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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.
And the company goes: "Well I'm not hiring anyone from THAT university again".
The schools do have an incentive to curtail cheating.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
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.
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.
From TFA:
“Copying homework is a leading indicator of becoming a business major,”
I leave the punchlines to the public....
As if to say they are usually taught anything they need to know for their job anyway.
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.
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.
"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!
Certainly not my undergraduates.
Exactly. My college had an honor system. We'd have take home tests and stuff. If you were caught cheating, you got kicked out of school, plain and simple. They did boot about a dozen people a year, so the cost/benefit of cheating meant you took that D and worked harder the next time.
Unfortunately business majors are usually the ones doing the hiring.
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.
Schools also have an ethical responsibility to ensure that graduates actually have the skills/knowledge that the degree implies.
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.
Earlier in my career I had great disdain for an aspect of my company's culture that seemed to venerate degreed folk simply because of the degree denying or holding back promotions of clear subject matter experts simply because they did not have the degree usually appropriate for that level. True to form, I was promoted immediately after getting my Masters. Nonetheless, I really did believe most of what we did could be trained "on the fly".
Then something changed.
I had the opportunity to mentor someone who hadn't yet finished a Bachelors degree.
I showered them with documentation, with web-based training, with tutorials and direct training. It didn't help. Others may have done well. This individual couldn't, on their own, complete the most basic assignments and froze instead of using many avenues to overcome problems or misunderstandings.
It's not a matter of what you learned to get your degree. It's that you learned how to learn. Completing a degree demonstrates your ability to complete a long-term project presumably with all the initiative, time-management and general project planning that entails.
Cheating your way through short-cuts all of that.
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.
If you wouldn't agree to it yourself, why would you inflict it upon others?
Because university degrees granted by the university would become worthless otherwise. A degree claims that you've learned certain things. If a university develops a reputation for effectively rooting out cheaters, then its degrees will be more valuable than those of a university where cheating is perceived to be rampant.
As to the hypocrisy of the thing, be sure to tell your concerns to your potential employers too, so they don't hire you by accident. You seem to value some skewed illusion of fairness more than whether you get anything of value out of the deal. If I were an employer, I'd have to ask myself, "How will you screw me over to fulfill your idea/illusion of fairness?" Will you steal and sell off my IP because others don't have it yet? Will you steal valuable equipment because it's not fair that you or some needy person you know doesn't have them? Will you slack off because it's not fair that you work harder than someone else? Will you demand more privileges because the senior workers have them?
Life isn't fair nor can it meet the demands of what we think fairness should be. Do you really believe that fairness, or rather the appearance of fairness, is more important than a good, solid education?
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).
will never work.
Humans are ingenious.
I wouldn't have a problem with cheating if the schools actually taught anything anymore. Certainly more than half of what I'm doing now is still reading out of a book and then taking a test on it, something that anyone with reading skills and free time can do. Actually, if they did teach things, it would also make it extremely difficult to cheat, so it would be a self-correcting problem.
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.
Amen to that. The University of Michigan's College of Engineering has an honor code such that the professors and TAs are not even allowed in the room while the students are taking an exam. It'll show in your work if you cheated your way to a degree, especially in engineering. I'm curious what other universities have such policies.
And yes, universities do have an incentive to reduce cheating (they don't want other graduates to suffer from guilt by association) but like you said, it's nice not to be treated like a criminal by default.
Hell no. Being in a highly competitive degree program at one of the best schools in the nation for it, cheaters not only hurt themselves in the long run, but everyone else in the class. In my analog signals class, there is a large contingent that cheats on the homework and artificially inflates their grades. This class is also heavily curved, and since analog signals are not my strong suit, I ended up getting bit by the cheaters by dragging my letter grade down.
Cheaters in a university very rarely hurt just themselves.
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).
Future career: Outsourcing job manager.
What the fuck sort of citation do you want?
How about Socrates? He once caught a student cheating. Do you know what he did? He beat the student's scrotum with a piece of wood, then expelled the student.
What about Sir Francis Bacon, while he was a professor at Oxford? There are stories of him catching a group of students cheating. Do you know what he did? He told the king, and the king had the students hanged.
What about Dr. Oppenheimer? When he caught students cheating, he wept.
Clearly, cheating is as unacceptable as it gets in academia. It's not tolerated, because it harms the very soul of what makes academia so important and valuable.
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).
I had the opportunity to mentor someone who hadn't yet finished a Bachelors degree.
That's a rather small sample size with which to shift your paradigm.
You hire them as techs and are flexible enough with your promotion system so that they can be rewarded if they show a high aptitude.
(In practice very few companies actually do this)
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.
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.
Hey, lemme introduce you to something. It's called a "period." It's a punctuation mark to separate thoughts expressed in text. You might want to learn a bit more about it on your own, since your own time in academia seemed to fail you so thoroughly.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Seriously, unless you're dead-set on working for a giant corporation, it's not that hard to find companies in any field that don't have a massive management system and an HR department. There are lots of small businesses where the handful of people who actually run the company are also the people who do most of the work.
It's not a big secret that large companies tend to develop big bureaucracies. If you go get a job at one of those companies, you shouldn't be surprised that you end up in the middle of that mess. If you don't want to deal with that, then go work for somewhere smaller.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
If that's true then the piece of paper they get saying they have a degree (read qualification) isn't worth a damn. Now let's apply your logic to all sorts of common situations:
- Do you want a doctor operating on you who cheated his way through medschool and can't tell the difference between your appendix and your spleen?
- Do you want an engineer who can't do basic structural analysis building the bridge you are going to be driving over?
Actually lets move away from degrees and just look at plain qualifications:
- The electrician who isn't qualified wires your house arse-about and you get electrocuted?
- Or what about the person who is performing CPR on your pregnant wife and just rolled her onto her right hand side in the recovery position. They qualified by cheating off someone who knew that pregnant women should NEVER be rolled on their right hand side, and now they are both dead because of it.
My degree has on it the words "[name] having fulfilled the conditions prescribed by the University is, on this day, conferred with the degree of [degree]". This is a promise of the institution that the person holding this piece of paper is competent enough to hold the degree. My first aid certificate says something similar that I have fulfilled the requirements and that I have shown to be competent to hold the title of senior first aider.
So yes it is the university's problem ethically. If the student is wasting their time and money and cheating they should not be conferred with the degree. Yeah they are there to provide a learning environment in the exchange for cash, but they also need to police what they are guaranteeing when they are giving people degrees. Otherwise the piece of paper isn't worth any more than the degrees you can buy online from the Cayman Islands, and this ethical responsibility is what should be setting our excellent worldwide institutions apart from the frauds.