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Non-Technological Ways to Combat Cheating?
blackcoot asks: "I'm currently T.A.ing for a required senior level class in algorithms. Having just graded the latest set of homework, I'm amused / sickened (can't make up my mind on that one) at the level of cheating. Slashdot has covered automated cheating detection in the past here and here, but I'm hoping to find some (necessarily nontech) ways of encouraging students to be a bit more honest (or at least a little less spectacularly stupid in how they cheat). I've been reporting the cheating as I've found it to the relevant profs, but it doesn't seem to be having much of an effect. Any suggestions?"
Give them zeros each and every time you find one of them cheating. They can appeal if they think it's unfair.
Just put in an impossible question and see how many get the same answer ..
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Make something up, then don't test for effectiveness. Tell profs that cheating is on the decline.
In the CS course at my uni, most units have one or two major assignments and the exam. The assignments are usually "design an app to do blah, document, discuss design decisions etc". The exam then has a number of questions based upon the assignments.
If you get less than half of the marks for those questions, you get zero for them. Seeing as they usually make up half of the exam (25% of the exam on each assignment), if you don't get 100% for everything else, you fail. This seems to have worked somewhat in stopping people from copying assignments from each other without understanding what's going on (this doesn't necessarily stop the smart lazy students from copying).
Of course, we also have a pretty draconian cheating policy. Any student caught cheating gets a zero and has to resubmit (for a completion mark, the zero stands). Repeat offenders automatically fail the unit.
I suppose the difference between us and other universities is that these policies are enforced (my last semester of undergrad, 8 first year students were failed and the entire student body was informed).
Cheaters go far in the current job market.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I misread the title, and thought we were talking about nano-tech.
I'd come up with a couple of interesting ways to combat cheating with it before I realised my mistake:
1) Have nano-robots floating around in your blood stream (and eyes) taking account of everything you see and write. If they witness you cheating, turn you into grey-goo.
2) As above, but instead of mushing your entire body, just take control of your hands to write "I AM A CHEAT!" all over the paper.
3) Since the above isn't actually possible yet, just *tell* the students that it is, and they've been injected with the "truth or die" serum.
One year, I marked all the coursework for a year and found some ridiculously blatant cheating. So the next year they were informed what happened before (including the 0 mark for all parties involved). I don't remember coming across any cheating when I marked that lot.
So either they got very good at Prolog or very good at hiding their cheating. Either way I don't care as had fewer meetings to attend...
as you wont EVER know if it is them or their roommate who the other bought a sixpack for(well, maybe from the beer stains)..
the whole point of homework is to LEARN things so you can pass the exam(ok, not just for passing the exam but you get the point), if you make it possible to finish the course without exam you will end up with people who are totally clueless about the subject getting passed. one year on the c++ course over here no exam was necessary at all, all you had to do was a very bitchy, for most people for various reasons, practice assigment and be at every lecture and write down basically everything the prof said and then return those notes. so you got through by just copying everything the prof said(no understanding necessary as long as you were willing to go there twice a week and copy whatever slides he showed) and by knowing some poor soul who was willing to code it for food(the prof really sucked too, and wasn't here for another year).
anyways, have sufficiently bitchy exams and you may catch the cheaters. of course if you just except them to report in lots of written work weekly you might just be screwed if you don't have enough time.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
In my experience, one thing that works is to make sure students care about the work they produce.
When they think that the quality and honesty of the work is is important to them, and to others they tend not to cheat.
One way is that we give them problems that we ourselves not fully understand, and we clearly tell them so. You present them with a challenge saying "Ok, here is this tough problem. We (the reseach group) dont quite get it yet. Maybe you will see the light and can help us get it further. If your solution/idea it is particullarly good, we will make you a coauthor on the paper on the toppic"
Obviously, this requires that you do have such a toppic. But inventing a tough or next to impossible problem is usually not a problem.
Anohter way we use is to introduce a element of competition into assignments. Make them make competing designs/solution and invite an industry/scientific expert to evaluate and judge the solutions during a workshop/panel discussion. Works wonders for us.
Caveat: this experience comes from teaching Environmental Science and Sustainability, not computer related stufff, but is should port finely to CS as well.
If you want more info/literature on the topic of chalenging education, just mention it.
Complexity is a measure of our ignorance...
If the work is not graded, there's no incentive to cheat. So don't grade the work. You'll eliminate cheating that way, and you can focus on actually educating students, rather than ranking them.
:(
Of course, with education having little to do with education, I doubt this is possible.
Here's something I've used while I was a TA. You could say it is a little ugly, but it worked like a charm.
After every assignment in which I have detected cheating, I have published a note (to the course email list) that went something like that:
During the checking of your submissions, some instances of cheating (copying) were detected. In all such cases, both sides (the copier and the source) will be graded zero, unless you approach me and let me know who really solved the assignment, and who copied. In this case, only the cheater will be graded zero; the source will be given his fair grade.
It worked. It worked like a charm. For every submission that I suspected was a copy of somebody else's work, one of the students came up and admitted cheating (they were often pressed to do that by their friends). They had the most pathetic excuses, of course, but that's beside the matter. The bonus part is, many students approached me and admitted cheatings that I didn't detect.
- Tal Cohen
As someone who teached for 3-4 years, I faced the same difficulty. So, my options were, basically:
1. grade the students based on practical, speed tests (not essays or homeworks). What is concept? How would you use it in case? What is the error hidden in lot of code here?
2. grade the students based on my subjective perception of how much each one absorbed. pop quiz everyday, 3 or 4 students a day, noting my remarks on their answers. keep them interested.
3. to smooth 2, throw in some auto-evaluation.
Hope I have helped.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
And you can't get out of the game.
This is an area where you would be well advised to be VERY careful, and
I suspect that the LESS automatic [ergo: more personal] your methods of
detecting and dealing with cheating, the greater the risk to you.
Two situations, both of which astonished me at the time:
In High School, I always thought of tests about the same way that a Jock
thinks of a Track Meet--Fun and Games with the chance of winning a worthless trophy.
When this one bad-attitude twit with a two-digit I.Q. started whispered requests for answers
during a mid-term, I thought that giving her 100% WRONG answers was a perfect
way of dealing with an insult. Want to guess who got more than TWO HOURS of
major [as in YELLING and ARM-WAVING]from both the Dean of Students and the Vice-Principal?
Not the cheating twit-bitch.
A few years later, Proctoring an Exam as part of my T-A duties, I spotted one of the test-takers
repeatedly peering into a book-bag. A few minutes later, having seen the suspected Crib-sheet,
I confiscated both it and blue book, then quietly ejected the cheater.
Want to guess who very nearly got fired?
Thelma, I'm not making ANY deals.
I agree with kicking students out of class. If college is supposed to prepare you for the "Real World" (where taking another employees work and calling it your own is A Bad Thing) then lets do that. I agree that letting students know the consequences is important, people cheat because they believe they can do it with impunity.
