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200 Students Admit Cheating After Professor's Online Rant
Over 200 University of Central Florida students admitted to cheating on a midterm exam after their professor figured out at least a third of his class had cheated. In a lecture posted on YouTube, Professor Richard Quinn told the students that he had done a statistical analysis of the grades and was using other methods to identify the cheats, but instead of turning the list over to the university authorities he offered the following deal: "I don't want to have to explain to your parents why you didn't graduate, so I went to the Dean and I made a deal. The deal is you can either wait it out and hope that we don't identify you, or you can identify yourself to your lab instructor and you can complete the rest of the course and the grade you get in the course is the grade you earned in the course."
Thats pretty cool of the teacher to offer them all a way out. With all the cheater sites out there, its no suprise to me that 1/3 of the kids cheated.
~Bchickens
Perhaps the students admitted to avoid punishments due to them being identified as a falsepositive..
Reminds me of what happened in my university. Some students thought it would be smart for their final 4th year projects to go onto a public forum and offer money for somebody to do the project for them. The university sent a public mail out offering for the students to turn themselves in and redo a different project over the summer (might have been capped at 40%) or else risk getting caught and not get a degree + be banned from all the universities in Ireland.
Only a sucker would come forward.
If he could identify you he would. He and the dean know that if they tried failing people based on "statistical evidence" the university would get its pants sued off.
Tell him to get back to working 20 hours a week for $130,000.
"Successfully cheating is the only part of the curriculum that has any relevance in the real world".
To bad these students hadn't advanced to "plausible deniability" yet.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
If they were to do this for some of my classes they'd find a 100% cheating rate, is it just because we are lazy and can? Partially perhaps, but partially also because of absolutely horrible standard of the teachers and the quality of lectures. Having a dickhead read straight off a powerpoint slide with a voice fit for a text-to-speech app means people won't learn shit on the lecture, and then cheating may be more viable than actually studying the massive amount of materials on your own. This especially for courses that are just there as a filler and that 95% of the students won't use in their professional life.
If the schools realized that it's 2010, not 1810, and if teachers actually were a bit more passionated about learning than a corpse i'm certain cheating would drop a fair bit.
This just shows me how sad of a state our society is in, when we have to pander to cheats and liars simply because there are so many. For the record, if I were that professor I would've had all their butts thrown out of school. It would've been a good example to the rest.
This guy rocks. All the anger should be directed at the cheaters who thought themselves too smart to be caught.
Watch the stats change when the cheaters get lousy marks.
Trolling is a art,
For a country full of people trying to get rich quick by appearing in reality TV shows, or cheating their way to a degree so they can do the same up the corporate food chain, I'm glad to see someone cash the reality check of those that think there's a shortcut that can be taken to success. I'm equally glad to see that he didn't destroy these students futures as well . Lets just hope that they take advantage of the moral lesson they have been presented with, and I hope others take note too. Hard work and honesty may not be the easiest thing to do, but it pays off in the end and still allows you to look at yourself in the mirror each day.
I have no problem believing that so many students would cheat, if they had half a chance to do so.
I don't quite get (nor does TFA adequately explain) how such a large number had that chance to cheat, however - And on a midterm exam, at that? What, did he hand them out and leave the room?
I imagine he had suspicions that many students had cheated, but did he actually have the means to generate the proof? Maybe this was all an impressive bluff. He couldn't pin it on everyone he wanted to, but by making it look like he could, he forced everyone into a difficult position. They could either fold and potentailly pass the class, or hope he was talking out his ass. After all, what you know doesn't neccessarily matter. Instead, what everyone thinks you know matters.
This happens more frequently than you think - see IRS amnesty for foreign bank accounts or my town's amnesty for constructions without permit.
One my my Comp Sci professors gave the same offer - you get an F if you are identified to have cheated on exam, or come clean, retake the exam, and you get a 90% of your grade.
When I was in university, we had to submit a paper for one of our accounting classes. Naturally, many students didn't reference a few of their citations since they had met the minium required. (Myself included.) At the end of the following class, the professor informed us that he KNEW who had plagiarised portions of their papers. If we didn't turn ourselves in, we would be reported to the dean. Naturally, the entire class turned themselves in. He wasn't thrilled when the entire class lined up outside of his office to point out which minor excerpts we had taken as our own without proper referencing. Turned out only 2-3 people had plagiarised their entire papers. I wish he had done a better job wording his announcement. Would've saved everyone a lot of time.
While I'm sure several students did cheat, everyone who so much as glanced around or thinks they may be suspected of cheating will turn themselves in to avoid worse consequences.
Well , he's wrong that the days of cheating are over.
Let's see you cheat you way through a technical interview loop, kid.
- If you're going to cheat, you should attempt to not get caught.
- The more people that know, the more likely you're going to get caught.
Therefore, cheating only works when it's a small number of people who can keep a secret. Preferably one.
Some of the professors at universities are extremely research focused, and do not place sufficient attention on undergraduate teaching. In one class, the teacher scheduled five midterms. After each midterm, he would hand out the answers to the midterm after the test.
Very quickly, the procedure switched to leaving the answers at the front of the class, so people could pick up their answers on the way out of class. It is a boring to invigilate a mid-term, so the professor quit showing up at the midterms. Similarly, the T.A.'s left.
By the third midterm, the answers were passed around - during the exam. Someone complained to the Dean about this, and considerable efforts were made to reform undergraduate teaching.
When you use the Textbook samples test or reuse the same test year after year. This is what you get when some one passes it out.
200 Students doing real cheating seems unlikely and makes it seem like they just studied the sample test.
I also don't think it's possible to know who cheated, just how many.
You're telling me this guy has taught for 21 years and was blindsided by the oldest, most common cheating vector?
What I don't understand is why he's so easy on 'em. He's giving the cheaters a four-hour slap on the wrist and no permanent record.
What I would have done (and did; I taught college level computer engineering) is that cheating, if caught, is an automatic zero credit on whatever you cheated on.)
My conclusion is that their forensics is full of holes and they have absolutely no clue who cheated and who didn't; there's no other reason to offer such a tremendously good amnesty deal.
When I was a CS major at UCF, everyone cheated constantly.
I was probably one of the few people who didn't copy programs or do group work. This is not only the CS classes, but pretty much all science and math.
On the other hand, 2/3's of the professors barely spoke English (it was definitely their second language), and had zero teaching ability, so I can't really blame the cheaters.
imho this is nothing but FUD. you cant possibly get the cheaters from statistics only.
and making such a drama about cheating is a bit... overreacting.
A statistical approach will give false negatives and false positives. This method will have much better accuracy. So much so in fact that the statistical analysis isn't even needed. He could just claim that he knows how many have cheated, threaten those who don't confess and see if they cal his bluff.
Are you feeling lucky?
It's like a whole different kind of cheating.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
What kind of deal is this? If they turn themselves in, they get to complete the course? That is absolutely ridiculous. If they cheated, they fail. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.
Christ, they SHOULD be expelled.
There is no such thing as cheating, only getting creative with your sources. The real world, whatever your career will be, relies on the same behavior that is punished in school that they call "cheating."
or else!
Being that I did EE & CS, and dabbled in a lot of literature courses at a top university, I was wondering what he taught. In any of the exams that I took, it would have been impossible to cheat, and we had an "Honor Code," so the profs didn't even bother to check. TFA didn't mention what Dr. Quinn taught, so I googled him. He in a member of the faculty in the Department of Management.
Management? Cheating? Sounds about right. Actually, he should give all those cheaters high grades; they seem to understand what management is all about.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I know a professor who was teaching a class at his university where the exam (I think it was the midterm) questions got leaked one week or so prior to the exam day. So the questions get spread around and the students coordinate to subtlety ask for help of similar questions to get answers (there was 4 or 5 teachers for that class, so they only had to ask one of them per teacher, and they asked other questions at the same time to prevent suspicion).
However, a few days before the exams, some students went to the teachers to tell them of the leak. So, the teachers burn the midnight oil to write totally questions.
Well, that would be the end of the story on how cheating was prevented. But, the most outrageous is that, after going through the rewritten exams, some students dared to complain to the teachers that "it was the wrong exam"... It must take some guts to come to a teacher and complain to them that they prevented you from cheating...
First test (that I'd taken 2 yrs prior) I realized over half of the 180 students cheated. I told him and he could not believe it was possible. So instead of proving it I devised a new test. 3 identical looking exams with 3 entirely different answer keys. Most of the students were using a key person to cheat from. About 4 people were getting the (live) answers from 1 person. With the new test I did nothing to stop the cheating. The questions were all entirely fresh as well. Nothing was brought into the exam room. The class had a normal pas/fail slope on the first exam. On the second 64% failed with less than 25% correct. 20% more got less than 70% correct. So 16% of the class comfortably passed the exam. The professor was outraged. I just thought it was funny. When many of them protested I simply showed them the results to prove who they cheated off and explained they were more than encouraged to go to the administration with the results.
