3 ms·

But the cultural expectation has shifted. AFAICT, it is now expected that people will cheat as a matter of course. That may have happened because of past lenie

by sfink 3y ago

But the cultural expectation has shifted. AFAICT, it is now expected that people will cheat as a matter of course. That may have happened because of past leniency, but at this point expelling students is shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. If 10% of students cheat, you can hold the line through punishment. If 80% of students cheat, you have a systemic problem, and beating students is only going to produce better cheaters. The whole structure is now set up to strongly disadvantage those who don't cheat, and once that happens, the decision to cheat ceases to be a moral one. I went to school during the last century. I did not cheat. Cheating was already pretty common, I knew of plenty of people who did cheat, but the norm (as I understood it) was still to not cheat. If I were go to school today, I'm not sure what I would do. It would depend partly on the stakes. It's like being an honest politician. You can feel good and pat yourself on the back, but you'll never get elected. (Ok, "honest" may not be the best word for it. Someone who measures the effects of various things and governs accordingly rather than by how popular and marketable positions are, and refuses to make deals that go against principles.)

burnished 3y ago
Disagree. I went to university within the last five years - cheating was rampant but tended to produce students who seriously struggled to keep up with coursework in their third and fourth year. I did not cheat and was typically one of the top performers in my courses. However we may be operating under different assumptions; there was no assumption of grade curving (it happened a few times when an exam was a little over juiced, but it pulled people into a passing grade instead of pushing people into a failing one). On reflection it sounds like you are anticipating a curve designed to flunk a certain portion of students. I'm not sure if one or the other is the 'default' experience these days.
fullspectrumdev 3y ago
In the 2010’s, cheating was commonplace and socially accepted. People were still being caught and harshly punished, but nobody would snitch if they saw you up to something. Snitching carried much more social stigma than cheating on an exam or whatever. What didn’t help was these stupid false positive prone plagiarism detectors like turnitin which would assign an arbitrary “score” that would get you dinged for copying - even if it was original work.
catgary 3y ago
I had a math professor who did an amazing job at preventing cheating by making coursework more-or-less optional, and then exams would be 50% problems they’d invented specifically for that year, and 50% problems given ahead of time (you only needed to do half of 75% of the exam). If you “got it”, the problems he made up were always very short, whereas half of the preassigned questions were long and tedious. This basically set a hard cap of a B/B- for any student that wasn’t either wildly talented or engaging with the course material and getting useful feedback from the assignments. It was possible to pass with a C by cheating on assignments (looking up the answer and rewriting it so it wasn’t terribly obvious) and memorizing the solutions to the preassigned problems, which was honestly fair based on the rules he set for the course.

by sfink 3y ago

burnished 3y ago

Disagree. I went to university within the last five years - cheating was rampant but tended to produce students who seriously struggled to keep up with coursework in their third and fourth year. I did not cheat and was typically one of the top performers in my courses. However we may be operating under different assumptions; there was no assumption of grade curving (it happened a few times when an exam was a little over juiced, but it pulled people into a passing grade instead of pushing people into a failing one). On reflection it sounds like you are anticipating a curve designed to flunk a certain portion of students. I'm not sure if one or the other is the 'default' experience these days.

fullspectrumdev 3y ago

In the 2010’s, cheating was commonplace and socially accepted. People were still being caught and harshly punished, but nobody would snitch if they saw you up to something. Snitching carried much more social stigma than cheating on an exam or whatever. What didn’t help was these stupid false positive prone plagiarism detectors like turnitin which would assign an arbitrary “score” that would get you dinged for copying - even if it was original work.

catgary 3y ago

I had a math professor who did an amazing job at preventing cheating by making coursework more-or-less optional, and then exams would be 50% problems they’d invented specifically for that year, and 50% problems given ahead of time (you only needed to do half of 75% of the exam). If you “got it”, the problems he made up were always very short, whereas half of the preassigned questions were long and tedious. This basically set a hard cap of a B/B- for any student that wasn’t either wildly talented or engaging with the course material and getting useful feedback from the assignments. It was possible to pass with a C by cheating on assignments (looking up the answer and rewriting it so it wasn’t terribly obvious) and memorizing the solutions to the preassigned problems, which was honestly fair based on the rules he set for the course.