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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.
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
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'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.