The biggest problem with kicking students out of a class is support from your department/school/university/institution. You may care about the quality of students in your class, and maybe your boss cares about the quality of students in his program, but much beyond that the concerns become financial. If you kick a student out that is lost revenue. The institution where I taught there was actually an unwritten policy that 90% of the engineering students in math and physics classes had to pass, meaning that a professor could only fail or kick out 10%. How can you enforce cheating policies (btw, show me a accredited college/univ that does not have failure of a course as punishment for cheating) if you can only enforce them so many times?
I mark first year JAVA in university, and you would be amazed with the people who cheat on the simplest of programs. All we do is give them -100% on the assignment, which means 0 on 2 assignments for the first time and the second time they cheat, they are kicked out of the course. Plain and simle.
also, in another course, if you get less than 50% on yer assignments, or 40% on the midterm or 50% on the final you fail. No matter what.
Cheers
while(1) { fork(); };
If n people submit assignments that are largely the same, divide score by n.
One thing you should do is make sure that they know you've been where they are now - and that means you know all the tricks. Even better if you can give them some examples of what you'd expect them to do, and tell them that you will check. Don't rely on the "we have this magical software that can detect cheating" trick - students don't believe it until you prove thta it can do it (I didn't believe the CS department work for had one when I was an undergrad, until I graduated and saw it from the other side)
If there's some way you can call cheaters out in front of the whole group, even better - for example, half way through a lab say things like "Oh, and can suchabody, thingummy and wossname stand up and tell everyone how they cheated on the last exercise please" (just make damn sure you know they did beforehand though!)
And tell them that is they are caught cheating once, they get zero for the exercise and if they are caught twice, they get zero for the course. And a permanent record of the cheat.
and the assignments are sufficiently varied, i recommend the following: if any two assignments are identical but incorrect, they are marked 0. this permits collaboration, but each student must understand the result to make sure it is correct. my best high school teacher did this and we collaborated, but it helped rather than hindered our learning.
I'm assuming we're talking about cheating on take home assignments, right? Why bother grading them? I always like the approach taken by most of my electronics professors...homework really meant nothing, grade wise. Some of them would collect it, mark it, and hand it back with a grade, but it only counted for something like 10% of your final grade. Any test was worth more than every homework assignment, and it was much, much harder to cheat on a test.
I've never quite understood homework grading...in HS, sure, make them do work, but in college it should be a matter of learning the subject, *practicing* at home, then being tested on how well you've absorbed and interprete the knowledge. Granted, due to class period time constraints you should probably have a test every 3-5 weeks so that you can properly test their knowledge.
--trb
If you mean turning in the same copy of the homework, then report it to the prof/dept/university and let them deal with it. Most places take a very dim view of cheating and the consequences can be very harsh.
If you mean turning in homework that has similar answers, then that's, IMO, different. Especially at that high level, you can't honestly expect all the students to work completely alone on all the homework. I know I sure worked with my friends trying to figure out the solutions to harder problems. Now, I always wrote it all up in my own words after I understood the solution. If working with peers to determine and understand the solution to a *homework* problem is cheating, then I guess I was a cheater. Considering that most places encourage students to form study groups, I think it's hypocritical of them to not expect the members of those same groups to help each other. That doesn't mean writing the solution for each other, but to help them understand. Of course, this is highly variable for the type of work for each class, but the senior level algorithms class in this case probably has a lot of thinking and writing/explaining as part of the homework.
As a TA, it's part of your job to distinguish between the two. Yes, it's hard and subjective, but that's part of the job. Fortunately, back in my TA days, I didn't have to worry about that (grading Freshman labs wasn't that hard, though I did have to grade the homework for one sememster)
As for detecting the cheating, the only low tech thing you have is that great pattern matching device sitting on top of your neck. If you think you've seen the same answer before, chances are you probably have. Go back and find the similar paper. Compare the answers -- quality, correctness, writing style, grammar, spelling, etc. Keep in mind that the students may just have been working together, and not copying one another. Use your best judgement. Maybe you just need to talk to the students yourself first. Let them know what you find unacceptable.
Always remember, however, that the point is to get the students to learn. If they can accomplish that through working through the problems together, then why stop that? All you want to stop is one person doing the work and the rest copying (because there's very little learning going on on the copiers' parts).
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
every time you teach the course, invent a completely new and original set of problems, and assign them individually to students. Use a non standard language (such as Fortran 95 - yes - ) hard to install on home computers, and watch the students as they work in your computer lab, so they cannot get outside help from people who code C++ for food (or wannabe boyfriends of cute students).
Only problem with this approach : one has to be extremely creative...you can get away with, say, three set of twelve assignments which you mix and rotate every semester.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Try this: The new policy is, when you catch a cheater, the person who cheats will not be allowed to have any work graded (getting all zeros on every assignment and test) until the cheated work is re-completed by the student.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I've been quite suprised at the leniency described in some of the answers here. In both high school and university, the vast majority of our marks were earned through examination, exam desks were always set up at least a metre away from their nearest neigbour with several invigilators patrolling up and down the aisles, and it was made VERY clear (in Uni especially) that cheating (on exams or plagiarism on essays) could not only cause you to fail the course, but also be ejected from the institution, and even have earlier qualifications from the same exam board revoked.
That said, I don't recall that happening to anyone I knew, but I do remember seeing someone dragged to the front of the exam hall and being loudly chastised by the invigilator for saying 'hi' to a friend as he sat down at his desk. The non-communication rule was very stricty enforced in exams.
Like you suggest, go as low tech as possible. No computers.
Ideally, you'd keep everything in your head and then just verbalize in front of your students. Failing that, find a typewriter and a mimeograph machine. (Do they still make mimeographs? Dunno, but there's always the office copier).
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Does a LART count as Non-Technological? ;-)
Denken hilft.
Just let the cheaters go on their merry way. Your prof doesn't want to deal with it.. Your school doesn't want to deal with it.. And if it ever went to a judicial review thingy, you won't want to deal with it.
Besides, people who cheat in these classes will just go on to be your managers and bosses eventually (assuming you leave academia)... Move along people, nothing more to see here.
I know a lot of people have suggested zeros. I had a prof who would dish out negative points on an assignment if you were caught cheating. So you could get -20 points on a 100 point assignment.
But in the same class, we had a discussion board where people could talk about problems in the open. Maybe they won't be able to post specific pieces of code (from their homework), but at least people will have a forum to post questions where everyone can read them and help each other.
One: give each student a different assignment. This is really great if, for instance, you know the students well enough to assign each the project they need to round out their education.
:w
Two: assign the whole class one project, something that a smaller number can't complete. This method reflects what I like to call "the real world".
Find some really good (and trustworthy) students. Ask them to do you a favour: Have them write the exam early, and then go in and "write" the exam again with everyone else -- except writing bogus answers.
It won't stop people from bringing notes into the exam with them -- you should have other ways of stopping that -- but it will have a good chance of catching people who "casually cheat", i.e., look over someone's shoulder and copy answers.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Depending on the school's policy, it might not even be your place to do anything about it.
Some slashdotters have gone to extremes and mentioned giving both parties big fat 0's. But is this really the right thing to do? What if they happened to reach a spectacularly similar solution by coincidence? Do you wish to defend and testify in a review committee session?
The reason that it may appear as if your prof isn't doing anything could be that it's not his place to decide anything about it either!
