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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"?
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.
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Sundar Pichai is the utter asshole whose incompetence has resulted in the shutdown of Google's Atlanta office.
ha ha ha ha ha
I know you are being sarcastic, but two of the best motivated people in my lab have on degree. One has a HS diploma, the other a GED. The one w/ the diploma is a senior technician, worked up from the bottom over 12 years and outperforms the recent grad engineers at most of the work (similar job profiles between Sr. tech and Jr. engineer). The GED tech has been with the company for about a year and is starting the working from the bottom up. Both of these guys are way better at their jobs and motivated compared to the average BS degree holder.
Realistically this is a rare trait in people, but I'll take one of these guys any day over the average degreed person.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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 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.
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.
So that you don't sound illiterate when you post on slashdot.
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.