If you get caught cheating in his class, he immediately fails you, reports you to Academic Honesty, and does everything in his power to make sure you do NOT work in Computer Science.
By contrast, in the "comp sci for non comp sci majors" (how to use MS Office) in which the professor refuses to fail anyone. Catch the same ring of cheaters several times in a row, they just get 60% on each of the assignments they cheated on.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
CONFESSION_MODE=ON
I cheated once. 't Was for a really crappy course on business administration during my CS study. Worst teacher I ever witnessed. Multiplied that by the un-interestingness of the subject and you get the incentive as to "why?"
No regrets here. I never needed anything that was mentioned in the course. I'm happy to say that I'll never be the BA god some people can be. OTOH, I'm not too shabby on my CS skills, which is what I wanted to study in the first place.
CONFESSION_MODE=OFF
Mr. Quinn did make a huge effort into securing the required level. He also was more than pretty fair to the students. He has my respect.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
How is the professor surprised by this? Has he ever met business majors let alone businessmen?
Prof too lazy to write his own tests (and don't give me any shit about how this is how they all do it; the prof is responsible for the test content, including the security of it, period)? Check.
Prof too morally lazy and incompetent to stand up to cheaters by identifying them and getting them kicked out? Check
Prof too stupid to realize that relying on the security of a "test bank" (or anything like it) is foolhardy beyond belief? Check.
Prof too ethically incompetent to realize that punishing the ones who did right along with the guilty is an act more despicable than the original cheating? Check.
Prof too full of himself to realize that his emotional reaction is entirely innapropriate? Check.
Prof too incomeptent to realize that changing the rules midstream is an unforgivable breaking of a contract, something no one in a business school should countenance when there are already established procedures for dealing with cheaters? Check.
I'm not even going to try to list all the WTF moments in that vid. If somebody wants to go to the trouble, there are at least a half-dozen quotes that are absolute howlers.
What's really going on here? Off the top of my head, I can come up with two theories. Maybe the prof was pressured not to turn them all over for discipline because the uni higher-ups didn't want all the hassles and potential litigation. Or maybe he's bluffing and doesn't really have a perfect idea of who did and didn't cheat.
Either way, if I was in his class, didn't cheat, and was forced to come back to do the re-test, the physical violence I'd direct toward this idiot would track with whatever I had to give up. If he made me miss the birth of my son or the funeral of my mother, I'd beat the bastard to death. If he made me miss a date with some chick I didn't really care about, perhaps a stern email would suffice.
This situation is screwed up no matter how you look at it. I hope a whole bunch of students are demanding their money back from that institution. And I hope this idiot either decides to start educating, i.e. working directly with students, writing their tests, etc., or, better yet, gets the hell out of the business.
One "inB4" for the people who will be anxious to point out that I obviously went to university far too long ago to understand the modern, high-volume business of churning out sheepskins for job-seekers - You're absolutely right. My ignorance, however, still doesn't excuse the idiocy of this prof's actions.
Hmm. This isn't so cut and dry. It seems that the midterm was using questions over again from previous tests, and some students had access to the previous tests. At my school, PSU, in the engineering department, this was fair game. In fact, the Engineering Library even had some old tests on file. Old tests and previous course notes were valuable study tools. That being said since it was engineering, we didn't generally have multiple choice style test.
If the teacher was lazy enough to use the same questions over and over, well then I guess he got what he deserved.
I'd be offended if my morality was questioned because I had seen a test beforehand. I don't filter information based on what I should be able to know. I wouldn't steal the information from the professor to pass the test, but if someone handed me a copy of the test beforehand, I'd read it, not throw it away, and I wouldn't be ashamed.
Also, I expect the university where I pay tuition to work for my money, for example by not re-using publishers standard tests but instead writing new tests. Is the morality of the university and their corner-cutting re-use of tests even in question here?
I had math classes were we could have calculators but not a page of equations/identities. I developed a private code to store, say, a list of trig identities in a format only I could read. Thank you HP-41 and your alphanumeric storage. :) There were no worries because I never had a teacher who knew how to recall stuff like that from the calculator to check, and the HP-41 was relatively new.
That college sucks. Let's see.
The college and the test bank fuck up and leak the test questions. As is to be expected, 1/3 of the students decide to cheat. I'm surprised that only 1/3 cheated, it seems that he should be happy, not disgusted. Not to mention that I wouldn't call using publicly available information to be cheating, but whatever, I wouldn't do it (in this case), so let's say that it is.
Then a person with no understanding of statistics (he gets the Monty Hall problem wrong during the lecture) tells us about statistics. And tells us how statistics will be used to catch the cheaters. Now, if he know statistics he would know that catching them is impossible. The false positives would be too many, and even one false positive is too much.
What's more, he fucks up everyone. Everyone has to redo the test, even if they didn't cheat, and there isn't any kind of compensation, and there isn't even an apology. In fact, they are forced to attend something at a specified time, whether they can or not. Not to mention the false positives who he would fuck up by destroying their academic life for no fucking reason.
So, fuck you, Richard Quinn, you're a fucktard and deserve to die, and your college sucks.
Especially among fraternities and sororities. While originally these groups would keep older tests, which is NOT against the student code, access to test banks... that's all of the possible questions AND correct answers... is not only unethical... but illegal as they were obtained under false pretenses.
When I was in college I knew of two frats who had access to almost all of the test banks from the college of textiles at NC State. At the time I really didn't understand what it meant as I wasn't part of those frats. I thought that just meant they had access to older tests etc. There were several professors who didn't really care about this... because they didn't use multiple choice tests. Everything was short answer and they changed their questions every time. Sometimes they would have similar questions but different values etc.
That's the problem today with courses like this... too many people and multiple choice does equal to quality education. Students are pushed hard to memorize, not learn, information in 101 classes like these because noone wants to take the time to read answers. It's very frustrating.
I have never used a test bank to "cheat" from... but I have used older tests which some professors think was the same as cheating.
The article is rather short on details.
I am a university level teacher (not professor, no phd yet), I have to say, I am NOT impressed with the teacher. We are in a system where grades are the currency, not learning. I caught cheaters, I think most teachers have. Some basic rules: students are smart and resourceful, if they can, they will cheat. Students don't cheat if you make it more of an effort for them to cheat than to study. Compare it to game piracy. the teacher effectively put DRM on everyone.
my solution: open book, open Internet, open computer exams in a closed environment with hand made exams that I personally wrote and printed 12 hours before the exam.
It requires a bit more of an effort on the teacher's part than taking what is provided, but the students prefer it and it is a LOT more reflective of "real world" tests they will face.
How many times has your boss said "Shirley, no book, no internet, solve these theoretical questions, you have 90 minutes and so help me god if you don't use a #2 pencil, I will commit unspeakable acts!"
It seems to me that not only was this professor lazy, but he had been lazy for awhile. Why did he have to rely on a test bank for his mid-term questions? Answer: because he was too damn lazy!
I never cheated on any tests or assignments. It did not even occur to me. It was not until years after graduating that i asked around and found that absolutely everyone cheated. That was kind of a shock.
What, did he hand them out and leave the room?
This is the way it worked where I studied. We had an Honor Code. The prof passed out the exam, and came back three hours later. I never saw anyone cheat, but I was always so concentrated on my own work that aliens could have landed next to me, and I wouldn't have noticed. If I witnessed someone cheating, I was required by the Honor Code to turn them in. This made a lot of students uncomfortable, and was often a hot topic for the university newspaper.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
On a homework assignment. I considered yelling at everyone, but decided it was cleaner and more direct to just say -- pop quiz, do question #1 (very basic, 2nd week procedure) with any of the materials in front of you right now, and here's a formula card if you don't already have one. If you can't do it, then I'll retract credit for that assignment (everything else in the assignment was built on that initial result).
Now, I don't have a huge lecture hall (N=30), so it's more feasible for me to personally oversee that process. I'd hate to be in that situation, honestly.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Ugh. Preparing for an exam is emphatically not cheating. I would personally attempt to find and solve every question I could get my hands on in advance of a test. I went to the University of Waterloo, and we have a published exam bank for every course by the Engineering Society for exactly this purpose. You can verify its existence at http://engsoc.uwaterloo.ca/services. The point is to get a feel for all the types of questions you're going to see, and you count on the professor to not take the easy way out by just copying questions directly from some textbook publisher. If they do, they certainly can't blame the students -- they're cheating too!
