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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.
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.
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.
It's okay for colleges to copy so long as they pay the money upfront. ;-)
"the more you copy homework, the lower your grades." - I disagree. If the homework is worth 10% of your grade, then it's better to copy rather than run out of time and never turn it in (a zero). I recall in my engineering classes most of us copied, not because we wanted to, but because the profs so overloaded us with homework that it was impossible to get it all finished.
It was ridiculous - about 10 hours of homework/week for a 3 or 4 credit class. Typical 18 credit load is 50 hours just on homework. Plus 18 hours for the lectures. Plus 10-20 hours on labwork. == 80-90 hours per week!
Hmmm... on second thought maybe they were trying to prepare us for the Real World Suck of 60-70 hour weeks.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
on second thought maybe they were trying to prepare us for the Real World Suck of 60-70 hour weeks.
That was actually part of our orientation. They drew a graph for us. It went like this:
This line here represents how hard the average worker works in the field.
The first year, you'll be working about this hard: Half of what the average worked works at. Just introducing you to all the concepts, learning, seeing if you enjoy it, that kind of stuff. We don't want to scare anyone off in the first year basically.
Second year, you'll be right on par with the working force. Expect your classes to be a little less than working a job but homework will make up for it.
Third year, you'll be at about 1.5 times the average work load. This is so that when you get out of school, you are more than equipped to work in a variety of fields, and be an expert in each one. We pride ourselves on our graduate employment rate, we have to keep this high.
Fourth year, You'll be at 2 times the average work load. This is so that when your boss comes down Friday at 4:55 pm and says "Holy Gosh Darn Crap, the server room has smoke coming out of it" you can go "No problem chief, I'll have it up before anyone is in on Monday, I better get that raise I asked for".
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 your college is run by people with no significant grasp of reality. Yes, bosses occasionally ask you to pull all-nighters or all-weekenders, but that happens occasionally. If it's happening continuously, then that's a sign that this is a job for first-year college grads that they don't expect you to actually stay in for very long before moving on to a real job. Either that or the company is in a death spiral. Either way, you don't want to stay there.
For a school to pull that on a continuous basis isn't preparing you for the real world. It's preparing you to go postal and shoot up the campus. Just saying. An 80 hour week is simply unsustainable for more than about two or three weeks at a time, whether you're talking about a workplace or a college. You're going to spend, at minimum:
That's 12 hours and 45 minutes, which leaves 11 hours, 15 minutes MAXIMUM that you can usefully use. An 80 hour week requires 11 hours, 26 minutes on average per day. So it simply can't be done without cutting into something that's actually critical for your health and well being, and that's if you don't take a single minute to just relax and enjoy life, don't attend any sort of religious institution, aren't in any fraternity or sorority, don't get any actual exercise beyond walking to/from class, etc. In short it's very unhealthy.
Over long periods of time, such insane levels of work lead to serious mental health problems. If your school is truly working you 80 hours per week, you should contact a mental health professional and have them do a study on your school's population. I suspect you'll find higher than normal rates of anger management problems, severe inability to concentrate due to sleep deprivation, and a significantly elevated rate of depression and suicidal thoughts. It simply is not healthy to work people that hard over an extended period of time. It's so unhealthy that nearly every civilized country in the world (except the U.S.) has laws limiting work hours to significantly less than that.
And it's not just unhealthy in the short term. College is a critical time in people's lives for creating new social relationships. For most people, their first thirteen years of education was spent with mostly the same people. College is the first time that they break away from that, and it is critical that they have sufficient time during all four years to get used to making new friends quickly. It's going to happen when they move from job to job later in life, and if they aren't prepared to handle that, it can be socially damaging, even devastating. When you lose a job, your whole social network goes away. Preparing students for that is at least as important as any academic information that they can impart---maybe even more important. The social learning will still be useful in twenty years, long after any detailed technical knowledge has become dated and stale.
Also a substantial percentage of marriages occur because of people meeting in college. With an 80-hour instruction week, such socialization becomes nonexistent, leading to even further elevated rates of depression in graduates down the road. The lack of adequate time to socialize also results in those graduates having a hard time with social interaction after they graduate simply due to not having socialized much for four years. This further exacerbates the problem.
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