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Colleges Stepping Up Anti-Cheating Technology
Bruce Schneier's blog highlights a New York Times piece on high-tech methods for detecting student cheating. Schneier notes, "The measures used to prevent cheating during tests remind me of casino security measures." "No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could disguise a student's speaking into a hands-free cellphone to an accomplice outside. The 228 computers that students use are recessed into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen — using, say, a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test later — is easy to spot. Scratch paper is allowed — but it is stamped with the date and must be turned in later. When a proctor sees something suspicious, he records the student's real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for evidence." The Times article quotes from research published a few months back suggesting that the more you copy homework, the lower your grades.
So these schools are buying solutions to their problem of students cheating rather than figuring it out themselves? Isn't that what they're trying to prevent? /sarcasm
It's being a 'team player'.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Go ahead, let them cheat. They'll be paying for it once they get a job based on their "degree" and suddenly realize they don't know fuckall about what they're doing.
Living With a Nerd
Before you know it, all student financial records will be audited to make sure they haven't bought anything from Thinkgeek during their academic careers.
Bruce Schneier already knows Alice AND Bob's secret; all he has to do to detect cheating is eye a test taker until their lies burst into flames. Nothing hides from Bruce Schneier... Nothing.
All professors who authorize such measures should have their entire academic careers examined very carefully... how do we know they didn't get to where they are by cheating?
If you wouldn't agree to it yourself, why would you inflict it upon others?
You know what, if a student is capable of developing a pen-camera just to cheat on a test. Let him pass. There is a very good chance by the time he leaves school he'll be creating even better technology. God knows the West needs the innovation.
"The more you copy homework, the lower your grades."
No shit, Sherlock! Does that mean that if I don't think by myself I will not really learn? Wow! Who would guess that!
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
I think of the purpose of education as getting an education. If you don't ever learn the material well enough to pass exams on your own, it's kind of a waste of time.
And, yeah, I get that people work for grades and the piece of paper at the end of the whole thing, but if you didn't actually learn anything apart from how to cheat well, you missed the whole point. Though you probably stand to have a lucrative career in international finance.
I've worked for educational institutions and in one case I recall them attempting to deploy an anti-cheating countermeasures and got shouted down by students. Also given that many public institutions are compensated by degree completion working against cheating costs the institution not just for the price of technology but in the lost tuition and public funding. To me, this seems like an institution who cares about the quality of their student's education.
If your university finds it necessary to go to such lengths to prevent cheating maybe you should take that as a sign to find a better university.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -Aldous Huxley
It's a waste for cheaters to go this far. Hidden cameras? Using gum to hide conversations? Word macros? If you're going to go to that much effort to cheat, why not just put that effort into learning what you're supposed to?
But the bigger waste is all these measures to stop cheaters. Sure it will reflect poorly on your school if you have rampant cheating, but a) if you have an epidemic of cheating maybe you should ask why and b) if it's only a few cheaters why not let them go? They're only hurting themselves in the end. Spending so much money and effort on anti-cheating measures screams to me that you don't trust any students. Even though that's really not the case (I hope), what kind of a message is that to send to potential students? "We're going to watch you like a hawk the whole time you're here." Sorry, that's no way to treat people.
At my university, in scenic New Jersey, we had an Honor Code that we had to sign after every exam; saying that I didn't cheat. I felt proud signing that, and believe that most of the other students felt the same.
If some folks want to cheat, they will find a way: Chewing gum or no chewing gum. With such measures, you will only force the cheaters to be more creative. Try to teach them values so that they will know that it is wrong instead.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
They'll never stop people from cheating. They'll catch a few idiots and an equal number of innocent people. They'll raise the tension so much for the average student that they'll have to double their suicide watch programs during finals week. They'll still have a bunch of students who get away with it. Most importantly, they'll be so confident in their success that they'll do what academia does best - pat themselves on the back for wasting money while being completely oblivious to those who are outsmarting them.
Tests and anti-cheating measures are the lazy way to go about "education". But what do you expect when the most egregious cheaters, plagiarizers, and bullshitters are the professors themselves?
Write your own lectures.
Write your own tests and assignments.
Change them every year.
Change them if you have multiple testing sessions.
Don't copy them from the campus where your other professor friend works.
Don't pull shit out of the book you wrote for the class and made students buy.
Don't make students buy the book of your cohort^h^h^h^h^h^h colleague on another campus and have him reciprocate the favor, only for both of you to teach to your opinions and not what's in the assigned material.
Get TAs that speak English.
Speak English.
Respond to emails.
Update your website.
Post notes and assignments when you say you will.
Hold more than 1 office hour per week. Understand the material yourself.
Etc.
My brother in law, an economics professor, recently had to grade a paper from the freshman class he was teaching. He found that virtually every paper had the same ideas in the same sequence, and frequently the exact same wording (I.E. cut-and-paste). Even more interesting, and disturbing, he found that by comparing the texts they could be roughly grouped by the race of the student.
His theory is that the current generation is so used to forwarding, re-tweeting, re-blogging, and re-posting that they literally don't see it as cheating.
So glad I went to a school with an honor code where people are not assumed to be criminals by default.
Exactly.
