Students Looking For Easy A Target Online Courses, Where Cheating Is Easier

In my day there was an easier way to cheat to an A by NotSoHeavyD3 · 2012-06-03 05:49 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

MBA? by grasshoppa · 2012-06-03 05:50 · Score: 5, Funny

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!

Re:MBA? by roberthead · 2012-06-03 08:30 · Score: 2

I say reverse that. Let's just replace "the internet" with "the cloud" and everyone is happy.

Nonsense! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-03 05:50 · Score: 5, Funny

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!

Re:Nonsense! by networkBoy · 2012-06-03 06:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

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
Re:Nonsense! by dehole · 2012-06-03 06:12 · Score: 2

Yep, companies are having to screen people by measures that exceed "do they have a BS", because they find that no matter which school you went to(or your GPA), it is not an indication of how well you will work.
Re:Nonsense! by dingram17 · 2012-06-03 08:52 · Score: 4, Interesting

Are you really surprised that someone with 12y experience can outperform someone with a 3 or 4 degree and a couple of years experience? Come back in 10y and see who is outperforming who. There are many tech level jobs that engineers are rubbish at, and many engineer jobs that techs are rubbish at. Occasionally you'll get a person that is the exception to the rule, but on the whole, you need a mix of people in your team.
Me? I'm an engineer than doesn't overly like maths, but can connect test equipment up to large generators (>400MW) and not break anything or kill myself in the process. I'm not as fast as connecting gear as an electrician/electronics tech, but I can do machine stability analysis that you need university level maths to understand (unless TAFEs and polytechs are teaching eigenvalues and eigenvectors + linearisation of non linear systems these days).
Re:Nonsense! by silentcoder · 2012-06-03 20:26 · Score: 2

While there is some truth to that, the counterpoint is that self-taught people (especially in high-tech fields) tend to be BETTER educated and better at their jobs than university educated people.
Somebody who learns to do something because they have a passion for what they are learning is simply going to be more motivated and more skilful in the end than somebody who did it because it promised a good return on their study-investment.
Neither of these are hard-and-fast-rules however, and an interesting counterpoint is that perhaps the greatest techs of all ARE in fact university educated - but not in tech. Philosophy students especially those who did logic and critical thinking courses tend to become absolutely brilliant programmers if that's where they go later on - outperforming both the CS students and the self taught HS-only guys.
I suspect this trend is true in many fields, though perhaps less strongly. One of the things about programming that is rather unique is that it requires a degree of understanding of many other subjects to do well. You cannot write a program for any field without at least understanding the needs of that field - so multi-skilled programmers are simply better than highly specialised ones.

--
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *

Um, yeah. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-03 05:54 · Score: 3, Insightful

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 by Joe_Dragon · 2012-06-03 05:55 · Score: 2, Insightful

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?

Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by the_B0fh · 2012-06-03 06:06 · Score: 2

right... if you cannot even discuss basic flags or basic concepts, but can google, that's all that's needed to be a good competent programmer, right? Because good enough is good enough.
no wonder USA is losing its edge, with this kind of thinking.
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by rikkards · 2012-06-03 06:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

I see where the GP was going. It's better to ask more complex questions where it tests the person understands concepts than that they can memorize. Problem is that it means the grader has to do more work when grading
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by Znork · 2012-06-03 06:23 · Score: 5, Insightful

If they can pass the test using only google, then they're certainly what in the eyes of that test passes for a good programmer. Of course, one might question the reliability and usefulness of a test that can be passed using only google, but the test was as useless before as it would pass 'crammers' who may have as little understanding of the subject as the 'googler'.
I suspect that a lot of complaints about 'internet assisted' cheating are partly due to the educators getting caught with easy but low value methods of testing and assessment.
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-03 06:30 · Score: 4, Insightful

right... if you cannot even discuss basic flags or basic concepts, but can google, that's all that's needed to be a good competent programmer, right? Because good enough is good enough.
no wonder USA is losing its edge, with this kind of thinking.
Done properly, an open book test is a lot harder than a closed book test. On most of the ones I've taken, you needed a good grasp of the material or you were doomed.
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by fiziko · 2012-06-03 06:31 · Score: 3, Interesting

Making new tests every time means we can't analyze student responses to confirm that test questions really are testing what they are supposed to be testing. When I was teaching in the classroom, I used the happy medium: I generated tests and homework with LaTeX packages that randomized numbers in the questions and the wrong answers, so I could verify phrasing and alignment with learning outcomes quite rigorously while still making sure the third period class couldn't feed useful answers and tips to the fourth period class. It works extremely well in my fields (math and physics), although I openly admit Language Arts/English and Social Studies teachers would have a tougher time of it.

