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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.
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.
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.
All of you who cheated, you're on the right track. For the exception of the students who admitted to the cheat and the ones who opened up their big mouths; please submit your resumes to:
Fortune 100 Big Corp.
USA
Looking forward to having people that meet our character standards come aboard!.
P.S. For those of you who blabbed, check the Wall Street firms, they don't give a shit and they get away with just about anything.
Yours:
Big Corp CEO
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
"Successfully cheating is the only part of the curriculum that has any relevance in the real world".
So true...
is it just because we are lazy and can
Yep. That's pretty much it. Collegiate teaching has been hit-and-miss for centuries; your lecturers aren't anything new.
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?
Wait...
You're seriously trying to blame the professor for cheating? Seems to me that if it's "massive amount of materials," that's all the more motivation for you to actually learn the material.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
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.
This is all rationalizing BS. It really depends on what you're really in college for. If you're in college to learn and better yourself, then cheating is idiotic because you're only screwing yourself over. If your lecturers are boring, then study the material on your own. Sure it's extra work, but it's worth it if you really care about your own education. I work a full time job and carry a full class load and I still find plenty of time to study enough on my own to do well in my classes, even the ones with boring lecturers. The secret is not to go out and get loaded every night like most college students do.
If, on the other hand, you're like these other morons who are apparently in college to drink, then studying is just a waste of your time. Cheat your ass off and get the degree your parents paid for without learning anything and devalue it for the rest of us who actually care about getting an education.
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!
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)"? It would lend more credibility to your arguments if you didn't commit such sloppy errors.
Apart from that - this is a university you are talking about. You are supposed to be an adult, who takes responsibility for what you learn, at least to the extent that you read and try to understand the day's subject before the lecture, so you can pick up the presumably few points you didn't quite understand. Lectures are only meant to be a minor part of your effort, so I think your rant is misplaced.
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.
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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)
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.
You've missed a very significant third option: those who are there with the (sole) hope of furthering their future career choices. At the end of the day it's perfectly possible that the A grade on their record is worth more to them than the material they may have learned. It may not be 'right' but it's perfectly logical. To that end, they may have a good grasp of the material (or they may not, it's true) but consider cheating a worthwhile risk since the final grade is really what matters to them. Sure, they should probably be at trade schools if that's their attitude, but the system doesn't work properly and a degree will serve them much better. I'm not saying they can get away without learning anything, and I doubt most of them would want to, just that the exceptional grades could help their CV percolate to the top of the heap, giving them a better chance to display the useful knowledge and skills that they did pick up.
Sure, you might get to a higher position faster if you spend those four years gaining experience rather than a degree, but you have less choice, and if you want/need to move career paths significantly in the future you're starting again from zero, whereas a widely applicable degree will gain you points in many industries.
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.
In spite of your Insightful mod ups you must have meant this as a "funny" post because if you think that the Fortune 100 would hire students known to cheat in college then you are fooling yourself.
The article is rather short on details.
No, he knew who they were. He and the Dean didn't want to lose the revenue from those students going forward. Best to make a scene, scare 150 straight, let 50 stay cheaters, and keep all their money.
"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."
Don't you think that's a two-way street? If I read you correctly, you think universities should have evolved beyond their original purpose and be devoted to professional, vocational training. But of course, the faculty's own professional advancement is not based primarily on in-class teaching, but rather research and journal publication. So if everyone is to be devoted to their own private, professional interest, then the end result is exactly what you describe.
Now, I've reconciled myself to the fact that I'm happier being a part-time college instructor and not advancing past that point, so that I can focus on having rewarding in-class interactions. But a lot of economist-types would call me stupid for having done that.
(P.S. "impassioned")
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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!
Well, they do appear to be business majors...
I read the internet for the articles.
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
There's also a group of people who care about their education, in fact, so much, that they don't consider universities fit to deliver it. I've been teaching myself ever since I was 8 or so, and I'm currently studying an undergraduate degree at a university simply because it will provide me with the piece of paper to "prove" (pretty poorly in practice) that I know something. I've barely learned anything useful in college - almost everything useful I already knew, and the rest is just superfluous stuff that everyone forgets by the time they're done with university (though there are, of course, a few welcome exceptions).
The problem is that university exams do not measure the actual knowledge required for working. No professional can go to an undergraduate level exam and ace it. They add tons of superfluous stuff and knowledge of specifics in order to attempt to ensure that the core concepts stick, but in doing so, they ensure that you need to study for that particular course, with that particular lecturer, in order to pass the exam. And don't get me started on incompetent lecturers.
Although I am certainly no regular cheater, I have done it in the past. It is simply utterly frustrating to have to sit through lectures and memorize large amounts of what amounts to trivia and encyclopedia content just to, in the end, prove that you know the important bits, which you already do, and sometimes the frustration and temptation are great enough that you cheat. Some courses are worse in this regard than others.
