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I’ve been teaching in higher education for 30 years and am soon retiring. I teach math. In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everythin

I’ve been teaching in higher education for 30 years and am soon retiring. I teach math. In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating. The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes. But even requiring in person proctored exams is not the full solution. Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. And that work is increasingly cheating. It’s a clusterfuck. I have calculus students who don’t know how to work with fractions. If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated. K-12 needs to be changed as well.

Jcampuzano2 2y ago
Agree. This isn't even necessarily an AI problem, people have been cheating/plagiarizing for years. And schools have failed to find or implement a method to prevent it. I was in high school when kids started getting cell phones with internet access and basically as soon as that happened it opened up rampant cheating even among the best of students. I can only imagine it being much worse nowadays than even 15 years ago when I was in high school.
sealeck 2y ago
I think this is one of positives of standardised public exams (e.g. IB, Abitur, A Levels, etc); the people implementing them take cheating very seriously.
SkyBelow 2y ago
>If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated. Isn't it to either do that now, or to lose the signaling value of college degrees as indicating knowledge.
- skhunted 2y ago
  Yes. But people now teaching at higher education institutions need their classes to fill. That means we need to treat our students as if they are our customers. We must please the customer. In years past the attitude was that society at large was our client. Today the student is our client.
  - greentxt 2y ago
    The student is the one paying your salary so that would be expected though, right? Where the students get the money from in the first place is the issue imo. Perverted markets do perverse things.
    - skhunted 2y ago
      In the old days the money public colleges got to operate overwhelmingly came from the state. Now it comes overwhelmingly from tuition.
- lazide 2y ago
  That signaling value was lost years ago.
- pdonis 2y ago
  > the signaling value of college degrees as indicating knowledge I'm not sure knowledge is what a college degree signals to prospective employers. The alternative hypothesis, which AFAIK has a fair bit of support, is that it signals a willingness to do whatever it takes to fulfill a set of on paper requirements imposed by an institution, by hook or by crook.
  - ericjmorey 2y ago
    I think you have a clearer understanding of the signalling that colleges have been providing for centuries than others who have been sold the lies that have been perpetuated by school administrators and those trying to justify their social advantages to those that didn't have similar advantages.
bonoboTP 2y ago
> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. In Germany, all exams are like this. Homework assignments are either just a prerequisite for taking exam but the grade is solely from the exam, or you may get some small point bonus for assignments/projects. > But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. The main courses are mandatory in order to obtain the degree. You can't "not sign up" for linear algebra if it's in your curriculum. Fail 3 times and you're exmatriculated. This is because universities are paid from tax money in Germany and most of Europe. The US will continue down on the path you describe because it's in the interest of colleges to keep well-paying students around. It's a service. You buy a degree, you are a customer.
- skhunted 2y ago
  You can't "not sign up" for linear algebra if it's in your curriculum. Same in the U.S. but you can sometimes find an online offering. If you don’t know what you are doing or don’t care then always take the online offering. Much easier to cheat. My ex-girlfriend is German. She cheated on her exams to get her agricultural engineering degree at university. This was in the 80s.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  > The main courses are mandatory in order to obtain the degree. You can't "not sign up" for linear algebra if it's in your curriculum. The course might be mandatory but which professor you choose isn't. What if multiple professors teach it? Word gets around and everyone chooses the easy profs.
  - hedora 2y ago
    After I graduated, I noticed that the people that chose the easy profs ended up with crappy jobs. There were exceptions to this rule (in both directions), of course.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    The same course can have the same exams for different professors. If faculty wants to solve this it is solvable. I guess there is some sort of incentives that rewards institutions taking the easy way out.
nostrademons 2y ago
The solution, clearly, is a world where those who actually learned the math can use it to cheat the people who didn't. ...which is what we have today, where the most lucrative industries for people with good math skills are finance (= cheating dumb people out of their retirement), advertising (= cheating dumb people out of their consumer dollars), and data-driven propaganda (= cheating dumb people out of their votes). /dystopia
- skhunted 2y ago
  ….and data-driven propaganda (= cheating dumb people out of their votes). I like the phrasing you used.
- eropple 2y ago
  > advertising (= cheating dumb people out of their consumer dollars) Advertising absolutely works on you regardless of how smart or educated you are. How it has to work to do that can change, but the idea that advertising only impacts dumb people is pernicious as shit.
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    I don't disagree, but was more referring to the swindler side than the rube, and compared to a good ML model we are all dumb.
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  Math has little to nothing to do with how people are cheated in those fields.
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    Math lets you do it reliably at scale. The basic principles of how to cheat people have way more to do with psychology and information asymmetry than math. But math lets you process orders of magnitude more data so that you have more information and better models of peoples' psychology than they do themselves.
- 2y ago
simsla 2y ago
As a student of the previous generation, I much preferred exams with an oral defence component. Gave an opportunity to clear up any miscommunications, and I always walked away with a much better estimate for how well I did.
- slt2021 2y ago
  this was Soviet system as well, where student draw a random card with 3 exam questions (out of all curriculum) and had to prepare and answer question in person verbally in from of a panel of professors. This system truly forced students to grind the hell out of science
- jimhefferon 2y ago
  Hard to see, though, how to do that with hundreds of students in a room, and be reasonably uniform and fair about it. An argument perhaps that there should not be hundreds in a room.
_fat_santa 2y ago
I remember taking a math class in college and the professor had a very unique way of dealing with cheating. He let us use our books, notes, and "any calculator capability" from our TI-84's. His rationale is that students will try to use these tricks anyways so just let them and then update the test to be "immune" from these advantages. Before every test he mentioned that we could use all those tools but always said "but please study, your books, notes and calculators won't save you". Long term I see education going this route, rather than preventing students from using AI tools, update course curriculum so that AI tools don't give such an advantage.
- skhunted 2y ago
  I’ve done this but then you end up with students who are not used to “thinking”. They do bad on the test. Now I’m known as a hard teacher. Now people avoid my classes. Administration hounds me for having s low passing rate. I need a job. I now give easy tests. The real issue as I see it is that no one wants to face the reality that far too many incapable, incurious people are going to college. So I pretend to give real tests and pretend to give real grades and students feel good about themselves and my classes fill.
  - itchyouch 2y ago
