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Students Looking For Easy A Target Online Courses, Where Cheating Is Easier
An anonymous reader writes "As online courses become mainstream, some students are finding they are often easy to game. A group of clever students at one public university describe how they used a Google Doc during on open-book test for a new kind of 'cloud cheating.'" Instead of "cloud" all the time, can't we switch it up with "on the internet"?
Wow... I swear when I first opened this there was no article... That is so odd. I wonder if the mods can correct their posts as well?
Simply take a course where you were already familiar with the subject matter. (I really suspect a lot of the students in the language classes I took were already fluent in the language. Boy did that suck for me.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
A group of clever students at one public university describe how they used a Google Doc during on open-book test for a new kind of 'cloud cheating.'"
Instead of "cloud" all the time, can't we switch it up with "on the internet"?
Must have been business majors.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Everyone knows that everyone with a piece of paper saying they graduated college is intelligent and deserving of a job. They shouldn't have to show you that they know what they're doing! You should just immediately give them a job!
That's one of the biggest reasons why online degrees are suspect.
Of course cheating has always occurred in bricks and mortar schools, too, but it's supposed to be harder. For STEM courses, exams usually make up the majority of the grade, and are held in proctored halls. At the best schools, cheaters who are caught are dealt with harshly; usually they fail the course (which goes on the official transscript) and sometimes they are expelled.
more tests need to be open book / open Google.
Why should people who can cram but don't know what they are doing get better marks then people who know what they are doing but are not good at craning.
What the point of craning command line flags when you don't want why you want to use them that way vs say looking at MSDN / look at the build in help ECT?
When I started university we had Calculus, among other things, during our first year. You were allowed to bring anything you wanted into the exam room: books, notes, a computer. This was because, unless you had studied hard and done lots of exercises, there was no way you would pass the exam. That's how you test people, not with tech bingo or a/b/c/d answer questions.
--
Sundar Pichai is the utter asshole whose incompetence has resulted in the shutdown of Google's Atlanta office.
Wouldn't this entire problem be solved with proctored tests? The idea of an all online course feels great, but if you want to confirm someone's understanding you need a trusted proctor system.
If you object too loudly to "cloud cheating", we're probably just going to be saddled with "cybercheating" instead. Unless that's already taken for marital infidelity involving cybersex.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I've taken quite a few online courses, where the tests and quizzes during the semester were online, and I've cheated on a couple (lazy professors who actually copy/pasted questions that were easily found Googling), but the final was always a written exam taken on campus.
You can breeze through the bulk of the semester all you want with the help of the good folks at Google, but you'll be screwed at the end if you can't Google your way out of the final. And if you don't pass the final, you fail the course, regardless of your test/quiz grades.
I've taken quite a few online courses, where the tests and quizzes during the semester were online, and I've cheated on a couple (lazy professors who actually copy/pasted questions that were easily found Googling), but the final was always a written exam taken on campus.
You can breeze through the bulk of the semester all you want with the help of the good folks at Google, but you'll be screwed at the end if you can't Google your way out of the final. And if you don't pass the final, you fail the course, regardless of your test/quiz grades.
This is my signature. There are many like it but this one is mine.
In the same sentence Timothy manages to complain about the changing English language, and then himself uses a non-standard and frankly nonsensical modern colloquialism.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
well when you take theory based CS for IT jobs this is what you get for when the class cover stuff you don't get in a real job or lot's of high level math that does not come up in most jobs as well.
yes we need more tech / vol / apprenticeships when the test is on the job and it's about doing the job for real and not in class room with no books or other reference books.
This won't be an issue for long, because online classes (I have in mind Udacity and MITx) were not designed to have online exams in the first place. They said from the beginning that exams will be held in test centers under surveillance. It is not implemented yet, as MITx is currently a prototype, but we are getting there. Udacity just partnered with Pearson VUE to hold exams in their test centers. Pearson VUE has about 4000 test centers in 170 countries.
It will most likely still be possible to take online exams, but the certificate earned for completion will have much less weight than a certificate earned by taking exams in a test center.
Instead of "cloud" all the time, can't we switch it up with "on the internet"?