When I was in school I talked with a couple of instructors (I tended to finish tests early) that pointed to specific students that were cheating. Guess what the punishment was? Nothing is the correct answer. What the schools need to teach is accountability and that is the exact opposite of how the self esteem factories that have been created function. That includes the teachers at the grade school level who are virtually unaccountable once tenure is obtained.
I don't know why colleges waste time on pointless technology when there are easier and less expensive methods to stop cheating.
Instead of a 500 person lecture hall bring it down to 30 students. Watch the little bastards during a test. See little Sammy Jean pulling her skirt down in the corner? Move around the room and watch her eyes start darting around as she starts to get nervous. Walk up to her and ask, "Is everything ok?" I bet she'll probably admit to it on the spot.
Students will go and tell their friends what the questions were on a test, don't make us sign some stupid waiver saying we won't because we will. If it bothers the lecture, professor, or god forbid the do-nothing provost, change some of the questions for each section or just stop whining.
It's a pointless arms race where the kids are always going to have the one up. Stop wasting the waste of money and have your professors and TAs walk around and watch the students. Realize that making a good effort to stop 95% of cheaters will work and the other 5% will grow up to work for Lehman Brothers, Citi, or become politicians. Needlessly wasting money on anti-cheating or plagiarism tools takes away money from improving services like the shitty food in the dining halls, the rat infested dorms, or having a notable group perform on the weekend prior to finals will make your student population happier and more likely to be donating alumni in the future.
And finally, In my own not so humble opinion, the risk of getting caught just isn't worth blatantly cheating on a test. Most professors will just fail you for the semester which is more than enough of a punishment. There are the few that will go above and beyond the duty to make your life hell (suspension, expulsion), but failing a course is more than enough of an incentive to keep me from cheating.
Phew, I needed a good rant today.
and, we had the "honor code". "On my honor as a student, I have neither given nor received aid on this exam." It sounds corny, but it actually worked. Not only was there very little overhead in detecting cheating in the system, but a huge majority of students actually abide by it. It is still something that 20+ years later is part of who I am today. I am thankful for that experience and having it be part of me. Incidentally, it has cost me a very good job but I have no moral qualms about my actions, too.
Anyways, it works, here's a bit more info about it. Or, at least it did 20 years ago for me and the majority of my peers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Virginia#Honor_System
Perhaps they could cut down on a significant amount of cheating if they didn't have class sizes in the hundreds. Smaller class sizes focus more on learning and less on degree mills to make a college rich. Who am I kidding, cram 'em in and buy anti-cheating tools.
Yeah and what if I put a camera in some fake glasses?
If people with the resources to buy a pen with a camera in it want to cheat, they're going to and there isn't much they can do to stop them.
Get each class to test and grade each other.
The theory will be they are best placed to honestly appraise the quality of each others' work, and to catch cheating. The practice will be that slutty chicks, trust fundies, jocks and backstabbing weasels will buy, bully or scam the highest relative grades at the expense of the plain, the poor, the timid and the trusting.
And that, class, is how you prepare yourself for surviving the next half-century climbing the greasy pole at AnyCorp Inc. You can't teach lessons like that.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The other thing is, let's face it, a degree is really a ticket into the white collar work world - sometimes. (Look at the authors for Fine Homebuilding and you'll see a lot of BAs who went into the trades because they couldn't get an office job.)
A real education would be a liberal arts or science degree - just about every other degree is really training for a trade: engineer, accountant, programmer, etc... or a stepping stone to a higher paying trade: lawyer, doctor, or some other professional certification.
A college degree is pretty much corporate drone training; unless, you come from a wealthy family that can afford for you to got to school a become a 'refined' person.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I suspect there are serious cultural differences regarding cheating. For example: at my university, the Indian comp-sci students all knew each other and held regular "study sessions." I was once invited to one. I was amazed to observe that it was simply a highly-organized cheating exercise. These guys had graded homework assignments and exams from all classes, and they passed them around, casually copying solutions verbatim to their homework assignments and recording exam answers. They begged me for all of my exams and homework assignments from current and previous tests so that they could add them to their collection. And they didn't see anything wrong with this.
What I found particularly amusing was how amazed they were at my abilities at coming up with solutions when we had non-trivial group projects. "How did you know that would work?" they would ask. I had to try hard to avoid saying "I don't cheat so I have to actually understand the material to pass the classes."
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
When I taught, we had a fool proof way to stop illegal cheat sheets. Just let the students bring a cheat sheet. Of course, that made the exams a bit harder. They ended up being less regurgitation and more about comprehension. And proctoring became much easier, fewer things to look for (more time spent scanning for cell phones in use).
Am I suppose to believe that the school even with the considerable higher fees as of lately are unable to innovate the education and evaluation of the skills and knowledge of a student. Nay, I believe the schools do have all the means necessary to create other means of evaulation. However they do not need to do so because of their subsidized product that not only have caused higher fees but also obviously a stale product and lack of innovation. Just as expected from a subsidized industry. Instead they decide to implement a surveillence regime treating their customers as criminals. Wait I have seen that pattern before, ohh yes from other subsidized industries such as the media industries which are granted privelegial laws just for their benefit.
This is pretty much just paranoia at the point they are talking. "Nobody can have any idea what is on the test!" Sorry, but you'll have to do better than that. I could go in to said test and come out and from memory give people a fairly accurate rendition of the questions on it. That's just life. You can't have this big secret.
