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Cheaters Exposed Analyzing Statistical Anomalies
Hugh Pickens writes "Proctors and teachers can't watch everyone while they take tests — not when some students can text with their phones in their pockets, so with tests increasingly important in education — used to determine graduation, graduate school admission, and — the latest — merit pay and tenure for teachers, Trip Gabriel writes that schools are turning to 'data forensics' to catch cheaters, searching for data anomalies where the chances of random agreement are astronomical. In addition to looking for copying, statisticians hunt for illogical patterns, like test-takers who did better on harder questions than easy ones, a sign of advance knowledge of part of a test or look for unusually large score gains from a previous test by a student or class. Since Caveon Test Security, whose clients have included the College Board, the Law School Admission Council, and more than a dozen states and big city school districts, began working for the state of Mississippi in 2006, cheating has declined about 70 percent, says James Mason, director of the State Department of Education's Office of Student Assessment. 'People know that if you cheat there is an extremely high chance you're going to get caught,' says Mason."
The headline should be "Cheaters Exposed By Analyzing Statistical Anomalies"? I thought the cheaters themselves were doing the analyzing, to get ahead of the cheat detection.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
If I fall into the anomaly category without cheating, I'll be screwed. What can I demonstrate in my defense? Not much. I find it hard to believe they can prove that you cheated without actually video-taping you cheating or something along those lines.
Anomalies are what they are, data anomalies, nothing more and nothing less.
Improbable is not impossible. Are they going to boot people for a good test if they think it was the result of cheating or will they still need to catch them in the act (or find irrefutable evidence)?
multiple choice tests at any level are completely divorced from the concept of real world knowledge application
all tests should be scrapped and replaced with double blind judged projects
but that might make the poor teachers union members work a little bit instead of using the same multiple choice test for 20 years and relying on a computer to spit out the grades
...the lesson here is to cheat just barely enough to get by, or to consistently cheat all the way through. A better lock just makes a better lock picker. Not that I'm saying we shouldn't discourage cheating, but the issue is why students want to cheat rather than gain the knowledge. I understand that testing is one of the best ways to gauge knowledge, but we're too focused on testing and no where near focused enough on education. Tests are proven to decrease a students interest in subjects. The solution is to move to more objective based learning where students complete projects or applications showing their knowledge of the material. Obviously testing is easier, but if our goal is education, we need to change.
I would like to apply this idea to see when a politician is lying. But then I realized it would just overload. So then I figure we should try to see if it can detect when they are telling the truth. That way you work with a much smaller data set. Damn near zero. So it looks to be a total failure.. Nevermaind
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Gotta love this line:
Interesting. So their people have time to explain the methods to non-peers ... but not enough time to write them up for peer review.
Have a little case with enough slots for desks. Each student puts their cellphone into a box corresponding to their desk.
No Cellphones makes it MUCH simpler to not have them used for cheating.
And the rule is - If you don't turn your cellphone in - YOU FAIL. Done.
UPS Sucks
Teacher: I'm sorry I am going to have to fail most of you for cheating.
Students: But we didn't cheat!
Teacher: Then how do you explain how so many of you came to the same conclusion that 2+2=4?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Since Caveon Test Security, whose clients have included the College Board, the Law School Admission Council and more than a dozen states and big city school districts, began working for the state of Mississippi in 2006, cheating has declined about 70 percent
Or cheaters have become 70% less detectable.
"cheating has declined about 70 percent"
You mean, people caught cheating has declined 70 percent.
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"Your goal is not to catch a bunch of people and hang them," Dr. Fremer said. "Your goal is to have fair and valid testing."
I hope administration agrees. When I was in university I wrote a group paper with one guy whose wife was a professional editor, she helped us out by reviewing it and making suggestions, we had to fight not to get expelled because our paper was "too well written" to be our own work.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
And yet, there will also be false positives.
I did poorly on one test. Noticing this, I studied hard and greatly improved my grade in the next test. Would this flag up a warning that I'm a cheater?
Or for that matter, doing better on the 'harder' questions. Perhaps I decided to concentrate on doing those questions because they offered higher marks than the easier questions, or because I had a natural aptitude for some elements. I may have elected to study those materials harder.