Surprisingly enough, schools now usually have committees that deal with this. Your best bet is to continue to give them marks as if they haven't been cheating, but continue to make thorough notes regarding those people that you suspect are cheating. You should then review these findings with your professor, and encourage him to contact the proper academic conduct review board of the school.
This is called proper proceedure. You should read your school's guidelines and your TA contract. Vigilante behavior is not what we want to teach, both to the students and to you, the TA.
Just my two cents.
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*beware the cute-bunny virus
Not entirely non-technical...and a little more work for you.
For exercises that involve a bunch of questions being answered, you need to ensure that each person only has to answer a subset of the questions. The plan is that they can't simply copy one person's answers, they have to find enough people to 'collect the whole set', which is a little harder.
Generating a list of variations on which person should answer is easy (think binary). Assign each person a variation number along with an assignment (write this down!) and tell them what questions they need to answer. You can do this by telling them their numbers and giving everyone a list of what numbers mean what question - but don't give everyone a list of what names correspond to which number! (otherwise they can figure out easily who's answered each question)
The outcome is you will always be marking, say, 4 questions from the 8 you set. If you do this for each exercise, vary the variation number assigned to each student, so that the people they copy from would have to change.
This approach isn't original, but its more used for an automated multiple-choice approach rather than essay questions and a pencil-and-paper scheme. The downside is you would need to set more questions - but an exercise where you set 8 questions and a student does 4 gives 35 variations, enough for a typical high school class (here at least!).
If you are only setting a single question in each homework exercise, here's a variation: instead of letting each student answer 4 from 8 on an individual exercise, over the course of 8 exercises, only some of the students answer each exercise, so that in the end each has done 4. In this way you can deal with single essays.
make them use GPL or sommat on their code, that way they need to document what portions they copied. Then grade them on the portions they actually did them selves.
Ie copied the core algo, but wrote the rest 25% or less
copied the algo, but rewoked it to be more efficient
75 or what ever
-- tim
TKrabec Pahh
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Easy -- flunk them, suspend them, expel them.
After they've been through 2 or 3 schools, maybe they'll start to get the picture.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
The EE department at my Uni (I was a Science student) used "personalised" assignments in many subjects... The questions were all set up so that one of the inputs to the problem was your student number, last name, initials, or some other personally linked detail.
Therefore, while students could still work together to some extent, each assignment had to be "solved" individually.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
However, as much as I wish they'd all fall off the edge of the earth, it takes a lot of true positives to make up for just one false positive. I know several people who've been wrongfully accussed of cheating. It's not pleasant, for the obvious reasons, and apart from alienating the accussed from the accussors - often their lecturers & tutors - it can have dramatic long term effects. I've seen one person who was very intelligent, but did the usual thing - didn't turn up to lectures, didn't bother doing homework if they were busy doing their own thing, etc. When they got near perfect marks on the exam, they "had to be cheating". They couldn't defend themselves through prior work, since they hadn't submitted any, so even though they were never formally punished - no hard evidence - they became completely switched off to all school work. Didn't bother turning up to exams, in the end, and that was the end of that.
Granted, it's not often that people are accussed of cheating simply because they do well, but it does happen. I don't want to be dramatic and say it "ruins peoples lives", but a certain someone would be doing a heck of a lot better if it weren't for that one wrong accusation.
Working together is great, as long as everyone comes away understanding the answers.
In the undergrad algorithms class at CMU some of the assignments are "presentations," where a group of students solves problems together, then presents the answers in front of a professor or TA. At the time of the presentation, the TA picks the question that a student will answer randomly, so that it's in his interest (and his group's interest) to understand the answer to each question.
This is actually *easier* than grading (at least, it's more interesting), and I think it makes cheating pretty much impossible.
All you have to do is provide her the right kind of poisonous beans. If she's cheating, she'll eat them all at once and die of the poison. If she's innocent, she'll eat them one at a time and vomit them out. Yes, the right beans are a suspicious spouse's best friend ;-)
Do the powers that be in CS departments frown on the GPL, too? I don't get it. As a computer scientist, you're supposed to solve problems, and solve them in the most efficient manner possible. I think sharing code counts as efficient. That terminator was just being systematic.
When you think there's a need for a program, what's the first thing you do? I always look to see if someone's done it first. Even if you do have to start from square one, examining other peoples' work can make your first implementation that much more forward-thinking. My university's CS department is also very picky about copying--and people wonder why "not built here" syndrome is a big problem. I think our IS department has a much more realistic point of view.
Perhaps the key problem you're having is not "cheating" per se, but rather the students breezing over the assignments without giving it a second thought. What my professor does is give us assignments where we can use every resource at our disposal to solve the problem, provided that we understand (and can more or less explain) the code we use. Assignments are turned in individually or in groups, and then validation procedures are performed. This is in the form of a brief quiz or in the more complex cases, an oral exam. I'm told that the latter is a very good measure of telling whether students actually understand the material or not. You do of course have to take into account that they might be nervous and lock up, but apparently the system seems to work. I can get more details if you want to give it a shot.
The local policy here is to give -100% and a letter to the dean. If you are caught a second time, you are on probation. A third and you are kicked out.
The result is somewhat less cheating but also quite interestingly more intelligent cheating. The copier makes an effort to understand the solution of the copee and rapidly translate it into his own words.
Having experienced university in the US and UK, I can vouch that there's a simple answer that will be popular with the students too: eliminate the incentive to cheat by grading the entire course properly invigilated exams. This is the standard approach in UK universities: yes, you have tutorials and problem sets, but no-one cares about attendance and marks count for nothing. Everything hinges on the exams.
As a result, the lazy students who would otherwise have cheated simply to pass the class, simply don't bother to do the exercises. They fail, deservedly. The students who care but find the exercises difficult just do their best and come to class with partial answers, but with an understanding of what they need to learn; that's a lot more constructive than copying out someone else's answers. They actually learn something. As for the students who find the class a breeze, they don't need to waste their time completing those poxy problems or attending the class, and can instead work on something worthwhile.
I have to say that coming to the US for grad school from the UK was a real culture shock -- it was like going back to junior high. I would have thought that by the time you've completed a college degree, most people would consider you capable of structuring your own learning but no... warning to any british students thinking about US universities: welcome back to weekly homework assignments.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
Here's a trick I've seen in the real world that gets the results you want in short order:
- Tell them teamwork is required (this cuts communication down right off the bat).
- Implement some form of zero-sum grading; e.g., you are going to award N points for each problem / assignment, distributed among the correct solvers as you see fit. Make sure they understand the system.
- If you suspect cheating, give half the points to the cheater (the one who you think copied, not the source) and divide the reduced remander among the rest of the students.
- Act like you don't notice when the cheaters fail to show up for the next few classes, or limp, etc.
It works best if their livelyhood is on the line, but the effect should be sufficent even with grades.-- MarkusQ
- People who cheated on most assignments
- Questions that many people cheated on
For the people who cheat on many assignments, often turning in identical, alpha-renamed problem sets, I think the best solution is to give them a Zero and send them to whichever judicial administration your school has in place for academic integrity violations. Those people probably don't want to be in a CS course in the first place, or they have other priorities (Sports, Social life, etc.), or maybe they just have no faith in their ability to pass on their own and just need more tutoring. If you can make it less worth their time to cheat than to just not take the class at all, hopefully those people will take another class that they might be more interested in.But I've seen questions that honest/smart students cheat on. I've heard of people in the labs shouting answers across the room. The questions that caused this kind of cheating tended to be trial-and-error questions with one line solutions. In any class students are going to work together, and I think it's wonderful if they can help each other understand what's going on.