Also, it is a symptom of a shitty test and shitty teaching. If you test relies on nobody knowing what is on it, that means it is just a memorization test. You are having people memorize random facts with no context, and that is why it is so important that nobody reveal what is on it before hand since people could just memorize those. That doesn't test anything worth testing.
A real good test is one that doesn't rely on secrecy. My senior year I took pre calc at the community college since I had a conflict at highschool. There, tests were open note, open book and open teacher. You could go up to the teacher, and ask hm questions. He wouldn't give you the answer to a test question, of course, but he'd help point you in the right direction, answer questions about how various formulas worked, and so on. I learned more in that math class than any other. It showed too, in university they gave us a pre calc test in calc 1, since many students learn it wrong, and a positively aced it, highest score by a wide margin and I am NOT a math whiz.
In the real world, you don't have to do things in a vacuum. You aren't asked to solve problems without any sort of notes or help or whatnot. You are able to call on resources. So a good test is like that, in that it tests your understanding of the material and problem solving ability, the ability to synthesize the material and apply it in novel ways, and doesn't rely on complete secrecy.
In my college days I had a few classes that were like this, and in all cases I learned a great deal. I wasn't focused on trying to memorize a bunch of shit for a test, I was focused on trying to understand the material as a whole.
I totally understand this, and apply similar tactics against my students to prevent cheating in high school science/math...
I have built limited area cell phone signal jammers - it does not damage the phones - just says no service on their phones. I have put up empty usb camera shell casings, along with fiberoptic terminal ends in random places for appearances.
This is in addition to using different coloured paper, different fonts, mixing up the questions - whether different order or multiples for values, limiting calculator usage and other things!
Why? The kids these days apparently cannot live without their mobile devices. Heck, they can't even make it through lab without looking at their cellphones to send a text to someone in the room next door! A lot (but not all) of my kids just want to know what will get them the grade.. there's not a lot of interest for the sake of learning as much at this level anymore. And their idea of what is cheating, and what isn't is vastly skewed from mine.. almost like the whole pirating/plagiarism stuff too! So I have to beat them at their own game, sadly.
Yes, I spend quite a bit of energy prepping homeworks, labs, projects and exams to make sure I have enough different versions to keep things interesting.. most of my colleagues think I am insane for doing so.. but I feel like I'm doing a disservice to the students if I don't do it to keep them focused .. and more importantly, trying as much as they can on their own for as much as they can!
For those of you that will probably comment as to - you're a *&^@#%! teacher who is probably boring.. you know what? There probably are days that I am like that, either because of content of what I have to teach because of requirements, or I am just flat out tired. But I would like to think that I try to keep it interesting by bringing things that I feel kids should see before they finish HS - like liquid nitrogen, napalm, gummi bear rocket fuel, growing silver and so on. But it's uniquely challenging to keep that level up for every class of every day! And when you have a lot of student indifference because they are there only because they are required to do so.. it's just not a great combination.
will never work.
Humans are ingenious.
I never once cheated when I was at university, and am quite proud of that fact. But I hated the fact that *I* had to suffer with these kinds of heavy-handed anti-cheating measures, even though I never once cheated. Taking a test at university was akin to being dragged in for questioning as a murder suspect. No matter how much you tried to establish your innocence, it always felt like every prof viewed you as a criminal, with something to hide. It really made for an adversarial relationship. And it got worse and worse during my time at university too. By my last year, I felt like my prof's would have been happy to frame me on a bogus cheating charge at the drop of a hat. I was presumed guilty.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
you described new jersey as scenic
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I taught a circuits lab class when I was in grad school. I eliminated cheating quite easily. I generated an individual test for each student with the exact same problems but different values for the components. I also randomized the order of the questions and used different color paper to create more confusion. For example, I'd hand out 1/4 of the test each in 4 different colors, with no two adjacent students having the same color - to discourage the thought of cheating in the first place.
I'll never forget, though, the time that two students in different sections turned in lab writeups with the exact same measurement data - out to 5 decimal places (because that's what the Keithley meters were set to display).
why is self plagiarism red / black flagged? and why does turn it in own your work.
They've been doing these exact things in Australia (even at High School level) for years, and students don't even use computers for exams. Can't have bottles of water with labels, erasers can't have cardboard covers, can't have a pencil case (must be in a clear container/bag), minimum separation distance between desks as well as a checkerboard approach to class types (IT student next to science student next to math student etc.) and all incidents, no matter how minor, are reported by supervisors via a form (whether it be writing your name on your answer booklet, question booklet, notes paper, phone ringing etc.).
In my observation, the only way to really curb cheating is to make the punishment for cheating extremely severe AND to not simply give the same exam year after year. The risk of a very severe punishment like expulsion and basically black-balling you by putting "expelled due to cheating" on your transcript discourages the typical casual cheater from even seriously thinking about cheating. If your school costs a bunch of money, this is even more effective as being kicked out with a $50-100k+ debt and no diploma is a worse fate than simply being kicked out with no diploma. Many professional programs (such as the one I attended) have this system and cheating is practically unheard of as we are far too scared to even think about it.