Professors can't rely solely on 'statistical anomalies'. Illogical patterns may well have an explanation that has nothing at all to do with cheating or advanced knowledge of the test. Of course, we all know just how lazy a minority of our lecturers are.... and how likely they'd be to take the word of this agency as gospel.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
Don't refute mathematical truth! Though I would imagine what it would do would identify potential cheaters, which would then be monitored later. Because, as stated, it would be unreasonable to kick someone out based on a probability of dishonesty. That said, I never saw the benefit of cheating, considering what good does an education do, if you never learned anything? Other than how to cheat of course.
Nothing.
They are for discrimination. i.e. to choose one person rather than another. That has nothing to do with educating people.
Since Caveon Test Security . . . began working for the state of Mississippi in 2006, cheating has declined about 70 percent.
How can anyone possibly know this? If they're detecting 70% less cheating, how do they know it is because students are cheating less rather than cheating in less detectable ways? The company methods aren't published or peer reviewed, and the graphs on the website are post-hoc graphs from excel (rather than whatever they use to data crunch - R, SAS, etc). As pointed out in the article, the company says nothing of type 1 (false positive) or type 2 (false negative) error rates. If students study together and have similar answers, particularly if the test is open book, how likely are they to be flagged as cheaters?
I'd love a silver bullet to stop cheating, but I'd like it to be something we can all agree is a good check. More fundamentally, multiple choice tests are a lousy way to test anything but recall - they're just not capable of testing real learning: comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, or evaluation. Maybe we ought to move towards other types of tests, less vulnerable to hidden cheating.
Cheating has always been around, I doubt that cell phones are making it more frequent. Grades based on testing are themselves very unreliable too. Should they associate p values to the test scores?
metageek
I usually perform much better on hard questions than on simple ones. In one extreme case in multiple choice test I had all easy questions wrong, half of the medium difficulty questions right and all the hard ones with no error. Does it mean I cheated? Does my brain cheat itself?
The "dumbing-down" of America continues. Because it's much easier to turn the wrath of the "system" against anyone who stands out rather than actually following the steps involved to prove a person's guilt. Publicly flogging an innocent person is just as effective a deterrent as flogging a guilty one. It does, however, speak volumes about how those entrusted with authority view their powers.
While statistics may be absolutely certain about what the odds are over the long term of getting any particular number on the roulette wheel, it absolutely cannot predict the next spin. Using "statistical analysis" to "catch someone" is absolute, utter bullshit and any faculty using this should be run through a statistics course and then fired. It proves nothing. Get up off of your fat arses and do your damned job. You can tell in under 5 minutes which students have studied and which haven't, just by talking to them, and this information is far more valuable than any statistical snake oil.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
With more than 100,000 students tested, proctors could not watch everyone -- not when some teenagers can text with their phones in their pockets.
And how exactly did they read those text messages if their phone was in their pocket?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
As an engineering student I had many false positives in many classes. There were times when I had to make an A on the final to get a C in a class and I did. This method of catching cheaters will only add to the stress a student is under. I was accused of cheating because I made a perfect score on a final and I had to go through a whole review process to prove my innocence. The process was definitely guilty unless proven otherwise. While a cheater might make perfect scores on all his test because he was cheating from the start.
Played out about as purely as it could be. Here again, as in criminal law, we see that deterrence is always a better choice than retribution. It's why the death penalty doesn't persuade anybody not to commit a capital crime. It's retributive. It says nothing about the probability of being caught to begin with, so it does not change the murder rate.
Maybe I'm a bit slow on this, but I'm still trying to figure out how one cheats with their phone in their pocket. I get how on some phones you can send a text with your phone in your pocket, but how exactly do you receive an answer with the phone in your pocket? Does the person aiding you send you back 1 text for answer A, 2 for B, etc. and you count the number of times your phone vibrates? Of course in a smaller room, I'd imagine some people would be able to hear the vibrating and ask you to give up your phone.
so with tests increasingly important in our current (broken) educational system — used to determine graduation, graduate school admission and, the latest, merit pay and tenure for teachers, Trip Gabriel writes
Tests are not important to education. They contribute little to the actual process of learning. They are simply the (very rudimentary) measuring stick to see how "tall" you are in the learnosphere. Sadly, measuring sticks only measure one dimension. Almost all fields of study have many, many more dimensions that bubble sheet/essay testing cannot measure.