Personally I think usage of the term cloud is relevant when you're talking about using a single service that isn't run or sourced from one single machine (or even a few) but several. Or even from one physical machine machine or rack running literally hundreds of hypervisors. Especially when you bring anycast into the mix, because at that point (in the case of the google docs real-time collaboration) your peers don't ever exchange packets directly, or even exchange packets with the same server.
When any of the above apply, the term "server" doesn't quite seem to fit, because you aren't exactly interacting with any particular server. This is where the word cloud fits just perfectly in my opinion.
Disclaimer: I am a network engineer. That may make me have a different viewpoint than the people who write software (which I think is the majority of slashdot.)
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
is that the exams are not themselves online.
I've been doing online distance learning for years to keep my brain active, and the exams are structured in such a way that cheating is more difficult. You do the majority of the course online, but the exam is performed through an approved invigilator who watches to make sure you don't cheat. The approved invigilator is pretty well any local university or college that offers that service.
Damn kids and their new Internet terminology! Why can't they just call it the Information Superhighway like the rest of us who dislike change!
A certificate for completing an online course is worth nothing, and they learned nothing, and they're still "proud" of that. As long as these idiots are only cheating themselves, it's fine with me.
People "shout" RTFA when they have read the article and the poster is asking a question that was answered in the article, so I'm going to go with if there was in fact no article, then yes, people would have noticed that before "shouting" RTFA
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
that where you don't want tests to be and what is so bad about having a book with you?
I think it's better to know what you want to do and have to look up the right commands then it's to just flashcard that commands and not know why you doing that.
what about a test lab? or class long test?
You have a class with no finale so it's about doing the work for the full class so it can't be just have no idea cram for the finale and pass.
or have the finale be a open book / lab where it's about what is done and you have all the tools that you have a in real setting to pull it off.
Alternatively, you may refer to it as Wiki-wiki-web, Usenet, Matrix, Information Superhighway, Virtual Space or Altavista.
I was the real korpiq until I woke up clowned.
The problem described with the students cheating could be solved very easily by not releasing the test scores until all students have submitted their answers. This is a setting on most learning management systems.
I took on online class, calculous, to fulfill a pre-requsiste for my MBA.
I had not taken calculous since High School, and it was almost impossible to learn it via the online class and the text book. To take the weekly tests and quizzes, I just figured out the patterns of where the numbers went. You could take the quizzes over and over again till you go a passing grade.
Give me a class with a grad student who can not speak english any day.
Simply take a course where you were already familiar with the subject matter.
I know I sure as hell didn't major in History for the amazing job prospects :)
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
So what you're saying is... you didn't RTFA? (limp-wristed rimshot here)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
My professor loved giving multiple choice questions with calculator use.
We could only use a TI-36.
He would either put all available variations of answers up there, or make the answer error out the calculator.
I had to take three online courses to finish my degree due to scheduling issues. They're about five times more work than a normal course. I don't know who really thinks this is an "easy A", but I wholeheartedly disagree.
Normal course: Sit in class and participate one or two days a week. Take 3 tests. Do a handful of assignments.
Online course: Write 500 words a day, every day, on forum posts just to get attendance. Do daily homework assignments. Write 3 short papers. Take weekly tests.
Where's the easy A again?
if i were in school today, i'd find a few other people in the class and setup a shared google xls/doc that we'd share thughts, ideals, answers.
we'd agree on the rules
- no copying the answers exactly unless you posted it to the share doc
- no mooching. if you don't contribute an equal share, you are out of the group
As long as schools ensure that the only classes they offer online don't matter... like Art History, etc. Obviously, it would be stupid to offer a class online where cheating is almost trivial to do AND to get away with... if the students grasping and understanding deeply, and retaining the things learned in the class actually mattered in the future.
Do you mean Cyber Courses in the cloud?
"On the Internet" seems to be a legally loaded word these days. "Cloud " is acceptable.
Via online/distance ed. We had to go to campus to write the exams though or have someone they approved of proctor us. They usually let us use our computer though but still they were walking around and checked that at least before the exam you'd shut off your wireless. What really sucked was a stats course where the proof insisted on hand written assignments and exam and specifically noted that if he can't read it he wouldn't give you marks. This after about 10 years out of school where the longest thing I've written was about 1 paragraph and my writing was never good. 3 hrs of writing ferociously hand drawing plots etc. Argh. Nice guy but, argh.
group project is the real work place / world
Cheating is a byproduct of a failed education system. Instead of driving students to learn, we drive them to show the world they can succeed; Students cheat because they don't want to take time to learn a subject, and why is that?