The other part of the equation is the faculty needs to know that people can and will talk about the exams afterward (even if it's a general "here's the stuff that was emphasized on the exam" or "here's the kinds of questions they asked" rather than specific questions) and they cannot simply reuse the same stuff year after year. I know, asking test makers to make new tests or refresh their question pool frequently is akin to asking a geek to use Windows Me for a month, but it needs to be done in order to make a decent test. The worst offenders I've seen are in professional certification exams as they use a fairly small pool of questions and rarely update it, but charge $500, $1000, or more to take the test. Then they whine about how people are scoring too well and try to sue some for copyright infringement (the line "takers shall not discuss or reproduce any part of this test, including reconstruction of questions from memory" is the thing they like to put in the tests.)
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
To me it sounds like more effort and danger than doing the homework or test yourself. I was always a top student and test-taker myself. So maybe its harder for others to do this.
Maybe if I read and understand the assigned material in advance, ask questions about things I'm unsure about, and do all my homework problems; I can then use what I learned when I take the test!
Check and mate, professor!
1. A student writes a paper and submits it. These TurnItIn type services compare it to other papers and returns a score to determine if it was a copy of someone else's work. This student's own work now becomes part of that database to help the service make more money. Students need to copywrite their work before handing it in and demand that any service verifying that it is original remove it from their database. 2. A student writes a paper, it gets tested by one of these services and is found to be original and gets a decent grade. Later in a different class, another paper is required and it just so happens that this previous paper fits in precisely with the requirements, so the student uses it again. Remember, it is the student's own work. The service now says that he copied it word for word from another student and the student is accused of cheating. Now with scenario #2, reuse of a student's own work may be questionable, but it IS HIS OWN WORK and he should be free to use it however and whenever he wishes.
Or the lower you grades, the more likely you are to copy your homework because you can't do it.
My professors have done this on multiple occasions. Give out questions before hand. Make them hard. Pose a very slightly different question in the actual exam and ask them to explain the difference.
Here was my plan:
And, if you see someone cheating, turn them in accordance with the Honor Code, because, damn it, you studied and you don't want to fall in the middle of the curve just because everyone else cheated (This did happen to me once -- a copy of the answers to the test for the prior year got circulated among a group of students and the prof. was too lazy to change it; so, anyone who had seen the old test already knew the answers and received an A. I studied my ass off and only got a C-.)
Professor cheating rate is low enough that it is big professional society news and sometimes US national news when it occurs. Read the recent book "Plastic Fantastic" for an extreme case of one situation at Bell Labs. Lack of result reproducibility did him in.
They've done computer matching studies of journal articles since most everything is online now. The xeno-plagiarism rate is always low at single-digit percentages and mainly obscure foreign journals. The auto-plagiarism rate is higher, mainly copying of boilerplate review sections and references from incremental paper to paper.
I've always wondered if the cheat rate is double-digit percentages for undergrads, why it falls so low for practicing professionals. I guess part of it is the constant peer-review. In our graduate seminars we watched each other like hawks. The occasional phonies who got through did not last long. Ditto for the work environment.
Homework copied from online is a real problem in schools I've worked in here in the UK.
Students seem to think that a C&P job from Wikipedia equates to a weeks worth of project time. They then have the effrontery to look annoyed when you throw their work in the bin and tell them to do it properly.
The fact that they don't even read what they copy was made very clear to me one day when a student had accidentally copied his 'work' not from Wikipedia, but from the Unencylopedia.
The worst part of the whole thing is that it's laughably easy to tell if a student has cheated in this manner - if a kid who can barely write his own name hands in a lengthy treatise quoting references etc., then you bang a few phrases into google and there they are. Ten seconds work tells you how they cheated. But the fact that they're so surprised when they get caught demonstrates that they usually don't - most teachers are apparently accepting this rubbish as the real deal.
Education is probably the answer, but I'm not entirely sure who it is that needs it most - the tech-savvy kids or the luddite teachers...
What about the poor underprivileged children who aren't able to get through college without cheating?
Wouldn't the easier solution be to make all exams open book and change the difficulty/type of questions accordingly?
After all the real world doesn't care how you get your answers so long as you get them and they are correct. Perhaps a better solution to education is instead of memorising facts and repeating them on command, learn the material well enough that you can given a complex question parse out what facts you need to lookup to determine the answer
We have a lot of foreign grad students, Indian and Chinese in particular. Well something I notice especially with the Chinese students but the Indian ones to an extent as well is the idea that all knowledge is something that someone already has. If you do not know the answer to a problem, the correct course of action is to seek out the person or book that does. Everything is already known, you just have to find who knows it. The idea of problem solving is one they don't grasp.
So their computer will break (that's what we do, we are the systems and network support) and they'll come and ask us about it. They get vexed when we say "I don't know what is wrong," they often look at you like you are an idiot, and why don't you go find the person who does?
I remember one time when a lab lost network connection so I was heading down there and he says "Why is the network down?" I said "I'm not sure," that got me a very quizzical look. So we got there and I said "Where's the switch, let's reboot that first," he said "Will that fix the problem?" I said "I don't know." He didn't seem to want to do it, since why bother if it wouldn't fix the problem? I found the switch, rebooted it, and the problem was solved. This was a totally mysterious process to the guy. How the hell could someone who didn't know what the problem was solve it without asking someone who did?