    People want to be engaged with the work they believe in. Students or adults. Fundamentally, kids that are just trying to pass a class don't see the value in learning and it seems that the contributions towards the "pointless" school work are parts teacher attitudes, parts curriculum design, parts real-life applicability to the student's interests, parts framing. We've been using tests and such for far too long as a proxy for competence, rather than developing the competencies in such a way that engages the kids. I think we need to look at reframing fundamental parts of how education is structured. I don't think there needs to be drastic changes, just some small things that allow the education and curriculum to become more engaging.
    - skhunted 2y ago
      …don't think there needs to be drastic changes, just some small things that allow the education and curriculum to become more engaging. I think the vast majority of people who say and think this haven’t taught in the classroom much.
fallingknife 2y ago
They dumbed down college degrees so that everyone can get one. What did you expect? Can't do that without lowering standards.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  We are now several generations in on telling people the way to get a good job is to get a college degree. So everybody is there to get the piece of paper, not to actually learn things they are interested in.
  - commandlinefan 2y ago
    Since it costs $50-$200,000 per year, I wouldn't really expect many people to go there just because they were "interested".
    - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
      Yeah, we've fucked up education pretty badly with student loans. Just another example of the current generation sucking value from the future to spend now, and leaving the debts for the next generation. Easy money corrupts everything.
thesuitonym 2y ago
> Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. This is because 100-200 level math courses are not about teaching anything, but about filtering out students who can't do the work. Once you get past that level students have already formed bad habits and so still only do what it takes to pass. I don't know how to fix it, I don't know if it CAN be fixed.
- skhunted 2y ago
  This is because 100-200 level math courses are not about teaching anything, but about filtering out students who can't do the work. This is 100% incorrect.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    Have you ever heard of "weed-out courses" ? Admittedly, they are about teaching things. For example, teaching Laplace transforms to mechanical engineers. It certainly isn't true to say the "courses are not about teaching anything". But if 20% of the class should decide to change majors to business? Well, there's been some filtering out of students too.
RomanPushkin 2y ago
> They are used to doing the necessary work to pass The same for job interviews. I did a lot of technical interviews in the past as interviewer (hundreds) for Software Engineer positions (and still help companies to hire sometimes, as independent interviewer). There is insane amount of cheating. I'd say at least 30% in normal companies are cheaters, and 50% and more in FAANG. I can prove it, in private groups, and forums people share tech assignments. And very large number of these people use some kind of assistance while interviewing. It's interesting to see how sometimes questions that are intentionally sophisticated are getting solved in a few minutes the best way they can be solved. I see this over and over.
- varelse 2y ago
  [dead]
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Yup. Blind has people seething about known FAANG interview cheaters getting promoted before them. Everyone who works in big tech knows the cheating grift for getting in.
- Plasmoid 2y ago
  What sort of things do you see? I interview a lot of people and I rarely see anything I'd describe as cheating. Maybe my company is not famous enough to be worth cheating at.
zahlman 2y ago
Absolutely true, and not limited to the USA either. In university I can recall a computer graphics course where literally everyone got 100+% on problem sets (there were bonus questions of course) and the median score on the midterm was below 50%. Leading up to the exam I remember the prof leading an exam prep session, opening the floor to questions, and getting a sincere request from one of the students to please go over the whole concept of "matrices" again. This was a 400 level course, BTW. At one of the highest-rated universities in Canada. (I was taking it as an elective from a different program from the default, so I can't speak to the precise prerequisites to get there.) This was over 20 years ago, BTW. I'm sure it's only gotten somehow even worse.
- chatmasta 2y ago
  In my algorithms class (and some others), our professor openly approved of collaboration on problem sets. He knew that students were going to collaborate anyway, so it may as well be encouraged and used as a pedagogical tool. The problem sets were more difficult because of this, but nobody was afraid to talk about them and help each other work through the proofs. The midterm and final exam were in-person in bluebooks, and they were 60% of your grade. If you were just copying the problem sets, you would fail the exams and likely the class.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- hbn 2y ago
  In 2018 I did a 400-level CS class that was an introduction to computer audio. One of the assignments was to implement a fast fourier transform. After class I went to the cafeteria and hacked one out in like an hour or 2. A week or so later as the assignment was nearing due, apparently many, if not most of the students complained the assignment was too hard because... they seemingly just didn't know how to write code? They ended up changing the assignment to where you could just find an implementation of a FFT online and write about it or something. That's not even getting into the students who copy-pasted Wikipedia straight into their papers in that same class.
lumost 2y ago
My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating. As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted (the hard classes) and not cheating (as I did what I wanted) - I can say that there are consequences to this approach. In my opinion, the solution is to reduce the reliance on assessments which are prone to cheating or which in the real world would be done by computer.
- skhunted 2y ago
  I think grading is obsolete. Grade inflation increased a lot the past 30 years. Ironically, it has increased the least at the least prestigious colleges. Pass/fail is the way to go. Don’t know if this would mess up things like applying for graduate school or jobs but let’s end the farce that grading has become.
  - CBLT 2y ago
    Getting rid of grading sounds crazy, but it's actually happening. Los Angeles Unified, the second largest school district in America, is moving to "equitable grading", which amounts (imo) to pass/fail with extra pageantry. Teachers are being retrained _right now_ to equitable grading. I know an equitable grading champion at an LAUSD school, I'll see if I can get material to share. EDIT: I just received [0][1][2][3]. [0] (5 page pdf) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YO7SQEwisAbHHi6mfgj7XU9FcSB2l-Rh/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YO7SQEwisAbHHi6mfgj7XU9FcSB... [1] (4m30s video) https://drive.google.com/file/d/10eWor4uhSxR8ZITA1w3kzqhTOX0Hx-ZK/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/10eWor4uhSxR8ZITA1w3kzqhTOX0... [2] (audio interview) https://www.bamradionetwork.com/track/fair-grades-dropping-grades-grading-versus-knowledge/ https://www.bamradionetwork.com/track/fair-grades-dropping-g... [3] (article) https://ascd.org/el/articles/taking-the-stress-out-of-grading https://ascd.org/el/articles/taking-the-stress-out-of-gradin...
    - 2y ago
polishdude20 2y ago
I think homework is coming back to bite us/them. K-12 specifically has it bad. Wake up 7am get to school for 8/9 fill your day with classes you don't have much interest in while also figuring out how to be a social human with other kids and all the stress that entails. Then we require them to go home and continue to do more schoolwork. Of course they're gonna cheat. They're overworked and overstressed as it is.
- skhunted 2y ago
  There is much less homework these days than in, say, the 1980’s. This is true across all levels of education.
dehrmann 2y ago
> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. When I was in college, this was every math class. You could cheat all you want on the 20% of your grade that came from homework, but the remaining 80% was from 3-4 in-class, proctored exams.
deleted 2y ago
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busyant 2y ago
> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. I completely agree, but the entire higher ed system is moving to on-line instruction. Basically, if the University of <xyz> follows your suggestion, all of the competing institutions will eat their lunch by offering on-line courses with the "convenience" of on-line assessments" and the University of <xyz> will lose enrollment. :-(
- skhunted 2y ago
  That's why this has to be mandated by the Higher Learning Commission or the federal Department of Education.
- dsv3099i 2y ago
  Depends. If the competing universities degrade into glorified coding boot camps they’ll probably get thier lunch eaten in turn. And graduates need to be getting reasonable job offers as well.
golergka 2y ago
I never understood why americans do their exams with multi-option tests. Even if you don't cheat, these tests don't actually test knowledge, just memoization. For me a proper exam is when you get a topic, spend 30 minutes in a classroom preparing, and then sit down with an examiner to tell him about this topic and answer all the follow-up questions. We don't do multi-option tests at software interviews, and for a good reason. Why do them in a uni?
- jasperry 2y ago
  A big reason is that it's quicker and more objective to grade, making the heavy workload of teachers a little easier to shoulder. I don't completely agree that multiple-choice questions can't test real knowledge. It is possible to write multiple-choice questions that require deep thinking and problem solving to select the correct answer (modulo a 25% chance of getting it right with a guess.) It's true that MC questions can't evaluate the problem-solving process. You can't see how the student thought or worked through the problem unless you have them write things out. But again, that's a tradeoff with the time it takes to evaluate the students' responses.
mlsu 2y ago
I did a "hard" degree and saw classmates who worked half as hard sail by me, because they cheated. Groups that share answer banks, in-class quizzes with answers shared (when they were not supposed to be), group projects that used last year's stuff. All of it, all the way through final exams, which people had answer keys to. I had a few classmates that were formally investigated for cheating by the university; their punishment is to re-take the class -- the cheat's cumulative 3.8 is turned into a 3.75, that's sure to dissuade them from doing it again! When I tell people that I never cheated, ever, in any class, through my entire degree, I get mostly surprise. You never? Not once? But I paid for it, I think. Because it was not easy finding a first position out of school -- I certainly got filtered by GPA. It actually enrages me. What is the point of a degree? What exactly is the point of this thing, if most of the signal is false? Why did I work so hard? Not even to mention -- many of my classmates (about 1 in 5, one in 6 or so?) were granted "accommodations" which granted them twice as much time to take their exams. There are online services: pay $80, get a letter certifying your ADHD, that you can give the school to get these accommodations. It's completely ridiculous.
- wry_discontent 2y ago
  You're supposed to work as hard as you can, then cheat for the grade.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    No, you're really not supposed to cheat.
jessekv 2y ago
> Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. I'd like to point out this has nothing to do with cheating. Cheating happens at all levels of academic performance. I have not been in university for a while, but I do remember that it was rare that I did my best work for any individual class. For me it was more of a "satisficing" challenge, and I had to make hard choices about which classes I would not get A's in. I'm sure some professors might have interpreted my performance in their class as indicative of my overall abilities. I'm fine with that. I learned as much as I could, I maxed out my course load, and I don't regret it at all.
atum47 2y ago
Well, during the end of the pandemic I had the misfortune of hear some engineers undergrads talking about on how would they supposed to pass classes now that they were going to be in person; apparently a lot of them were doing just "fine" on online classes and tests...
rincebrain 2y ago
Honestly, the problem is not the cheating, per se. The problem is the lack of learning the material. You don't, IMO, directly care how they produced the answer, you care about it only as a proxy for them learning the material well enough to solve the problem. And making people do them in person with no technology is unrealistic - not because it can't be done, but because at that point, it's not a reflection of how you'd use it outside of that classroom, and people are going to call it pointless, and IMO they'd be right. You would be correct that anyone who met that bar would have likely learned the material, but you'd also have excluded people who would have met the bar of "can use the material to the degree of familiarity needed going forward". I think a reasonable compromise would be to let students collaborate on the exams in the classroom, without external access - while I realize some people learn better on their own in some subjects, as long as everyone contributes some portion of the work, and they go back and forth on agreeing what the right answers are, then you're going to make forward progress, even if that ruins the exam process as anything other than a class-wide metric. You could subdivide it, but then that gets riskier as there's a higher chance that the subset of people doesn't know enough to make progress. Maybe a hint system for groups, since the goal here is learning, not just grading their knowledge going in? Not that there's not some need for metrics, but in terms of trying to check in on where students are every so often, I think you need to leverage how people often end up learning things "in the wild" - from a combination of wild searching and talking to other people, and then feedback on whether they decided you could build an airplane out of applesauce or something closer to accurate.
- skhunted 2y ago
  You don't, IMO, directly care how they produced the answer, you care about it only as a proxy for them learning the material well enough to solve the problem. I don’t care about the answer. I care about the thought process that went into finding the answer. The answer is irrelevant. And making people do them in person with no technology is unrealistic - not because it can't be done, but because at that point, it's not a reflection of how you'd use it outside of that classroom, and people are going to call it pointless, and IMO they'd be right. There’s body of knowledge a person trained in a given area ought to know without use of computers or notes. There are things a person who calls themself “an engineer” or “a physicist” ought to know off the top of their head. A person going into mechanical engineering ought to have some familiarity with how to integrate without using a computer. Such is my belief.
FloorEgg 2y ago
I have friends that started a startup trying to tackle this problem. They actually found ways for certain types of exams in certain subjects to make cheating exponentially harder and also provide less of an advantage, so much so that if the student is cheating they are effectively learning. Some of their stuff works really well, and they have prof customers who love it. The CEO went on a tour to visit their biggest customers in person and several of them said they couldn't imagine going back. Unfortunately as a whole the industry is not interested in it, aside from a few small niches and department heads who are both open minded and actually care about the integrity of the education. There have even been cases where profs want it and the dean or admin in charge of academic integrity vetoes its adoption. I've been privy to some calls I can only characterize as corrupt. There is something deeply broken about higher Ed, the economics, the culture of the students, the culture of the faculty, the leadership... This isn't an AI problem it's a society problem. When the students genuinely want to learn something and they are there for the knowledge, not the credit, cheating isn't a problem.
- jimhefferon 2y ago