Personally, I had a much better time with open-book and/or open-notes exams. Those let you prove that you know how to work the mechanics of the course content without having to memorize all of the details that you'll forget by next week, and, in my opinion, are much better at proving that students know what they're doing. The winning formula is an open-book/open-notes exam with problems that are not in the book or weren't discussed in class (or equivalent problems). This would both enable students who are bored with the class and know the core material to pass the course without spending useless hours studying the fine details, and as a bonus would also filter out the large amount of brainless idiots who get college degrees these days by memorizing everything, without actually being able to solve any problem that isn't a facsimile of something they saw in class. I remember getting a problem in a 150-person class final that only myself and two others were able to solve correctly. It was something no one had ever seen before (a clever twist on a familiar problem - in fact, it added an element bringing it closer to reality than idealized theory), and it could be solved quite easily, but 95% of the class were utterly stumped because it didn't match their mental regular expression bank of problem solutions.
....and if teachers actually were a bit more passionated about learning than a corpse i'm certain cheating would drop a fair bit.
It's so hard to find instructors that are passionated these days. In fact, I would consider it a epidemicalamity.
Actually you can get very very accurate results, especially with multiple choice tests. Its not 100% but you can get near there. Its not what they got wrong, but how they got it wrong. A class of 400 is a lot of statistics to work with. There is a great chapter in Freakomics on it.
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
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.
Not to mention that two clauses should always have a combining comma unless they are very short, and the pronoun "I" should always be capitalized.
At least he/she didn't forget the apostrophe in "I'm", though. The fact that I'm impressed by that is quite depressing.
I don't necessarily agree that the lecture is merely a supplement to the reading, though. It has always been my experience that the lectures cover the material that the professor considers important, so except for the occasional prof who uses the test from the textbook (rare these days, since it is assumed that those tests are easily available and are often used as study aids), listening and absorbing the lecture is usually all you need to make a good grade in the class. The book is mostly there for people who don't absorb material as easily through their ears.
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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.
If they were to do this for some of my classes they'd find a 100% cheating rate
That is an admission of cheating, I think you should have posted AC unless you are really really sure non of your profs know your Slashdot nick/id.
Which would not shock me if one or two does. I had a prof ask me if my nick was DarkOx based after he read some posts and recognized some of the idea's I had discussed with him in class. You might want to be more careful.
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Exactly, "known" cheaters are clearly amateurs who weren't smart enough to cover their tracks. Fortune 100 companies want cheaters who know how to cover their tracks for an indefinite period of time.
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?
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.
Given how he talked about the makeup examine, I'd say this was probably an online exam students were allowed to complete on their own time. Which means having the questions ahead of time allows them to have the sit with the answers to the questions and just put in the correct answers. The only way that kind of exam actually determines a student's level of knowledge/ability to find answers from literature is if the student doesn't have the questions. I agree, being given a mess of questions and answers ahead of time and the professor picks a third of those for the actual examine is a good way of doing things, but that doesn't work if students have the Q&A during the test, which they obviously can if they take the test on their own time.
I'm a psychologist (amongst other things).
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.
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
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.
They wouldn't make it at any type of trade school. There are practical components, and you have someone standing over your shoulder as you complete them.
Om, nomnomnom...
absolutely horrible standard of the teachers and the quality of lectures.
I had a prof for differential equations who was absolutely brilliant. He consulted for NASA for the Apollo missions, and beyond. Although he was a prof for mechanical engineering, he was revered by the mathematics department, which had John Nash as a member of their faculty.
The differential equation prof was a miserable lecturer. You could snort a pound of crystal meth, and still fall asleep in his lectures. But he was a genius in creating problem sets, and the textbook that he chose was excellent. So most students just came by the lecture hall to pick up the problem set and write down the chapters to read, which the prof would always write in one corner of the chalkboard. The prof knew that he was a miserable lecturer. But he knew that through his creative problem sets, that he could teach us something.
These problem sets took about 20 hours of work per week to complete . . . and this was just one of five courses per semester that I had to take. The irony, is that you could hit me over the head today with a differential equation now, and I would not even know it, let alone being able to classify the equation. But that course taught me persistence and disciple, as well.
So, no not every prof is a great lecturer . . . but some manage to teach despite that.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
imho this is nothing but FUD. you cant possibly get the cheaters from statistics only.
Sure you can.
If you get a question from a test bank and it asks to find how many samples you must take to give you a 95% confidence interval, and you change it to be how many samples you must take to give you a 98% confidence interval, and 1/3 of the class comes up with the answer for a 95% confidence interval, it is statistically probable that they cheated. If you modify most or all of the questions and this happens on all of the modified questions, it’s almost a statistical certainty.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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 especially for courses that are just there as a filler and that 95% of the students won't use in their professional life.