Let's hope they are correct in their assessment and it's cheating that declined 70% (by the way, why not more than 70%?) as opposed to something else happening - like people cheating 70% MORE during all other times, not just during exams to throw off the statistics during the exams.
You can't handle the truth.
I often have students who do worse than they should based on random chance. ie. Each question has five choices, a student who chooses randomly should get four questions right on a twenty question test. Scores of 2/20 are common.
Given that students often do worse than random chance, there must also be an equal number of students who do better than random chance. In fact, there is a finite chance that a student will get a perfect mark based on random chance.
The bottom line is that, if they accuse you of cheating based only on statistics, they have no real proof. They have to hope that they can get you to confess.
My solution is to give students with suspicious results a chance to take another test in a room by themselves with a proctor or video surveillance.
you can proactively mask your cheats with statistically valid test answers, right and wrong. thus, the cheats won't be caught by the test analysis software, it will be thrown off the scent
however, if you can actually master this methodology, and the test you are cheating on is a test in a college level statistical analysis class, perhaps you deserve the A nonetheless
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Some emotional disorders can cause lapses in concentration in which complex questions are solved and easy questions answered incorrectly. I would think that any accusation or action in regard to cheating best have one heck of a strong proof or the lawyers will have a feeding frenzy.
In my time at Georgia Tech I was accused of cheating on a physics test by some similar analysis. I hadn't done anything wrong, but i had to defend myself to the head of the department and a panel that was investigating the matter (How can I prove that I didn't cheat?!?!?) After the head of the department grilled me on the subject matter on the spot he felt that I probably didn't cheat, but they still put a note in my file that I was suspected of cheating and told me that if they suspected me of cheating again it would be used to show a pattern and I would be expelled.
I think what must have happened is they didn't take in to account that I have a fever of 101 for the first test and was recovering from a surgery right before the second test so my scores were sub-par. I worked my butt of to be ready for the final and got an A-.
I am sure these systems are statistically a great tool, but in specific cases the human element that is using it has to over ride the mathematical analysis.
like test-takers who did better on harder questions than easy ones, a sign of advance knowledge of part of a test or look for unusually large score gains from a previous test by a student or class
Sounds awesome, lets punish those who started studying since they bombed the first test.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
if the purpose of education is to prepare for life in the "real world".
Cheating is a part of everyday life and if you are going to compete in a world of cheats, you need to refine your cheating skills as early as possible.
How else are you supposed to be a competent financial analysis, stock broker, lawyer, etc.. Success in many fields is all based on being the best cheater.
In fact, there should be a requisite course taught in schools titled "How to cheat and get away with it".
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
The most interesting part of this expensive and heavily studied technology will be the results (or lack of) with regards to demographics such as race, sex, parents income, political beliefs, whatever.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
boolean politicianIsLying() {
return true;
}
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If you get caught, you ain't trying hard enough
And yet, no mention of how little importance "timed data recollection, now with life altering consequences!" really is in the real world.
Its looking more and more like one of those sadistic game shows, you know?
Some ideas:
1. Jam cell phone traffic during exams. If it's not legal then make it legal. More feasible for large college courses than high school exams due to cost.
2. Zero tolerance policies. If you're shown without a doubt to have cheated then you not only fail the course, you're expelled.
3. Keep exams short, possibly in sections spread out over multiple days, and stipulate that if you leave the exam room for any reason (including to use the bathroom), your work for that day is invalidated and you must re-take an "alternate" version of that day's exam.
4. Design exams such that they're resistant to cheating. Use essay or short answer questions instead of multiple choice. If you must use multiple choice then generate different exam versions in which the answers are ordered differently. No two students in proximity to one another should have the same exam version.