  Can you say more about the startups stuff?
  - plewd 2y ago
    I'm a bit surprised they talked so much about the AI startup's effectiveness without actually explaining the solution
IncreasePosts 2y ago
> Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. Can you blame them? If they do the necessary work to learn, but do poorly on an exam for some reason, will you still give them a passing grade?
hungariantoast 2y ago
> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. If all my math professors had done this, I never would have earned my computer science degree or my minor in mathematics. I have an immensely difficult time memorizing formulas and doing math by hand. I absolutely need to be able to prepare notes ahead of time, and reference them, to be able to complete a math test on paper. Even then, I'm a very slow in-person test-taker, and would often run out of time. I've honestly come around to the idea that maybe I have some sort of learning disability, but I never gave that idea much thought in college. So, I didn't qualify for extra time, or any other test-taking accommodations. I was just out-of-luck when time was up on a test. The only reason I was able to earn my degree is because I was able to take almost all of my math classes online, and reference my notes during tests. (COVID was actually a huge help for this.) And by "notes", I don't just mean formulas or solutions to example problems that I had recorded. I also mean any of the dozens of algorithms I programmed to help automate complex parts of larger problems. The vast majority of the math classes I took, regardless of whether they were online or in-person, did not use multiple-choice answers, and we always had to show our work for credit. So I couldn't just "automate all the things!", or use AI. I did actually have to learn it and demonstrate how to solve the problems. My issue was that I struggled to learn the material the way the university demanded, or in their timeframe. So as an otherwise successful student and capable programmer, who would have struggled immensely and been negatively affected mentally, professionally, and financially, had they been forced to work through math courses the way you prescribe, I'm asking you: please reconsider. Please reconsider how important memorization should be to pass a math class, how strongly you might equate "memorized" to "learned", and what critical thinking and problem-solving could look like in a world where technology is encouraged as part of learning, not shunned.
- skhunted 2y ago
  One should not memorize in mathematics at the college level. If you understand you don’t need to memorize anything. The memorization that should occur is when you remember certain facts because you’ve done enough problems that your brain “just knows” them. Anytime students are allowed technology there is massive amounts of cheating. Knowing a certain body of knowledge off the top of your head is important in all areas of study.
com2kid 2y ago
> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes. Just one generation ago this was the norm. The only differences between how exams were given in my math classes were what size of note paper was allowed. In general students hated the few classes that tried to use online platforms for grading, the sites sucked so much that students preferred pen and paper. Also, it is a math class! The only thing that is needed is arguably a calculator, a pencil, and some paper. What the hell kind of technology are students using in class? > The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes. Colleges used to all have tech requirements, the big debate was to allow calculators with CAS or not. > If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated. What the heck are students doing in college then? I was paying good $$$ to go to college, I was there because I wanted to learn. Why the hell would I pay thousands of dollars to go to class and then not learn anything in the class, that would be a huge waste of my time!
skissane 2y ago
I remember when (almost 25 years ago now) I did first year computer science, you had to hand in your code for an assignment, and then you had to sit with a tutor and answer questions about what it did, how it worked, and why you'd written it the way you did. Cheaters could get someone else to write their code for them but they did very poorly on the oral part.
tqi 2y ago
> Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. Can you blame students for optimizing for grades rather than "learning"? My first two years of undergrad, the smallest professor-led lecture course I took had at least 200 students (the largest was an econ 101 course that literally had 700 kids in it). We had smaller discussion sections as well, but those were led by TAs who were often only a couple years older than me. It was abundantly clear that my professors couldn't care less about me, let alone whether I "learned" anything from them. The classes were merely a box they were obligated to check. Is it so hard to understand why students would act accordingly?
cryptonector 2y ago
The school I went do did a lot of oral examinations where each student would walk to the front of the class then answer questions, do math problems, recite poetry, etc.
deleted 2y ago
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underbiding 2y ago
Personal take: Education / pedagogy needs to pull itself up finally and actually learn to modernize and change the fact that its absolute core model hasn't changed for hundreds of years. Rote memorization and examinations as being the basis of modern education is the problem here, and frankly I'm glad that many academics are struggling because it should show how terrible most educational programs truly are at actually teaching students and developing knowledge. Sorry, I'm tired to hear about the crocodile tears from instructors who refuse to adapt how they teach to the needs of students and instead lashing out and taking the easy road out by blaming students for being lazy or cheaters or whatever. When you can read about a classroom in the 1800s and in 2024 and you realize the model is exactly the same, then this should tell you that your entire model is broken. All of it. The rote lectures, the memorization, the prompting students to demonstrate knowledge through grading. All of it is useless and has been a cargo cult for a long time because (and this is especially bad in higher education) there's no interest or effort in changing the way business is done. Yeah sorry, no sympathy from me here.
- skhunted 2y ago
  I think you have very little experience teaching.
moomin 2y ago
Face to face, proctored and standardised exams are, indeed, pretty much the only way most of the rest of world allows kids _into_ university. One thing I was reasonably certain of at my university is everyone _arriving_ at it to study maths knew how to differentiate and integrate a polynomial.
ncr100 2y ago
Modern technology, disruption, and societal impact. "It’s a clusterfuck."
fargle 2y ago
all true. but rather than be frustrated, i just see it as an opportunity - your saying that there's a scarcity of people who know the material? if it's valuable, then that should lead to higher value for the good ones. don't sweat the lazy ones, teach the ones who want to learn. it sucks that a college degree is no longer a sure way to spot the "good students", but meh, been like that for 20 years or more.
musicale 2y ago
> In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating This is kind of astonishing to me, because for most of my math and engineering courses cheating on take home work would not have improved my final grade (much less helped me learn the material, which is kind of the point I thought, and often necessary for subsequent courses.) It seems common for math (and related) courses to grade almost entirely based on in-person, in-class exams. In some courses problem sets are optional (though they can be turned in for evaluation) but are recommended for understanding and practice. Exams can go poorly, so perhaps having more of them (e.g. frequent quizzes) can help to compensate for having a bad day. Also exams can include basic problems, ones that are very similar to problem sets or worked problems from lectures, etc. > If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated. That sounds like an improvement over the current situation?
eleveriven 2y ago
The focus has shifted from genuine learning to simply passing
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Jcampuzano2 2y ago