The solution is not to come up with ways to stop the students from cheating, the solution is to come up with ways to make education interactive and enjoyable therefore minimizing the desire to cheat on a test (test in themselves is a band-aid solution to this very problem)
Again we have large institutions forcing a solution that is against the very nature of the people they are overseeing.
Not only this but we need university courses that actually teach, rather than certifying people for the workforce. Our society is facing a major shortage of education institutions in my opinion. Work certification can be done by the employer, and often is anyway. Very few employers will trust a degree alone and many will test employees themselves. If this becomes too much of a burden we could set up certification organisations, who simply administer tests based on the required abilities for specific job types/industries. If I want to learn how to do something, for me that is quite separate from wanting to have evidence that I can do a certain job. Perhaps there are institutes that focus solely on education. If anyone knows of one I would be glad to hear about it.
it makes the headline for the problems of cloud services very Easy and PHB friendly.
WHAT HAPPENS IF IT RAINS???
of course defining in detail what "rains" means is an exercise left to The Student
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I know I sure as hell didn't major in History for the amazing job prospects :)
Did you do it so you could bitch about your student loans and how it's difficult to get by on 23k a year and how you're a college grad with no good paying job prospects?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
filler classes also have more cheating and whats up with classes loaded with essays.
Why should some taking say IT / CS classes have to write a book report on the great gatsby??
part of the cheating comes from off base filler classes. They should be pass / fail with NO GPA tied to them.
any ways in a IT help desks do really need to write essays for stuff like password resets and let's say you need to write documents isn't that what tech writes are for anyways?
I'm hrrmmm-ing here.
Several years ago I shadowed a few students who were taking online courses in a large state university system in the US. What was clear, was that there was almost no online interaction in the forums, and that the ill-paid instructors had to give little attention, somewhat as a result-- if no one posted questions, then instructors didn't have to post answers, and they seemed fine with that.
No portion of the grade was "participation--" papers-based grading.
In the end, one of the students found papers roughly on the topics elsewhere on the internet, and reworked them enough that they seemed hers.
And in the end, I got the impression that distance learning throughout the system was somewhat of a joke, a way to boost enrollment numbers and revenue while delivering a low-cost product (official credit hours) that was essentially worthless.
and more apprenticeship leering is needed not all people belong in college and not all courses are college material
people collaborate in the real work place so why is it bad in school???
There are times to collaborate in school. They are called "Group Projects".
There are times when the class wishes to test individual skills and knowledge.
These are called "Individual Tests".
If the "Individual Tests" are taken by draining the answer bank into a collaboration document, then that doesn't really fit the requirements?
Each course gives you a syllabus the first day. That is your contract for the class. If you don't like it, you march yourself down to the registers office, and un-enroll and get your money back. On the first day (some schools week/s) of class, there is no fee or penalty.
Can the testing system be tightened up? Sure. Will it be 100% secure? Never.
Quick thoughts -
Step 1) Don't disclose right/wrong answers. If the teacher wishes to, he can do a test review - covering the most often answered incorrect answers without bleeding out his test bank. And, this keeps the solutions from being revealed while there are still people with the exam to take.
Step 2) Paper tests and Scan-trons.
Let's start with a basic premise - that the goal of education is to train you to enter some career, do some "job", with many of the "general-ed" classes being to train you for the job of "living in modern society". Seems like a fairly safe assumption.
Let's further assume that the purpose of tests is to ensure that you can actually do the things that job requires. That seems like the logical purpose, although I've found that far more tests seem to be just generating paperwork showing that the teacher is actually teaching, not that the students are actually studying.
It would seem logical, then, that tests should mimic the task you are being trained for. English tests should mimic the writing and reading you will actually do in real life, math tests should mimic the kind of math you will be doing, and so on.
Unfortunately, that's rarely the case.
Any multiple-choice, no-books-allowed test is simply not found in real life. Essay questions seem to test "can you write using proper grammar and spelling" rather than "can you explain a complex topic". I don't think any boss has ever said "I need you to write a report on _____, but you cannot do any research".