So to avoid cheating, the best way is to create problems where the understanding is separated from the answer. This way students that just get the answer really miss out on something that the students who solved it honestly get.
UCR makes us paranoid about cheating. When they catch someone cheating, the person gets an F in the course and the choice of going to a seminar, or getting suspended for a quarter. If the person chooses to fight it, I believe he/she will be suspended for a year if the person can't prove that there wasn't cheating.
To catch cheating, they use MOSS, and an anonymous cheating report form
If you cheat twice, you're likely to get suspended for a year or get expelled.
The policy on academic dishonesty
So don't rely on exercises from the book, or perhaps modify them enough so that the answer changes substantially. Even rewording them slightly will fool clueless students.
It sounds like the professor doesn't care enough to take some sort of (disciplinary) action on the student. Being a TA and not being the one who ultimately determines if the student passes or fails, one can only do so much. So it sounds like it's really the professor's fault for not taking action when you've clearly made it obvious that this is happening.
"Cheating" is a *good* thing. Why would you
deprive future software engineers of what might
be their *only* opportunity to work as a team
in a realistic simulation of a workplace environment
before their graduation?
If you wanted to make things more realistic, you
would let everyone google for their test answers,
give 'A's to your friends, and randomly pick
fat people to fail.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I'm hoping to find some (necessarily nontech) ways of encouraging students to be a bit more honest
By this time of their lives, it's a bit late.
Morals and ethics are best instilled at an earlier age and society has relies fundamentally on parents to do this (even if parents don't do it, leave it to others, etc.) People can argue for eternity whether society ought to or is obligated to pick up or replace what incompetent parents leave as a legacy.
But this is an institution of higher learning. These people ought to have a clue and be able to put two and two together.
That is , a word to the wise suffices.
The prof should mention once in class that there have been cases where homeworks bore a striking similarity and that he hopes everyone will try to get the maximum learning benefit from doing their homework as independently as possible and that he and the T.A.'s have office hours if anyone is having particular problems. Competent students that simply let others crib without learning are not doing the cheater any favors, any more than buying an alcoholic a drink does that person any favors.
If someone wants to hang themselves and their career by cheating, they've already got enough rope to do it.
When I was an undergrad there was an honor system that included exams which were:
- take-home,
- finite-time,
- closed-book.
and was a much more pleasant environment than the kind of proctored exams that are more common. I'm sure that some cheating occurred, but I still managed to graduate with a tolerable GPA without cheating.By comparison, some early coursework in grad school was really ugly. I had to roll out of bed early to go take some stupid scheduled final exam with 40 other sweating, anxious students at the same time. Until you've experienced how good things can be you don't realize just how palpable the environment of no-trust and no-respect really is. It sucks, and it's not worth sacrificing to punish a few cheaters that will hurt themselves in the long run.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
At my university, two T.A.'s tried novel approaches that seemed to work well. The first printed out the university's academic dishonesty policy and stapled it to the front of the assignments of people he knew or strongly suspected of cheating. Cheating took a dramatic nosedive.
The other person actually began academic dishonesty proceedings against the first poor sod she caught. I don't know if they were eventually dropped, but everyone in the class got the picture that this particular T.A. didn't mess around.
Either way cheating dropped, although I don't know if the quality of work improved any.
OK, so setting 20 sets of questions for 20 people is a bit over the top but set four sets of questions that test the same knowledge.
If there are two or more people who you suspect of cheating/copying, give them both a zero (of course, it helps if you've previously warned the students that copying will be rewarded with a zero mark) and have them complete different sets of questions the next time around.
If there's still copying going on with the second homework assignment then it should be easier to detect who did the work and who did the copying, as you've already know who your likely cheats are. Again, give the cheat a zero, and the person they copied from a provisional zero too. Make it clear to both that any other instance of suspected copying will result in zero for the whole set of homework assignments. (Or, if that sounds like too much of a discouragement for them to actually bother learning anything, threaten to halve their marks for the year.)
What you want to get is a situation where there's not only no reward for the copiers but an actual disincentive for people to let others copy their work. If you make it clear that cheating will harm rather than help their grades and if you punish the people who allow the copying to go on as much as the copiers then the problem will soon disappear.
It's a bit like fighting a disease. You can either let the disease spread and treat the symptoms every time they occur, or you can save yourself a lot of work by curing it at the source and not ever have to worry about it again.
Regardless of what approach you take, good luck.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
"both excessive and public humiliation"
The fact that you don't get that, makes me worry that you ever attempted to teach teenagers in the first place. The fact that an adult role model can lead a classroom with an attitude of calling their students 'twit-bitches' with low IQs, is abusively stunning. Even when upper administrators tried to set you straight, your high and mighty attitude wouldn't let you see just how demoralizing you were. So you moved into higher ed where there were less constraints and you could bully freely - well then, bully for you!
I graduated in 1997, and was told by the director of the department I worked for that they would be creating a full time position for me, but that it would take some time... So I stayed through the summer, and when the job finally got posted, I was told by my manager that the director had told her that she was not to even interview me for the job.
Who did they hire instead? Someone who kept asking to copy off of me in class. Hell, one of the projects that he cited in his portfolio was actually based on a webpage that a former employee and I had done, and he took the basic content, and added a few pictures to the top of it.
What's he doing now? He's now a director. [Although the IT department is no longer headed by a director, there's now an Executive Director and CIO above that]
And the most insulting part of this whole story? We had one week overlap between his first day, and my last day... and I was told to train him. If you're going to put someone in a job that was supposedly created for me, you'd think they'd have known more than me, not the opposite, wouldn't you?
Managers and the like go very far in taking credit for other people's work and ideas.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Oral tests. No one dares cheat if they know there's an oral test coming up.
I've had this sig for three days.
I've always found that I was much more motivated to do the work, and learned more from the process, if I had the ability to work with someone else--whether the policy allowed it or not.
Working alone is prone to getting stuck at one place and not being able to move on, whereas when you work with a partner (or partners), there's a potential for a different perspective, which almost always helps. I found that I learned a lot simply from hearing a different take on the problem (usually, after getting stuck in solving it :) as opposed to spending hours agonyzing over a stumbling point and possibly not really advancing from it, thus learning very little from the assignment. Furthermore, many people learn a lot by just discussing the problem, as it forces them to think along paths their brains would not take if they were left to themselves; many things fall into their place and sink in much better in this fashion (for example, how many of you have come up with an answer to a tough question while explaining your question to a friend?). And let's be realistic, in the real world, many things are done collaboratively and are beyond any single person.