I hate to tell you this but much of life is filler. If you can't deal with that in academia, then how can you deal with it in your "professional life" as you put it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That implies you're too stupid for words. They only want to hire the successful cheaters, especially since the successful ones haven't ever had any consequences from their lying and cheating and thus are more willing to continue
Why yes, I *do* teach in higher ed....
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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.
Hah, you say that like it's easy! I highly doubt you've ever been in that position yourself -- it's easy to say "all they have to do is..." when you have no first-hand idea what that means. Let me share a bit of my experience with you.
As a CS grad student, I paid for my education working as a Teaching Assistant. After my first two semesters, the TA coordinator assigned me to be the primary instructor for a night section of CS101: Introduction to Computing. I had control over what material to teach, I made the tests, I created the assignments, etc. I thought this would be great, as it would give me the opportunity to design some creating, engaging, interesting assignments and even participatory activities to take place during lecture. (i.e. I was very passionate about my students' learning.) I went into the first class very excited -- and it didn't take me long to see I was totally failing to excite my students even slightly. Still, I kept at it, hoping that it just wasn't what they were expecting, and that it might take a bit to sink in. Toward the end of the class, a student made a comment that made me realize what was going on. This class was required for all business majors; it had the potential to be a very useful class for many of them (it covered how to use both Excel and Access, among other things), but they didn't care how useful it could be. They also had no interest in being interested in the class. It was just a class they had to take, and they were hoping ideally for an easy A, or if not that then at least for the course not to bring down their GPA too much if they only exerted the minimal energy required to coast through the semester and cram for the exams. Let me repeat that, in case that didn't sink it -- they had no desire for the class to be interesting. They were not there to have fun, or even really to learn. They were there to get a grade because it was required for their major, and they wanted to do that by expending the least amount of time and energy that would yield a reasonable grade. So tell me: how many semesters in a row could you stay passionate about what you are teaching under those circumstances?
I lost a lot of my passion and motivation for teaching the course that day. It was very disheartening to discover that 95% of my students didn't care if I spent an extra 6 hours a week to make the course interesting -- why should I spend that extra time and effort myself if it wouldn't make any difference for more than maybe 2 or 3 of my students? In the end, I still made an effort to keep things interesting, and I'd like to think my section was more interesting than the day sections which had 300+ student lectures, but I didn't put nearly as much of myself into it as I could have.
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.
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
Would be a valid claim for our AI courses.
Teacher from Italy trying to speak English very poorly to a Swedish class using a compendium made of her OH slides only containing single words to help her remember what to speak of.
There was a book to though but I don't think I bought it, back then at least, did get one (a different one?) later.
Probably solved it from the thin book itself but the classes really sucked.
She where researching into robots and probably knew her lisp but she wasn't a very good teacher.
Also I ate once a day, stayed on IRC half night and most likely slept away everything beyond the first 10-15 minutes of the lectures but that can't have anything to do with it.
I don't necessarily agree that the lecture is merely a supplement to the reading, though. It has always been my experience that the lectures cover the material that the professor considers important, so except for the occasional prof who uses the test from the textbook (rare these days, since it is assumed that those tests are easily available and are often used as study aids), listening and absorbing the lecture is usually all you need to make a good grade in the class.
Indeed.
Cause, if all you need is the text and the teacher is just there to explain to those who can't pick up from it - what is the point of the teacher?
You could just as well ask around campus. Or google it.
And since there would be no difference to just buying a book at the bookstore - what is the point of the University? It's not like the teachers somehow increase the quality of the knowledge, right?
You can just buy the book and carry it around with you when you need it - convert it to a PDF and stick it on your phone.
And the best part is, everyone would save years of time and thousands of dollars cause there would be no need for need for grading.
No need to even check if you have your copy of the book with you. You know... like the "honor system".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I agree that the prof/school was remiss in letting things get this bad. Such a culture surely does not appear overnight. But, I think it's the only thing he could have done at this point to have restored any value to the work that the diligent students did. After all, those who studied for the original test have a leg up over those that did not, and without a retest all of their hard work is overshadowed by the scandal.
Nullius in verba
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
In spite of your Insightful mod ups you must have meant this as a "funny" post because if you think that the Fortune 100 would hire students known to cheat in college then you are fooling yourself.
Yes, these companies prefer to hire students who cheat and don't get caught.
Didn't mean to imply that trade schools were a better place for cheaters, although I see how it sounded that way. I meant that if you care more about the career prospects than the knowledge gained (thus leading you to cheat on a university degree) then you should probably be getting a more practical education, but unfortunately the qualifications from a university are still considered more valuable than those from a trade school.
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.