Agree. This isn't even necessarily an AI problem, people have been cheating/plagiarizing for years. And schools have failed to find or implement a method to prevent it. I was in high school when kids started getting cell phones with internet access and basically as soon as that happened it opened up rampant cheating even among the best of students. I can only imagine it being much worse nowadays than even 15 years ago when I was in high school.

sealeck 2y ago

I think this is one of positives of standardised public exams (e.g. IB, Abitur, A Levels, etc); the people implementing them take cheating very seriously.

SkyBelow 2y ago

>If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated. Isn't it to either do that now, or to lose the signaling value of college degrees as indicating knowledge.

skhunted 2y ago
Yes. But people now teaching at higher education institutions need their classes to fill. That means we need to treat our students as if they are our customers. We must please the customer. In years past the attitude was that society at large was our client. Today the student is our client.
- greentxt 2y ago
  The student is the one paying your salary so that would be expected though, right? Where the students get the money from in the first place is the issue imo. Perverted markets do perverse things.
  - skhunted 2y ago
    In the old days the money public colleges got to operate overwhelmingly came from the state. Now it comes overwhelmingly from tuition.
lazide 2y ago
That signaling value was lost years ago.
pdonis 2y ago
> the signaling value of college degrees as indicating knowledge I'm not sure knowledge is what a college degree signals to prospective employers. The alternative hypothesis, which AFAIK has a fair bit of support, is that it signals a willingness to do whatever it takes to fulfill a set of on paper requirements imposed by an institution, by hook or by crook.
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  I think you have a clearer understanding of the signalling that colleges have been providing for centuries than others who have been sold the lies that have been perpetuated by school administrators and those trying to justify their social advantages to those that didn't have similar advantages.

bonoboTP 2y ago

> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. In Germany, all exams are like this. Homework assignments are either just a prerequisite for taking exam but the grade is solely from the exam, or you may get some small point bonus for assignments/projects. > But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. The main courses are mandatory in order to obtain the degree. You can't "not sign up" for linear algebra if it's in your curriculum. Fail 3 times and you're exmatriculated. This is because universities are paid from tax money in Germany and most of Europe. The US will continue down on the path you describe because it's in the interest of colleges to keep well-paying students around. It's a service. You buy a degree, you are a customer.

skhunted 2y ago
You can't "not sign up" for linear algebra if it's in your curriculum. Same in the U.S. but you can sometimes find an online offering. If you don’t know what you are doing or don’t care then always take the online offering. Much easier to cheat. My ex-girlfriend is German. She cheated on her exams to get her agricultural engineering degree at university. This was in the 80s.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
> The main courses are mandatory in order to obtain the degree. You can't "not sign up" for linear algebra if it's in your curriculum. The course might be mandatory but which professor you choose isn't. What if multiple professors teach it? Word gets around and everyone chooses the easy profs.
- hedora 2y ago
  After I graduated, I noticed that the people that chose the easy profs ended up with crappy jobs. There were exceptions to this rule (in both directions), of course.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  The same course can have the same exams for different professors. If faculty wants to solve this it is solvable. I guess there is some sort of incentives that rewards institutions taking the easy way out.

nostrademons 2y ago

The solution, clearly, is a world where those who actually learned the math can use it to cheat the people who didn't. ...which is what we have today, where the most lucrative industries for people with good math skills are finance (= cheating dumb people out of their retirement), advertising (= cheating dumb people out of their consumer dollars), and data-driven propaganda (= cheating dumb people out of their votes). /dystopia

skhunted 2y ago
….and data-driven propaganda (= cheating dumb people out of their votes). I like the phrasing you used.
eropple 2y ago
> advertising (= cheating dumb people out of their consumer dollars) Advertising absolutely works on you regardless of how smart or educated you are. How it has to work to do that can change, but the idea that advertising only impacts dumb people is pernicious as shit.
- nostrademons 2y ago
  I don't disagree, but was more referring to the swindler side than the rube, and compared to a good ML model we are all dumb.
ericjmorey 2y ago
Math has little to nothing to do with how people are cheated in those fields.
- nostrademons 2y ago
  Math lets you do it reliably at scale. The basic principles of how to cheat people have way more to do with psychology and information asymmetry than math. But math lets you process orders of magnitude more data so that you have more information and better models of peoples' psychology than they do themselves.
2y ago

simsla 2y ago

As a student of the previous generation, I much preferred exams with an oral defence component. Gave an opportunity to clear up any miscommunications, and I always walked away with a much better estimate for how well I did.

slt2021 2y ago
this was Soviet system as well, where student draw a random card with 3 exam questions (out of all curriculum) and had to prepare and answer question in person verbally in from of a panel of professors. This system truly forced students to grind the hell out of science
jimhefferon 2y ago
Hard to see, though, how to do that with hundreds of students in a room, and be reasonably uniform and fair about it. An argument perhaps that there should not be hundreds in a room.

_fat_santa 2y ago

I remember taking a math class in college and the professor had a very unique way of dealing with cheating. He let us use our books, notes, and "any calculator capability" from our TI-84's. His rationale is that students will try to use these tricks anyways so just let them and then update the test to be "immune" from these advantages. Before every test he mentioned that we could use all those tools but always said "but please study, your books, notes and calculators won't save you". Long term I see education going this route, rather than preventing students from using AI tools, update course curriculum so that AI tools don't give such an advantage.

skhunted 2y ago
I’ve done this but then you end up with students who are not used to “thinking”. They do bad on the test. Now I’m known as a hard teacher. Now people avoid my classes. Administration hounds me for having s low passing rate. I need a job. I now give easy tests. The real issue as I see it is that no one wants to face the reality that far too many incapable, incurious people are going to college. So I pretend to give real tests and pretend to give real grades and students feel good about themselves and my classes fill.
- itchyouch 2y ago
  People want to be engaged with the work they believe in. Students or adults. Fundamentally, kids that are just trying to pass a class don't see the value in learning and it seems that the contributions towards the "pointless" school work are parts teacher attitudes, parts curriculum design, parts real-life applicability to the student's interests, parts framing. We've been using tests and such for far too long as a proxy for competence, rather than developing the competencies in such a way that engages the kids. I think we need to look at reframing fundamental parts of how education is structured. I don't think there needs to be drastic changes, just some small things that allow the education and curriculum to become more engaging.
  - skhunted 2y ago
    …don't think there needs to be drastic changes, just some small things that allow the education and curriculum to become more engaging. I think the vast majority of people who say and think this haven’t taught in the classroom much.

