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When I was in college, there was a cheating scandal for the final exam where somehow people got their hands on the hardest question of the exam. The professor
by huevosabio 11mo ago
When I was in college, there was a cheating scandal for the final exam where somehow people got their hands on the hardest question of the exam.
The professor noticed it (presumably via seeing poor "show your work") and gave zero points on the question to everyone. And once you went to complain about your grade, she would ask you to explain the answer there in her office and work through the problem live.
I thought it was a clever and graceful way to deal with it.
- j45 11mo agoThis is a nice approach. The students who know the material, or even who manually prepare before seeing the prof achieve the objective of learning.
- onion2k 11mo agoIt's not great for the teacher though. They're the ones who will truly suffer from the proliferation of AI - increased complexity of work around spotting cheating 'solved' by a huge increase in time pressure. Faced with that teachers will have three options: accept AI detection as gospel without appeals and be accused of unfairness or being bad at the job by parents, spend time on appeals to the detriment of other duties leading to more accusations of being bad at the job, or leave teaching and get an easier (and probably less stressful and higher paid) job. Given those choices I'd pick the third option.
- mavhc 11mo ago4. Use AI to talk to the student to find out if they understand. Tests were created to save money, more students per teacher, we're just going back to the older, actually useful, method of talking to people to see if they understand what they've been taught. You weren't asked to write an essay because someone wanted to read your essay, only to intuit that you've understood something
- WalterBright 11mo ago> Tests were created to save money I'm skeptical. Tests are a way of standardizing the curriculum and objectively determining if the lessons were learned.
- RealityVoid 11mo agoBoth can be true at the same time. You outlined the objective, the money is an extra constraint (and let's be honest, when isn't money an extra constraint?)
- j45 11mo agoTests are a way of largely seeing if a response to a question was memorized. The lesson of how to swim sometimes only comes in applying the learning.
- WalterBright 11mo ago> Tests are a way of largely seeing if a response to a question was memorized. Some tests require memorized knowledge, like what is the stall speed of your airplane. Some tests require reasoning skills, like what is the stress in this beam.
- j45 11mo agoThese are different levels of learning. There are learning frameworks that explain it all well enough. Learning what something is, vs applying what you learned has different terminology in the learning world, but not everyone might use that.
- rixed 11mo agoI really believe this is the way forward, but how do you make sure the AI is speaking to the student rather than to another AI impersonating the student? You could make it in person but that's a bit sad.
- 11mo ago
- miki123211 11mo agoOr option 4 (a lot more likely in my opinion), pretend nothing is happening.
- skeeter2020 11mo agooption 4b: resolve the teacher from being the gatekeeper who has to "prove" knowledge has been imparted, accepted and consolidated? It's your idea, but with explicit candor and not a sly wink :)
- lazyasciiart 11mo agoOnly if she advertised that option somehow. I worked two jobs in college, I didn't take time off to go complain about my grades.
- rgblambda 11mo agoNot to mention there'd be at least a few students too timid to challenge the teacher, even if they knew they got it right.
- idiotsecant 11mo agoThat's a valid and useful lesson, especially for the shy students. Arguably, it's probably more important than whatever the question on the test was. The world at large rarely accommodates shy people. Coping skills are essential, even if they are unpleasant.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- watwut 11mo agoExcept they did not learned to not be shy. There was no such lesson. This is like saying that stealing from a student is ok, because it is teaching them thieves exist. They learned that cheating gives advantage to the cheating individual. They also learned that reporting cheating harms them and non cheaters.
- lazyasciiart 11mo agoOnly if she advertised it somehow. The dick version is, of course, to tell the class that “you know, until now, if you had come in to challenge your grade I would have let you fix it. Too late now!”
- smileysteve 11mo agoLol, in 3rd grade algebra, a teacher called 2 of us in for cheating. She had us take the test again, I got the same exact horribly failing score (a 38%) and the cheater got a better score, so the teacher then knew who the cheater was. He just chose the wrong classmate to cheat of of.
- darkwater 11mo agoI don't get it. If she called you too it was because your results were good, no? Who cheats to get a bad result?