It sounds like these are seniors. The university has gotten most of the money it likely will from them. (Not that tuition is generally the lion's share of revenue anyway.)
Yes.
Personal exp. Same kind of situation.
Class with a old prof. He'd been using test bank questions for years! (I didn't know that...) Was a horrible prof too - would just read, literally read, the book in class.
So, he had like three test rotations [all created from a test bank] and he'd pick one and use it for the year, each year. Once you knew what rotation he was on, you could get a copy of the test from somewhere - I never found out where...
First test, reasonable curve - but highest score was something like 93%.
The next test had multiple scores of like 97%+.
IIRC - [it's been like 20 years] - I finally wondered "what the heck?" after test 3. I graphed all the scores [all scores were publicly available, but you didn't know who belonged to which score.]
Those 97%+'ers? They scored in the mid 60's% on the first test.
Went to the department chair - dropped the graph on his desk, and said. "You know that simply doesn't happen. The test bank is out there, and the prof is making it tempting and easy to cheat.
Next test, I didn't notice any difference, but suddenly those killer scorers from test 2 and 3 went back to the low 60's and stayed there...
So, the cheating was the choice of the cheaters. No blame for their choice to the prof.
However, the prof was sloppy and horrid. He made it so easy and so profitable to cheat, he deserves ample blame for the low-hanging fruit.
He also deserves what he gets in blame for the fall-out the non-cheaters must bear because of his poor teaching/administration skills.
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.
Of course this would only work in a high-school like situation where you can expect every student to be in attendance (barring excused absense). Typical 500+ person college lectures do not have this luxury (and maybe not for midterms, but at my school all final exams were supposed to be on an official calendar in advance).
Bottles.
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.
You are supposed to be an adult, who takes responsibility for what you learn, at least to the extent that you read and try to understand the day's subject before the lecture, so you can pick up the presumably few points you didn't quite understand. Lectures are only meant to be a minor part of your effort, so I think your rant is misplaced.
I always had a problem with this, because I have to use almost all of my willpower to learn from a book, whereas I can usually remember, often word for word, information that is said in a lecture. Ideas I struggle with on the page are intuitive when I hear them coming from a human's mouth. Reading the subject before hand would be a massive investment of my time an energy, and make the lecture boring as the ideas wouldn't be new to me. I will continue to review the materials after the lecture, because it works for me, but I'm curious what you think of that.
Dear mods, there is currently no "cynical" moderation.
"Flamebait" is not an adequate substitute.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Most people are probably in college to get a degree. The HR guy reading your resume can't see what you learned, only what's written on that piece of paper.
bickerdyke
Ok, so what if the professor cannot guarantee whether or not a student cheated? For example, the methods he seems to be using are looking for the same mistakes, that types of errors, things that would pop up when you recognized the question and just regurgitated the answer rather than approaching the question from your own understanding. What if a student "somewhat" cheated? Their exam looks sort of correct but slightly fishy. And he knows that there is at least some cheating but can only nail down all the "certain" cheaters. So he has a couple of options:
1 - Risk false-positives (i.e. a student that did not cheat yet was unfortunate enough to answer close enough to be suspect) and have some innocent students expelled.
2 - Let some cheating go while punishing other cheating (enforcing the "if you can get away with it, it is alright to cheat"). This punishes students that did not cheat by seeing their peers succeed where they did not deserve it.
3 - Offer a way out for those that cheated to in some way redeem themselves (it is NOT easy to even go in private and admit to cheating; this type of thing while it shouldn't be glorified for these cheats, IS something that is worth learning and will serve later in life), and those that choose not to, get dealt with via the normal cheating rules of the school.
Why the extra chance? Because those that cheated and turn themselves in will STILL most likely fail and those did it without cheating will still get the mark they deserve. Additionally, it will teach any student that knew of the cheating, but that decided not to cheat that they should have had the balls to act BEFORE the test was taken (and it seems that at least one person MAY have known before the exam about the leaked test-bank).
-- Humans, because the hardware IS the software.
"Sure, they should probably be at trade schools if that's their attitude..."
Yeah. I hope you don't attempt to learn electrical wiring or even construction by cheating for grades.
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.
If your lecturers are boring, then study the material on your own.
In one case, I had to: the lecturer was a fabulous guy, and really knew his stuff, but suffered from the disadvantage of having a delightful lilting, soporific Irish accent that routinely sent me to sleep. In a couple of cases, I became aware of a distinctly "hairy eyeball" glance that made me wonder if I had been snoring very loudly. I felt bad a bit about it, and actually apologised to him, making it clear that it wasn't 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".
It would lend more credibility to your grammar nazi'ing if you didn't commit such sloppy errors as misspelling criticize and failing other random punctuation issues.