A number of my CS classes at Cornell had a very simple policy, which has worked remarkably well (and I've seen this both as a student and a TA). The policy was, roughly:
1. You are allowed to discuss the problem with others
2. You have to give credit to the people you discussed the problem with (write down their names on your assignment)
3. Everyone has to do their own writeup
This policy had the benefits of letting people bounce ideas off of each other, to learn from others, to pick up things they wouldn't otherwise pick up. At the same time, requiring everyone to do their own writeup ensured that the people understood the solutions well enough to be able to formulate them well on paper--not an easy task if you're just trying to blindly copy parts of a solution without understanding it.
What I saw with that policy in place was that people tended to form stable study groups, the overall results were pretty good (yet sometimes people in the same study group might have rather different explanations of the same things!), and also, in the rare cases of cheating, the cheating was relatively obvious and easy to spot.
Here's a radical notion: legalize it.
I'm serious: in the spirit of "pair programming" and "egoless programming", make "cheating" or collaboration permissible. Just point out that the submissions had better not look identical, and make them disclose who they're collaborating with. If you think there are one or two students who are supplying the whole group, cut them out and give then different assignments.
I've worked with this kind of notion both as a student and as a professor, and I'm convinced that it actually leads to overall better learning -- as well as letting me relax and not get all het up about it.
"I hereby declare on my word of honor, that I have neither given nor received help with this work." Antiquated, I know. Maybe a stern lecture on the university's cheating policy, complete with knowing and humiliating smirks at the suspects, would do a better job.
I've wondered for years, though, what good it does once you're past fractions, to assign graded homework that just consists of a series of written examples or problems to be solved. Life doesn't work that way, and the people who're up to their necks in real life situations are solving problems by whatever means they can.
I took a fairly rigorous exam quite some time ago for a then-important industry certification, and it was "open book." The reasoning was that when I got back to the real world, I'd have access to the book to solve my problems. That turned the certification testing into an interesting learning process rather than a frantic rush to memorize topics. I delude myself that the certification perhaps meant more than some others.
Try putting them on teams and giving each team a problem.
Anne
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
Then report the professors to the university's academic standards board. If the people with the authority to punish wrongdoing tolerate this dishonesty, then *they* are a large part of the problem.
Although I generally agree that at college level, the students are old enough to know right from wrong, they are learning important life lessons while at University, and one of those needs to be "Cheat, and you lose". The others are the answers to the questions "How much can I drink before I fall down?", and "Is that it?"
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
Kick them out for cheating, and go very easy on the ones you can't detect any cheating from.
The problem here is that there is no reward for honest behaviour. Yea, yea, a degree is the reward. But if you're good at cheating, you get that *plus* you have a chance to get top marks in your class and graduate with "honours" *plus* you get to concentrate on the stuff you're actually interested in learning. Once you learn that many people don't actually want to be in the class you're teaching, you'll realize that cheating is often a way for them to make time for what they consider to be more important classes or activities.
In every University I've been to (quite a few) and every College and University I've heard about, the honest ones are effectively punished for being honest. If you can cheat and get away with it, you'll often get far better grades than if you had been honest, done the 45+ hours of readings, completed the 30 hours of time in front of your computer, performed the 30+hours of library research, and had no time left-over to do your laundry, cook your own meals, or basically attend to your own personal hygiene.
It's bullshit. Often the only way to get through a particularly difficult course is to collaborate with friends, which itself is considered cheating. I mean, when you get out of University, do you really think your average employer is going to fire you for talking to your programmer friends about a particular problem? Your colleagues? The people sitting next to your cubicle?
Besides all that, most Universities have strict anti-cheating policies and kick out students who cheat. Why doesn't yours?
It is the professor's problem. If the instructor doesn't have a zero tolerance policy, then you're screwed.
I just started taking classes again, and one of my profs stated that any cheating would result in an immediate F for the course. He claimed that at least once a year he has a student in his office crying after being caught. He always states this policy on day 1 so that there is no surprise. I respect that, and wish that more faculty weren't such candy asses about enforcing academic accountability.
The middle mind speaks!
Look, in an algorithms class, there's no good reason to be monitoring students for copying. They are (or should be) taking the class to learn. If they decide to copy other people instead of figuring out how to do things on their own, then they're wasting their own money.
A professor I had in university (for an algorithms class, no less) had this attitude: make the tests worth a lot, and make them tough. Students who copied homework will fail, and the problem corrects itself.
Hopefully, the professors you speak of have the same philosophy. As a grader, I believe your responsibility is to decide whether the questions were answered correctly, and perhaps report blatant plagiarism to the professors the students are writing for. Policing papers for copying is a waste of your time, and demeaning to students, anyway.
Don't give them zeroes, just throw the test away. Nobody takes roll...
"Professor, I don't remember this guy being there. We need to look into our attendance problems."
That is the most low tech approach. No accounting, your word against theirs. No dean in the world would bust your balls for throwing away the tests of cheaters.
Not to sound old fashioned, but when I was in school, cheaters were expelled without remorse or question. Busted=end of academic career.
Just make sure they aren't someone important's miscreant. It would suck to find out that one of them happened to be the dean's son.
l8,
AC
True story:
My wife was student-teaching a biology in a senior high school some years back. Students were supposed to work independently and write up their lab notes individually.
To cut to the chase, here's what my wife said to a student:
"OK, so you copied your lab notes. That was bad enough. But a carbon copy? What were you thinking?
And then to put them in my in-basket with the original directly on top of the carbon?"
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I personally give the cheaters extra credit for the best trolls posted on /.
It's amazing how motivated a cheater can be
Personal anecdote: I once caught somebody copying my test answers, so I began deliberately marking them incorrectly, every single question. I pretended to check my work while he turned his test in. As he returned to his seat, he couldn't help seeing me furiously erase my answers and reworking the entire test. I just smiled at him.
There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Some dickhead in my programming class copied my project when I left the lab to go to the can. I had no idea until I got an F on the project. Three trials, and four months later (long after the course was over) I was finally vindicated even though the cheater kept repeating the fact that I had no prior knowledge and explained exactly how he stole my project. So before you go on about failing people without telling them, just make sure that both parties were in on it.
I did both my BS and MS at UNC-Chapel Hill, where there is a fairly strict honor code. Basically, if you're caught cheating, you flunk the course and are suspended for at least one semester.
The basic message, at least in the Computer Science Department was to give credit to others. Most professors didn't care if you worked in groups on assignments; in fact, it was strongly encouraged in many classes. You generally had to turn in your own work, and it had to be your own work.
For example, the group would work a problem on the whiteboard and everyone would take notes. Then, you'd have to go home and write it up.
On the first page of every assignment, you had to sign an "Honor Pledge" that went like, "On my honor, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment." I always added an additional line such as, "I worked with, helped, or non-trivially discussed this assignment with: ". In this way, I acknowledged that the work I was turning in was my own, but I was giving credit to those whom I had helped or who had helped me.
So the two things I would suggest for you to take to your students or administration are:
1. Enforce very strict/harsh penalties for cheating (an F in the class or at least on the project; other disciplinary action).
2. Encourage students to give credit to those who help them or whom they help.
(2) is in the spirit of academic collaboration -- you give credit to all the contributors on a project, paper, etc., whether it's by listing them as an author, by citing them in your bibliography, or in a "Special Thanks To..." paragraph.