--
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by Mashiki · 2012-06-03 06:42 · Score: 4, Insightful

right... if you cannot even discuss basic flags or basic concepts, but can google, that's all that's needed to be a good competent programmer, right? Because good enough is good enough.
no wonder USA is losing its edge, with this kind of thinking.
Open book tests are terribly difficult. When I took my legal courses they were all open book, my POA(provincial offences) tests? All open book, same with traffic law, again all open book. The very best of all these tests are written by instructors who know their material and write their own questions based on the material that they've taught through the year.
That means you not only need the book, but you need to understand it, and have attended the classes to make it through the exam. People think they sweat bullets on a 80 page exam? Hah. Try 13 pages, where it's all open book and you're required to break down a full construct question that's worth 10% of the exam mark.

--
Om, nomnomnom...
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by AthanasiusKircher · 2012-06-03 06:46 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
This is a problem with test design, which has little to do with whether memorization is good or not.
As an undergrad engineering major, most of my advanced engineering courses were open book -- usually not just open book, but open notes, open just about anything you could carry. (One student in one course actually carried in a graduate student and was allowed to make use of him -- they changed the rule to exclude carrying in persons the next year.)
Electronic devices other than calculators were restricted I think, but this was before the age of Wi-Fi, so perhaps even laptops were allowed.
Of course, all of those exams consisted of problems unlike any of us had seen before -- they were designed to test whether you could actually think independently and apply the broad concepts of the course to new problems, rather than just regurgitating information or plugging numbers into an equation. Google would have been of little assistance with such a test.
All of that said, I do still believe that there is value in a test that is NOT open book/open notes/open Google, whatever. Most of the information I have in my head has been through extra levels of processing and understanding. For example, to memorize an equation, I usually tend to know something about why the form of the equation is the way it is, rather than just memorizing the abstract symbols.
These days, it seems many people devalue the skill of memorization, but with memorization comes the ability to internalize the content, to recall it at will, to think through it as a tool when considering various problems, even to meditate upon it. (Medieval monks tended to memorize entire books to gain greater understanding and synthesis of ideas in this way.)
All of this is unlikely if you're just cramming and memorizing the night before, because you're likely to forget all of it next week. But if you're a more mature person with different study habits and learn things gradually, review them, and go over them in preparation for the test yet again, memorization is likely to come more naturally and ultimately reflect a greater internalization of the ideas.
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by Opportunist · 2012-06-03 07:28 · Score: 3, Insightful

I think you got the GP wrong.
His point is, if I understand him correctly, and I do agree in this point with him, that it becomes more and more obsolete to have a mass of facts in your brains without the ability to apply them. It gets easier and faster every day to look things like that up. What's heaps harder and rarer is the ability to solve problems.
My profs at the university, and I still thank them for that, preferred the latter. I'd have a hard time thinking of any (but pure basic) tests that weren't open book, "bring whatever materials you want" tests. In general, anything but interactive material (read: sending the test to someone else and have him come up with the answers) was pretty much ok. You were actually expected to use your notes and books, because they didn't test what you could stuff into your head, they were much more interested in you showing that you understood what they taught and that you could demonstrate that you can apply it to "real life" problems. The test question were not "solve this equation" but rather "you're facing this problem", with the test being more to come up with a solution rather than actually solving it.
I distinctly remember a math test that I thought I bombed only to find out my prof gave me an B, despite not having finished a single sample. His argument was that I demonstrated I know what approach was necessary, that I showed I did understand how to use the rules required and he expected that I can punch buttons on a calculator when I dare to study CS and am about to graduate, if I couldn't, I probably wouldn't have survived the entry level programming classes.
And that's basically what counts. Today I am often tasked to screen applicants and I throw similar things at them, only to be surprised how many cannot come up with a solution. And interestingly enough, the ones that usually ace my "real life problems" are the ones without a "relevant" degree.

--
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by Opportunist · 2012-06-03 07:34 · Score: 3, Insightful

Bullseye! Can someone hand that guy an insightful mod?
That's exactly what's wrong with our schools (and to a lesser degree even universities). It's simply easier for teachers and educators to come up with cram tests, preferably multiple-choice so they can far easier check the right answers, than to think up some kind of realistic problem and then evaluate the students' solutions, which will invariably differ slightly from one to the next due to them having different, but probably equally valid, approaches. Hell, it might even expose that the teacher knows less of a subject than his student (which isn't as far fetched as it may seem, especially in a field like CS where new developments often render your knowledge obsolete in few years).
It's simple laziness on the side of the teacher, and so we're stuck with tests that favor those who are able to hoover up information like a sponge, pour it out in the test and instantly forget it. I know a few people of that quality. They were doing quite well in school, but out in the reality, they're usually quite useless.