- and it would lend more credibility to your reply, if you had checked whether or not "criticise" was not in fact a legimitimate spelling in UK ;-)
This smells a bit fishy. He was lazy enough to use a test bank, but he's now writing a new exam from scratch that he should have done to start off with. Test banks fall into the wrong hands, they always have and they sometimes get innocently handed out as preparation material. This doesn't just happen overnight. There's also no real proof at all that any one individual has cheated either. Statistics doesn't give you any evidence at all other than that something may have happened. They might find the source of the leak, but that's about it.
It sounds like the lecturer is covering up his own part in this and it's entirely possible that those investigating would conclude that the leak was his fault, at least in part and maybe in whole.
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.
I disagree.
In the lecture, he said that by the end of that week, he'd have a perfect list of who cheated and who didn't. If that's true (and it's not at all clear that it is), then the proper course is to flunk the cheaters. Once that's done, the diligent students not only get their good grades but everybody in the school then knows that they were not only diligent in their coursework but also have some integrity.
I'd call that "restoring value."
The question I'm incompetent to answer (since I haven't been in a universtiy classroom in a quarter-centry) is "What is it about the modern business of higher education that would lead a prof to do anything but flunk those students?"
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.
The professor holds some of the blame for being lazy about testing.
You can't cheat if you're in a locked room with a test that nobody has ever seen before.
Professors who give take-home tests and reuse old tests are facilitating cheating.
This professor's plea-bargain takers will be attending an ethics course to remind them that they should do the right thing even if nobody is watching. He should take it as well, because if that many people can cheat, he's not constructing a resilient test to protect the curve for people who don't cheat.
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.
Apart from that - this is a university you are talking about. You are supposed to be an adult, who takes responsibility for what you learn, at least to the extent that you read and try to understand the day's subject before the lecture, so you can pick up the presumably few points you didn't quite understand. Lectures are only meant to be a minor part of your effort, so I think your rant is misplaced.
I'm not sure what curriculum this is for, but in my experience (engineering in the U.S.) it is not the case. I would have to think hard to identify a class where the majority of the material was to be learned out of a book before the lecture. All my classes in my major (undergrad and grad, two different universities) were 3-4 hours of lecture per week where all the new material was presented, and then reinforced by homework assignments and us reading the book [again?] outside class. I have one class now where the homework is on material that had not yet been covered in lecture, but is related and expands on it. I've also had multiple courses where there was no textbook at all and the professor just emailed out the lecture slides an hour before class for us to refer to later.
Regarding the grandparent post here, you must have bad profs. I've been a TA for the past 3 semesters and have witnessed a bit of cheating during tests (sophomore level class), but only to the extent of 2 or 3 people out of 150 looking at their neighbors' tests a few times. We even had a student come to the proctors under the pretense of asking for help just to say that the kid next to him was constantly looking at his paper and he was annoyed about it. The cheater still did badly on the test even with cheating so we didn't make an issue out of it though. It seems to me that cheating is more a function of the mindset of the students than what the professor is doing.
Of course in my major it's quite rare for there to not be an equation sheet provided or the students being allowed to bring their own crib sheet, so there's little motivation to cheat when it's not a multiple choice test, the method is worth more than the final answer, and they already have all the equations provided (the test is on how to use them correctly).
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.
I'm not trying to troll, but you're comparing teaching an Intro to Computing course, which is presumably for underclassmen, to teaching a Strategic Management capstone course?!? The lower level courses in colleges are where the poorest/newest professors tend to be. It should be quite obvious that a required course for non-majors would result in a less interested student body because they could care less about the subject matter. The upperclassmen, however, should be engaged because they (presumably) have a large selection of courses to choose from and found one they're in interesting/useful/whatever. Teaching lower level courses is usually intended to weed out weak teachers who can't maintain the expected GPA. It's entirely possible that you would still be teaching if you had been moved up to classes only for CS majors. Sadly, many good teachers are stuck in this purgatory because of tenure and other asinine policies that allow outmoded professors to continue teaching a Software Engineering course with overhead slides and printed reports.
Thing is, the "innocent" will be punished anyway if the cheaters' grades are allowed to stand. If there's no way to distinguish the cheaters from the non, but the overall test results are known to be suspect, everyone's grade is devalued.
The only way the "innocent" can actually come out ahead at this point is if everyone is forced to re-take a test that they can't cheat on, and they do well on it again.
Either way, non-cheaters are the ones getting screwed; either with more work, or with their work being devalued. One alternative leaves their earned grade suspect, the other just requires repeating a test that they should already be able to do. Pick your poison, I guess, but personally I'd prefer getting the chance to distinguish myself from the cheaters.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
To be fair, ethics goes out the door when you decide you want to do business.
There is no -1 Disagree.
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.
