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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?"
Just put in an impossible question and see how many get the same answer ..
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
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.
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.
Two comments:
:), while currently not having mod points, I can vouch that it was the case. I know more than a single set of a cheater and a cheatee who approached him and told the truth.
1. Being a student of the former poster (Hey Tal, enjoyed your physics exercises
2. Being a TA myself (CS, though), I tried the following approach - every student writes the names of the students around him, in all 8 directions, in a specially drawn 3x3 box. Now, this killed 99% of cheating, as we TAs could get a quick verification of cheating suspects. It also helped us recognize cheating, since we could check the tests in the order of seating. This, coupled with Tal's method, could probably locate almost all cheaters.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, consult.
So either they got very good at Prolog or very good at hiding their cheating.
In my first year of undergrad, there were some people who were terrible cheats. This was at a university that's consistently ranked among the top 5 in the UK, so you would think the students would be a little smarter. These people would literally photocopy someone else's report, stick blank white self-adhesive labels over the original name, handwrite their own name on the label, then bind the photocopied pages and hand it in. I mean, they weren't even smart enough to get a copy of the Word document and reprint it, let alone try to rewrite the content in their own style. About half a dozen of them were booted out in the first few weeks of the course - the only reason they lasted as long was it took a while for professors to get round to actually looking at lab reports!
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.
You may be on to something here - social engineering to a positive effect being more powerful than the technical applications of cheat detection.
... and some are there from a foreign country with severe penalties for not passing and doing well (and thus very motivated to exceed at any cost - I have seen some of the (insert nationality here) syndicates in action : entire sets of class material including exams in advance.) And some are just lazy.
... so copying someone else's homework totally defeats the purpose of the homework in the first place ... the prof doesn't care if you get it right or wrong or even do it - it is his way to help you help yourself for the upcoming exams (and thus cheating on homework really is only cheating yourself and shouldn't be monitored.)
Perhaps the first day dedicate a 15 minute sermon asking the students to be completely honest as to why they are there. Some are going to be there because they have to be there (and thus more likely tempted to cheat simply to get out of the class) and some are there because they genuinely want to know / learn the material (and thus the only ones they would be cheating would be themselves)
Also differentiate between cheating on homework and cheating on exams / projects.
At the collegiate level homework is simply a formality, the professor's way of indicating which material in the book he finds important and which can be ignored, and sort of a form of extended classroom instruction. It gives the student an opportunity to apply the theories and formulas in a controlled environment and determine which he has a solid grasp of, and which not (hopefully so he can get it explained during the next class or during office hours 1 on 1.) It is to get him ready for the exams
At the exam / report / computer program level, let the students know that first sermon that you are looking for someone to make an example of, that you look forward to catching someone cheating so you can document it very well, assure a 100% no questions asked case of cheating, let the student float along the entire semester and regardless of the marks in class / exams / programs / papers that student will fail the class horribly, only not realize it until he gets his report card. You will not acknowledge that he has failed, but you will know and because he cheated he will know. And you are willing to do it for more than one. Perhaps after the first major exam or paper or program take a minute at the beginning of class to announce that one student was determined with 100% certainty to have cheated and will be failing the class regardless of their marks over the course of the semester, but don't tell them which one it was. Any one of them that was even borderline considering cheating even a little is going to fly totally straight the rest of the semester.
When the penalty is too extreme, most people will pass on the crime. As a child the penalty for stealing a banana from a fruit stand is pretty wimpy, so it happens. As an adult in Saudi Arabia the penalty for stealing a banana from a fruit stand is what(?) the loss of a finger or a hand? I don't envision too many cases of that. 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 - and I for one don't do it.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
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
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.
In one of my composition classes during my freshman year a student copied a paper verbatim from Cliff's Notes. The teacher and everyone else in the class had read the Cliff's Notes for the material, so this was a really dumb move.
The teacher's solution: give her a really high grade and have her read her paper aloud in class as an example of an outstanding paper.
As she read the paper it became obvious to everyone in the class what she had done and she immediately approached the teacher and apologized, rewrote the paper, and explained the whole thing to the class at the next meeting. That class never had a problem with cheating again as far as I know.
This could be applied to CS classes if there are student's with identical programs. Give them high grades and have them each present their solutions to the class separately and they will be forced to admit what they have done as it will become obvious to everyone present.
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.