One thing to remember though, is that cheating will catch up to the cheaters eventually. They won't have learned the material and, in the end, they will get fired, won't be able to get jobs, or will flunk the exam or subsequent classes, etc. They'll get their just deserts in the end.
Another trick is to ask the student to explain his/her answer to you. If they can't explain it, and it looks too similar to another solution, then you have evidence that they cheated. Give all of them an F (unless they credited their sources...) and let the professor sort it out.
Well what happens with people who copy ?... Well homework was worth 10-20% of the grade, tests 50-60% (labs the rest) so if you weren't doing/understanding the homework - you flunked the test
Is the purpose of the homework to really show that I know how to type in some silly answer - or is it about working towards a demonstrated mastery of the skill. If it is the former - you are probably wasting your students time. If it is the latter - change the architected behavior of what cheating is (make the students admit who they are studying with, ask homework problems knowing about group behavior, whatever) you will be much more effective as a T.A.
Note - I know you probably have almost zero influence over the homework sets, how they are graded, whatever as a T.A. But sometime you might actually be teaching a class and can take these points into consideration
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
In college I had a professor that graded assignments but didn't count them toward you grade. There was no incentive to cheat and you could learn from your mistakes. Exams were your whole grade. I know this approach is possible, this was a math class and relates very well to the manner in which algorithms are normally taught.
When I was teaching I did it differently, 80% of the grade was in-class quizzes and tests I proctored. The remaining %20 were programs. And I stated at the begining of class, if they look alike you and the person you cheated from get 0 and I'll probably fail you for the semester.
Both techniques produced very low instances of cheating by taking away the incentive. Risk vs reward is somthing most students understand.
BOFH, My model for being a sysadmin :)
You can also get rid of some of the easy opportunities for cheating, without making your class into a prison camp. For instance, I just handed out a take-home test in my physics class, which is due Tuesday. I basically have to trust them not to cheat. However, I also didn't hand out the test until the end of class today, because there's no point in making it easy to cheat. I also don't make every test a take-home test, just one or two.
Find free books.
I am a high-school student, and am concurrently enrolled in pre-calculus and ap calculus at my highschool, as well as quasiconformal geometry at a local university. In the two high-school classes homework is required. In pre-calculus I cheat regularly (from the teachers edition), everyone knows it; in calculus, however, I do all homework, own my own. The difference: I already know the pre-calculus, but calculus is challenging, I truely benefit from doing the work. In the quasiconformal geometry class, homework is assigned every time we meet, and the solutions are always reviewed. The homework, however, is completely optional, yet every person in the class does it. Yes, we work together, it is often incredibly difficult, and sometimes several of us have identical solutions. On those rare occasions that one of us is completely comfortable with a topic, we can skip the homework.
My point is thus: require homework in a math/science/cs course is rarely a good idea. Assign homework, but don't require it; that will eliminate most cheating. Students should known if they need to practice something, and in general will do the work _if it benifits them_. As for cheating, allow collaboration, and the tests will punish those who do not learn for themselves.
I have to comment here.
I cheated on more than one assignment while getting my cs degree. That is, if you include collaborating, trading, or circumventing the problem. Certainly I cheated when I was supposed to do the assignments by myself.
Hey, guess what -- these are exactly the skills required that landed me my current, very sweet job.
Besides, when some lame-ass prof hands out a 20hr assignment that's 1% of your grade, but you have to complete all your assignments to pass, that's just asinine. The solution? Collaborate with others. Or trade assignments on and off with others. Or, just get the solution from one of the TA's who left their user home directory unguarded. Whatever.
I say, cheat. Just be smart enough to learn what you need to learn and get away with it. Often that taught me a lot more than doing the assignments themselves.
"You disturb me to the point of insanity. There. I am insane now." - The Sprockets
It would be far better to have a test with a variety of shorter questions in a variety of difficulty levels (ie.. easy, medium, hard). Sometimes people just need a warm-up problem or two to gear up for the more difficult stuff. Throwing an impossible question at someone doesn't test them on what they know... it just tells you they either can or can't do that impossible question. The ones that can't will resort to anything like cheating... and then justify it to themselves because the test was too hard. Make the test so even the people that don't recall as much can still score some points for what they do know... they may still get a C or a D but they'll at least have the chance to show they learned something with an opportunity for improvement in the future. (it's hard to improve one's average with a sub 50% score on a major exam). People are industrious when it comes to solving problems in any situation... if they "need" to succeed, they will do it somehow. Make it worth their time not to cheat.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
As a former student, I would have to say that the actual punishment is of little conserquence, the real question is how easy is it to get away with.
The best techniques for stopping cheating were:
a) A confirmation test, that may not actually be graded, but the test result were required to corralate with the assignment mark.
b) Where computer based submission was required, been told that the computer automaitically compared all submissions for signs of cheating (weather this was true or not, didnt really matter)
c) Stories of what happened to the person who cheated last year.
What always amazed me was the lengths people would go to to cheat, often takaing far more effort than actually passing. Attempting to adjust someones elses code, so it looks different, then spending hours trying to solve the nwe bugs in the altered code. Or spending hours to break through security or whatever to gain a copy of someone elses work.
I believe the grandparent said put in "an" impossible question.
That would be like a really really hard one, in a good mixture. Not just one really really hard one. If people cheat on a single problem in an otherwise reasonable test and justify it, they still suck and should be punished.
For the impossible problem scenario to work it does not even need to have any points associated with it. It is just a test to see who copies the answer when they can't do it on their own.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Break their knees.
1 - Try some (the weakest link) comments: Nice try, but your colleague got it first
2 - Different questions for different people (and if they still cheat, see 1 and square it)
3 - Make they do it in front of you (like, you have 10minutes to write a program that shows a calendar...)
how long until
I remember back to first year CS at University of Waterloo (long time ago). We had been instructed to talk to others, to share information, but to leave the pencils down when you do it.
Anyways, it was the last assignment. I get back my assignment, -100%! It was a direct copy of so-and-so. Now, I'd never heard of the other guy, so I went to the TA, toting the text book I had scarfed the answer from.
When I got there, the TA said that the other student had already been in (with a different book/same author) and re-instated the grade.
I learned 2 lessons that day. Cheating gets you BUSTED, and how to attribute your sources. They hadn't told us about that, so I was LUCKY!
As research, you can check out what Waterloo has done to students that appealed the findings over the past 6 years or so.
UW Committee on Student Appeals
Jason PollockFirst, yea confront the people about the cheating on a one-to-one basis. Secondly, give them 0s for sure on the assignment. Third, have surpise quizes worth as much as a homework assignment. Try to make them so if you did the assignment and understood it, not cheated, the quiz should be fairly easy.
Another thing, but could get you and the univ in trouble, would be to read the names of the cheaters in class or post them on the class webpage.
This is a people issue. Make and use a process that is described clearly and mentioned often. Inform everyone of misconduct cases.
Our numbers are going down.