The disconnect between education and reality really bothers me sometimes. In the working world, would you ever go to a meeting without knowing what was being discussed in advance? Even better, if you knew exactly what questions were going to be asked, would you demand NOT to be told so that you could come up with something on the fly to display your knowledge? Of course not! The thought of it is utterly ridiculous and stupid. You'd be fired for being completely incompetent. And yet somehow, we blame students who take advantage of lazy question re-use as being cheaters. I realize there are legal ramifications to obtaining the publisher's original test bank, but publishers have to realize that information is going to be leaked at some point. As far as I'm concerned, after that leak happens, all bets are off!
I think in an ideal world, the publisher has no secret test bank. They publish it. The teacher gives it out. Here's 500 questions to try. Learn from them. Then on the exam, I'll make up a few new ones and you can use your knowledge. Done.
Students cheat to appear more proficient than they are. The authority of the system says, "You were very bad, but we'll give you another chance if you pretend to be contrite." Students pounce on it.
Following this, the university was flooded with calls from law firms, congressional offices, and investment banks, all seeking contact information and resumes. "These kids have shown real initiative in both presenting a patina of proficiency, and recognizing a wristslap. In today's image-driven business and political environment, it is absolutely critical that we nurture these young charlatans to help them reach their full potential."
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Maybe it was a statistics class.
Students that cheated wouldn't know he was bluffing.
I've seen new grads talk about cheating and they justify it by saying that everyone else does it. Somehow moral equivalence has replaced ethics.
Perhaps you shouldn't have cheated on your spelling tests....
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Having a massive amount of materials is not, in and of itself, motivation to learn.
Seeing as how it takes time to study, and there are other potential uses for that time, the more material there is to study, the greater the incentive to skip the study and cheat to get the grade anyway.
A belief such as "the knowledge itself will be useful to me later in life" would be motivation to learn. However, most modern students don't have this belief. Instead they believe that most of what they are learning is fluff, and that the grade itself is far more important than the knowledge. Whether they are right or not is a different issue, but given the prevalence of this belief, combined with the belief that one is competing against OTHER students who cheat, it is clear that modern students have very strong incentives to cheat.
And, surprisingly enough, people tend to do what they are incited to do.
Smells like fear from him, he sees his complacency has cause a massive percentage of his students to be incapable of learning from him and his underlings, so instead of revisiting his course layouts, he attacks his students. Why isn't he at all concerned that 200 students are so uncomfortable with the material (between the lines; poor educator) that they feel they have to cheat? The other huge concern is why does he give a crap about what marks they are getting? Shouldn't he be concerned more about the statistical analysis of how poor he is at getting his material concepts across to his students?
Super insightful.
If schools were interested in testing if people know how to do something, rather than testing if they know what something is, cheating would not be a problem. Besides, knowing how to do something is more useful than knowing what something is.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
The prof talks about throwing out this test result and about the "great efforts" of his staff to write a new test which this time does not use material from the textbook publisher's test bank.
WTF?!
The prof was too lazy to write his own exam questions? He simply copied questions provided by the publisher?
Tuition money spent by a class of 530 students wasn't enough to pay this prof to write his own exam!?
Punishing the innocent to get at the guilty is an act far more despicable than the original cheating. The prof is an idiot and the school that allows him to get away with this crap is not worth attending.
If your professors are boring then don't go to class, but there is no excuse for cheating. The fact is cheating is dishonest, and it is not a victimless crime. You might think that everyone is cheating, so it doesn't matter, but the truth is that at least one person in your classes actually cracked open a book and has been working his ass off to get your grades.
What's going to happen when you both graduate? You're going to get his job because you got a higher GPA, and you knew enough to BS your way through an interview. Despite the fact that the honest guy is vastly more qualified than you, there is no way for the company to know that because neither of you have much work experience, and your transcript looks better.
A few months down the line the your boss realizes that you know almost nothing about Databases, so he takes another look at your transcript and sees that you got an A in your Databases course. He thinks to himself, what are they teaching at XYZ University?
A few months later, your boss is recruiting for another position similar to yours. He gets an application from someone who also got in A in Databases from the same school you attended. He also gets an equally qualified application from a student at ZYX University. Who do you think he's going to hire?
So now, you have a job that going nowhere because you boss and coworkers think your an idiot. The guy who could have excelled at your job is unemployed, and the guy who just graduated has a worthless degree because nobody wants to hire anyone from XYZ university anymore. Do you still think that cheating was the right thing to do?
1 professor teaching a 400 level class to 600 students? I don't remember taking any lecture style classes at the 400 level. Certainly none with more than 40 students.
When you get paper-walled with unnecessary material which is marginally relevant to the subject of the course at best, and then you are not even tested in that - that very much IS something to blame the teacher for.
Also, lousy text-books where you can tell that the material has been patched together from several other books, often changing nomenclature mid-paragraph or referencing non-existent material.
Then, there are badly designed tests where the time allotted simply doesn't suffice for the complexity or volume of the test.
Also, the fact that "they'd find a 100% cheating rate" indicates that the teacher really doesn't give a fuck. Just like in the examples I mentioned above.
He/she is simply there to get payed for as little work as possible. If that means condoning cheating - no skin off his/her back.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Well, if you turn yourself in, it becomes your fault and you comply with the professor's plan. If the professor pushes the point against a stonewalling class, it becomes obvious that the professor didn't do his due diligence in writing his own exam, and he might be the one punished.
Offering amnesty allows the professor to handle it under the umbrella of his class, while offering punishment opens the gates to challenging the punishment, which would require a review of the professor's testing practices.
They also have to take a 4 hour ethics class and the professor won't help them with anything in the future.
I'm surprised more profs don't do statistical analysis on big lecture hall classes to see how many students are cheating. I know where I go to school, often there is not enough TAs to fully monitor the whole room, and I've seen kids cheating off each other after a TA walks by.
So let me make sure I understand this you are paying for an education and you are cheating on your tests just to get a good grade? But wait when you get out into the real world and have to use the information you should have learned from school you are ummm..... shit out of luck because instead of you studying and retaining the information you cheated and now you are useless.
Each student vs. the answer key is its own data point. Tests can have real quirks, so when he's doing this, he can ask some loaded questions and check the answers. For example, if #7 is "unfair" he's "supposed" to be hearing a lot of grumbling about that, and everyone getting it wrong, except the class genius and maybe the guy who said "screw it" and got lucky. If tons of people get it right it makes that test no longer random, so it might only take one more example to nail it for sure.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
First thing you must understand is the size of this place. We are the 3rd (at last check) largest university by enrollment. Look at the video, how was it taken? It was taken by the camera that is used to stream the class to people at home. Classes like that can have enrollments over 500 and that may just be one section. At UCF you're nothing but data in a spreadsheet. This feeling rapidly degrades youre ethics. I know I lost most of my reluctance to cheat by my second semester.
Some of you dont understand how he wouldnt believe that so many would cheat and others dont understand how so many could cheat. Let me shed some light
From reputation Professor Quinn is one of the few at UCF that genuinely has passion and from what I know believed that people will do good given the chance (this is simply hearsay so take it as you will).
Yet UCF is a business through and though and as such has many deals with publishers to use the most recent editions of books. This creates a problem for professors who are given the choice to remake their own personal lectures every year to change chapters and wording around in order to fit each new edition or do what most do. Take the publishers premade lectures and read them while adding their own knowledge and opinions on top. For most classes this is fine, its dry but gets the job done but creates a unique opportunity for students. Let’s say that they had the new edition 9 of a textbook. What was wrong with edition 8? Perhaps nothing or something as simple as typos but that doesn’t mean the publisher won’t move chapter 5 to chapter 6 and re arrange the problems. The book may have identical content but just a different order. This means that the solutions manual and test banks are still valid with a little work to match problems. It’s that simple, and when each opportunity given by the school is up for competition between you and 500 others you tend to take any advantage you can get moral or not, and hey in the end what are the chances of you getting caught? Almost none unless someone gets a little vindictive and turns in some evidence. So the cheaters win, they get the scholarship they get degree faster they get the better job. How’s that for a life lesson? Who do you blame? The students for actually cheating or the Faculty and school for making it the most profitable way to go through college?
It’s unfortunate that the 200 got caught and brought down the ones who still have some moral fiber. They are however very lucky that Professor Quinn is nice enough to make them a deal.
...Allowing so many to cheat on a test.
Many years ago, when I was at a major university, I was taking a class where nearly everyone in the class had copies of old exams and cheated on every test. I was offered copies of the exams, but I refused to cheat. Because of the skewed curve, I was getting a low C in the class. I complained to the professor and told him that I thought I knew the material better than anyone else in the class. He defended his testing strategy, but said "to prove me wrong" he would devise a new test, using a different methodology for the final.