5. Structure classes in a such a way that exams are taken individually, with very little opportunity for cheating. I took a self-paced digital logic class that used this format. To advance to the next unit a student had to get a perfect score on a six-question 30 minute quiz taken in the presence of a proctor. After the student had finished the proctor would denote any incorrect answers and the student had 10 minutes to correct them. If he failed to get all questions correct then he had to wait 3 days before re-testing on that unit.
You send the questions out to a source to be sold later.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There seems to be an increasing emphasis by schools on "catching cheaters". This seems to be missing the point.
We send our kids to school not so they can pass tests. I honestly do not care if my kid gets an "A" or an "F" on the test; I care that he actually learns the material. Tests are a tool that educators can use to help them determine if a child is learning the material but passing grades shouldn't be the goal. If students are cheating on tests then you need to look at the reason why. Is the material being presented in a way that is too hard for the child to understand? Is it not being presented in a way that interests the student? If a student is intererested, he will learn. If he learns, then he has no need to cheat.
Stop spending money on anti-cheating technologies. Spend money on improving the methods of education.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212
"People know that if you cheat there is an extremely high chance you're going to get caught," says Mason."
Yeah, unless it was for a statistics test.
-FB
I bet they got the idea to do this from their neighbor's paper.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
When teacher pay was linked to student achievement in standardized tests, some Chicago teachers decided to 'help' students during tests, and were subsequently caught through statistical analysis
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212
Too bad your stupidity and skimming did you in bigmouth, lmao!
I think I've heard ideas along these lines before...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I would probably be flagged as a cheater because A) I do better on hard questions than easy ones and B) I often have advance knowledge of subjects.
This isn't because I'm cheating but because I study harder on the hard stuff and dismiss the easy stuff as a waste of time. If I'm interested in it I'll seek out other sources of information than just the class lectures and assigned reading material which often leads to the advance knowledge of subjects not yet taught, or of better techniques than what was taught.
I've never cheated in school because the reason I'm going to school at my age is because I want to learn. But I've all but given up on the American education system and if I got tagged by a system like this I would pretty much give up all together and resign myself to the fact that if you're going to get any serious learning done, it'll either be exclusively on your own with no degree to show for it, or in another country.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212
Hmmmm? Did Your big mouth and skimming got you into a jam again?? Absolutely.
I remember an example from my high school days. It was a statistics class and the teacher had three classes of the exact same subject. He would give the same test to all the classes. One would think that the situation was ripe for massive cheating and you would be correct.
When the first test was given, he purposely allowed the students to take their tests from a pile. Of course, there were more tests taken than there were students in the first class. These purloined tests made their way into the hands of students from the second and third classes who did unusually good on that test. By the way, the first class was composed of the best students. When the test scores were analyzed of course the second and third classes did much better than the first class. When the tests were handed back, everyone noticed that they had unexpectedly bad test scores. Here is what happened.
For the first class, the teacher lumped their scores in with the other two classes. Of course, this skewed their curve so that they received low marks. For the second and third classes, he did not do this and their average was so high that it was impossible to get a good mark. Their curve was "skewed" also. He then went into length about how he used statistics to teach us a lesson about cheating. He explained that the good students were aware of the cheating and did nothing, as such they were enabling the cheating. The students that distributed the stolen tests actually were damaging their test scores so they lost. The students that used the stolen tests also lost out because to the "skewed" curve. In the teachers words, he "SKEWED" all of us. Needless to say, we were all leery about cheating in his classes after that.
Read this article when it appeared in the Post and couldn't help but wonder - how do they use the DMCA to have brain dumps taken down? If I recall and summarize a question in my own words and the answer - whay is this an issue? Is it not a derivative work?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I was disqualified from a competition run by FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America) when I was in high school because I scored so well I must have cheated.
It was multiple choice on 'Computer Concepts' I scored 98/100, second highest was 76/100.
That was pretty bad... but worse was the next year, I tried again... and was disqualified because I 'won' the previous year.
I ended up dropping out of school and getting a GED later because of the stress of it.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212
Hmmmm? Did Your big mouth and skimming got you into a jam again?? Absolutely! You're too stupid to live.
I was disqualified from a competition run by FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America) when I was in high school because I scored so well I must have cheated.