Interesting story and you're on the path to the reason I cheated my way through about 1/2 of college: bloated requirements to graduate. Out of the 120 credits I needed to complete, I'd say about 40 had any application whatsoever to my actual major or taught any sort of lesson I could use elsewhere in life. The rest were courses tacked on to bloat out the coursework and find a way to justify the extra wasted time before I could be given that piece of paper I still have sitting in the envelope it was mailed to me in and I could finally move onto working. Just as a small sampling of what I am talking about....
I had to go through Calc 1, 2, 3, and 4. All were a bit borderline useless, but all past calc 2 were completely useless and the professors actually only really cared to talk to/take questions from/address students who they knew were math majors and were going to take even higher level classes (ya know, the ones they actually cared about).
I had one WONDERFUL business course (and side-note, the tests in that course were all completely open-book and we could even take the tests home with us if we needed, since the class had under 10 students, attendance was mandatory, and the tests were 100% essays, the professor would know right away if someone was trying to cheat, compared to how the student did in class). The rest were all an utter waste of time asking me to regurgitate definitions onto a piece of paper.
I went to college for IT. I was told I had to take 2 physics classes (each with a lab included as well). Why? Because they felt like they had to throw some kind of science class in there and couldn't come up with a better solution.
I think you get the idea. So what was the result? I cruised through college well enough, and instead of wasting my time learning crap I would NEVER use again in my life, I could spend that time learning more about what I actually wanted to do in life outside of class, was able to put more extra-curricular activities on my resume coming out of school, and compared to others in my major who did play by the rules, am generally doing better professionally than them.
If, instead of bloating out a curriculum with garbage, more schools took the approach of actually adding in more appropriate classes and maybe even work to help students get some light real-world experience while there, there would be less students just there to coast through a class and more really interested in learning what they're being taught.
Conclusion: at worst, students just want to get a piece of paper to get them a job and get the hell out. At best, they want to learn about a fairly specific topic. None want to waste their time on things they will never apply in life, personally or professionally.
I'm not trying to troll, but you're comparing teaching an Intro to Computing course, which is presumably for underclassmen, to teaching a Strategic Management capstone course?!?
Not at all -- I was responding directly to this comment, where the poster complained about teachers being boring "especially for courses that are just there as a filler and that 95% of the students won't use in their professional life". That poster seems to be talking about lower-lever courses as well, nothing like a capstone course.
As an aside, I do agree that if I were given the chance to teach higher-level for-major courses, I would very likely find it more enjoyable and my students would likely appreciate my efforts more. However, even to be given that chance generally requires a PhD, which in turn requires research. I did not like the high-pressure publish-or-perish environment which surrounded research, and so I stopped early in the program and graduated with a Master's. It was the combination of those things (if you want to teach students who want to learn, you have to teach higher-level courses; plus if you want to teach higher-level courses, you must first pass through the mostly unrelated trial-by-fire of research) which led me to bow out of teaching and instead pursue a career in software development.
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);
The problem you faced is caused by your lack of understanding motivation. The motivation of taking the class doesn't have to be the motivation for staying in the class. If was teaching that class, I'd have a simplified grading system A, C, F (No B or D). Everyone starts off earning a C, to get an A or F requires effort.
If a student shows up every class, takes every test, participates "enough" they get a C. If a person doesn't show up, doesn't take the exams or participates, the get an F. To get an A would require active participation, be engaged, do the extra effort work etc. Not that getting an A is hard, it just requires "motivation".
In such a class, a B or D is more or less meaningless except to pass (solved with C) or GPA (solved with A), and those that truly fail would get the F. If you want an A, you have to show the proper enthusiasm for the material that merits an A.
And yes, you should put in the work for 2 or 3 students, especially if you identify those early in a semester. Those are the ones that become Teacher's Pets and who will get the A when the time comes. And you might just find that you'll actually get more than 2 or 3 if you actually cared for those 2 or 3.
Obviously you're not a teacher, otherwise you'd more than realize it is the few (2 or 3) that make the whole difference.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
First of all, he was totally bluffing. They might be able to have a REALLY GOOD IDEA of who cheated, but it would never stand up in court. And if you're kicking a bunch of people out of a University, expect at least some of them to take it to court. Fortunately for the professor people would start talking and eventually most if not all of the names of the cheaters would be known merely from confessions.
More importantly, I can't imagine why any professor would think any previously published materials would not be available for study by the students, be it "test banks" published by the book publishers, previous years' exams, etc. Unless the student(s) literally broke into his office and stole the test bank they didn't do anything immoral imho.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
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.
Most people are probably in college to get a degree. The HR guy reading your resume can't see what you learned, only what's written on that piece of paper.
This, and further they likely wouldn't care even if they could see. Nobody likes the know-it-all kid who's coming in fresh from school with a plan to change everything. They just want you to do what you're told with just enough accuracy to keep them from being out-shined or embarrassed.