Ralf
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-Bertrand Russel
I suppose this depends on the subject material, but implemented correctly, this may actually make the students learn something. Give out homework assignments that require studying some obscure part of the course's subject matter. Soon after the assignments are turned in, throw a pop quiz at some unpredictable interval on the same obscure material. The students who did the work honestly will be more prepared for the quiz than the ones who just copied. This won't catch cheaters in the act, but it'll help ensure the people who cheat instead of actually learning and using the material won't get decent grades.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
Over the past few years I've seen two principal strategies to deal with cheating prevail in my Comp.Eng program
1. Accept it. In most classes where there were paper-based assignments (think Math, Physics, etc.) our profs would basically say on the first day of class "I know you're all going to work together on these assignments. Fine. But remember that exams arn't done in groups." and would then point out the fact that assignments were only worth ~10%. Thus, we all learned the best way to work as a team, got everything done, and had good sets of notes for the final. Also had the bonus of having to explain each solution to your friends, so you knew much of it inside out by the time exams came.
2. Expect it. At the start of the semester the prof would announce "I don't care where you get your answers from, as long as you cite and reference them." (mainly for programming and design clases). He'd then give us a list of decent sources for programming information/examples. But then all the questions he'd set would be different enough that you could only copy-and-paste parts of the code most often found. Thus, you learn to see what's been done in the past and not to reinvent the wheel, while at the same time having to work with and understand a stranger's code. Which is exactly what working with any downloaded code (think SDKs) is.
Whatever you do, accept that people will work together/cheat. Just find a way to make it not that important.
Cue The Sun...
You could do what my University Prof does, hand out different copies of the assignment. he hands out 4 different assignments, and keeps trackof who he gave them too.. that way its harder for people to cheat
That's the most evil thing I have seen! I love it. I'm gonna do it if he doesn't, even if he does! ;-)
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
On whether an "expected" answer might be the same for a number of people. If the question is impossible, but people are likely to screw up in the same way, then they'll still come out the same.
Of course, if somebody knows that such questions will be asked, a bright soul might just mark "not possible" (which would be the correct answer)
The honor code system at Caltech worked ... it had a
well at minimizing cheating
lot of structural support, though.
Learning how to behave is a really big part. I really don't give a shit if my students learn a lot of the stuff I teach. But I absolutely hate people who don't do as I ask by learning the important stuff that is on the tests. I don't put it there because I like to make up big tests.
Here's a good one. Cheaters can't complete anything to specs becasue they think they don't have to put in all that shit the customer wants.
People who cheat simply can't learn either. If you are stupid enough to live with one or work with one, you deserve what you get. I can guarantee it won't be rich or happy. Sorry about being anon. slashdot is read a lot in my classroom and this was really coarse.
So he didn't stay in place. Somebody saw that he had no talent for his job and promoted him.
:-))
Once he was no longer in the position, did he need the knowledge that he was supposed to have had? Can I guess and say probably not? You need a different skill set for a different job. Maybe he's in charge of wireless squirrel networking now.
So once he got promoted, your issue should have been settled. Don't let it bother you. Since when did somebody in H R have a clue anyway?
What I hate is people who think that life is an analogy for baseball.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
From reading the comment, the twit-bitch was a classmate in high school and not one of the poster's students. I have serious doubts you ever went to public school if you never thought one of the many who just cheat their way through was an idiot/ass/etc.
In the second case, personally, I feel publicly expelling a cheater will do more good -both for them and the rest of the class - than hiding it for them. The students who would get 'emotionally damaged' or some other ridiculous term over such a thing need mental help anyway. Much better to make a lasting impression on the cheater and an example for the rest in order to keep a few more of them in line.
When the penalty for DWI in the USA was pretty wimpy it happened all the time, but now the penalty is total financial and employable destruction
So should I switch from Dance With Intensity to StepMania?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Nope, not cheating - dropping out...
Back when I was taking Bio II in college, it was the "weeding" course - the hard one to pass. The grading for the class was quite simple. 50% for the final, 50% for everything else - NO CURVES
All exams were given in the lecture hall. I don't want to say there was a LOT of cheating going on, but it was blatant. I was running a C, and seriously bummed, because the only people I knew getting B+ or greater were cheating. I decided to drop out, and put in my paperwork to leave
Then came the final, and something happened - the tets was given in small rooms, and folks were watched like hawks. We were also then told that the final would be curved.
Yep, the teacher setup the class! All the cheaters ended up with Fs and Ds because he made it impossible to cheat on the last exam, but they had gotten lazy. Those of us who WORKED, did well (I ended up with a B+ for the class)
The thing is, I had already made a commitment to leave, so it hurt me, even though I did OK. Sigh. I never went back
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
...by exhibiting the rotting corpses of last semester's cheaters at the front of the room.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The Harvey Mudd Honor Code
The honor code works incredibly well here at Mudd. It also makes us happy, because it gives us pretty much free roam of the academic facilities and often results in take-home tests and quizzes. Granted, we're a small school, and it would probably be less effective at a larger school, but it's still worth looking into.
In many of my courses during university, regular homework averaged about 10% of the final mark for the course. Homework was really a small kick to encourage us to keep up with the course material, more than anything else. Big projects, exams, and class participation (where cheating is easier to catch or not applicable) took the lions share of the course mark. We were often encouraged to work together on the assignments - though verbatim copying was not accepted (if caught)!
One system I've seen my university adopting more and more recently is to have multiple versions of exams, say 4 versions, spread out in the exam room. This way, no-one is in view of someone they can cheat from. I mostly see this with 'multiple-guess' exams where they are marked my machines. The best part of this system is that you don't need to change the questions themselves, just the order.
Another tactic I ran into recently was to have assignments with the same questions but different parameters. We even had a simulation where we had to model interactions from the point of view of different actors, with each group being given a different actor to model.
Wow, your reading comprehension suuuuuuucks, and your overwhelming concern for cheaters sucks too.
Let the cheater keep cheating? Possibly let them pass answers to others? Keep an eye on them and not be able to watch for other cheaters?
Cheater. Popped. Game over. A little public humiliation for one of the highest academic sins? GOOD. It might discourage others from cheating, or developing such cheat-friendly attitudes about how students should be treated.
I'm a last-year Engineering student. Instead of studying like hell and knowing the material, you can take advantage of the fact that the professors, are, in general, incredibly lazy.
All you have to do is "cheat" on the assignments by getting old ones, working in groups, or using tools like MATLAB. Your assignments are worth (in my experience) 5-30 percent of the final grade. If you do the same with the labs (20-30 percent), you can have 25-60 percent going into the final.
Then comes the best part: If you memorize an old final, you'll get a great mark. You'll probably do better than if you study the material. Why? The profs tend to keep the same finals (or very similar) finals from year to year, and don't update them when the texts change. In other words, you are often tested on stuff you didn't learn. This was the case with a Math course I took. The midterms (5, worth 20% each) were from when the course was using a different text and covered different material. The ONLY way to pass was to memorize the old tests. Knowing the material presented would net you a failure.
The end result? You can get an A average without learning a thing. I know. I learned the material. As a result, I've got a B- average. My lab marks are about 95%, showing that I do actually know what the hell I'm doing. But without those old tests, I got hosed every time. (Except for the previously mentioned Math course.)