There does seem to be a cultural difference with this, and I think it comes down to the education system. My mom went to teach English in China for about half a year (she used to be a teacher in the US) and said that their version of teaching English was route memorization. Students were presented with a couple hundred phrases per night they were expected to memorize. That was it. Needless to say, that works for shit. The Chinese government realizes it doesn't work very well, which is why they bring in US English teachers, but it is fighting against a cultural attitude of eduction through memorization. Mom said the teachers were very skeptical of her methods (which did not include memorization).
sounds like the cable guy / phone people at comcast!
That is all.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
it was about an internet troll taunting random people he didn't know about their supposed pathetic lives (obviously a simple reflective psychological need to make up for his own pathetic life)
but one day, he picked on the wrong random person he didn't know
for it wasn't a college student or an IT drone or a hack programmer commenting on slashdot, it was someone... something... different...
it took offense. not at the lame troll comment. but at the existence of a person so empty, yet so full of himself
so it simply reached through the troll's monitor
AND RIPPED HIS FACE OFF
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
sleep tight
YOU'RE IN THE MOVIE NOW
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well, lack of study/work habits *may* be a factor for people without degrees, but in a lot of cases it's also that:
a) A degree is f***ing expensive
b) It takes a lot of time
I've actually started up on my degree via distance-ed, as I'm still working full-time and, frankly, could not afford to live without doing so. I've had a diploma for ages, and I've been in "the industry" for about a decade. In this time I've met *plenty* of people who exhibit the habits you describe, some of whom had their papers, and others who didn't.
A degree doesn't guarantee ability, nor does a lack of one mean that a candidate is lacking. I've seen plenty of people with degrees simply because they had the time and cash (and a good study-buddy) to get through... but ditched any *good* habits afterwards.
Correlation != causation
Lets hope this isn't a statistics class.
Have gnu, will travel.
If you wouldn't agree to it yourself, why would you inflict it upon others?
Times change. As a professor I'm not happy with the increasing anti-cheating methods being deployed and do my best to design exams to make it hard to cheat by design rather than by technology. However I am also not happy with the huge rise in cheating that we are seeing at Universities. The philosophy I would like to follow is the one I was used to as a student myself: you are basically trusted to some degree but when you seriously violate that trust by cheating the consequences are extremely severe. When I was at school in the UK if you were caught cheating on an exam you got an automatic failure ("I didn't know it was not allowed" was no excuse) and if the cheating was deemed to be deliberate then ALL your exams taken at that time were automatically failed on the basis that if you cheated on one you may well have been cheating on all. Believe me not many people cheated in those circumstances and everyone made sure they knew exactly what the rules were.
The problem today is that you cannot do that because parents and possibly lawyers get involved and the law then requires "appropriate punishment" given the exact actions and does not allow for severe punishments designed to set an example to others. The result is that, rather than being able to catch some fraction of cheats and throwing the book at them to discourage others, we end up having to catch almost every incidence of cheating which is not compatible with trusting the students. This of course perpetuates the problem since people who are strictly monitored for compliance are far more likely to comply to the degree that they are checked on whereas if you trust people to follow the rules they are far more likely to comply and will usually feel happier about doing so (as long as there is some chance they may get caught for violations!). Schools have it even worse since they have to deal with parents fighting the school when they try to punish pupils for cheating.
Today in a typical course of ~250 students I will usually have to report at least one for cheating every year, about twice the rate it was 5 years ago (rough estimate with admittedly low statistics). The result of this sea change in attitude is that we have increasing numbers of students entering university who are used to a culture of cheating and these need to be caught early and given an education in acceptable, ethical behaviour. So until society decides to start properly supporting teachers who discipline pupils in school and allow for severe punishments (in cases of clear guilt) this situation is likely to get worse, not better.
I just hope no needs to dail 911 in your class. You can get sued big time maybe even face jail time.
Was actually an English class. (Yes, I'm an engineer, but I love to read, and I wanted to be a better communicator, so it seemed like a good elective.)
We have a major essay on "The Scarlet Letter". After we hand it in, the prof announces that she did her masters degree on the book. She says she has read everything ever written on the book. And she mentions that she has detected plagiarism. She says "If the cheaters drop this class immediately, I will not pursue charges. Otherwise, expect this to be brought up with the University." Now, I hadn't even looked at other texts. Everything I had written was straight out of my head. I don't cheat normally, but in this case, I knew I couldn't even accidentally cheat.
Next class I show up... 66% had dropped the class. We literally had one third of the students still in the class. It really opened my eyes with regards to how common cheating is.
Oh, and for the record, for those who know the book, my essay had argued that colour vs. black/white was what defined what was acceptable in Hester's world. And thus the 'Black man' was not an outsider, but instead a necessary part. (Kinda along the lines of "There would be no God without Satan, so Satan is actually a positive Christian force, a good guy.") I still remember the response which was "This is entirely original... And wrong. But you did a wonderful job trying to make it work." and I received an A on the paper. So the incident also gave me insight into profs that have seen it all... If you can bring them something original, even if it's wrong, they're just happy to see someone breaking new ground, so they'll give you marks for trying.
if they get caught, expel their pathetic @sses with entries in their transcripts. the best to mediocre schools will not admit them, and companies that i have worked for (oracle, google, etc) will never touch them.
simple economics of risk vs. reward. with a 'politically-correct' attitude of 'we will just lower the grade', they risk nothing by cheating (they probably would have received lesser mark in the first place).
and those that are good enough to not get caught, will probably end up in law school...