Like it or not, successful cheaters meet that metric.
Apart from that - this is a university you are talking about. You are supposed to be an adult, who takes responsibility for what you learn
And this would be the 1810 part that Parent is referring to...
You could say the exact same thing about high school today that you can say about college, because they serve the exact same purpose.
Further, nearly no one, including the US government (e.g. healthcare reform,) considers people of college age as 'responsible adults' anymore. College is the new high school now.
It seems like the simple solution, then, would be to stop requiring such classes that the students do not want to take. Allow them to select from a wide list instead.
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.
Like it or not, successful cheaters meet that metric.
So it's good that they at least try to weed out the unsuccessful cheaters.
And honestly, just buying and using the answer sheets from the publishing company is rather lame.
Back in school we nicked the test from the teachers briefcase or from the waste paper basket near the teachers lounge....
bickerdyke
Considering your low ID number, I'm guessing that you're a bit older than the average college student (am I wrong?)...and likely more mentally mature as well. That would mean that you're probably not joining in with the younger folks at the frat house beer bashes. While I do agree with much of your post, I think that there is a certain rite of passage here that some miss out on (I did, having not done the traditional 4 yrs. right after HS...night school/fulltime work. UGH).
Just another day in Paradise
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.
I had a similar experience at work (IT company). I was complaining about how nobody seemed to care about learning new technology, and one of my staff said "most people are not like you. They want to go home at 4:30, plop on the couch, and not worry about this stuff." It struck me that's the difference between a real professional and everyone else --- a professional does want to keep up with technology, does want to learn better ways of doing things, does want to succeed. Many people in white-collar positions (yes, even in the tech industry) have no other desire than to collect a paycheck while doing the least amount of work they can get away with. Maybe that's also the difference between tech-geeks and say, the marketing department.
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 it's a relevant one, especially to the question of whether the professor is to blame for the cheating.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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?
Probability is not proof.
Proof is tautological... either you have it or you don't.
The professor knows people cheated because students have confessed that there has been cheating, but he can't prove that they cheated, even with statistical analysis.
No dean will flunk a student who he suspects MIGHT have been cheating. That's simply a lawsuit waiting to happen.
The problem here is with the professor. A 400 level class that has a freaking scan tron test? Just how lazy is this guy? If the students simply memorized the answers from the test bank, then they have fulfilled the objectives of the test, because a multiple choice test simply requires you to choose the correct answer from a list.
Know what kind of test you can't cheat on?
A test that requires you to answer the question and explain how you came about the answer.
I lost a lot of my passion and motivation for teaching the course that day. It was very disheartening to discover that 95% of my students didn't care if I spent an extra 6 hours a week to make the course interesting -- why should I spend that extra time and effort myself if it wouldn't make any difference for more than maybe 2 or 3 of my students? In the end, I still made an effort to keep things interesting, and I'd like to think my section was more interesting than the day sections which had 300+ student lectures, but I didn't put nearly as much of myself into it as I could have.
You spend the extra time for the few students who do actually get excited about learning. Because those few students are usually the ones who end up taking the knowledge you gave them and changing the world. The rest of them don't matter. It's sad that you lost your own passion for teaching a subject you enjoyed just because you were faced with a bunch of idiots who were forced to be part of a class they didn't care about. A good teacher ignores the students who don't care and just focuses on the ones who do.
Yeah, because it's totally relevant to compare an introductory freshman level filler class full of information they either already know to the degree that they need to, or don't need to know at all, to an upper classman level business class for business majors.
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.
Anybody is actually hiring students these days?
Know what kind of test you can't cheat on?
A test that requires you to answer the question and explain how you came about the answer.
That is a laughably naive statement.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I'm going to sound like a high-minded and pompous jackass here: why should you emulate your students' bad attitude? Just because they're lazy ignorant slobs doesn't mean you have to be one. Be your own man, don't follow the others like a sheep. You're on a mission, and that mission is not dependent on other people's feelings, attitudes or moods.
Yeah, 90% of people are dull and boring. Doesn't mean you have to be.
A capstone course should not have 600 people in it. A lot of 100 and some 200 level courses have huge class sizes, but if your school has a class size this large at a higher level something is wrong with the school.
The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important
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.
I suppose that one would have to look at hiring and retention rates out of your school to really get a good idea, but from the initial "knee-jerk" reaction to your post, I would think that UCF is not a good institution to get your education from, nor is it a good institution to hire from (I am a student myself, but putting myself in an employer's shoes I instantly put up a red flag). If this is the feeling of the majority of the student body, as you claim, then no defense or sweet talk of the university would convince me that their graduates are worth my time. Point is further proven by a 500+ person capstone course. I understand that the lecture itself is the 500+ part, and the class is split into labs for a percentage of their class time, but it still unfathomable to me that such a setup even exists. The level of personal attention from instructor to student must be terrible.
