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With all due respect, this is nonsense. This is a teacher and a human being that exists and works within a system. You seem to be one of those people who thinks

With all due respect, this is nonsense. This is a teacher and a human being that exists and works within a system. You seem to be one of those people who thinks that teachers are some kind of supernatural, super-powerful heroes of humanity who have the responsibility on their backs to be larger than life. This guy has to apply exams; it's not something he wants, it's what he needs to do in the system. And he has to grade 96 of them. And he is a human being. Do you know what it would take to assess 96 students in the way you are describing? Plus, cheating or not cheating is an ethical matter, not a pedagogical one. He is not trying to teach anyone not to cheat. The expectation of not cheating comes as a pre-requisite of any formal education. He has the social duty to capture cheaters because if not he is failing the society and system who have given him the responsibility to not only educate, but to certify someone's skills. If the cheaters get out there with a diploma in their hands, certified by him (and his institution), he has failed those who believe in that diploma's validity. Everything you said about learning being a lifelong pursuit that can't be forced, etc. are personal pursuits which are independent and orthogonal to this teacher's formal responsibilities in the educational system.

overgard 3y ago
I think it amusing and I don't have a problem with what he did, but I guess I don't really understand why teachers get so fired up about the subject in the first place. If people are in the class to fill out a general education requirement or something and otherwise don't care about the topic or will never use it again, why get so vigilant about it? And the students that do want to continue in philosophy would just be punishing themselves by cheating.
- foldr 3y ago
  It's unfair to the students who don't cheat, and makes it hard to correctly calibrate the difficulty of exams.
  - low_tech_love 3y ago
    It’s literally his job to care about that. Chances are the students in his university classroom got their place in competition and other people weren’t so lucky. Plus everything else the previous reply said and also in mine.
    - overgard 3y ago
      No it's not, it's his job to teach people that want to learn. If uninterested people that are forced to be there drift through without creating a fuss, who cares? Let me ask you people something. Of the college graduates that have been out longer than 2 years, what do you actually remember about non-major classes? My guess is: basically nothing. It's a waste of everyone's time. I don't support cheaters because at the end of the day you agreed to the rules, but I'm not upset that people break dumb rules to save their own time.
  - overgard 3y ago
    Grading on a curve also strikes me as bad. Either you know it or you don't. If I score 50% in the class, but 60% of the class cheated so I pass based on the curve.. is that a good thing?
    - foldr 3y ago
      I’m not quite sure why you’re bringing up grading on a curve as it’s not mentioned above. But anyway, it’s tricky to set different exams with the exact same difficulty. So the alternatives to some degree of curving are: (i) accept that the exam may vary significantly in difficulty from one year to the next, or (ii) use the same exam every year. There is no perfect option.
      - overgard 3y ago
        I was assuming that calibration of difficulty implied some sort of curve. I'm admittedly not a teacher so there's much I don't know, but I don't really understand why difficulty would be a useful metric, which is what I was getting at. The only useful metric is if they can apply the knowledge somehow. To the original point, if someone cheats, they weren't interested in the first place, so why were they there? Likely they were coerced. I just think this effort of "gotcha"ing people that don't give a shit about the subject in the first place might be better spent either showing them why they should care, or working with the people that are actually interested. What could this professor alternatively have done with his time compared to this, which is a headache of dealing with these people that are going to have to, bitterly, retake this class, or worse, leave school altogether? What was accomplished here?
        foldr 3y ago
        >I was assuming that calibration of difficulty implied some sort of curve. No, it just means "last year's exam seems to have been a bit too difficult, so I'll make this year's a bit easier" (or vice versa). Curving means that you assign grades based on a student's performance relative to the others in the class rather than on their absolute score on the test. >but I don't really understand why difficulty would be a useful metric, If you really don't understand how it's possible for an exam to be too easy or too difficult, then I'm not sure what to say. The exam is intended to differentiate between students who've mastered the material, students who understand the basics, and students who learned nothing. To do that it has to be difficult enough that people who skipped half the classes† can't get full marks, but also easy enough that not everyone fails it. Even these basic boundary conditions on a good exam can be quite tricky to satisfy in some cases. †Not that I care about people skipping classes per se. I just mean that typically they'll have significant gaps in their knowledge of the material.

overgard 3y ago

I think it amusing and I don't have a problem with what he did, but I guess I don't really understand why teachers get so fired up about the subject in the first place. If people are in the class to fill out a general education requirement or something and otherwise don't care about the topic or will never use it again, why get so vigilant about it? And the students that do want to continue in philosophy would just be punishing themselves by cheating.

foldr 3y ago
It's unfair to the students who don't cheat, and makes it hard to correctly calibrate the difficulty of exams.
- low_tech_love 3y ago
  It’s literally his job to care about that. Chances are the students in his university classroom got their place in competition and other people weren’t so lucky. Plus everything else the previous reply said and also in mine.
  - overgard 3y ago
    No it's not, it's his job to teach people that want to learn. If uninterested people that are forced to be there drift through without creating a fuss, who cares? Let me ask you people something. Of the college graduates that have been out longer than 2 years, what do you actually remember about non-major classes? My guess is: basically nothing. It's a waste of everyone's time. I don't support cheaters because at the end of the day you agreed to the rules, but I'm not upset that people break dumb rules to save their own time.
- overgard 3y ago
  Grading on a curve also strikes me as bad. Either you know it or you don't. If I score 50% in the class, but 60% of the class cheated so I pass based on the curve.. is that a good thing?
  - foldr 3y ago
    I’m not quite sure why you’re bringing up grading on a curve as it’s not mentioned above. But anyway, it’s tricky to set different exams with the exact same difficulty. So the alternatives to some degree of curving are: (i) accept that the exam may vary significantly in difficulty from one year to the next, or (ii) use the same exam every year. There is no perfect option.
    - overgard 3y ago
      I was assuming that calibration of difficulty implied some sort of curve. I'm admittedly not a teacher so there's much I don't know, but I don't really understand why difficulty would be a useful metric, which is what I was getting at. The only useful metric is if they can apply the knowledge somehow. To the original point, if someone cheats, they weren't interested in the first place, so why were they there? Likely they were coerced. I just think this effort of "gotcha"ing people that don't give a shit about the subject in the first place might be better spent either showing them why they should care, or working with the people that are actually interested. What could this professor alternatively have done with his time compared to this, which is a headache of dealing with these people that are going to have to, bitterly, retake this class, or worse, leave school altogether? What was accomplished here?
      - foldr 3y ago
        >I was assuming that calibration of difficulty implied some sort of curve. No, it just means "last year's exam seems to have been a bit too difficult, so I'll make this year's a bit easier" (or vice versa). Curving means that you assign grades based on a student's performance relative to the others in the class rather than on their absolute score on the test. >but I don't really understand why difficulty would be a useful metric, If you really don't understand how it's possible for an exam to be too easy or too difficult, then I'm not sure what to say. The exam is intended to differentiate between students who've mastered the material, students who understand the basics, and students who learned nothing. To do that it has to be difficult enough that people who skipped half the classes† can't get full marks, but also easy enough that not everyone fails it. Even these basic boundary conditions on a good exam can be quite tricky to satisfy in some cases. †Not that I care about people skipping classes per se. I just mean that typically they'll have significant gaps in their knowledge of the material.