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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."
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.
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
As a student, I would be pretty pissed off if I had actually studied for that test and had my work thrown out because other people cheated.
That's at least partly the point. People don't help cheats if could cost them.
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!
So honest people have to do extra work, and cheaters get a second chance. What a great life lesson this school is teaching.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
It is a business course, and that's pretty much the central lesson of modern business.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
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.
For what exactly? I'm not aware of any contract between a student and the university guaranteeing that they will only be tested on material once or that every test taken will count towards your final grade. I mean you can sue for anything, but your chances of winning such a suite seem remote at best to me.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
What surprises me is how emotional and "utterly disgusted" the professor was. Why?
Because 200(+) students lied to him and thought he was stupid enough never to notice. Back when I was a TA, after I graded a test, I had a student erase his incorrect answer, put in the correct answer, and tell me I made a mistake. I was livid. Still gets me angry thinking about it. It's a good thing I made a mention of _why_ his answer was wrong, and had photocopies.
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.
I cheated once in undergrad.
It was on a humanities class I took in my final semester. I didn't care about the knowledge, I only needed credit for completing the class. I miscalculated the minimum amount of work I needed to do to prepare for a test, and was really freaked out I would fail the class I be forced to enroll in another semester just to complete a humanities requirement. So I tucked my textbook under my shirt and took a bathroom break.
I am a little ashamed. Mostly embarrassed that I miscalculated so poorly. Given the moral and ethical greyness that I've come to expect in the adult world though, I am not sure that I can say that I wouldn't do it again in the same situation. I can't even recall what class this was for, so I don't feel that I robbed myself of any learning. In fact I think it taught me a greater lesson about being prepared, and gives me a great story to pontificate on when I lecture my kids about academic honesty.
Usually a course has what my school called a ROASS document: responsibilities of academic students and staff. This document outlines how many assignments there will be, roughly when they will be assigned and due, number of examinations, the relative weighting of each of these, penalties for cheating, etc.
This document helps the students plan their term because often they are taking 4-5 heavy workload courses. If all of your courses are backloaded with big projects or exams, you may want to replan your semester. The document also protects students from lazy profs who fall behind and would then dump 3 assignments on the students by surprise at crunch time at the end of term, or from inventing course projects at the last minute, etc. Also from shifting weight to the final exam with short notice because their students did too well on assignments, or because they bombed the assignments, etc.
If a student lives up to his/her responsibilities as outlined in the document, but the professor does not, the student has grounds to file a complaint. Extreme cases are needed for anything to come of it, but it definitely happens. More often you would talk to the dept head and he might have a chat with a rogue professor who is abusing their students.
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."
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Turned out several of the students parents' were lawyers, and the university got sued hard...
Interviewer: "Wow! You have great grades! You must have studied really hard!"
Interviewee: "No, my parents sued the university for higher grades for me."
Interviewer: "Well, being that we're a law firm, you're hired!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Spend long enough memorizing the material from your text book and you can conjure the answers from your mind during an exam. Its like a new paradigm of cheating.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
You photocopied all of the tests you graded?
Well, what do you think? Obviously it wasn’t the first time someone had thought of changing their answer.
Plus all you really need to do is scan them all to PDF. It wastes no paper, it’s easier to organize, and you can delete them eventually.
However, to GP: Why get angry? Just get even. Take the modified paper, write a big fat ZERO at the top of the changed paper with a very short description of why, staple it to the original, file copies as always, and then send it in triplicate: one to the student, one to the prof, and one to the dean. See how the student likes that grade.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
If I'm one of the students who lost a letter grade due to the retake, it doesn't particularly make me feel any better that someone else may have done better because of the retake, let alone the fact that the retake was to allow people who cheated to not get kicked out of school as they should have been (at least according to my old school's policies).
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I know of no decent university in which a syllabus is actually required for each class, let alone given any binding status. When one is given, it's always been a guideline. It's ridiculous to me to hold a course to the syllabus since there is variability between groups of students, and any instructor (even the best, and especially the best) is optimizing their class as they go along.
Maybe a diploma mill works this way, but it's a ghastly idea to me that to avoid a lawsuit I would have to stick to a pre-established schedule when the students obviously need, say, more time on topic X; or have mastered and are bored with topic Y.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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 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
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.
Did you not pay attention? Almost all the people that caused the financial meltdown walked away with boats of cash, while the honest people pay the price.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I cheated on my metaphysics final. I looked into the soul of the student sitting next to me.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I think the answer is he made it too easy. From what I can gather, he was using canned exams that came with the textbook. Students obviously got wind of this and used their internet savvy to find a copy on line; there's a wealth of teacher and solution manuals out there.
He also says that the students can take the make up exam from 7:00 am on monday to 12:00am on wednesday. This seems odd to me, and it's either that the exams are on line or at a computer cluster of some sort. Either way it seems possible that students could be taking it before their friends and sharing their answers. Typically in this situation the teacher is using software provided by the textbook which randomizes questions, but there are only so many questions to ask a class of a couple hundred students.
The obvious solution is to design a test to disincentivize cheating. Tell them they can bring a piece of paper with definitions, terms, equations.... anything they can fit on the page. Then design the test to test a range of knowledge. Make 1/3 easy, 1/3 difficult, and 1/3 very challenging. The very challenging questions should really probe the student's knowledge of the material; pose it in a new way, ask them to extend a concept, and other questions you just can't look up or even anticipate. This way, if the student can answer the easy and medium problems, and some of the hard problems, he'll end up with a C, which is pretty much the objective.
The problem is, this is difficult and time consuming, something most Professors won't entertain. Therefore they end up recycling exams, or worse, outsourcing them, and end up with situations of mass cheating.
My wife is a professor at a very large university.
From her experience, it is much more work for a prof to fail a student than to pass a student. There are usually numerous avenues for appeals and reviews. There is one particular case in which she spent god knows how many hours defending her decision to fail a student who was determined to exhaust every avenue of appeal. The student in question had done extremely poorly on the project component of his final mark (which was marked by the co-teacher) and needed a solid final exam to pass. When he failed the final, he accused her of bias (racism actually). She had to have 2 other profs independently re-mark the exam and average the 3 scores (which resulted in his mark actually being lowered). You would think that would be the end of it right? No, the faculty had to caucus and debate failing him. As it was a core course in a cohort based program, he could not progress without completing it, and as it would have been his 3rd failing mark, the school's policy was to expel him. In the process of the investigation, it was determined that he had employed a ghost writer for his admissions entrance essays; English was not his first language and his skills were rudimentary at best, so it was quite obvious that he hadn't written these essays. So now it's easy right? Toss him!
Nope. They failed him, but re-admitted him for the following term. The program has a limited enrollment with a large pool of applicants. So in order to re-admit this loser, they had to deny admission to someone who was actually qualified for admission.
The truly scary part is that It's a school of nursing. This loser is going to be responsible for patient care when he graduates as an RN.
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
You may be right.
But I too catch cheaters, and let me tell you my emotions start with nervousness at explaining to the student (individually), and then run to subdued anger.
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.
Perhaps he was being modded "Troll" for trying to turn a conversation about cheating on tests into a forum for Tea Party propaganda....
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.