The scores were posted. I scored a 90 (minus 10 points for a sign error). The next highest score was 80. The rest of the class scored below 50. So I went to the professor and asked if he was going to adjust my grade for the semester. He said no. Instead, since everyone else in the class had done so poorly, he felt the test was badly structured and had decided to weight it so that it had muted impact.
I was furious, so I went to the dean, who agreed to investigate the matter. I figured that would be the end of it, but in fact the dean called me back to his office, informed me that my grade had been appropriately adjusted, and that the professor had been invited to focus on his research and would no longer be teaching at the university...
My point is not my happy ending, but that in some cases the professors, even in light of overwhelming evidence of cheating, refuse to admit that it's going on and may even encourage it by covering it up.
I think the professor is be extremely generous giving people that cheated a chance to retake the exam, with them potentially having no record of even cheating if they complete the 4 hour ethics course. However, I think he's being a little unfair by saying the only way to get out of taking the make up exam is a signed note from God. What if the student doesn't believe in God, then does he have absolutely no way of getting out of the make up exam? Seems a little unfair.
You make good points but I must disagree.
On some minor points - As other posters have pointed out, the fact that test banks have escaped into the wild is known and for the prof to get all indignant at the cheating isn't right. He knew or should have known that such was possible and going all "nuclear option" in the aftermath isn't justified. Also, the question of refunds is a toss-up; there's just too much of a fine line to cover on that score.
However, I do take exception to the notion that "teaching from a book" and "doesn't want to argue" are justifications for using the bank. I've been in this situation before, where an answer key or a textbook had errors. Those are teachable moments. Real education requires getting into discussions (I hesitate to use the term "arguments") over such things. That's why you have real people teaching courses instead of just chucking a giant pile of books at incoming students and telling them when to report for the first test.
Further, using banks, textbooks, and instructor knowledge as absolute standards for judging the ability of students to learn is just wrong. It's an "argument from authority" that any student of rhetoric should be able to refute as basis. Good students are students who can find the errors in a textbook or argue with a prof, not those who pass standardized tests maintained by book publishers who are as remote from the classroom as the moon.
So if the goal is education, I think my original post was a mostly reasonable summary of my first impression of the lecture.
On the other hand, if the goal of a university is exchanging sheepskins for money (and the higher the volume, the better), then I'm completely off base.
At about 2 mins in he says for years students have scored about the same, and he hasn't changed his teach methods, maybe if he changed his teaching methods he would get a higher average of grades. Also, I would be quite angry if I was made to do a make-up test, when I was innocent.
We wouldn't know about these cases except that they get caught.
This shouldn't come as a surprise. Cheating, by its very nature, exhibits distinctive characteristics that are easy for an expert in the subject area to spot. It is like a first year art student trying to pass off another's painting as their own who has no clue about differences in brush technique. To an expert, this is easily spotted from a mile off. This applies even in hard science fields like computer science (where I teach).
In other words, generally people who need to cheat don't know enough about the material to get away with cheating because if they did know enough then they wouldn't need to cheat. Consider that before you ever think of cheating.
Also, once you are suspected of cheating, a teacher can verbally quiz you about the material and your answers. If you didn't know enough about the material to earn that A or B, what makes you think you can convince the teacher that you know enough about the material to merit the A or a B you cheated to get.
So, yeah, it happens all over the place, but they also get caught (assuming the instructor is paying attention) all over the place. This falls under stuff you see others do but that you shouldn't "try at home".
This situation is very interesting. I know that they investigated the situation and somehow narrowed it down to a majority of individuals who cheated, but I guess I'm just wondering what happens to the student who normally doesn't prepare well for exams and actually took the time to prepare for the midterm (seeing as the grad has a greater impact on you) and did will on it. So if there name is included in the list of cheaters where do they go from there. I think that there was a truth to an extent as to what the professor was saying, but i don't believe that they could narrow it down unless people started telling on people. It's really unfortunate for the students that took the time to study for the exam. Part of me believes the professor and another part of me does not.
I partly believe everything that the professor is saying but another part of me is saying that everything he is saying isn't true simply because there is no way to determine who studied and who didn't. What if some people just turn themselves in just because they know they did well and assume they are going to be categorized as a cheater?
But you know, if I got email-walled and if the professor was honest enough to say "these are amusing little side exhibits that won't be on the test" the kid can just file the emails and poke at them one boring day.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm not sure how it works at UCF, but this professor is breaking many standard rules of any college I've ever seen.
1. You cannot punish a student if you have no proof they broke the rules.
2a. You cannot change the schedule of the class, especially exams, outside of what is on the syllabus.
2b. You cannot hold a student responsible for your own actions, ie changing the date of an exam and telling them they cannot miss it.
If he has PROOF of cheating, punish those responsible. However, if I was in that class, and was falsely accused of cheating or was being punished for OTHERS' cheating, HE would have a serious problem with the ethics board and the dean's office.
This is what happens when you don't make people truly think through their answers. A 10 question test, all long written answers, give partial credits... you get rid of this. No essays, no multiple answers.. just 10 hard questions that cover multiple topics each. This is why SATs, GREs and tests like that are bad... I got a A inthe math section of the equivalent of a GRE for my PhD admissions in my hometown in Mexico. There's no way I got all right... I definitely had a 80/100, but 100 of 100?? What I blame for the extra 20 points???smart guessing and ballparking answers
Why would he have to explain to the parents why they didn't graduate? This is supposed to be a university not a high school.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
The professor is upset and agitated, part of that is due to not being able to due more about the problem. He knows he got screwed over and he knows he doesn't have the power to bash heads, and it shows in his speech.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
"closed environment" and "open internet" are mutually exclusive.
also, good training is very rarely the same thing as good performance.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I cheated on my metaphysics final. I looked into the soul of the student sitting next to me.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
But you know, if I got email-walled and if the professor was honest enough to say "these are amusing little side exhibits that won't be on the test" the kid can just file the emails and poke at them one boring day.
Plus, in a grade-based "education" you know that the "kid" is just gonna drop those "amusing little side exhibits" and never look at them.
And why would a lazy teacher give you ANY kind of heads up?
Like I said above, they are just there to pick up an easy paycheck for as little work as possible.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
This isn't an argument of school syllabi or binding contracts, nay. This is an argument of right and wrong, and of education ethics. In my opinion all those who cheated should be failed. People broke the rules, and there needs to be consequences. In a capstone course such as this, you are well into your transition out of college. The students have been given ample opportunity to act ethically and prove themselves in their journey through academics. If people cannot act ethically NOW (while in school), when will they begin to uphold integrity? They must be taught a lesson.
We had almost the same situation occur in a freshman class I was teaching at a top-10 CS program in 2000 or so. About 500 students in the class, blatantly clear evidence of massive cheating on a tiny assignment. So our deal was: fess up and you'll take a 0 grade on the assignment (2% of your final grade) with no other consequences; you don't and we get evidence then we'll prosecute. In the end about 30% of the class admitted to it. The sad/ironic thing was that there was only obvious evidence against about 7% of the class, and almost none of those 7% asked for the deal, so we still had to prosecute most of them.
How many times has your boss said "Shirley, no book, no internet, solve these theoretical questions, you have 90 minutes and so help me god if you don't use a #2 pencil, I will commit unspeakable acts!"
Well, I've seen a secretary threaten to commit unspeakable acts upon her boss with a #2 pencil when he gave her 90 minutes to sort out a payroll issue and didn't want her using the computer. Does that count?
...than actually teaching the material.
I've dropped many a class because of this. I felt that if the professor would rather pretend he's a university administrator intoxicated with power rather than a professor, it was a waste of my time and money.
I had the same confidence. I put a potential employee through a battery of programming tests, and he passed with flying colors. But when he began work, he wasn't so good. And he was a slob, too (not that I cared).
Four years later, I came upon him in a business suit. I was flabbergasted...never before had he looked even marginally cleaned up (except at that first job interview).
There was a tap on my shoulder. I turned around, and there he was. Again. All sloppy like normal.
I...was...confused.
I looked forward, and there he was in in the suit. And behind me again, there was the familiar slob.
The slob said, "Say hello to my twin brother. And by the way...HE's the one you interviewed...I was the one who took the job. There's no way I could have passed your test."
True story...good enough for me to have enjoyed the quality of the deception more than having resented the depth of the deceit.