- writebetterc 11mo agoThe students had identical answers, I presume
- edwcross 11mo agoWhich, in a subject like algebra, is extremely suspicious ("how could both of them get the exact same WRONG answer?").
- aleph_minus_one 11mo ago> Which, in a subject like algebra, is extremely suspicious ("how could both of them get the exact same WRONG answer?"). In Germany, the traditional sharp-tongued answer of pupils to the question "How could both of you get the exact same WRONG answer (in the test)?" is: "Well, we both have the same teacher." :-)
- bigstrat2003 11mo agoI assume that the cheating student didn't know that he was copying answers from someone who was doing poorly. It was third graders after all; one wouldn't necessarily expect them to be able to pick the best target every time.
- 11mo ago
- respondo2134 11mo agoExcept the power imbalance: position, experience, social, etc. meant that the vast majority just took the zero and never complained or challenged the prof. Sounds like your typical out-of-touch academic who thought they were super clever.
- gonzobonzo 11mo agoIt's an incredible abuse of power to intentionally mark innocent students' answers wrong when they're correct. Just to solve your own problem, that you may very well be responsible for. Knowing the way a lot of professors act, I'm not surprised, but it's always disheartening to see how many behave like petty tyrants who are happy to throw around their power over the young.
- array_key_first 11mo agoIf you cheat, you should get a zero. How is this controversial. Since high school, the expectation is that you show your work. I remember my high school calculus teacher didn't even LOOK at the final answer - only the work. The nice thing was that if you made a trivial mistake, like adding 2 + 2 = 5, you got 95% of the credit. It worked out to be massively beneficial for students. The same thing continued in programming classes. We wrote our programs on paper. The teacher didn't compile anything. They didn't care much if you missed a semicolon, or called a library function by a wrong name. They cared if the overall structure and algorithms were correct. It was all analyzed statically.
- skeeter2020 11mo agoI understand both that this is valuable AND how many (most?) education environments are (supposed) to work, but 2 interesting things can happen with the best & brightest: 1. they skip what are to them the obvious steps (we all do as we achieve mastery) and then get penalized for not showing their work. 2. they inherently know and understand the task abut not the mechanized minutia. Think of learning a new language. A diligent student can work through the problem and complete an a->b translation, then go the other way, and repeat. Someone with mastery doesn't do this; they think within one language and then only pass the contextual meaning back and forth when explicitly required. "showing your work" is really the same thing as "explain how you think" and may be great for basics in learning, but also faces levels of abstraction as you ascend towards mastery.
- raincole 11mo agoI think this kind of approach is the root of (the US's) hustle culture. Instead of receiving a fair score, you get a zero and need to "hustle" and challenge your teacher. The teacher effectively filtered out the shy boys/girls who are not brave enough to "hustle." Gracefully.
- beeflet 11mo agoI don't even think it is about shyness. Some professors do not respond well to being challenged on every possible exam question. The time spent challenging exam grades is usually better spent studying for the next exam. I've never gotten a significant grade improvement from it.
- aprilthird2021 11mo agoThis is completely incorrect. Hustle culture is what made kids cheat in the first place. She didn't ask them to challenge them, she asked them additional questions. The test already asks them questions. If you are really shy, a culture where no one cheats is far better because your actual ability and intelligence shines through
- raincole 11mo ago> And once you went to complain about your grade
- watwut 11mo agoThey had to challenge her first. So, yes, challenging her was the only way to get better grade. And you still knew im advance what questions are giing to be. Cheaters and non cheaters were punished in exactly the same way. Effectively cheating gave you an advantage and being shy gave you disadvantage.
- huevosabio 11mo agoNah, the professor wasn't American (as is often the case) and she had a tricky situation. She had strong reasons to believe people were cheating and had to sort out who did and who did not in a swift way. This has nothing to do with American Hustle culture and just with that professor's judgment.
- stonemetal12 11mo agoStory doesn't make sense. > the final exam where somehow people got their hands on the hardest question of the exam. They got the question but not the answer so they had to work it out before the test. They couldn't explain it later?
- SoftTalker 11mo agoIt's unstated as to whether they got the answer as well.