One of the best (and hardest) tests I ever took was in a second-level Java class. Four hours. Three tasks. No rules other than "no copy-pasting from the Internet or each other". And the tasks? First was to write, from scratch, a full four-function calculator. Then a simulated inventory system - including a database via ODBC. Final one was, IIRC, a simple, two-way Internet chat app. Grading was done based on quality - completeness, bugs, interface usability, source code readability, and any extra features outside the specifications.
It was almost exactly what I ended up doing as a career - building applications to a customer's specs. The applications were simple, yes, but the deadline was tight - out of the entire class, I was the only one who actually hit every feature in every project, and I think the main reason I did so was because I kept at *least* one tab open pointing to the Java library documentation, at all times.
I wish more of my tests would have been like that. Instead, I got hundreds of multiple-choice questions, or essays that I honestly could have filled with bullshit and still gotten an A, or math problems I know I will never, ever see again.
You want to improve education? Make the tests practical, concrete tests of competency, not "whatever is easiest to assign a grade to".
I really suspect a lot of the students in the language classes I took were already fluent in the language. Boy did that suck for me.
When I was at university, I specifically chose a foreign language where I was unlikely to encounter native speakers for precisely that reason. For example, it was unwise to study Spanish because there were too many native speakers who set the curve very high and engineering curriculum was difficult enough that I couldn't afford to waste study time in non-major courses. I really didn't care much about foreign languages anyway, so the logical choices at my school where German, French or Italian. Russian and Asian languages were out because they involved learning mostly alien alphabets and grammars. I chose German because it's closer to English than either French or Italian and there were hardly any native speakers at my school. Finally, the German language has some pedigree in the engineering fields, as compared to either French or Italian, so there was at least some engineering value in a rudimentary understanding of the German language. It was easy enough to get a solid B in German without diverting too much time from my engineering studies, so that's what I did.
yes we need more tech / vol / apprenticeships when the test is on the job and it's about doing the job for real and not in class room with no books or other reference books.
The problem with that, at least in here in the United States, is that companies are very reluctant to spend any resources on training. They want to hire someone with all of the required knowledge who can "hit the ground running" and be instantly productive, work them like crazy for short term output and then get rid of them through layoffs as soon as they've outlived their usefulness. Of course, if every company does this then there will be a shortage of skilled and trained workers; especially in technical or knowledge intensive fields. In fact, that's exactly what we have today here in the United States today, if the companies are to be believed; a shortage of skilled workers and a severe shortage at the prices that most companies want to pay (read peanuts).
If this becomes too much of a burden we could set up certification organisations, who simply administer tests based on the required abilities for specific job types/industries.
That has already been tried and people game those systems too. There's no substitute for a company specific knowledge, training or apprenticeship program because no third party cares more about finding and training qualified employees than the company doing the hiring.
People "shout" RTFA when they have read the article
You must be new here.
Students Looking For Easy A Target Online Courses, Where Cheating Is Easier
Universities Looking For Easy Cash Target Online Courses, Where Teaching Is Non-Existent
I do that to annoy Republicans who think they have a divine right to force me to work for them while they create money out of thin air and keep it artificially scarce for everyone but themselves because otherwise, however would they get attention?
but they pass over tech school people who have more skills to hit ground running for people with BA's who may have less skills.
In which case you must be from the future, Mr. 2449186 ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It is a shame so many grow up without honor or integrity.
They will realize it when they start job interviews.
Not only this but we need university courses that actually teach, rather than certifying people for the workforce.
In my experience, science departments also seemed aimed primarily at certifying people for academics -- hence "weeder" classes designed to flush out people whom they don't think will do well on tests in the later courses. I actually had one chem teacher warn me not to try to retake the class if I got a bad grade. He said most people who retake the course end up getting the same grade, because it was designed so that most students couldn't retain all the information. Some education.
Breakfast served all day!
Yeah, like 5 people isn't a "cloud," I'd just call it a bunch of drips. Oooooh, burn.
Define "collaborate"? I've never been in a work place where two or more people sit down and work on a single, discrete problem together. Or at least, where they were successful at solving it. That sort of collaboration is not unlike "multitasking"--it's provably suboptimal and _everybody_ sucks at it, even the people who think they're good at. (Yes, even women!)