All of the above was pretty much the standard at my university. Rarely would any problems in studies actually be something that could be remotely attributed to the teaching abilities of my professors.
:)
The most common problem I found was that (especially in upper-year physics) was that nobody wanted to do more than the minimum amount of homework. This is a shame, as one would have to have endured the "weeding out" process of university for at least 3 years in order to reach this level in the first place. People typically hunted down exams and homework solutions from previous offerings of the course in an attempt to create a catalog of "probable questions" for the exams.
My approach was simple: spend the $10 per course for the student solutions manual. The questions are the same as the text book, save for tiny changes so the final evaluated answer isn't identical, and complete, worked-out solutions are provided. I also purchased the "Schaum's Outlines" series of books for every course I possibly could. This was invaluable, as most of my texts would only offer "final solutions" for a fraction of the "odd number questions" (ie: less than 10% of the questions per chapter, and none of the more difficult questions would have these answers provided; Very frustrating as these questions were typically the ones on the exams). This supplementary material was very beneficial for courses in which the textbooks explained a concept poorly, and essentially provided no means for the student to work through the homework, even after reading the chapter 3 times.
These extra materials allowed me to learn the general application of the principles, and helped me to ace my advanced math and physics courses for 3 years straight. The end result is that every week, I probably did at least 60 to 120 sample questions per chapter as opposed to the 10 we had to have on our submitted homework assignments. People have a choice with respect to how well they want to do, and this is coming from someone who worked 2-3 jobs to put himself through engineering and pay rent, so I sincerely doubt the "I have no time or money" argument is applicable here. Mind you, I do recall studies mentioning that people can be driven by adversity more than the average person with fewer obstacles in life. Although this isn't the particular example (below) I was thinking of at the time of writing this comment, it provides some insight with respect to how enduring adversity can push an individual to strive. I am willing to concede on that point, that such circumstances while attending university may have been advantageous for me.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10511821
how naive of me. I had just assumed that people stopped cheating in exams around the time they reached young adulthood if not sooner. In college I can only remember one classmate cheating in an exam - but he was a bit 'special' and somehow I couldn't really hold it against him. I love this high tech bit: '...burned onto a CD for evidence' How futuristic. Can we learn more about this new CD technology they plan to implement? It might be the next big thing.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Babies are born knowing how to learn; people only need to relearn that if it has been stomped out of them, as is done through most conventional compulsory schooling. This is not to disgree that college can also be an effective filter for businesses to use to obtain compliant workers who know certain basic skills and who also are unlikely to seriously challenge authority. Related links:
http://ilabs.washington.edu/news/scientist_in_the_crib.html
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I am related to someone which I suspect utilizes or utilized a service by which you would pay someone through the internet to write a paper for you on the topic of your choice. Many other posters referenced a "submittal" method to combat cheating (e.g. "TurnItIn"), but no one I read actually suggested a "work intensive" method.
If the goal of teaching is to impart knowledge, and the goal of paper-writing is to learn how to write, present arguments, etc, then why does the entirety of the "work process" need to be done in a vacuum? To combat a cheating system like the one I described and to ensure that you are still teaching, the solution is to check the entire "work process," not just the end result. Require a formal submittal of brainstorming. Require a formal submittal of an outline. Require a formal submittal of a first draft. Require a formal submittal of a second draft. And only then, require a submittal of the final paper . If a professor steps through the entire "work process" with the student, you reduce or eliminate the incentive to cheat while also teaching/reinforcing the fundamentals.
I guess one can't pretend to be chewing gum either. If I were in college, I would be there to learn, and I wouldn't give a shit what anyone else thought. If they did something like this, I'd come in pretending to be chewing gum. When they said to spit it out, I'd pretend to do so. But since I was chewing pretend gum, I would still have it in my mouth, so I'd continue to pretend chewing.
Why the hell do teachers care whether their students are cheating, as long as they aren't disrupting students who are there to learn? Let a student waste his time there just to get a grade if he wants. It's like the MAFIAA putting all that crap into movies legitimately purchased, making it annoying for those who bought the movie and simply wanted to enjoy watching it. This only makes it worse for the students who are there to learn, making them not only anxious about doing well on the test, but anxious about not being accused of cheating. Fuck that.
Yes on both.
That's why a really good class will require that you do homework and have it reviewed and marked, but not included in your final grade.
The only penalty for getting homework wrong is having a TA hunt you down so they can help you master the material.
The only reward for copying homework is that you cost yourself that opportunity, and find yourself unprepared when the exams hit.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
We got along without cell phones for a lot of years without that being an issue. And if someone actually has an emergency and is coherent enough to dial 911, using the very same energy it takes to extract a cellphone and dial it, they surely could attract the attention of a fellow student, a TA, or even the professor. Whose desk is probably armed with a phone.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Yes since cell jammers stop land lines from working.
I'm a TA at a Research 1 university in physics.
