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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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
Not even close. As long as the group did the research, the presentation, and the conclusions, a professional editor is only going to clean up grammar, suggest paper flows, etc. When I was in high school and in college, we were ENCOURAGED to get other people to proof-read our papers. If my mom or dad happened to be a professional writer, you damn well better believe I'd ask them to read my paper. Cheating is paying someone to write your paper for you, without doing any research or anything yourself.
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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.
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.
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.
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