. Unfortunately, most of my professors reuse old content verbatim (usually content they didn’t even write themselves in the first place) and put it in the easiest to grade format possible (multiple choice/auto graded math). My CS classes are concerningly light on actually writing code.

acwan93 4y ago

I like A) simply because sometime during college I became a terrible test taker. I realized that I'm very good at projects and actually understanding the concepts, but I couldn't articulate that in the traditional exam or problem sets. When it came time to anything that involved presentations or demonstration of a project, I was exceptionally better at the topic. Maybe it was a better way of learning since I was more engaged, or the types of professors that heavily believe cheating is going to happen any way and try to mitigate it actually give a damn.