So, what do you do about cheating? There's nothing you can really do. The penalties for cheating aren't severe enough to concern the average student. Worst case, they'll get a zero on the assignment, and chances are, they would have got a zero anyway. They lose nothing! One guy I went to school with wrote notes ON HIS HANDS for every test. The result? One year of "Dean's Vacation."
It's been going on for years and will continue. I'm sure you've cheated in some way. I'll wager that your profs have at least one assignment in their past that had their name, but not their sweat. No offence, but there's probably a reason that they're not in industry.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
My solution: turn cheating into group work! (aka if you can't beat 'em...)
For about the last half of the assignments in the semester, I required students to work in groups of 2-4. They would turn in one paper, and would all receive the same grade. The kicker? Part of their grade (25%) on the assignment was based on a discussion I had with the group. During this discussion, I would ask each of the members of the group a question or two about the code. If a group member couldn't answer the question, they'd all lose points. The questions were moderate enough that if they had spent at least some time working on the concepts covered by the assignment, they could answer them (even if they hadn't done much/any of the original coding).
Some notes about this:
- Students got to choose their own groups. I had a few in-class exercises before the first group assignment, so that people had a chance to get to know each other.
- This took up a _lot_ of class time, but it was waaay worth it. I usually had them work on some sample exam problems while waiting for their group to be called.
- Benefits? The number of students who finished the class went up, I found that I didn't have to re-explain things as often in class, and that in general students' understanding of the concepts went up. Students didn't just get the program to work and say "phew! it works! print it out!", they said "phew! it works! how???"
- Students were initially very reluctant to do group work, but gave me lots of positive feedback after the class was done (and after doing well in follow-on classes).
Anyhow, as far as cheating is concerned, make sure you know the school's policy about cheating and grade review (your College Catalog is a good first place to look).If you're going to start giving zero's to all involved, make sure you (or your prof) has the details of this in whatever handout the students get on the first day. I've got something like this:
Good luck!I'm an associate professor at a community college, I teach two courses, Basic C Programming and Communications/Networking. Both are introductory level courses - C presumes computer knowledge but no programming background, CommNet presumes computer knowledge but no networking background.
There have been numerous instances where I suspected cheaters; the frequency would probably be higher in a more advanced course but I'm still amazed when two students try to turn in what amounts to essentially the same answers, or even the same source code.
In these cases, I have used the "canary trap" with 100% success. That is, every time I suspected cheating, I caught them in the act by distributing slightly altered versions of the assignment. As the parent mentioned, 20 different assignments for 20 students is over the top. All you need is one alternate, for the suspected cheater.
It works thusly: Suppose you notice a pattern in which Student A turns in excellent work from the first assignment, then over time, Student B gradually begins turning in nearly identical work. You suspect that Student B is copying Student A's work, and simply changing variable names, etc.
The trap is to let this continue for awhile, and then, without warning or notice, when you're passing out a lab assignment, hand Student B (the copier) a sheet which has slightly modified specifications. Student A, the source, receives the same assignment as the rest of the class; only Student B gets the unique assignment.
The difference between the standard assignment and the one that Student B receives should be subtle but obvious. For example, consider the following task, handed out to the entire class:
"You are a programmer at a bank, and your manager has requested that you create a program to calculate interest. Your program should ask for the following three values in the speficied order: a) The principal as a float, such as 10000.00; b) The interest rate as a float representing the percentage, such as 10.45 for a loan with 10.45% interest; c) The term of the loan in months as an integer, such as 48. Your program should perform the appropriate calculations and then output the total amount of interest that the loan will incur over its life."
Now, to Student B, you present a lab handout which looks otherwise identical, but switches the specs around a bit:
"You are a programmer at a bank, and your manager has requested that you create a program to calculate interest. Your program should ask for the following three values in the speficied order: a) The principal as a float, such as 10000.00; b) The interest rate as an integer representing the percentage, such as 10 for a loan with 10% interest; c) The term of the loan in months as a float, such as 48.00. Your program should perform the appropriate calculations and then output the total amount of interest that the loan will incur over its life."
The change is so subtle that if Students A and B are really conspiring, it's unlikely that either of them will notice. Student A will code to spec, give his code to Student B, who then does a Find/Replace on some variable names and makes a halfhearted attempt to add his own unique comments.
When Student B turns in his or her assignment and it asks for the interest rate as a float, and the duration of the loan as an integer, they're busted. Alternatively, you can switch the order of the parameters that the program is requring. In this example, switching the order may be too obvious a tipoff. However, if you have an assignment where there are a number of inputs, you can easily swap 2 or 3 of them and see if the suspected cheater gets them in the wrong order.
Like I said, so far this has worked every time. I give the copier a zero on that lab, and the source 50% of the credit he or she earned; along with a note to both of them attached to the grading sheet.
I have never had a repeat cheater. Nor have I ever had any of the guilty parties - source or copier - say a single word to me about it.
I think public embarassment is totally inappropriate in a high school or college environment. The student in question may well have learned her lesson, but did she go home that night and cry herself to sleep? Was she emotionally or physically uncomfortable for the rest of the class sessions that semester? Did the instructor care one way or another?
Humiliation is never a positive catalyst for change, and IMO this becomes more true with age. If you're 5 years old and accidentally piss yourself in front of your kindergarten class, it's no big deal, because you're 5 and you don't really know what the hell's going on anyway. If you're 15 and a high school sophomore, or 18 and a college freshman, you're not only trying to do well in your education, you're trying to build a social network. You're trying to hook up with or impress or at the very least get along with the cute [girls|guys] in your class.
Public embarassment is enemy #1 as you mature, and is a much stiffer penalty than it was back when you were 5. Your kindergarten classmates will never remember that you wet yourself on the see-saw. But every last hottie in 11th grade will remember that you were the Cliff-note copying moron that the teacher made a big joke about. Forever.
Several anecdotes posted here so far have suggested outing the cheaters in front of the class, to "embarass" them into conformity. I disagree with this tactic. In a college environment, the instructor's students are adults. Treat them as such - even if they aren't acting as such - and, chances are, they'll reciprocate.
Ever see Dangerous Minds? It's not just Michelle Pfeiffer playing some bullshit role. It's the way things work. You treat kids with respect, you get respect back. My mom's been in public education for more than 30 years. Trust me, I've heard more than my share of war stories to convince me that the teachers who cultivate a successful classroom environment are those who treat their students as their peers, not as their subordinates.
Teachers, and especially college instructors, don't humiliate your students in order to change their behavior, as they're only going to lose in the end. Show them that you know what they're up to, but don't embarass them in front of their peers. Show them that they aren't invincible and that no matter how careful they think they might be, they can still get caught. Show them how to deal with transgressions in a discreet manner. Regardless of what you're teaching, these are some of the most important lessons in life.
Thanks to everyone out there who's in education, overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated. Keep up the good fight. You only get one chance to make a difference. Make sure it's the right difference.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
I like to rewrite questions I do know on my tests.
You'd be surprised at the amount of partial credit I can get from those.
Over my years of teaching, I've found that the best way to combat cheating is to get to know your students and their work individually. When you know your students, you know what kind of work they produce and even what their narrative "voice" sounds like in their prose. Unfortunately, most universities have classes that are far too large nowadays to make this practical, which is why students can get away with cheating more easily.