fallingknife 2y ago

They dumbed down college degrees so that everyone can get one. What did you expect? Can't do that without lowering standards.

amanaplanacanal 2y ago
We are now several generations in on telling people the way to get a good job is to get a college degree. So everybody is there to get the piece of paper, not to actually learn things they are interested in.
- commandlinefan 2y ago
  Since it costs $50-$200,000 per year, I wouldn't really expect many people to go there just because they were "interested".
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Yeah, we've fucked up education pretty badly with student loans. Just another example of the current generation sucking value from the future to spend now, and leaving the debts for the next generation. Easy money corrupts everything.

thesuitonym 2y ago

> Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. This is because 100-200 level math courses are not about teaching anything, but about filtering out students who can't do the work. Once you get past that level students have already formed bad habits and so still only do what it takes to pass. I don't know how to fix it, I don't know if it CAN be fixed.

skhunted 2y ago
This is because 100-200 level math courses are not about teaching anything, but about filtering out students who can't do the work. This is 100% incorrect.
- michaelt 2y ago
  Have you ever heard of "weed-out courses" ? Admittedly, they are about teaching things. For example, teaching Laplace transforms to mechanical engineers. It certainly isn't true to say the "courses are not about teaching anything". But if 20% of the class should decide to change majors to business? Well, there's been some filtering out of students too.

RomanPushkin 2y ago

> They are used to doing the necessary work to pass The same for job interviews. I did a lot of technical interviews in the past as interviewer (hundreds) for Software Engineer positions (and still help companies to hire sometimes, as independent interviewer). There is insane amount of cheating. I'd say at least 30% in normal companies are cheaters, and 50% and more in FAANG. I can prove it, in private groups, and forums people share tech assignments. And very large number of these people use some kind of assistance while interviewing. It's interesting to see how sometimes questions that are intentionally sophisticated are getting solved in a few minutes the best way they can be solved. I see this over and over.

varelse 2y ago
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Der_Einzige 2y ago
Yup. Blind has people seething about known FAANG interview cheaters getting promoted before them. Everyone who works in big tech knows the cheating grift for getting in.
Plasmoid 2y ago
What sort of things do you see? I interview a lot of people and I rarely see anything I'd describe as cheating. Maybe my company is not famous enough to be worth cheating at.

zahlman 2y ago

Absolutely true, and not limited to the USA either. In university I can recall a computer graphics course where literally everyone got 100+% on problem sets (there were bonus questions of course) and the median score on the midterm was below 50%. Leading up to the exam I remember the prof leading an exam prep session, opening the floor to questions, and getting a sincere request from one of the students to please go over the whole concept of "matrices" again. This was a 400 level course, BTW. At one of the highest-rated universities in Canada. (I was taking it as an elective from a different program from the default, so I can't speak to the precise prerequisites to get there.) This was over 20 years ago, BTW. I'm sure it's only gotten somehow even worse.

chatmasta 2y ago
In my algorithms class (and some others), our professor openly approved of collaboration on problem sets. He knew that students were going to collaborate anyway, so it may as well be encouraged and used as a pedagogical tool. The problem sets were more difficult because of this, but nobody was afraid to talk about them and help each other work through the proofs. The midterm and final exam were in-person in bluebooks, and they were 60% of your grade. If you were just copying the problem sets, you would fail the exams and likely the class.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
hbn 2y ago
In 2018 I did a 400-level CS class that was an introduction to computer audio. One of the assignments was to implement a fast fourier transform. After class I went to the cafeteria and hacked one out in like an hour or 2. A week or so later as the assignment was nearing due, apparently many, if not most of the students complained the assignment was too hard because... they seemingly just didn't know how to write code? They ended up changing the assignment to where you could just find an implementation of a FFT online and write about it or something. That's not even getting into the students who copy-pasted Wikipedia straight into their papers in that same class.

lumost 2y ago

My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating. As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted (the hard classes) and not cheating (as I did what I wanted) - I can say that there are consequences to this approach. In my opinion, the solution is to reduce the reliance on assessments which are prone to cheating or which in the real world would be done by computer.

skhunted 2y ago
I think grading is obsolete. Grade inflation increased a lot the past 30 years. Ironically, it has increased the least at the least prestigious colleges. Pass/fail is the way to go. Don’t know if this would mess up things like applying for graduate school or jobs but let’s end the farce that grading has become.
- CBLT 2y ago
  Getting rid of grading sounds crazy, but it's actually happening. Los Angeles Unified, the second largest school district in America, is moving to "equitable grading", which amounts (imo) to pass/fail with extra pageantry. Teachers are being retrained _right now_ to equitable grading. I know an equitable grading champion at an LAUSD school, I'll see if I can get material to share. EDIT: I just received [0][1][2][3]. [0] (5 page pdf) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YO7SQEwisAbHHi6mfgj7XU9FcSB2l-Rh/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YO7SQEwisAbHHi6mfgj7XU9FcSB... [1] (4m30s video) https://drive.google.com/file/d/10eWor4uhSxR8ZITA1w3kzqhTOX0Hx-ZK/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/10eWor4uhSxR8ZITA1w3kzqhTOX0... [2] (audio interview) https://www.bamradionetwork.com/track/fair-grades-dropping-grades-grading-versus-knowledge/ https://www.bamradionetwork.com/track/fair-grades-dropping-g... [3] (article) https://ascd.org/el/articles/taking-the-stress-out-of-grading https://ascd.org/el/articles/taking-the-stress-out-of-gradin...
  - 2y ago

polishdude20 2y ago

I think homework is coming back to bite us/them. K-12 specifically has it bad. Wake up 7am get to school for 8/9 fill your day with classes you don't have much interest in while also figuring out how to be a social human with other kids and all the stress that entails. Then we require them to go home and continue to do more schoolwork. Of course they're gonna cheat. They're overworked and overstressed as it is.

skhunted 2y ago
There is much less homework these days than in, say, the 1980’s. This is true across all levels of education.