It was multiple choice on 'Computer Concepts' I scored 98/100, second highest was 76/100.
That was pretty bad... but worse was the next year, I tried again... and was disqualified because I 'won' the previous year.
I ended up dropping out of school and getting a GED later because of the stress of it.
Hopefully this method is better
I cheated my ass off in university in two classes. They both had the same prof, were required courses, and the prof was known to be a dick.
He would give these wicked exams (which I never cheated on) that would be so ridiculous that my 45% would be graded a B+. He would also give mandatory assignments once every other week that took ~60 hours to do and would be worth 1% of your grade. But they're mandatory so if you don't do one, or fail it, you're done. I cheated big time on these with a group of other guys... even wrote a parser/compiler that would take someone else's code, refactor it in random ways, and recompile it. We never got caught. And I didn't give a shit about cheating.
But in my discrete math course I struggled big time. Was a straight C+ student, and even though I was fascinated by the course, couldn't "get it."
I completely gave up on the final which was worth the bulk of the course. The prof was very good and helpful but I just couldn't do it. So I went out and got completely wasted the night before the exam. Stumbled my way in on a couple hours sleep, still drunk, sat down in front of the prof and aced the course. The prof was so flabbergasted by my exam that he told me that if he didn't know me and hadn't watched me write the final he would've accused me of cheating. He stopped me on the way out of the exam and offered to have me do post-grad work under him. I didn't.
But you know what? I've done just fine in my IT career. One of my most valuable skills I think is knowing when work isn't worthwhile doing, and when shortcuts are going to work.
"You disturb me to the point of insanity. There. I am insane now." - The Sprockets
> cheating has declined about 70 percent, says James Mason
And how do they know the absolute number of ppl that cheated? both now and in the past?
I think what he really wanted to say was: "we're catching 70% less ppl cheating after this system has been implemented and known to the public".
I hope they are less liberal in interpreting the stats coming out of these cheat tests than in communicating to the press.
Wow, clone certainly does seem like a moron...
Why not make suspects retake a similar test under videotaped supervision. If they can duplicate their results, good on them. Harder to do with a one-to-one proctor-student ratio.
I'm a Computer Science graduate student, and have lead the 'recitation' or 'discussion' portion of several classes. I've caught a number of cheaters over the last couple of years; they are almost always brain-dead obvious to a human. ***If you need a computer to catch your cheaters, you don't have enough humans teaching your classes.***
But that's really beside the point: it doesn't really matter that people cheat. A university's role is emphatically *not* to judge who will be a good candidate for an industry job; its role is to embrace learning and research, the furtherance of human knowledge. Those who cheat are not even the university's "target market", so to speak; these are people that will likely never improve the academic ecosystem, and it's just as well we get them through the system without wasting too much time or effort. Cheaters don't take too much of my time; I just ignore them. Trying to catch them is more effort than it is worth.
We should just have students take tests on their laptops in specially locked-down environments where it's "impossible" to cheat. That way, professors can let students take exams at home on their laptops without having to proctor the exam or worry about cheating.
Correlation is not causation, correlation is not causation, correlation is not causation. Even the one or two people in the world who managed to flunk statistics know this. Professors know better.
This scares me because it is too easy to get cought up in statistics and see patterns that don't actually exist or which subconciously reflect the biases of the individual. (See Bible codes in Mobey Dick) Maybe a student was more interested in or studied more thouroughly harder questions precisely because they knew they would have a more difficult time with them.
Perhaps patterns of multiple students getting the same sets of questions right or wrong was due to an emphasis on a particular set of questions in a certain study group.
And there is also the obvious problem where occassionally anomolies several std deviations out happen randomly by chance. Being accused simply because you fall into a statistical anonomoly is fundementally bullshit.
This seems like a waste of tax payer's dollars. I graduated High School in 2003. We had a similar problem; students sending a text to other students and cheating. To solve this problem, they installed cell phone scramblers all over the school except for in the front lobby and where the administrative staff worked. The devices were installed in early 2002. It solved the problem then ... how can it not be that simple?