His statistics show the people who had been performing poorly through the entire semester and all of the sudden score high. As someone who consistently scored high in college, making the Deans list, scoring mostly As with a few Bs. If I were presented with the testing materials in advance, I would not pass on the opportunity to see the exam before I took it. I would also not admit to seeing it unless it changed my average as compared to the other exams I had already taken. Scoring 5% higher than average will not raise any red flags. It is the people who score 10%+ higher on a mid-term exam that raises red flags. Also, this guy getting ready to cry about people cheating on his exam is lame. Dude is too lazy to make his own exam and is surprised (and offended) when people got the test questions from the same source as he did. The teachers that lecture on what they think is important, but give the standard test that doesn't cover what they think is important suck as teachers (me speaking as a student). In those classes, you have to ignore everything the teacher says and just read the book if you want to do well. This guy has 20 years of experience of teaching what he wants and presenting his students with standardized exams. I am glad this happened, now he can test on what he teaches as opposed to testing on material that he forgot to cover. It will make him a better teacher and his class a better class to take.
If the schools realized that it's 2010, not 1810, and if teachers actually were a bit more passionated about learning than a corpse i'm certain cheating would drop a fair bit.
True. But some points:
As more and more states cut back on funding, there is not only a visible tuition increase but also a hidden increase by lowering services (increasing class sizes, cutting lab and discussion groups).
Lecturing is less time intensive than doing a good class (probably by a factor of 2-3 just in prep). In a 100 student class, cutting a paper or individual component and replacing if with true/false cuts 1-2 work weeks. Clickers suddenly become popular for participation grades. Tests are about easy verifiable facts not complex intellectual concepts (much easier to grade).
If you cut your research, you will not be promoted, or not get tenure and find yourself in a part time position somewhere else soon. Research will give you recognition or at least help you move somewhere nicer with smaller classes, where teaching is better and some populist politician doesn't call you lazy after you just had a 70 hours work week.
Universities find it easier to evaluate research than to evaluate teaching. If they do take teaching into account, they want quantitative ("objective") evidence. The easiest way to get this are class evals. And evals reflect the majority opinion. If there are enough students that just want credits and not the content, guess what: A lecture with easy tests where you just have to remember the power-point slides might actually get higher marks than an intellectually challenging class.
This has of course always been true. But it has become more true in the age of truthiness. A campus that does good teaching is not spectacular. Developing classes that prepare students for tomorrow's world with "on-line components, somewhere in the "cloud" always is spectacular. Plus, it's also the market these online degree entities occupy right now. And since students are now "customers", who cares about actual content as long as having been to College will make you look flashy.
Bitter much? - Yep. And this is how it looks at the beginning of a new round of cutting, stream-lining, FUD-ing, and product value BS-ing. Maybe I should stop teaching and instead work somewhere were I can help shuffling some old ladies out of their foreclosed houses.
Can students do something? Well, they could open their mouth.
If half of your classes are lecture hall, write something for the student paper, interview professors about ideal classes, complain about not being able to learn in a large lecture hall class. The complains have to be systematic not about one particular class. If a couple people do that, maybe there will be better teaching instead of a new shiny building. Just make sure you come across as professional and as someone who values good teaching. Universities don' t care much about a few whiny students, but if good and knowledgeable students complain, the University's could lose their ranking in the future.
If you had a really good class, say so. Wait till the semester is over and you no longer have that particular professor, then write an email thanking for the class, mentioning the good things. If the professor wants to change things, she needs support. If some slackers didn't like the class to be different, mention that too and distance yourself. The email will end up in some committee discussion or the professors file.
I agree. Please note that at no point did I say the professor was responsible for the cheating. He failed to anticipate it when he should have. He failed to take steps to prevent it. He utterly failed in every way in his reaction to it.
But the cheating, itself, was certainly not his fault.
Sad to see that these college students found the need to cheat, let alone is such a speculative manner. I can understand maybe writing a few words on your hand or something to that extent, but making it so that 1/3 of the WHOLE class cheated? I find it hard to believe that passing this midterm would make or break all their college careers where they would have to do this. Did they really think it would go unnoticed is my question?
This is only coming from the perspective of an engineer - I realize that there are courses out there without math... MIT didn't do everything right, but it did tests right. Crib cheats, calculators, books, whatever at all you brought into the test with you wouldn't help. Even copying the final 'answer' wouldn't help you. You had to know your shit and you had to show your work. No understanding meant no grade. A packed crib sheet meant a struggling student. Any course that had tests that didn't satisfy this property bored the shit out of me.
nilbog wrote:
There is no such thing as cheating, only getting creative with your sources. The real world, whatever your career will be, relies on the same behavior that is punished in school that they call "cheating."
No such thing as cheating? You're a funny guy :-)
Observation: cheating demonstrates a lack of integrity.
Pro-Tip: Integrity is important for several reasons. One practical reason is that if you lack integrity, nobody will want to do business with you.
Now you may be (indirectly) be advocating that open-book tests are a better measure of learning; but that is rather different from what you wrote.
*shrug* At any rate...
My gift to you - some Real World examples of cheating: List Of Corporate Scandals :-)
Enron was just "creative with their sources"! Brilliant
2006 HP Spying Scandal
2008 Siemens Scandal, involving cases of bribery on behalf of Siemens towards the Greek Government
American Airlines, deferred maintenance of aircraft
Adelphia officers trial and prison sentence
AOL Time Warner
Arthur Andersen
BAE Systems bribery scandal related to the Al Yamamah contracts with Saudi Arabia.
Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandal
Barings Bank, derivatives trading scandal
Bayer, links to Josef Mengele's Auschwitz human experiments, HIV-tainted blood products, anti-Semitism, racism
Bre-X gold mining and stock scandal
Bristol-Myers Squibb accounting scandal
Clearstream, which has been qualified as "the greatest financial scandal in Luxembourg" (Clearstream is a clearing house, i.e. sort of a "bank of banks", used to centralize credit & debit between banks and other financial organizations). As of 2006, it hasn't been resolved yet.
Chiquita Brands International Financing terrorist organizations
CMS Energy
Compass Group, bribed the United Nations in order to win business.
Corrib gas controversy Kilcommon, Erris, Co. Mayo, Ireland.
Deutsche Bank, spying scandal
Duke Energy
Dynegy
El Paso Corp.
Enron accounting fraud, involving Arthur Andersen
Exxon overreporting of oil reserves
Fannie Mae underreporting of profit
Firestone Tire and Rubber Company for use of child labor
FlowTex, the largest corporate scandal in German history
Ford Pinto scandal
Global Crossing
Guinness affair
Hafskip's collapse
Halliburton overcharging government contracts
Harken Energy Scandal
HealthSouth reporting exaggerated earnings
Homestore.com
IG Farben, participation in the Holocaust
Kerr-McGee, the Karen Silkwood case
Kinney National Company financial scandal
Kmart
Krupp, participation in arming Nazi Germany and in the Holocaust
Lernout & Hauspie accounting fraud
Lockheed bribery scandal in Germany, Japan, and Netherlands
Merck Medicaid fraud investigation
MG Rover Group accounts and pensions scandal
Mirant
Morrison-Knudsen scandal. Led to William Agee's ouster
Nicor Energy
Nortel executives overstate post-dot-com recovery earnings in order to earn bonuses
One.Tel collapse
Options backdating involving over 100 companies
Parmalat accounting scandal & mutual fund fraud
Peregrine Systems corporate executives convicted of accounting fraud
Phar-Mor company lied to shareholders. CEO eventually sentenced to prison for fraud and company eventually became bankrupt.
Qwest Communications
RadioShack CEO David Edmondson lied about attaining a B.A. degree from Pacific
He used "statistical analysis and other investigatory techniques"? I gotta say, if I were in this class and the prof said he'd used statistical analysis to identify the cheaters, I'd breathe a sigh of relief and sit back in my chair comfortable in the knowledge that he was bluffing and didn't have shit. I'd be FAR more worried about the "other investigatory techniques" that don't seem to be worth mentioning for some reason.
Listening to him in this video, I am 90% certain he and the school know exactly jack shit about who cheated and who didn't. Everything he says is classic (and cliche) interrogation methodology. "we already know", "limited time offer", "just tell us and no repercussions"...it sounds like they have exactly nothing but bluffs.
Granted, on a risk/reward scale, there's very little reason NOT to take the deal if they're tossing the results anyway. Hell, I might even go to my TA and say "look, I didn't cheat on the test, but I'm requesting to be placed on the list of cheaters because I don't trust you to accurately exonerate me
Honestly, for a guy who was too lazy to write his own tests and used the publishers test banks...jesus christ...he's awfully dramatic about this, when he should have expected it with about 100% certainty. I'm more than a little surprised that there was any statistical difference between semesters, as this kind of cheating had to be going on all along.
