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Finding cheaters using multiple-choice comparisons
- MollyR 12y agoI don't particularly like the idea of harassing possibly innocent students. Innocent students might be under pressure with no proof of innocence, since they assumed to be guilty. They might do a cost/benefit analysis and admit guilt. Also if cheating is really such a concern, why not just handle it in a similar way to the american GRE's or SAT's ?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- mixedmath 12y agoWhen you suggest handling it like American GREs and SATs, what do you mean? Do you mean computer-given multiple choice tests? Or is there something about how they handle paper and pencil exams that you think should be widely adopted?
- bodyfour 12y agoA good start would be to not let students pick which seat they take the test in. They can still attempt to copy their neighbor's work but can't collude with someone to make it easy.
- MollyR 12y agoI'm going more by there security practices in general, not really one in particular . https://www.ets.org/gre/institutions/about/security/ https://www.ets.org/gre/institutions/about/security/ I think if academic integrity is huge issue, perhaps we should adopt some formal rules for all tests, rather than being at the whims of different professors, or universities. Essentially we need some kind of check and balance before we try to discredit students on a metric like the one being described this article. The GRE's as a specific example have a high degree of trust and a fairly proven track record for being secure and preventing cheating. It might not be that much of stretch to apply whatever they seem to be doing to combat academic integrity issues. I think I rambled a bit, but I hope that made sense
- bodyfour 12y agoI agree -- visually judging outliers is a pretty poor test of statistical significance. The fact that they sat near each other does give them some weight though. The big problem is that it only works for people who share a fairly unique answer set. In other words, they need to all have a decent number of wrong answers which correlate. What about people at the bottom-right of the graph who had a high correlation simply because they answered nearly all of the questions correctly? Certainly most of them are innocent, but how would we know? It seems this technique can only finger people who cheat and still end up with a mediocre grade, not those who cheat and end up acing the exam.
- xkcd-sucks 12y agoBased on the policies of the two universities at which I've taught, it seems like there's no possible benefit to admitting guilt. The only foolproof way to "convict" someone of cheating is to have (several) people witness/record the incident. If a student accused of cheating categorically denies everything, they're usually in the clear (although faculty will say nasty things in private).
- navait 12y agoBreaking connections to faculty has consequences, namely in letters of recommendation.
- brg 12y agoLetters of recommendation have almost no bearing on life. The only exceptions are for someone headed to graduate school, but at that point they likely have a pool of faculty members from which to choose.
- dubya 12y agoThis varies between schools. At my current school it's fairly straightforward to say "I saw this student looking at X's paper" and show that the answers are more similar than would be expected. Multiply choice would be harder of course, but free response or incorrect math calculations are pretty convincing. Students have recourse, but the appeals process here is not much work for the faculty member making the accusation until maybe the final level.
- dfgsdfgs 12y agoI did my undergrad in this gentleman's university. This author exemplifies the problem with Mac's education: Student aren't cheating on multiple choice tests. Professors too lazy to do their jobs are.
- sago 12y agoWhat is Mac? I didn't get that from the piece, he just started using it.
- quadrature 12y agoIts not just the tests, plagiarism is absolutely rife in Canadian Universities and the institutions are doing very little to combat it.
- CPLX 12y agoToday I learned that "invigilator" is a word. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/invigilate http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/invigilate
- DanAndersen 12y agoA few years ago, I was an ESL teacher at a university in southern China. As an American I remember having a fair amount of confusion when first talking with one of the Chinese teachers at the university, who had been taught with more British English, and kept using the word "invigilate" that I had never heard of.
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- littletimmy 12y agoCheating is a natural consequence of society putting a huge value on grade-point-averages and other dullard measures of achievement. If I had to sit through a lecture room with 200 students (TWO HUNDRED!) and I was absolutely confident that the professor cannot possibly give a shit about my learning in this crowd, I too would cheat.
- pavel_lishin 12y agoWouldn't that only harm you? Wouldn't you only be cheating yourself? I don't understand why your professors' interest in your personal learning would impact your own desire to learn. (Thinking about it a bit more, I can vaguely understand this if it's a required class that you have no actual interest in - an elective you had to take because all others were taken, or if you were retaking a class that you were already very familiar with - but at that point, cheating would be redundant.)
- littletimmy 12y agoI understand the difference between our thoughts. Where we differ is that I think college is not a place of learning. In general, it is a sequence of hoops to sort out the labor force.
- pavel_lishin 12y agoI suppose that in that case, your approach makes sense.
- mannykannot 12y agoI learned a lot of interesting and useful things at college, and so did many of the other students. If your opinion is based on actual attendance at a college, it seems you had an unfortunate experience. If that experience was at a place focused on teaching to multiple-choice examinations, that could explain it.
- littletimmy 12y ago
- speakeron 12y ago"I did put all 6 of them through a bit of an ordeal, though, and at least half of them deserved it." The author sounds like a really nasty piece of work.
- afandian 12y agoHow widespread is multiple choice at university level? I've never come across it.
- jackmaney 12y agoFor exams, it's nearly unheard of in small classes (ie <= 30 or so people), but in large lecture halls with hundreds of students, it's not uncommon (especially for general education large lecture courses).
- ska 12y agoRight, for service courses with lots of sections, the marking load can be pretty high (e.g 1000+ students taking the same course) and the difficulty in maintaining even marking policies both tempt towards scantron and the like. It is limiting, but if you put a lot of work into it you can even design pretty decent multi-part questions that reward partial understanding/success. Mostly people don't put that time in, though, and I've never been a fan of the practice.
- dweinus 12y agoI wonder if the front-back case is the top-most red dot. This would be explained if the front person was innocent and the person behind them copied. Not having the benefit of collusion, they have more shared wrong answers. Also, they have less answers in common overall, which supports the non-collusion theory.
- bildung 12y agoMultiple choice tests simply are a horrible way of assessing knowledge in any non-trivial domain. Instead of wasting time with writing R scripts the author really should grab himself a book about education. Edit: On second thought that's probably worded too harsh, but multiple choice testing for a final exam in biology? There's not the slightest chance the results will correlate with the capabilities of his students at all.
- hashmymustache 12y agoI'm surprised he didn't break it down to probabilities according to answer distributions instead of right vs wrong. For instance, given 2 questions with their answers and the percent of the class that answered for each choice: 1. A is the answer A - 60% B - 20% C - 5% D - 15% 2. C is the answer A - 10% B - 5% C - 70% D - 15% The probability of randomly selecting 2 students that both chose: - A and C (both correct) is 0.1764 - D and B (both wrong) is 0.000056 * Appreciate corrections
- potatoyogurt 12y agoThat doesn't necessarily work because wrong answers can have natural correlations. Let's say you have two questions about finding a slope on an exam. Anyone who thinks that slope is change in x over change in y is going to get both of those questions wrong in the same way, even if those wrong answers are both individually rare. It would be really hard to distinguish between when these correlations are expected and when they're unexpected.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]