The elephant in the room is that in American society, people are in general far more educated than they need to be. I have a bachelor's degree, none of the knowledge gained in pursuit of which[1] is of any help to me whatsoever in the course of my daily life, whether personally or professionally. And while I have no data, if the scuttlebutt is to be believed, I am very not alone in this. Furthermore, even a lot of the knowledge I gained in high school has proven completely useless to me[2]: outside of a class, I have never used any mathematics more advanced than the Pythagorean theorem.
As long as unreasonable academic credentials are required for jobs, though, there will be incentive for people to cheat—that is to say, cheating is not the problem; it's a symptom. Elminate the degree inflation in the job market, and you'll eliminate most of the cheating.
[1] Aside, possibly, from reading comprehension and writing skills, but those were not developed in college—I tested out of all the required English classes and all but one of the history classes—merely honed.
[2]The important words here are of course “to me.” I know lots of things which, objectively, are of no utilitarian use in my situation, but which I have sought out the knowledge of simply because it interested me; my enjoyment of them constitutes their usefulness.
like test-takers who did better on harder questions than easy ones, a sign of advance knowledge of part of a test
I usually get the hard ones right and the easier ones wrong, probably because I pay more attention to the hard ones but skim the easy ones. That's just the way I work.
that 'cheaters' is an anagram of 'teachers'?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Many people with ADHD consistently do better at "hard" things than at "easy" things. I'm a pretty decent programmer, I could do calculus (though not always very well) by about 4th grade... and even now I can't do single-digit arithmetic with complete reliability. Assuming that people who show the pattern I will show on basically any test of my ability in any field I work in are "cheating" is a poor tactic at best.
As a possible indicator, maybe useful. As a definite rule, hell no.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
The CISSP exam has special questions designed to catch cheaters or those who got a copy of the actual exam answers. At least a dozen questions are ambiguous and have more than one correct answer. The odds of two people answering all of those questions exactly the same, or exactly matching one of the the illicit copies of the exam answers is exceptionally low. The odds are low enough that you will get flagged for at least a manual audit of your test and test book.
Another dead giveaway is if your answers match almost exactly with the answers of someone else in the room. All the test books are not identical as they may have the questions in a different order or even different questions. If your answers to questions 1-40 exactly match the answers of your neighbor and he's using a different book, that would be suspicious too.
The irony is that there are cheaters for the CISSP exam, a certification that supposedly values honesty and ethics above actual knowledge.
I don't think that this system works for a normal (non multiple choice) test. At least that would require the teachers to spend a lot of time typing each students results in a nonambiguous way.
On the other hand it is a little more difficult to use cell phones to cheat in a non-multiple choice test, because the entire answer of an exercise is too long to fit into an SMS.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1922942&cid=34686090
I take offense to this measure.
I have always done better on harder questions than easier ones.
I believe this is because I enjoy the more difficult material and get easily bored by the rote and mundane stuff. This sort of thing is true for jocks in sports. Most HS student athletes hated gym, but loved their sport and excelled. Whenever we played basketball, the basketball athletes goofed-off during gym, but you knew they weren't even trying, largely because their competition was below them.
See here -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212 So, it appears Your big mouth and skimming get you into a jam again? Absolutely. You tried taking on your betters, and your skimming and your stupidity did you in, promptly. How embarassing for you clone. It was totally hilarious watching you run away! There will be NO burying this clone, for your trolling others here repeatedly. Time to put the shoe on the other foot now. You like?? LOL!
Perhaps you go to the toilet and use your phone to connect to facebook.
Alternatively you can write the answers on the toilet roll.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212
You tried taking on your betters, and your skimming and your stupidity did you in, promptly. How embarassing for you clone.
You've been embarrassingly shot down in flames again, showing up to "suddenly defend the troll clone52431" as you have.
I mean, come on clone, do you think you're fooling us now, what with that shiny-new 8 digit userid" (give us a break clone, lol, I mean - please: We KNOW it's you clone52431 under alternate logon credentials is all)
You're (shot down in flames) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y55wvdcCJfk here, just as you were here http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212
Are you giving us an instant replay, in making us just laugh at you more, what w/ the smoke & flames pouring off you, lol, and from both of your alternate registered userid accounts here you often brag of having?