If two individuals are incapable of solving a discrete problem individually, there's zero chance that they'll be able to solve it together.
Now if by collaboration you mean division and allocation of resources, then sure, that happens all the time in work. But the purpose of an exam is to test you on _all_ the elements of the subject matter, not on whether you can make Amy do the hard parts.
This is important. Someone is lying on the internet.
Jesus I hated "participation" grading. I'm fine with difficult open book test, I'm fine with memorization and above all I'm for difficult open book like test without open book (so you have to remember stuff). But participation grading has nothing to do with knowledge, abilities or skills.
It is just about who likes to talk more. Everybody is wasting time because Johny and Andy need their participation points and ask questions they should be able to answer by themselves.
Because your colleges have responsibilities and work to do in a real job. They can not help you with every single small assignment, they have no time. Because the work is often split into smaller tasks to be performed individually. Because you are much more valuable employee if you are able to refactor/write installation scripts without bothering your colleges every five minutes. They will be free to do other work in the meantime. Plus, if you go for business trip to visit customers place, you will be there alone.
Being unable to work in a team is very bad, but being unable to work alone for two days is equally bad.
My university had a specific rule that dual nationality students weren't allowed to study any of their own native languages (aside from English, which obviously has a very different course structure and is a different department). Worked fine except for the occasional triple nationality students...
I really don't get why people cheat in College/Uni etc... I mean, all the grades before that I can understand cheating, but Uni for me is something to PREPARE you for the working experience so you LEARN how to do the shit you want to do. It's not about passing and having a fancy paper saying you CAN do the shit which you obviously CAN'T if you're cheating. Sure those people takes the jobs from us others - but in the end it shines through that they don't know shit - they get fired and we get the job.
I guess "cheating" makes for a better headline but this is an excellent way of taking notes in class.
With several people contributing to the same page of notes you can correct each others mistakes and don't risk missing an important point in the lecture because you were busy writing down the last important point.
I wish to remain anomalous
Having started out in the vocational track you still had to go to day release and pass the exams - though the last time i ever used my mech eng skills was to correct one of the Engineers workings for a bridge design out in the middle east - I was asked to write a program to draw out the sections ready for the detailing to be put in as the curves where to complex for draftsmen to do by hand
Okay so a student wants to cheat, so what? Generally if a student is cheating it steams from two main reasons:
1. The course is taught HORRIBLY which I blame 30% + of the time
2. The course material isn't interesting
In the first case the issue is actually serious, we pay massive amounts of money to have someone stand infront of us and just blab on and on and usually not in any kind of actual english. These kind of profs should be fired because there not actually relying the information to the student. As a good rule of thumb for undergrad. If you need to read the text book to learn the material the prof isn't teaching it properly. Profs love to blame the system, the amount of time they have and 100 other things but it doesn't matter. Bad teaching will lead to kids needing to cheat to make it through the course.
In the second case, a lot of students just don't give a rats ass about what there learning, if they don't so what. There not going to learn anything and they'll get a nice high mark and no one actually suffered. If a student wants to cheat then let them, who care's if they get an A and never open a text book, If the imformation was important then when hey have to actually apply it they'll be called out and fired from a job and yet again no harm done to the school.
Over all if a student wants to cheat let them, it doesn't matter. When it comes time to apply the knowledge they don't know, that is when the true justice will be preformed. Once they get fired or demoted for being a smart ass with no real knowledge then I'm pretty sure the college will sit back, smile and just not care.
You underestimate my ability to forget usernames/passwords and lurk for years. :)
Even worse are team projects, where the A students get screwed and the D students get an easy grade that they didn't earn.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
" If you don't like it, you march yourself down to the registers office, and un-enroll and get your money back."
Can we also complain about it and point out why we think teachers keeping a closed fist around knowledge is counterproductive?
http://www.alfiekohn.org/index.php
From "The Case Against Grades":
As long as cloud cheating isn't anymore expensive to do than internet cheating, I couldn't care less what we call it.
I'll take the guy who knows how to use Google to get his information and use it over someone who "crams" any day. The simple fact is that memory fails, it makes mistakes, and therefore the crammer needs to verify his/her assumptions (and that means Google anyways). The days of memorizing facts to prove knowledge are dead, anyone can memorize (and it just comes down to who was lucky enough to memorize what was on the test or has the best memory) versus being able to seek knowledge and then apply it.