For the textbooks, you may be correct. From what I understand from speaking with my own professors though, each professor chooses their own books and makes their own deals. If it is really too overwhelming to make up your own tests (which if the team of professors here can put a new one together in short order like this, I think they could put one together at a less insane pace over 2 or 3 months before midterm/final), then the prof should tell the publisher that he is happy to do exclusive business with them, but on a larger timetable. Skip a version once in a while. At a high level like this course, should they really be using books with versions anyway? Isn't a theory based oneshot book for the times more appropriate? I fully admit I am not educated in this area, and there are most likely factors I am not even thinking of that make this decision impossible for faculty, but these are my initial thoughts.
Overall, I am leaning towards a lot of the other posters in my opinion on this professor. He is using a lazier method of teaching. If he is like you have heard, and is one of the professors with a real passion for what he is teaching, then I applaud him. On the other hand, I think he should leave the university for one with a much more personalized education system where he can really interact with every one of his students. Teaching at a university that treats their students as a number doesn't sound like a philosophy that is in keeping with his principals. He may want to evaluate if those tens of thousands of students lives he touched are better than the fewer number of students he could have really impacted at a different university.
500+ capstone... I'm still having trouble with that.
Vol~
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!!!
Was physical attendance at your class mandatory? One of the first things I did as a TA was to tell the students that they didn't have to turn up for the actual teaching sessions. Although officially attendance was supposed to be compulsory, I told them I would not be reporting anyone for non-attendance. I got this idea from an old teacher of mine, who said that if there are people in the class who don't want to be there, then get them out as quickly as possible, otherwise they will drag everyone else down with them. I never saw about 20% of the class after that. However, the rest of the class wanted to be there, they wanted to learn - maybe for interest, maybe for the grades - but regardless, they wanted to learn and chose to be there, and that made a huge difference.
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.
Maintaining "passionated" (GREAT word!) teachers is expensive. The school isn't here to educate or inspire. It exists to generate revenue. It's better for the school's bottom line to hire a hack and then put the blame on the students. This has been going on since the dawn of man. The young being blamed for the failings of their elders.
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
Awww... can't think for yourself, eh?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
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
absolutely.
You just need to be in the right field. Also making and using contacts help.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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";
and get the questions from where? the question bank that the cheaters have?
This prof has a pile of lab assistants, and TAs and yet the 7 people total can't write a newish 100 question test 3 times a semester... Yes i know that the TAs and whatnot are students as well, but few of them are undergrads taking 18 credits. They are taking 4 grad credits.
I think the publishers even say that the question banks are for "inspiration" or some-such, I'm not really seeing the problem here, other than multiple choice tests are easy to cheat on. Make them short essay questions and you'll do a much better job of testing.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
True, test-banks do introduce a security hole. However, unless someone does something extremely wrong (more so than cheating) and the test bank has adequate security, then there is nothing wrong with a test bank. It not only is more efficient, but has a more uniform goal for multiple instructors to teach to be tested on, and keeps truly lazy professors from giving crappy easy tests. The tests are in effect vetted by all professors that use them, giving them more credibility as an accurate measure of learning. Don't be upset that the professor saved some time not having to take the time to create the test, as it is for the best.
You think he is wrong to avoid 96 hours of a "team" to put together a test? Why reinvent the wheel? Oh, to keep out cheaters. Seems he has this covered with his statistics analysis, and has taught much more than just his class a lesson of the consequences.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
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 loved school. I took classes because I was really interested in them. Though I ended up with computer science/mathematics, on the way I took art classes, history, literature, philosophy, chemistry... most of them not required for my degree. And throughout elementary school, middle school, high school and college, I never cheated. Not even once.
Twenty years later, the teachers who invested the time in their classrooms are still influencing me today. Whether watching Lost and recalling Robinson Crusoe from English Lit, or hearing Lady Gaga and thinking about Warhol, or reading about Buffett and remembering an economics course, those few hours spent learning makes my life so much richer.
I actually feel an incredible sadness when I see kids rushing to get through college. Those years are so infinitely amazing that cheating your way through it is an affront to life itself. There will rarely be another time when you will be surrounded with so many vibrant minds.
And to those who make the excuse that they cannot afford to take courses outside their degree, know that I worked my way through school. It was hard. Damned hard. Going to work at 2AM, getting out at 8:30AM, then rushing to class.. Studying until 8PM, sleeping for a few hours... On weekends scraping together a few dollars to go out with friends (because that's part of it too). But it was all worth it. Given the chance again, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
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.
Not necessarily cheat, but... "Achieve, whatever the cost."
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/