I try to structure anything I teach so that the assessments aren't things you can cheat on easily, since I emphasize problem-solving skills and "I want to know what you think" questions over boilerplate problems -- because it's a better way to teach, anyway. Fortunately the classes I teach have been small enough that I've been able to get to know individual students and their abilities pretty well. And, well, I catch a lot of cheaters, without the aid of anything other than Google. Do I miss some too? I'm sure. But I catch enough.
But systems like turnitin.com and exam cameras are not the solution. They're expensive, and moreover they create entirely the wrong culture for the students. Who wants to live in a surveillance state?
The problem is that there is very little support from above for dealing with these punks.
I had a student get his dad to do his homework (very basic scientific programming -- Celsius-to-Fahrenheit converter in C) this year. Caught him, and he admitted it, but said "I didn't know that having someone else write the code for me was against the rules" and "I didn't know how to do it on my own, and wanted to turn something in." I told him that I'm not buying it, and that I was going to lower his grade by one letter grade. (This is a fairly lenient punishment!)
Well, he has his rich daddy write a five-page screed to the Dean of Science, demanding a written apology from me for being so mean to his Dudleykins.* Then he appeals to the Associate Dean for Academics, who actually buys his "I didn't know it was wrong to get someone else to do the work for me", and tells me I can't lower his grade at all.
There's also no mechanism for warning other instructors about a student that's cheated. The only thing you can do is to make a permanent notation on their transcript, but that is considered an extremely harsh punishment and the student gets all sorts of automatic appeals (and the Dean won't let you do it).
This has happened on other occasions, and this is the problem. Unscrupulous students, and they're out there, are going to cheat constantly if they know they can get by with no worse penalty than they'd get if they didn't cheat (either way they fail the class). And the administration turns me into a liar too -- my syllabus says "Cheating will be punished very harshly, don't do it", and then the administration doesn't back up their instructors.
Another hilarious cheating story: Two students from an athletic team had conspired to help each other cheat their way through freshman mechanics. They copied off of a third party and off of each other on exams. One student's lowercase mu's looked a little like N's, but it was obvious from context what they were -- \mu_s is the coefficient of static friction, etc.
Well, the other student misread his paper (having apparently not paid a bit of attention to the class), and blatantly wrote "N_s".
I caught both of them. Student #2 was completely incredulous that this handwriting analysis was enough to nail her in my book (she'd been claiming "He copied off me!")
Turns out Student #2 was already on probation after having failed classes with wild abandon, and the F she got from me was enough to get her kicked out regardless of the cheating. Student #1 tried to bribe his way out of it (with a $20 in my mailbox!), and he got punted up to the Dean of Students -- who threw him out too. At least they take bribery seriously.
*q.v. Harry Potter
When I taught a class, I made it clear that the students were free to collaborate on the homework assignments. I warned them however that any copying of any other students work had to be properly documented. As it was a computer science course, they had to submit their work as a computer file (which was submitted on a floppy disk). The class didn't know it but I had software that compared all the students work and searched for similarities.
When the first homework was turned in, the software flagged the work of three students as being similar. The homework that these three students had not documentation as to where the work came from ( they were claiming that it was solely their own work). On visual inspection, there appeared to be no copying but on closer examination they disguised the copying by changing variable name, changing the comments and moving subprograms around. My answer was to grade the three assignments as one homework and then divide the grade by three.
I knew that one of the three ( a very good students ) was the source but this was irrelevant to me. The three were then told why such a low grade and they could take up the matter with the academic honesty board which put them at risk of being expelled. They did not protest. Needless to say, word of the anti cheating software and my grading policy was rapidly disseminated by the students. After this, the students of the entire class documented EVERYTHING. As a side effect, the good students stopped sharing stuff and the poor students actually had to do the work.
smoke in the sever room just let the fireman deal with and come back to work on Monday after the fire chief says it's ok be back in there.
So now in addition to the pressure of needing to write a good exam I also have the pressure of not accidentally tripping their high tech anti-cheating measures with some thoughtless action? I never found it necessary to cheat on an exam, but had these measures been in place at my university I'm sure I'd have done worse on them.
It's the same logic that "behavior recognition" systems use at airports. Hey, that guy looks nervous, he must be hiding something. No, I'm nervous because I know if I make one wrong move I could end up missing my flight, having my bags searched and being grilled by some power tripping TSA lackey for the next 3 hours.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
When/where I was at the university, professors would talk to the students during exams and ask them questions. No stupid picking answers from the list.
that kid is a Straight Shooter with Upper Management written all over him!
I work in distance learning and frequently get involved in investigating online cheating incidents. It's quite common, but in many cases, the instructor invites cheating by using the same exams, questions from textbook publishers, and tests made up of all multiple-choice questions.
I've also seen some really great alternatives to this multiple-choice mess. Instructors use multiple-choice quizzes as introductory exercises as a way to get students to at least get some exposure to the material before participating in a graded online discussion. The students will then at least know the appropriate vocabulary and can respond to discussion with much more understanding.
There's also the use of plagiarism detection software, which really needs to be treated as a learning aide rather than a police officer. It should encourage students to make sure they've cited everything they need, not just change a few words of someone else's work to trick it.