When I was in college, every class you took you'd buy the text book, you'd buy class notes, and you'd buy historical exam packs...it wasn't even an underground thing, they sold them at the CAMPUS BOOKSTORE. Profs COULD be lazy and reuse tests semester after semester, some even did, but they knew the tests were out in public circulation...just like EVERY test is once you give it. Hell, even out here in "the real world", you can't keep tests private. There's a huge industry for buying suspiciously accurate "practice exams" for every technical certification test in existence.
This is lazy teaching methodology, lazy to the point that I'm not even sure it qualifies as cheating instead of "additional research".
"Look to the person on your left, look to the person on your right. One of them cheated."
Uuuh that would be 50% of the class not 33%. What he means is that if you yourself didn't cheat then look at the person on your left and right. One of them likely cheated.
That makes me think the hype about ethics in this is overdone. There is almost no consequence for turning yourself in (in their case a 4 hour ethics lecture/nap time). Combine that with false positives on the innocent group and you might turn yourself in even if your innocent. Ethically wrong but possibly the easiest path.
What if the student doesn't believe in God, then does he have absolutely no way of getting out of the make up exam?
If the student doesn’t believe God exists, he has exactly the same chance of getting out of the exam as he believes anyone else has.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
function of school is 2 things: 1) to teach and 2) to rank students performance. My experience shows that 1 and 2 are at opposite. Maximize #1 and all students get A's and that minimizes #2 - can't have that. This concept amazes me that it still exists - i think schools protect their institution. The mastery style of teaching truly maximizes learning, but it's hard to find (i.e. those math class started by the unpc guys from Iowa - highly recommend by the way)
The professor is bluffing.
Let's say I am a mediocre student, and I aced the midterm. How can you prove whether I cheated or not?
You can say things like "Wow, isn't it amazing that you answered every question right except the one that wasn't in the list of questions and answers that people used to cheat?"
But, that still isn't very conclusive.
Even if I did really bad on the first midterm, and aced the second, that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
Now, he may have something with the "other forensic evidence"... Perhaps someone posted a public wall post to 200 people that said "Dude, all the answers are here" with a link to the test bank. Or perhaps, they are allowed to look through your university e-mail account for such things? If so, he may have been able to catch some of the students there.
Unacceptable and unreasonable behavior on the part of the prof. 1. He should have turned over his results to the university without a deal. 2. He shouldn't have canceled the midterm. 3. In the alternative, he should have been flexible on the retake schedule. If I was a student, I would have appealed to the dean or the university senate, I have before.
sig = null;
Massive FAIL for a news site to post a video, then in the summary below the video use quotation marks to enclose words that the person in the video didn't say. Journalistic laziness and improper attribution are particularly ironic in an article about academic misconduct. But apparently the author, Alastair Good, just couldn't be arsed to record the professor's actual words. Which would be fine if the article were written in a paraphrase style, but it clearly has an entire paragraph written as a direct quote.
I'd prefer to give the author an F, but I made a deal with the Newsroom Editor -- if he comes clean about his lazy worthless cheating journalism skills, I'll give him 24 hours to re-write the article from scratch without it going on his permanent record.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
He was bluffing. If he truly believed he would have a perfect list he would not need to offer amnesty, it's like Tom Cruise asking "why the two orders?"
I too have not seen the inside of a university for decades (thanks for reminding me !) but I suspect the prof fears that actually pursuing the perps would make this messier than it is already.
Basically; "They can't handle the truth !..."
Nullius in verba
DePaul, St. Louis University, and Catholic University of America are three universities that I know that require professors to create a syllabus. I don't believe any of those three universities are "degree mills."
But perhaps you misunderstand what the syllabus states at most schools that require syllabi. The required elements are usually (a) how the grade will be assessed, (b) any policies that might affect the grade (e.g. attendance policies), (c) legal boilerplate from the university about honesty and disability policies, (d) office hours and contact information for the instructor. There is usually a line stating something to the effect that the schedule of what material will be covered when is subject to change at the discretion of the professor.
And, personally, I find having a schedule of what content will be covered when to be extremely useful.
UCF has one of the most stringent testing policies in the US. I proctor exams for them and there is direct computer surveillance, camera surveillance, software that keeps the workstations pristine every reboot and software that only allows the browser to be open and closes all other programs. this was a case of everyone getting the test banks, memorizing answers instead of why and then blowing the exam out without ever having to work hard. there was very likely no cheating going on in the testing labs, but they brought the stolen answers in their heads.
professor was angry because the test wasn't terribly hard if you paid attention in class, and the university takes cheating seriously. If the guy had just handing things over to academic affairs, everyone who cheated would be expelled from the university.
That professor is bluffing his way out of a lot of problems:
He claims with 95% accuracy that 133 student cheated
200 confessed
Also, 95% accurate, means 6 innocents convicted.
Back in the day, I was in a CAD class. All the computers in the classroom were networked, but the IT staff did not have the wherewithal to setup individual, protected folders for each student on the network. Therefore, all students in this class saved their work to the one folder that everyone else could see. Probably 80% of people were copying whoever finished each project first. I saw that for myself. Then the teacher found out. He made an announcement to the class; he knew people had copied other's work, and he would, at the end of the week, go through the files with the IT guys to look at the access records and find out who did what. Or, the students could approach him during that class and admit what they cheated on, and he would give them Fs on those projects. Nothing else would happen to the students. Probably about half the class admitted to copying.
Punishing the innocent to get at the guilty is an act far more despicable than the original cheating. The prof is an idiot and the school that allows him to get away with this crap is not worth attending.
I was once at a similar situation (college physics II). Some students cheated, and others (us) didn't. But the professor caught on and decided - for a variety of reasons - to have everyone retake the test. The primary reason for such a course of action is that it becomes almost impossible to determine who cheated and who did not (specially if those who did not did well comparably to those who did cheat.)
Those of us who did not cheat never contemplated calling the professor an idiot or thinking it was a horrendous, despicable act. We were pissed at the cheaters, but not at the professor. Right or wrong wrt the decision, it's ultimately caused by the cheaters.
Making us re-take the test was an injustice, albeit more of an annoyance, responsibility of which falls squarely on the cheaters. As for the professor, that's his right to order a re-test. Really, it is.
So honest people have to do extra work, and cheaters get a second chance. What a great life lesson this school is teaching.
The great lesson of life is that:
It is actually ridiculous to think life is fair 100% of the time. It isn't. Sometimes, no matter what you do, you are going to end up with the short end of the stick. If you have dignity and fortitude, you might complain a little, but won't expect fairness 100% of the time. You simply grind your teeth and walk over the obstacle (specially a small one such as re-taking a test - which is a very small obstacle in the grand scheme of things.) You do it, you shrug it off and you keep going.
Note: I've been made to retake a midterm (college physics II) because of people cheating, so I know what a PITA it is to re-take a test for something I didn't do.
Obviously it is annoying and it is unfair. But it also obvious that some cases necessitate to drop all results and order a re-test. Smart, hard-working people with a well-place of dignity simply deal with it.
On the other hand, looking at the whole affair as an unfair life lesson betrays a ridiculous, undignifying sense of entitlement, an entitlement that life and the world have never made a promise (much less a guarantee) of.
I taught an Anatomy and Physiology course for nursing students last summer, and some of the students clearly cheated. I gave them essentially the same examination, but the questions were ordered differently on the four different versions, and pictures that required labeling had the ordering of the labeled parts varied. When you have exams being returned that have the correct labeling for version 1, yet that student had version 2, it made for some extremely poor exam scores. It did lead to some shocked looks (Oh, shit!) when I was asked about the answer for question 24, and then told them that 24 on one student's exam wasn't 24 on another's.
The state of nursing is in peril. You don't want to get sick in upcoming years, because the students are poor (as a generality, some were very good, but they were the exception..
So, who wants to go to school at a place that makes deals with cheaters especially on such a mass scale. Fail, expel, done.
Too true, but nonetheless sad. Your comments are an indictment on a clearly broken system. When passion and effort are not recognized or even considered as valuable...
Sorry, but the world is results-oriented. Passion has nothing to do with it. Effort has nothing to do with it. Its not just that class, or just the education system, but the whole damned thing from top to bottom.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
So, basically he chose a book which he reads chapter by chapter to students - probably using pre-made PowerPoint presentations by the publisher.
The book also comes as a teacher's edition with 400 test questions and answers to choose from. This is used for all the exams for the class (midterm and final here, I guess).
Using a book like that is just wrong.
I think it's ok to use books as a teacher's aid in like "Today's lecture is based on chapter 8 in book A and chapter 7 in book B" and to say "The midterm is based on chapters 2-7 from book A and 3-8 from book B".