dehrmann 2y ago

> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. When I was in college, this was every math class. You could cheat all you want on the 20% of your grade that came from homework, but the remaining 80% was from 3-4 in-class, proctored exams.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

busyant 2y ago

> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. I completely agree, but the entire higher ed system is moving to on-line instruction. Basically, if the University of <xyz> follows your suggestion, all of the competing institutions will eat their lunch by offering on-line courses with the "convenience" of on-line assessments" and the University of <xyz> will lose enrollment. :-(

skhunted 2y ago
That's why this has to be mandated by the Higher Learning Commission or the federal Department of Education.
dsv3099i 2y ago
Depends. If the competing universities degrade into glorified coding boot camps they’ll probably get thier lunch eaten in turn. And graduates need to be getting reasonable job offers as well.

golergka 2y ago

I never understood why americans do their exams with multi-option tests. Even if you don't cheat, these tests don't actually test knowledge, just memoization. For me a proper exam is when you get a topic, spend 30 minutes in a classroom preparing, and then sit down with an examiner to tell him about this topic and answer all the follow-up questions. We don't do multi-option tests at software interviews, and for a good reason. Why do them in a uni?

jasperry 2y ago
A big reason is that it's quicker and more objective to grade, making the heavy workload of teachers a little easier to shoulder. I don't completely agree that multiple-choice questions can't test real knowledge. It is possible to write multiple-choice questions that require deep thinking and problem solving to select the correct answer (modulo a 25% chance of getting it right with a guess.) It's true that MC questions can't evaluate the problem-solving process. You can't see how the student thought or worked through the problem unless you have them write things out. But again, that's a tradeoff with the time it takes to evaluate the students' responses.

mlsu 2y ago

I did a "hard" degree and saw classmates who worked half as hard sail by me, because they cheated. Groups that share answer banks, in-class quizzes with answers shared (when they were not supposed to be), group projects that used last year's stuff. All of it, all the way through final exams, which people had answer keys to. I had a few classmates that were formally investigated for cheating by the university; their punishment is to re-take the class -- the cheat's cumulative 3.8 is turned into a 3.75, that's sure to dissuade them from doing it again! When I tell people that I never cheated, ever, in any class, through my entire degree, I get mostly surprise. You never? Not once? But I paid for it, I think. Because it was not easy finding a first position out of school -- I certainly got filtered by GPA. It actually enrages me. What is the point of a degree? What exactly is the point of this thing, if most of the signal is false? Why did I work so hard? Not even to mention -- many of my classmates (about 1 in 5, one in 6 or so?) were granted "accommodations" which granted them twice as much time to take their exams. There are online services: pay $80, get a letter certifying your ADHD, that you can give the school to get these accommodations. It's completely ridiculous.

wry_discontent 2y ago
You're supposed to work as hard as you can, then cheat for the grade.
- thfuran 2y ago
  No, you're really not supposed to cheat.

jessekv 2y ago

> Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. I'd like to point out this has nothing to do with cheating. Cheating happens at all levels of academic performance. I have not been in university for a while, but I do remember that it was rare that I did my best work for any individual class. For me it was more of a "satisficing" challenge, and I had to make hard choices about which classes I would not get A's in. I'm sure some professors might have interpreted my performance in their class as indicative of my overall abilities. I'm fine with that. I learned as much as I could, I maxed out my course load, and I don't regret it at all.

atum47 2y ago

Well, during the end of the pandemic I had the misfortune of hear some engineers undergrads talking about on how would they supposed to pass classes now that they were going to be in person; apparently a lot of them were doing just "fine" on online classes and tests...

rincebrain 2y ago

Honestly, the problem is not the cheating, per se. The problem is the lack of learning the material. You don't, IMO, directly care how they produced the answer, you care about it only as a proxy for them learning the material well enough to solve the problem. And making people do them in person with no technology is unrealistic - not because it can't be done, but because at that point, it's not a reflection of how you'd use it outside of that classroom, and people are going to call it pointless, and IMO they'd be right. You would be correct that anyone who met that bar would have likely learned the material, but you'd also have excluded people who would have met the bar of "can use the material to the degree of familiarity needed going forward". I think a reasonable compromise would be to let students collaborate on the exams in the classroom, without external access - while I realize some people learn better on their own in some subjects, as long as everyone contributes some portion of the work, and they go back and forth on agreeing what the right answers are, then you're going to make forward progress, even if that ruins the exam process as anything other than a class-wide metric. You could subdivide it, but then that gets riskier as there's a higher chance that the subset of people doesn't know enough to make progress. Maybe a hint system for groups, since the goal here is learning, not just grading their knowledge going in? Not that there's not some need for metrics, but in terms of trying to check in on where students are every so often, I think you need to leverage how people often end up learning things "in the wild" - from a combination of wild searching and talking to other people, and then feedback on whether they decided you could build an airplane out of applesauce or something closer to accurate.

skhunted 2y ago
You don't, IMO, directly care how they produced the answer, you care about it only as a proxy for them learning the material well enough to solve the problem. I don’t care about the answer. I care about the thought process that went into finding the answer. The answer is irrelevant. And making people do them in person with no technology is unrealistic - not because it can't be done, but because at that point, it's not a reflection of how you'd use it outside of that classroom, and people are going to call it pointless, and IMO they'd be right. There’s body of knowledge a person trained in a given area ought to know without use of computers or notes. There are things a person who calls themself “an engineer” or “a physicist” ought to know off the top of their head. A person going into mechanical engineering ought to have some familiarity with how to integrate without using a computer. Such is my belief.