It was no different from 50 years ago, where learning to use the index in a book was far more important than the books contents, and those who knew how to use the index were always better to hire than someone who tried to memorize everything (of course, there are exceptions, top-notch geniuses and people who are 100% dedicated to one tiny field). Of course, having the basic knowledge to know what to look for in the index (or Google) and knowing how to follow the instructions/logic is really what you go to university for, but somehow, that seems to have been lost along the way to enlightenment.
Yah same here, I took some french at the college level. A couple years after getting my BS (foreign language wasn't required at the school I went to for BS's if you had two or more years at the HS level!).
I thought I was going to have an advantage, even though I had pretty much forgotten all the french I had in HS. Boy was I in for it. French is the 2nd most popular language in HS after Spanish, and you could pretty much tell that about 1/2 the class had some experience with it. OTOH, about 1/4 of the class was completely lost. I had to work my ass off, and still got B's.
Even worse are team projects, where the A students get screwed and the D students get an easy grade that they didn't earn.
Depends how they're done - my Practical Programming team project let you choose your own teams at first, then any loners or smaller teams were merged in.
Doesn't take a genius to figure out that the smart and hard-working kids filled up their teams *real* fast.
Okay the article has a point, and SO WHAT? Frankly, introductory online courses should be FREE to encourage more students to pursue STEM degrees from home.
There have been many quick solutions posted regarding “How to easily solve the cheating”. However, some of the solutions may be worse than the problem. There is nothing quick and easy in designing an online STEM course, and not all online courses are created equal.
In introductory STEM courses, problem solving (application versus only knowledge and comprehension) is the desired Bloom taxonomy learning goal. Online courses built around the weekly application of concepts (problems), require students to learn and concepts versus memorize and/or look up information using the internet.
My below responses are based on the development and instruction of an online introductory chemistry course over the past two years. I use a “what’s best for the students” approach from a learning standpoint—unfortunately, it’s substantially more work for the instructor. I assume students do NOT have ANY previous online course experience and only use the absolute minimal number of tools in the learning management system course design and implementation.
Re: Immediate Feedback--GOOD
IMHO--It’s one of the best ways to encourage students to review their mistakes IMMEDIATELY after completing homework and/or quizzes. In a bricks and mortar course, it’s the same as handing out the answer key to a quiz/exam immediately after a student submittal. Most if not all students immediately sit down and review the answer key--it enables another opportunity for learning.
Re: Multiple Choice Quizzes--ESSENTIAL
IMOH—It’s the only way to practically assess an online course. And yes it’s possible to develop multiple choice chemistry problems where students can NOT look up the answer on the Internet. It is a total misconception that all answers are on the Internet or can be found using Wolfram|Alpha (I introduce Wolfram to students during the first week and require its use as an advanced “calculator”).
Re: Database of Multiple Choice Questions—GOOD, but a lot of WORK
IMOH—Yes you can build a database of multiple choice questions to use for homework and quizzes—it just takes a lot of work, the use of spreadsheets, a lot of cut and pasting to get into the learning management system, and constant editing of subscripts, superscripts and symbols. Key to the design is:
Detailed, published homework problem solutions
Development of large sets of multiple choice problems delivered using long timeframes delivered as weekly homework using a quiz tool (I call it quomework)
Repetitive use of the multiple choice homework problems delivered as quiz problems using shorter timeframes delivered as weekly quizzes.
Re: Multiple Attempts at Quizzes and Homework--GOOD
IMOH—Yes, giving students multiple attempts at submitting homework and quizzes is best for learning. There are always students who try to “guess” their way through a course, or try find a way around the “system” as in the article, but when it’s easier for students complete the work than to try to plagiarize/cheat, they go with the path of least resistance.
Re: Final Exams—Not Necessary for an Introductory Course
IMOH—Though I am required to give an final exam at my current institution, I have never seen it make much of a difference in a student’s grade. The institution I work at currently does not proctor the final exam and weighting too much of a student’s grade to the final exam could certainly create some of the issues mention in the article.
I hope this perhaps clarifies that not all online courses are equal and really what matters most, is to give a student the best possible opportunity to be successful in an introductry STEM course. On t
Did you respond only so you can express your ignorant viewpoint that only areas of study with a direct monetary benefit have any value?