That's what I heard about you, you know.
They called you "clone the CLOWN".
I saw slashdot and searched it, and there it was.
LMAO - I mean, lol:
1.) Not ONLY do you "amuse us" with your antics, but, like a TRUE CLOWN?
2.) You use "makeup" lol, in alternate accounts to 'disguise yourself'...
So, if it makes you happy? "Ok, you're 'fooling us' clone"... rotflmao!
Is there an English Grammar or Style forums here? Show us your proof of a PHD in English etc. to your credit at least to your name/credit. Even if you had a PHD in English, guess what - If you cannot grasp someone's meaning by the words used and within the context of the framework they're written in? It is you, clearly, with the problem: PHD and all.
Mmm, yeah, niggard me harder, you filthy nigger you!
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
For your viewing pleasure, ladies and gentlemen:
We have prepared in an exhibit for you - "cloneus ahominus erectus" (LMAO - "the crowd goes wild"):
"Mmm, yeah, niggard me harder, you filthy nigger you!" - by clone53421 (1310749) on Wednesday December 29, @03:40PM (#34702996) Journal
You have some "StRaNgE FaNtAsIeS" too there clone. I'd seek help.
Dang I wish I had some mod points today - thanks for having the balls to call a spade a spade rather than knee jerk agreeing with the OP and against the professor.
Anyone knows that trick. clone52431 (1805862) got burned, and now he's using his other clone53421 (1310749) account. That's one of the points that was made about him in another post here today. Clone is a known troll who others often refer to here as clone the clown. He uses alternate registered accounts to troll others. Seems that trick is exposed as usual for him now, and he's just stinging from his own being shot down in flames here http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212 where it appears clone in one of his guises above, tried taking on his betters, and clone's skimming and stupidity did clone in, promptly. How embarassing for you clone.
How hard can it be to randomize the the question order and make everyone a unique test?
More like embarrassing for APK. Keep posting those links, APK.
How do you rate a stalker? I've made many foes over many years, and I've never managed a stalker - it's not fair! by lgw = douchebag (121541) on Wednesday December 29, @02:21PM (#34702090) Journal
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212 clone did try taking on his betters, trolling them, and clone's skimming and clone's stupidity did clone in, promptly. How embarassing for you clone. You really are a clown clone.
"Wow, clone certainly does seem like a moron..." - by MindlessAutomata (1282944) on Wednesday December 29, @01:26PM (#34701284)
clone also uses multiple "clone" account names here to troll others also. Today, clone posted both as clone52431 (1805862) and now he's using his other clone53421 (1310749) account today also, here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1928730&cid=34703372 at the same time, as proof of that, as to how he operates using multiple registered accounts to troll others here with.
Cheating is still possible, but much harder because students can no longer send simple "Q23:B" messages, instead they need to send the complete question and answer (which may be a waste of time as that question may not even be on the recipient's copy of the exam).
I hope these statistical cheat detection systems don't gain traction. I see the danger of a self-fulfilling scenario that tends toward mediocrity rather than excellence. Don't exert any effort, son. Don't bother studying hard for your exams. Statistics say you're bound to fail.
History, of course, is replete with examples to the contrary. Japan managed to industrialize within a generation. Dark horses win horse races. The thirteen states managed to expel the British empire (with a little help from the French). And the New York Mets managed to win the World Series.
Maybe the headline has logical problems to point out the logical problems of the article being referred to.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
We try to protect "intellectual property" as if it were physical property.
Epic fail.
So we try to wrap the epic fail in so many bandages as to make the rest of society dysfunctual.
When an OS does this kind of exception response, it's called a double fault and generally results in a system panic.
Human systems also go into panic mode when this kind of epic fail cascades into more epic fails.
The testing model is also wrong, as I mentioned above. We try to separate testing from education.
Epic fail. Double fault, because we were already trying to separate education from vocation, avocation, and all the rest of anything that can make education meaningful.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
We need to use them differently.
Too much of our testing is divorced from the education process, scores out of context.
Tests can be good motivational tools. I know I study harder when I have a deadline and about 7000 yen invested in a test.