FloorEgg 2y ago

I have friends that started a startup trying to tackle this problem. They actually found ways for certain types of exams in certain subjects to make cheating exponentially harder and also provide less of an advantage, so much so that if the student is cheating they are effectively learning. Some of their stuff works really well, and they have prof customers who love it. The CEO went on a tour to visit their biggest customers in person and several of them said they couldn't imagine going back. Unfortunately as a whole the industry is not interested in it, aside from a few small niches and department heads who are both open minded and actually care about the integrity of the education. There have even been cases where profs want it and the dean or admin in charge of academic integrity vetoes its adoption. I've been privy to some calls I can only characterize as corrupt. There is something deeply broken about higher Ed, the economics, the culture of the students, the culture of the faculty, the leadership... This isn't an AI problem it's a society problem. When the students genuinely want to learn something and they are there for the knowledge, not the credit, cheating isn't a problem.

jimhefferon 2y ago
Can you say more about the startups stuff?
- plewd 2y ago
  I'm a bit surprised they talked so much about the AI startup's effectiveness without actually explaining the solution

IncreasePosts 2y ago

> Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. Can you blame them? If they do the necessary work to learn, but do poorly on an exam for some reason, will you still give them a passing grade?

hungariantoast 2y ago

> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. If all my math professors had done this, I never would have earned my computer science degree or my minor in mathematics. I have an immensely difficult time memorizing formulas and doing math by hand. I absolutely need to be able to prepare notes ahead of time, and reference them, to be able to complete a math test on paper. Even then, I'm a very slow in-person test-taker, and would often run out of time. I've honestly come around to the idea that maybe I have some sort of learning disability, but I never gave that idea much thought in college. So, I didn't qualify for extra time, or any other test-taking accommodations. I was just out-of-luck when time was up on a test. The only reason I was able to earn my degree is because I was able to take almost all of my math classes online, and reference my notes during tests. (COVID was actually a huge help for this.) And by "notes", I don't just mean formulas or solutions to example problems that I had recorded. I also mean any of the dozens of algorithms I programmed to help automate complex parts of larger problems. The vast majority of the math classes I took, regardless of whether they were online or in-person, did not use multiple-choice answers, and we always had to show our work for credit. So I couldn't just "automate all the things!", or use AI. I did actually have to learn it and demonstrate how to solve the problems. My issue was that I struggled to learn the material the way the university demanded, or in their timeframe. So as an otherwise successful student and capable programmer, who would have struggled immensely and been negatively affected mentally, professionally, and financially, had they been forced to work through math courses the way you prescribe, I'm asking you: please reconsider. Please reconsider how important memorization should be to pass a math class, how strongly you might equate "memorized" to "learned", and what critical thinking and problem-solving could look like in a world where technology is encouraged as part of learning, not shunned.

skhunted 2y ago
One should not memorize in mathematics at the college level. If you understand you don’t need to memorize anything. The memorization that should occur is when you remember certain facts because you’ve done enough problems that your brain “just knows” them. Anytime students are allowed technology there is massive amounts of cheating. Knowing a certain body of knowledge off the top of your head is important in all areas of study.

com2kid 2y ago

> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes. Just one generation ago this was the norm. The only differences between how exams were given in my math classes were what size of note paper was allowed. In general students hated the few classes that tried to use online platforms for grading, the sites sucked so much that students preferred pen and paper. Also, it is a math class! The only thing that is needed is arguably a calculator, a pencil, and some paper. What the hell kind of technology are students using in class? > The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes. Colleges used to all have tech requirements, the big debate was to allow calculators with CAS or not. > If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated. What the heck are students doing in college then? I was paying good $$$ to go to college, I was there because I wanted to learn. Why the hell would I pay thousands of dollars to go to class and then not learn anything in the class, that would be a huge waste of my time!

skissane 2y ago

I remember when (almost 25 years ago now) I did first year computer science, you had to hand in your code for an assignment, and then you had to sit with a tutor and answer questions about what it did, how it worked, and why you'd written it the way you did. Cheaters could get someone else to write their code for them but they did very poorly on the oral part.

tqi 2y ago

> Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. Can you blame students for optimizing for grades rather than "learning"? My first two years of undergrad, the smallest professor-led lecture course I took had at least 200 students (the largest was an econ 101 course that literally had 700 kids in it). We had smaller discussion sections as well, but those were led by TAs who were often only a couple years older than me. It was abundantly clear that my professors couldn't care less about me, let alone whether I "learned" anything from them. The classes were merely a box they were obligated to check. Is it so hard to understand why students would act accordingly?

cryptonector 2y ago

The school I went do did a lot of oral examinations where each student would walk to the front of the class then answer questions, do math problems, recite poetry, etc.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

underbiding 2y ago

Personal take: Education / pedagogy needs to pull itself up finally and actually learn to modernize and change the fact that its absolute core model hasn't changed for hundreds of years. Rote memorization and examinations as being the basis of modern education is the problem here, and frankly I'm glad that many academics are struggling because it should show how terrible most educational programs truly are at actually teaching students and developing knowledge. Sorry, I'm tired to hear about the crocodile tears from instructors who refuse to adapt how they teach to the needs of students and instead lashing out and taking the easy road out by blaming students for being lazy or cheaters or whatever. When you can read about a classroom in the 1800s and in 2024 and you realize the model is exactly the same, then this should tell you that your entire model is broken. All of it. The rote lectures, the memorization, the prompting students to demonstrate knowledge through grading. All of it is useless and has been a cargo cult for a long time because (and this is especially bad in higher education) there's no interest or effort in changing the way business is done. Yeah sorry, no sympathy from me here.

skhunted 2y ago
I think you have very little experience teaching.

moomin 2y ago

Face to face, proctored and standardised exams are, indeed, pretty much the only way most of the rest of world allows kids _into_ university. One thing I was reasonably certain of at my university is everyone _arriving_ at it to study maths knew how to differentiate and integrate a polynomial.

ncr100 2y ago

Modern technology, disruption, and societal impact. "It’s a clusterfuck."

fargle 2y ago

all true. but rather than be frustrated, i just see it as an opportunity - your saying that there's a scarcity of people who know the material? if it's valuable, then that should lead to higher value for the good ones. don't sweat the lazy ones, teach the ones who want to learn. it sucks that a college degree is no longer a sure way to spot the "good students", but meh, been like that for 20 years or more.

musicale 2y ago

> In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating This is kind of astonishing to me, because for most of my math and engineering courses cheating on take home work would not have improved my final grade (much less helped me learn the material, which is kind of the point I thought, and often necessary for subsequent courses.) It seems common for math (and related) courses to grade almost entirely based on in-person, in-class exams. In some courses problem sets are optional (though they can be turned in for evaluation) but are recommended for understanding and practice. Exams can go poorly, so perhaps having more of them (e.g. frequent quizzes) can help to compensate for having a bad day. Also exams can include basic problems, ones that are very similar to problem sets or worked problems from lectures, etc. > If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated. That sounds like an improvement over the current situation?

eleveriven 2y ago

The focus has shifted from genuine learning to simply passing

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