But to actually be copying exams like that? Get rid of that lazy ass teacher who is paid top money to do - in this case - nothing. He was simply handing out a selection of prepared test questions.
This situation was bound to happen at any point.
In fact, the students in the 21 years before this incident were dumb and don't deserve their degree.
P.S.: I've got a Masters Degree in computer science and in engineering. I've also been a lab instructor for 3 undergrad classes and loved the excitement on my side.
Students will always dislike labs and not pay attention and not participate - but that's up to them. I was like that too. But students (myself included) will always have to step up in order to pass finals.
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5004716/Economics_by_Gregory_Mankiw_%28Class_Lectures_Test_Bank%29_%5BOsheraj%5D
Just watching this, and I've never heard of this school, course or professor.
It sounds like you tried to make the class interesting to yourself, rather than understanding your audience and making it interesting to them.
Grades are so inflated now a days that no one gets the grade they deserve anymore. Professors give points to help students succeed, but it does not help them learn anything but to do so bad that they earn points for it. Cheating is not just done on exams, but papers, presentations, and various other things. The students should all go to the teacher and get the zero they deserve. In the real world, you would get fired for actions like this and most likely have a hard time getting rehired.
A question bank isn't the same thing as a sample test. Publishers provide banks of questions that are only provided to authenticated college faculty who sign an agreement to keep them confidential. Makes a lot more sense than hundreds of people making up tests on the same subject.
Either someone stole a copy or bought one from a dodgy faculty member somewhere or is related to a faculty member or an employee of the publisher or ....
not only that they look down on community college and tech schools.
So they want people who are in 600+ person classes vs community college and tech schools that have much small classes.
Ever heard the saying its not what you know its who you blow. In the business world its all about the social network. The people who were able to obtain the test answers were doing the same as any business would. If it found out the inside scoop about the competitor it would exploit them to better themselves. Stealing the competitive advantage is one of the many ways to strive in a business. Its a dog eat dog world out there. If you cant hang with the big dogs then thats all on you.
but still even that not cheating to study the questions.
This most disturbing thing about this thread is the outrage directed at the professor. 200 students cheated! That is absolutely unacceptable. What is wrong with you people?
If the schools realized that it's 2010, not 1810, and if teachers actually were a bit more passionated about learning than a corpse i'm certain cheating would drop a fair bit.
I don't normally criticise people for language and grammar, since it is beside the point, but I think since you are criticising university teaching quality and seem to imply that you are a student on one, it is fair in this case. So, don't you mean to say something like "If teachers were a bit more passionate (note the form of the word) about teaching (teacher may learn, but they are supposed to teach)"?
Um, notice the placement of the "e" and the "d" keys in the keyboard. And, have you considered the possibility that GP's problem really is teachers who aren't passionate about learning? Why do you assume that GP must have meant "teaching"?
It would lend more credibility to your arguments if you didn't commit such sloppy errors.
Why? How does it lend credibility to an argument to write it in a way that pleases somebody who's looking for excuses not to evaluate the freaking argument anyway?
Are you adequate?
Tech schools are more on curriculum with less bloat But HR does not like them why?
The bloat just seems to drive costs up and eats up time.
maybe 10-20 years ago there was good need for that bloat but not to day when you have to many people in college.
Who cares, school get you nowhere. Start your own business and work it. You will be more successful!
The teacher was too lazy to create his own questions. Instead he selected questions from a test bank that tons of people had access too. If the teacher wasn't so lazy, this wouldn't have happened. Even when he had to create a new test, he used his aids to do it. So that means he was too lazy to even use his aids to make a test for him to begin with.
The teacher shares the blame and should take a teaching class if the students have to take an ethics class.
that's why tests are a bad way to test learning.
The real world is not closed book.
Of course I didn't watch tfv, but from the comments I gather that apparently these were multiple choice questions. Wtf are multiple choice questions doing in an exam? If you really have too many students to check all answers, make sure at least fifty percent of the questions are new and open (as opposed to multiple choice) questions.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the professors testing practices and people making out that he is lazy, incompetent, etc are obviously not familiar with the workload of the average professor. They work their absolute butts off (mostly) and they don't generally write their own tests up as they aren't meant/allowed to. What amazes me is that the 2/3 of the class will be forced to sit in lectures/classes with cheating useless bastards(then again maybe it is a good simulation of the average boardroom)
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
These kids are being shown the 'too big to fail' theory in action. It is a business education after all. If they weren't all cheats, idiots, tossers, and general pricks they wouldn't fit into their chosen career path very well at all. If the University was serious about keeping up the standards of behaviour in the US business world then he would kick out the 2/3 that are demonstrably unsuited for their chosen career path.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Cheating is MUCH more rampant than that. I'm in a networking course, and depending on the teacher, and their test methods, a test could be easy, do-able, or a complete nightmare. Multiple choice, true or false? No problem. Short answer and scripting/code written out by hand? Not so fun. I've cheated on an exam. To hell with an exam for a class the school has admitted is outdated and is cancelling the next next semester. Also, a lot of courses are google courses. In the real world, you're just going to google for the info you need, if necessary. No need to base an entire class around it. Do I need a course dedicated to install Server 2008 R2? No, I don't think so. Most jobs either teach you when you start, or make you work shit jobs and move up through the company, anyways
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
I graduated from a mid-grade private high school in 1988, and I think most of the students did NOT cheat - at least, not much. In both high school and college instructors would sometimes (but not always) hand out three versions of tests to discourage cheating. However, my sister who attended a public high school reported that cheating was rampant in all her classes - with the teacher often leaving the room during tests and the students openly collaborating.
Cheating seems to be much more common now at all levels of education, but is more common some places than others. As you note, one culprit is the insane demands of modern schools - both in amount and stupidity of material. I remember absolutely detesting make work as a child, and I often simply didn't do it. My grades in 4th grade were terrible as a result. Worse still, one teacher (in 4th grade) alternated between giving us material suitable for college students and material suitable for kindergarteners - it was either so far beyond us as to be incomprehensible, or so far beneath us as to be insulting. On the rare occasions he gave us work at our grade level, it was often boring and repetitive. That is NOT a good learning environment. (On the other hand, I had an excellent science teacher that year.)
The problem is, most modern schools follow that formula across the board: lots of make work, lots of homework, lots of rote memorization. No wonder kids are cheating. If I were in their position I'd probably cheat too. If all you know of history is a list of dates and places, you don't know anything about history - and the students instinctively know it. They don't want to waste their time memorizing lists they're not interested in and will never use. The stuff that interests them, and the stuff they'll actually use, they'll learn. However, all the homework and make work that's piled on these kids displaces the time and energy they need to develop their critical and creative thinking and to learn relevant knowledge. Kids these days aren't stupid, they're educated into ignorance.
A few more notes on cheating: Since college I have gone back to school at several levels: for courses that were primarily for certification, for regular courses at community colleges, and a couple graduate level courses. While I can't say who cheated how much and where, I can say that in virtually every case where a test or a course was primarily about certification, cheating was rampant. So rampant, in fact, that many instructors simply read out the correct answers to the class - sometimes asking everyone to choose one answer to get wrong to make the results look normal. I did not see any cheating in the regular community college courses, but they were also largely hands-on, or were full of older, self-motivated students who wanted to be prepared for a state test that is not easy to cheat on. I didn't notice any cheating in the graduate level courses either, though essay questions are harder to cheat on.
Unfortunately, there appears to be a much wider culture of cheating than when I was in school, and even more unfortunately we have devised a system in which cheating is the only rational choice for most students. At this point, I suspect we would get a better educated public if we ended government schools entirely.
Why not make everyone take one last final, as an oral exam in front of all of their professors. ( You know, Back To School ).
That'll teach the kids to stop being slackers!
In certain aspects of life, you get no do overs, and you need to learn the reason for studying, if you cheat and get caught, it's ok, (sort of) but when you are opening a heart patient on your table, and you forget something, because that part you cheated through, well he dies, because of your mistake, etc....
I need not give millions more examples, but the reason is simple to learn what is needed, in case you need to know about it.
If kids were shown that reason more then anything, and compare it to playing a favorite game (like WoW) if you know the raid, your other teammates will be very grateful for having you there, because you know what needs to be done...even if it is lame. Yes history is lame, yes math is lame, yes xxx is lame, but
you can make it fun, by figuring out how to make it fun for yourself, then once it is fun, not only do you get less stressed, but you learn quicker, and also retain more.