Even studying for the test is not worthless, because it provides tracks the student can follow into a subject, and because it allows the student to evaluate his or her progress, as long as the student has the questions and answers afterwards, for review.
Scores, however, are not nearly as important as we have made them, and actually tend to get in the way. The more we emphasize the scores, especially as a goal independent of the subject, the more the score gets in the way.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Do you guys actually have multiple-choice tests on university level? What's the deal with that?
I never had any multiple-choice tests while studying for my M.Sc. degree in Stockholm. You had to give elaborate answers complete with calculations on every single question. Sure, it must have taken a while for the professors to grade the exams, but it made it virtually impossible to cheat unless you managed to smuggle whole sheets of paper. Even if you knew the exact answer to a question it likely wouldn't be much help if you didn't know how to arrive there.
Education should be the goal of the student, not of the school or its staff. (Providing a good environment for education is a different goal from educating, of course.)
Tests can be motivators. I know, when I signed up for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test recently, in spite of my complaints about how they run it, I actually buckled down and studied for the three months before the test.
(Then I relaxed by reading a Japanese novel after the test. Of course. And I'll read more now. I don't want to waste my effort.)
Tests should be re-absorbed into the education process, and then cheating as a problem can be dealt with where it should be dealt with.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Using a study guide / book test / last years test is not cheating and it's who made the test fault to use the test like that.
my teacher gave me back a cool essay I wrote with a bad evaluation stating "you possibly could not have written this, someone else wrote it" - "why?" - "it is way too good" :-)
Of course I did not cheat. Oh and this was like from the times the Internet did not exist!
Now this may be a compliment for my great writing skills but it was a blow to my school career. Bye bye languages and essays, at least science is more precise. So here I am doing IT
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
I would be flagged every single time. Though earlier in life I cheated (and was good at it, got 100% on some exams, thanks to weak lecturer passwords), these days I don't, because I really want to learn, and not just get a piece of paper. Though I sometimes wonder if a hybrid approach could be better, since I do want the extreme grades, since they sometimes count.
However, I digress. I'm ADD and Bipolar. While most people think this means "stupid" and can appear stupid, it's isn't necessarily. Basically, some things I get hyper focused and excited on, to the extreme point of spending days awake, working on the problem, sometimes forgetting to eat/drink/etc. On a softer scale, I have trouble retaining attention for "easy" problems, and have less trouble retaining attention for "hard" problems. Because of this, when doing tests, quizzes and exams, I often fuck up the easy ones, and do extremely well on the hard ones.
Based on their stated idea, I'd be flagged as cheating. This would happen in every exam. I wonder how much a university (with a strict no-cheating policy (like they all have)) would tolerate a student continually coming up flagged as cheating, regardless of their ability to prove it. If I get reprimanded for cheating, in my university, then I'm gone for a minimum of 3 years, and other universities in the area, might be warned of me (or at least that's the threat).
That would fucking destroy me. I'm already devastated by my results, as they're always 75%+, but they almost never reflect my competency in the subject. Some subjects it works in my favour, but mostly it works against me.
Side note: In some of my earlier statistics courses, we were privy to some analysis done by the statistics lecturers on various courses, and what variables explain the variation seen in students scores. Consistently in each course it was found that quizzes, attendance, having read the textbook, assignments, and many other variables, were all lousy explanatory variables for the final exam result, and as such the greater the weight of the final exam, the more likely your overall result wouldn't reflect you (working under the axiom that the other material/variables, better explained your competency).
This is quite interesting, at the very least.
* I find it impossible to remain consistent between the usage of the words subject and course, but they both mean the same thing.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I said A.K.A., not A.P.K.
A.K.A. "Short Response": A.P.K. = "Short Bus" (LOONY as a bird!)
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212
Hmmmm? Did Your big mouth and skimming get you into a jam again?? Absolutely. You tried taking on your betters, and your skimming and your stupidity did you in, promptly. How embarassing for you clone. It was totally hilarious watching you run away! There will be NO burying this clone, for your trolling others here repeatedly, and under your other registered username here too of clone53421 (1310749) as well.
See subject line above. You ran away because he showed how stupid you were each time you tried to troll him, dimwit.