Overall, there's a sense of hysteria about preventing cheating which has lead to these big, expensive preventative measures which will never out pace cheating. The ethos we've adopted is to encourage alternative assessment and personal assessment, and finally, punish those who do violate the academic integrity policy.
I'm from Eastern Europe and I cheated a lot both in high school and at my university exams. Why? Our exams were pointless memory tests. Computer science? No problem, just memorize this algorithm and be able to reproduce it and you'll pass. Physics? Sure thing, just be able to reproduce Kepler's demonstration for his laws of gravity and you're all set. This kind of attitude made me cheat - even if I was able to remember hundreds of pages of pointless mathematical demonstrations, in a few days time I would forget it.
The only way to prevent cheating is to give tests with actual problems to solve. Let the student bring any kind of books/courses he can muster and if he is able to successfully solve a problem in a given amount of time, it means he understands what he's supposed to. After you get your degree, your employer will not expect you to know everything by heart and they sure as hell won't mind if you know where/how to look for answers. (As a final note, the above-mentioned problems will have to be pretty much original, so the professor will actually have to give a damn).
You're paying them to learn from them, so they get most upset when you cheat to get good grades or graduate undeservedly.
Then you get a good job, what you think is good pay (entry-level pay for almost any job is laughable, btw), and fail your assignments dreadfully and get a reputation as dead weight.
Your raises suck, you get fired or laid off more than once since you're neither productive nor creative, and by the time you're a few years out of school you're broke and thinking about changing careers.
So, imo, schools shouldn't be interceding in cheating. They should simply be pointing out that the value of a degree is fleeting, and unless you actually have the qualities the degree implies you won't get much out of having gone to college.
But for some reason they don't want to admit how little degrees really mean, and that you don't have to pay enormous amounts of money to over-rated schools to be confirmed to be intelligent and resourceful. So they will continue to make a big deal about catching cheaters.
"We will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does" is the US Air Force Academy honor code. Cheating still occurs occasionally, but when it's discovered, the consequences are immediate and severe.
One of the benefits is the fact the honesty is expected and assumed to the extent that no special 'anti-cheating' measures are needed. I still remember the occasional 'take home' mid-term exam and, to the best of my knowledge, NOBODY ever cheated.
A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on his arm. He had blended them into his body art.
This guy simply tried to obscure non-permanent notes amongst his tattoos. However, I think that if someone were to have notes or formulas actually tattooed on, it should not be considered cheating. The knowledge would be carried with them as permanently and accurately as if they carried it in their brain. Probably even more so.
I never cheated, thats why I had a normal (2.x) GPA. I think this anti cheating technology is going to be very expensive and unless a critical percentage of students are cheating its probably not worth the investment. I'm sure some students who have a perfect 4.0GPA are or were cheating, but with hard work it is very possible to get a 3.0 or 3.5 GPA without any cheating.
Let them catch the cheaters, then watch the avg GPA go down, then watch the grades at ivy league schools and expensive private universities inflate as powerful parents threaten to take their kids out of schools that don't. Ultimately this wont do anything to change the fact that a lot of kids get grades they haven't earned regardless of if they cheated or if they just literally buy good grades.
So, the fact that's it's illegal to active-jam cell phones just doesn't matter to you?
Dear Sir,
My internet is broken. Please to be helping me fix it so I can become Principle Engineer. The reboot switch did not work - it made the teacup holder come out.
Sincerely,
Asif
UCF stands for Opportunity.. I mean University of Cheating Fuckers. I go to this school. there are tons of people asking 'you have the solutions manual'? etc. It's rampant in the Math/Science Department, Engineering Department and Business Department.
It's illegal to do a lot of things that aren't necessarily *wrong*.
Flipside, I can name a lot of gov't departments that do illegal things all the time. Does that bother you?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
How about you worry about what you do, instead of what somebody else does?
As far as the ethics of it, can you guarantee that your jamming signal doesn't inadvertently affect people or devices it was not intended for?
So, the fact that's it's illegal to active-jam cell phones just doesn't matter to you?
Just ban cell phones. Nobody will know that you're using an active jammer.
I'm not the one worrying about what some professor does ;)
And I don't suppose its range can be guaranteed, but are you in class to learn, or to gab on your cell phone??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Just ask Austin Milbarge and Emmet Fitz-hume. But they already saw this coming, with the cameras coming out of the air vents.
Call me crazy but if cheating is that big of a problem, maybe the teachers aren't being very effective. Case in point: Freshman year General Chemistry first mid-term exam. In a class of over 500 students on a test out of 200 points, the mean was a 60. That's 30% for those of you in Rio Linda. And here's the kicker: the professor was...wait for it...the HEAD of the Chemistry Department!!! Beyond that, IMHO practical application of the knowledge is a far better method of testing. Who cares if you can regurgitate from memory fifty different formula. If you can actually build the device and make it work or write the code and make it work, IMHO you're a far better employment candidate than if you just talk about it. As a teaching fellow for a microprocessors class, there were no 2-hour exams. There were several projects throughout the semester. You built the device and wrote the code for it. Then you demoed it to the fellows. It was immediately clear to us who understood the material and who did not. Granted these opinions are pretty much relevant to science and technology.
They do all this to prevent cheating, yet they still allow mental-steroids like Adderall? Such hypocrites.