This is what is missing in education, not the fact that yes you can cheat and look up on google every 5 seconds, or you can learn and KNOW why you need to learn. I think the teacher in this case was very fair, even too understanding, but I guess it is better then having so many drops outs...I just hope they change also the way they do the testing....that is also another problem...if you can cheat , then the test is not being supervised or enacted properly.
education: the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.
training: activity leading to skilled behavior.
sigh...
http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Tracking
http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?video1=http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DrbzJTTDO9f4&start1=430&video2=http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DpfpCQbv7wAU&start2=605&authorName=Richard+Quinn's+Soundtrack
SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE A_WINNER = "YUO";
There are disciplinary measures. They're mentioned on every syllabus. But I've never cheated and I don't know anyone who has. But then again I'm an engineering and CS student. The big stink about this story, which the summary of TFA fails to explain: this was the capstone business course. The fallout from this is really putting the business school in a bad light. But of course, our EECS department is just fine. :D
in some situations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_punishment
"Collective punishment is the punishment of a group of people as a result of the behavior of one or more other individuals or groups. The punished group may often have no direct association with the other individuals or groups, or direct control over their actions. In times of war and armed conflict, collective punishment has resulted in atrocities, and is a violation of the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions. Historically, occupying powers have used collective punishment to retaliate against and deter attacks on their forces by resistance movements (e.g. destroying whole towns and villages where such attacks have occurred)."
The professor is also trying to get students to mistrust each other with his whole look right, look left, one of these people cheated comment.
Of course, as a professor of management, he probably knows a lot about union busting.
While I don't condone cheating (the students are hurting themselves, to begin with), the students cooperated to do something, and that in itself is a very good thing.
In general, our whole schooling has lots of problems (see John Taylor Gatto and Jeff Schmidt/Disciplined Minds) and more and more students are realizing they are being scammed.
Just take the whole grading thing to begin with -- it is a terrible idea, as explained here by Alfie Kohn:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I sent the professor this: http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
Basically this article show how implicit underlying assumptions the professor is probably making about grading are wrong.
===========
HIGH SCHOOL MAGAZINE
March 1999
From Degrading to De-Grading
By Alfie Kohn
You can tell a lot about a teacher's values and personality just by asking how he or she feels about giving grades. Some defend the practice, claiming that grades are necessary to "motivate" students. Many of these teachers actually seem to enjoy keeping intricate records of students' marks. Such teachers periodically warn students that they're "going to have to know this for the test" as a way of compelling them to pay attention or do the assigned readings - and they may even use surprise quizzes for that purpose, keeping their grade books at the ready.
Frankly, we ought to be worried for these teachers' students. In my experience, the most impressive teachers are those who despise the whole process of giving grades. Their aversion, as it turns out, is supported by solid evidence that raises questions about the very idea of traditional grading.
Three Main Effects of Grading
Researchers have found three consistent effects of using - and especially, emphasizing the importance of - letter or number grades:
1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself. One of the most well-researched findings in the field of motivational psychology is that the more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward (Kohn, 1993). Thus, it shouldn't be surprising that when students are told they'll need to know something for a test - or, more generally, that something they're about to do will count for a grade - they are likely to come to view that task (or book or idea) as a chore.
While it's not impossible for a student to be concerned about getting high marks and also to like what he or she is doing, the practical reality is that these two ways of thinking generally pull in opposite directions. Some research has explicitly demonstrated that a "grade orientation" and a "learning orientation" are inversely related (Beck et al., 1991; Milton et al., 1986). More strikingly, study after study has found that students -- from elementary school to graduate school, and across cultures - demonstrate less interest in learning as a result of being graded (Benware and Deci, 1984; Butler, 1987; Butler and Nisan, 1986; Grolnick and Ryan, 1987; Harter and Guzman, 1986; Hughes et al., 1985; Kage, 1991; Salili et al., 1976). Thus, anyone who wants to see students get hooked on words and numbers and ideas already has reason to look for other ways of assessing and describing their achievement.
2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks. Students of all ages who have been led to concentrate on getting a good grade are likely to pick the easiest possible assignment if given a choice (Harter, 1978; Harter and Guzman, 1986; Kage, 1991; Milton et al., 1986). The more pressure to get an A, the less inclination to truly challenge oneself. Thus, students who cut corners may not be lazy so much as rational; they are adapting to an environment where good grades, not intellectual exploration, are what count. They might well say to us, "Hey, you told me the point here is to bring up my GPA, to get on the honor roll. Well, I'm not stupid: the easier the assignment, the more likely that I can give you what you want. So don't blame me when I try to find the easiest thing to do and end up not learning anything."
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking. Given that students may lose interest in what they're learning as a result of grades, it makes sense that they're also apt to think less deeply. One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less crea
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Posts I made to the p2presearch list concerning education (it would take years to read through all the embedded links on Gatto, Holt, Goodstein, Schmidt, Honigman, Lewellyn, etc.):
* [p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
* [p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
* [p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
Someone citing something else I wrote on schools and information technology:
http://purdueetech.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/why-educational-technology-has-failed/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
A book that discusses how police get people to do that: http://www.mistakesweremadebutnotbyme.com/
Among other things...
So yes, it is possible a lot of these "confessions" were false, with students just playing it safe.
That book indirectly helps explain why school cling to grades and homework when it has been shown they don't work very well.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
http://www.thecaseagainsthomework.com/
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
And it helps explain why competition is still so celebrated in schools when there are better ways of helping people learn together:
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/icccr/index.asp?Id=About+the+ICCCR&Info=Founder%3A+Morton+Deutsch
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/i/a/document/9448_AFrameworkforTeachingConflictResolutionintheSchools1987.pdf
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html ...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research. Moreover, much of the rest of the world was still crippled by the after-effects of the war. At the same time, the G.I. Bill of Rights sent a whole generation back to college transforming the United States from a nation of elite higher education to a nation of mass higher education. Before the war, about 8% of Americans went to college, a figure comparable to that in France or England. By now more than half of all Americans receive some sort of post-secondary education. The American academic enterprise grew explosively, especially in science and technology. The expanding academic world in 1950-1970 created posts for the exploding number of new science Ph.D.s, whose research led to the founding of journals, to the acquisition of prizes and awards, and to increases in every other measure of the size and quality of science. At the same time, great American corporations such as AT&T, IBM and others decided they needed to create or expand their central research laboratories to solve technological problems, and also to pursue basic research that would provide ideas for future developments. And the federal government itself established a network of excellent national laboratories that also became the source of jobs and opportunities for aspiring scientists. Even so, that explosive growth was merely a seamless continuation of a hundred years of exponential growth of American science. It seemed to one and all (with the notable exception of Derek da Solla Price) that these happy conditions would go on forever.
By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific talent to ensure the Nation's future competitiveness, especially since by now other countries have been restored to economic and scientific vigor, but in fact, jobs are scarce for recent graduates. Finally, it should be clear by now that with more than half the kids in America already going to college, academic expansion is finished forever.
The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.
The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more commo
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I can't side with anyone on this debate. I just heard the whole speech, all 15 minutes of it, paying attention to every word.
I can't side with the cheating students, what they did was awfully wrong, stupid, unethical, and it defeats the purpose of pursuing an education. I can't side with the non-cheating students either. If you didn't cheat, the only ethical reaction here would be to stand up to that fascist idiot with the obligatory cop-stache, tell him you would not re-take the test, and then submit a note saying "I cheated too" (Or "I'm Spartacus", for comedic purposes). I can't side with the "professor" either. He's using all kind of scare-tactics in his speech, and all kind of big-brother techniques to pursue students as if they were criminals. As I said, his copstache already gives him away as the fascist he is, but the speech leaves no doubt about it.
On the other hand, the students didn't really cheat. They memorized 700 answers and questions, knowing that 50 of those would be in the exam. As unethical as that is, it's technically not cheating, and it's the schools/professors/exam-bank-makers/whoever fault. If you are so fucking conservative to realize that exams are an archaic and useless methodology to prove knowledge, so fucking squared to use multiple choice or similar exams, so fucking lazy as to write your own exam, and so fucking stupid as to let the answers leak and only find out after the exam, then you need to shut the fuck up, quit your job, and become janitor, because you aren't qualified to do much else.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I think cheating is a SERIOUS issue and have no patience or respect for what these students did. HOWEVER, I think it's sloppy teaching to reuse the same midterms and questions over the years. Professors are paid to teach. Them writing their own material should be a part of their job description. They know this stuff inside and out--that's why they're teaching it. Now, I understand their job is busy and difficult in many ways, but I think recycling test material like this shows a disconnect from the professor and his students, and from the professors and the material. At least have some essay questions, or rewrite even 25% of the multiple choice questions would be a great start. Just having the TAs copy and paste is NOT an appropriate way to teach or to write an exam.