Simply take a course where you were already familiar with the subject matter. (I really suspect a lot of the students in the language classes I took were already fluent in the language. Boy did that suck for me.)
One of the ways I've seen online exams prevent cheating is to generate the questions on the fly and then time limit the exam so that there wont be enough time to try and find all the answers through cheating.
That being said if someone is determined to cheat and puts in enough effort it's just as easy to cheat right in the teachers face as it is to cheat online. It's not like the schools have high tech surveillance so chances are anyone who really wants to cheat already is cheating. If they receive all As in classes which rely on multiple choice exams then there is a possibility of cheating.
If the class is big enough the probability of cheating rises. One way to minimize cheating is to make each student take the exam in a sound proof fully shielded faraday cage cubical. This way they cannot see who is sitting next to them or behind them, they cannot hear, and no EMF can emit or transmit.
That's one of the biggest reasons why online degrees are suspect.
Of course cheating has always occurred in bricks and mortar schools, too, but it's supposed to be harder. For STEM courses, exams usually make up the majority of the grade, and are held in proctored halls. At the best schools, cheaters who are caught are dealt with harshly; usually they fail the course (which goes on the official transscript) and sometimes they are expelled.
If you want to cheat offline it's not like the professor can see everything students do while taking an exam. Most exams in college are given in a classroom where students can visually see one another, hear one another, electronics can often be in that room and can emit or transmit. Basically if you really want to make a room cheat proof it has to also be emissions proof, sound proof, and each desk has to be isolated.
This is possible but it's not something you see any of the public schools doing. I never cheated and I have the grades to prove it, but I've always been intelligent enough to know how to cheat if I really wanted to and from the perspective of a hacker it's easy. At the end of the day it's better to actually know your subjects because you'll actually make use of that knowledge in the real world and college is just training for that. If your goal is just to get into an ivy league school and rely on name brand value then cheating is a route to doing that but if your goal is to actually be good at a particular job or have the knowledge cheating isn't worth it.
And on some exams cheating can be made entirely impossible. If we want to make it impossible just put each student in a faraday cage isolated room. One room per student, and 20 rooms to allow 20 students at a time to take the exam. Let a private corporation handle the exam instead of public institutions and you'll see it's a lot harder to cheat. Finally make the test questions completely randomized so that it's impossible for the students to know in advance what will be on the exam.
Randomly generated questions could be used to stop cheating online. I've personally taken exams like this and it's impossible to rely on a doc of any sort when you don't know what questions you'll be facing.
'Russian and Asian languages were out because they involved learning mostly alien alphabets and grammars.'
Just as an aside (for anyone reading). Surprisingly most Chinese dialects have the same Grammar as English. Indonesian/Malaysian is like French, where the adjective comes after the subject/object being discussed. A lot of Asian languages use Sanskrit derived alphabets (Thai, Khmer etc)., but Japanese and Chinese technically don't use an alphabet (Chinese uses characters that represent ideas, and can be pronounced differently depending on the language, you can read Chinese using English if you learn the characters, where as Japan uses syllabary, which are characters that represent syllables, but the syllables aren't nec. related to the sound, for instance, the character for 'Ka' does not relate to the character for 'Ki', 'Ku', 'Ko', or 'Ke' or 'a' or 'k').
It sounds like you made a good choice.
I guess "cheating" makes for a better headline but this is an excellent way of taking notes in class.
With several people contributing to the same page of notes you can correct each others mistakes and don't risk missing an important point in the lecture because you were busy writing down the last important point.
Right and that would be fine but the exams should still be different for each student so that they cannot just get all the right answers from their notes. If it's basic memorization it's just an IQ test and I usually ace those sorts of tests. It's not fair but there are people who can just listen to lectures, never take notes, and ace exams simply because the professor is just asking you to recite what he or she said, or to recite what you memorized.
The hardest exams are open book, but that is because the grading is subjective and the professor can fail you for poor handwriting. Honestly I think it's best to have an example with some memorization, an exam with some very difficult conceptual questions, and to mix up the questions in such a way so that people who do have good memorization skills cannot help the people who don't, and people who do have deep conceptual understanding cannot help people who simply memorized the answers.