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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."
So honest people have to do extra work, and cheaters get a second chance. What a great life lesson this school is teaching.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It is a business course, and that's pretty much the central lesson of modern business.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I had an A, B and C exam spaced out so that you never sat next to or in front of your own test. And yes, I would say that almost everyone cheated. The exceptions would be the few who got quite high grades. I should add that I failed the person in the middle who fed the answers to those around them (quite easy to see who that was based on results and seat numbering).
The prof felt that we were basically setting up entrapment and had a moral issue with it on the first test. From then on we told them we were doing this. To help combat potential cheating I added a D exam. Eventually the grades leveled out to a normal distribution.
After looking at this video, I have to add, this guy is a tool. He is EVERYTHING that's wrong with education today. He's a fat lazy ass who feels he's entitled because of his position. Yet he cheats the very students at whom he's pissed. If he felt like he was delivering a good product in his education career he'd NEVER used canned tests. He'd also have fresh material that needed to have a new test created each and every time. Instead uses canned lectures and he's got a bank of assistants to do his bidding while he packs on the pounds and years to get to retirement. Teaching is an easy job for this type of person because they do it once and repeat until they retire. Using the moral high ground is just a way of deflecting the fact that he couldn't even write a good test.
Cheating is ubiquitous in our education system. I remember in high school, all of the "honors" students would sit around at lunch swapping homework and copying answers. Many of them cheated on tests as well. I don't think any of those "good kids" who took a bunch of AP tests and had a >3.6 GPA didn't constantly cheat.
In their defense, their workloads were insane. I didn't take a lot of honors classes and only took a couple AP courses, and I still had 5 hours of homework a night. Every teacher acted as though they were the only ones giving homework. Meanwhile the homework was the most inane busy-work. History classes were all about memorizing names and places and dates, but you rarely got much insight into the complex causal links and cultural backgrounds underlying the events. Math courses were usually just plugging numbers into formulas that you were expected to have memorized. English courses spent a lot of time testing whether you remembered random facts and details about the book, just to prove whether you read it.
Meanwhile, kids were constantly being told that "doing well" in school consisted of doing what you were told and getting good grades. The purpose of all of this was explicitly to get into a good college. No one was focused on actual learning. No one expected classes to be interesting or worthwhile on their own right. This is why our school system is absolutely insane.