--
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by Opportunist · 2012-06-03 09:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

An example, ok.
One standard question I use a lot when filling programmer positions for our bug hunting crew is to take a few common entries from our bug report list and ask them "where'd you look for the bug". That usually already gives me a pretty good idea what kind of "thinking" I have in front of me. What I do NOT want to hear is some kind of apology (like "I don't know the code, so I can't say anything specific..."), I know he doesn't know, and that's sadly often exactly the problem he will face, but I still want an answer. You get tossed into this bug, how do you handle it?
Here I like to hear that he is checking the headers so he gets an idea what libraries are used, checks if the libraries are outdated, checks the lib known bugs... or whatever else he'd do, hell, nearly anything is fine. I want to know if he has some kind of general approach to bug hunting. What I don't like to hear is useless ass-covering tactics, some kind of apology or trying to find someone to blame, like finding out who wrote the code 3 years ago. Even if he finds him, that guy certainly won't remember a thing about it.
It's worse when I hire someone for my department directly, we get to face very unique situations daily. Security can be tricky at times, because your problems are not only technology but also very personally, both with personnel security issues as well as secrecy. What I want to see in general in an applicant is whether he has a plan. Whether he can come up with an idea that will solve the problem or at least find the source of it, whether he has "common sense" and whether he knows how people work. That's something that is oddly not taught at any kind of university: People are generally lazy and will gladly cut corners. For some odd reason, everyone with zero "real life" experience will assume that people work according to spec. Hint: They don't.

--
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by AK+Marc · 2012-06-03 09:18 · Score: 2

That sounds good in theory, but when you have "open Internet" rules, then someone may have already answered that exact question such that the most complex question is a single google search away.

I remember one question from physics that was "given the temperature of the sun, the distance to the earth, and the radius of the earth, calculate the force on the surface of the earth (assuming complete absorption) caused by the blackbody radiation from the sun." The point was to test some basics of geometry and physics, but if you can just google for all the formulas involved, it's easier, almost too easy. If you can google and find someone else somewhere else last year asked a simlar question and the answer was already online (with work shown), then it is a useless question.

In practice, open google only works if you have a pile of grad student slaves to google all the questions on the test in multiple different ways to see what does and does not come back. Having written a few tests myself, it's hard enough already, without having to add checking all the questions against google and all the other search engines (As you never know which they are using and which has the best results for the particular question).

--
Learn to love Alaska
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by tbird81 · 2012-06-03 10:03 · Score: 3, Funny

You're lucky it isn't based on reading comprehension.
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by __aaqvdr516 · 2012-06-03 11:44 · Score: 3, Insightful

right... if you cannot even discuss basic flags or basic concepts, but can google, that's all that's needed to be a good competent programmer, right? Because good enough is good enough.
no wonder USA is losing its edge, with this kind of thinking.
It worked pretty well for some guy named Albert Einstein.
"Never memorize something that you can look up. --Albert Einstein
Then again, cheating is still cheating.
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by fiziko · 2012-06-03 12:42 · Score: 3, Interesting

Yes, it does take more, which is why we analyze the difficulty and discrimination of tests.
Difficulty: what percentage of the population gets the answer right?
Discrimination: sort the class by overall grade. Divide them into groups. (Thirds, quarters, etc. depending on class size.) Compare, question by question, the percentage of students in the top performing group who answer correctly to the percentage of students in the low performing group who answer correctly. A highly discriminating question should be correctly answered by the top performers but incorrectly answered by bottom performers. If the reverse is true, the question is confusing or miskeyed and needs to be adjusted accordingly.
We should also analyze how often students pick the "distractors" (i.e. incorrect answers) in multiple choice tests to determine if students answer correctly because they know the material or because the wrong answers are so obviously wrong.
Obviously, there is a lot more to it than this. The point I'm trying to make is that test structures need to be chosen and analyzed carefully to ensure validity and reliability. This can't be done by creating tests from "whole cloth" every time. Some degree of reuse needs to take place. That's why I used the LaTeX package. It can base questions on random numbers, and answers can be generated randomly or with preprogrammed algebra, so I set it up to have the correct answer, two answers generated by the most common mistakes, and a random number from a range that could make it the highest or lowest number on the list, sorted from smallest to largest. Then option e was "none of the above" for every question. I rarely used it intentionally, but it came in useful on the first couple of tests where typos in my algebra setting up the tests prevented the right answer from appearing on the list. (If you are interested, I wrote a book on assessment that you can access via my signature.)

--
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google by Jessified · 2012-06-03 18:31 · Score: 2

100% Agree.
This is not cheating, anymore than it is cheating to use your book during an openbook test.
I had a online formal logic course, and on the same website as the course material was a program that would spit out solutions to problems. Is it cheating? Why did they put a calculator on my desk if they don't want me to use it?
Similarly, there was an online course where we were given all of the available material in websites. The test was short in terms of time, and it was cram format, and so scanning through each page manually would be infeasible and the idea was that you would study lots and memorize random factoids. Instead, I made a custom google search that would such the subset of websites the test was based upon.
In school, they call you a cheater. In business, they call you resourceful. If it is cheating, then who is more guilty? I vote the lazy person designing the test.

You ares testing students the wrong way by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-03 05:58 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Re:You ares testing students the wrong way by fiziko · 2012-06-03 06:35 · Score: 5, Interesting

I went to a great school that allowed calculators on calculus tests. Why? In the prof's words: "because there's no way they will help you answer the questions I wrote for you, but paperweights can be useful the way these desktops are sloped."

--
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
Re:You ares testing students the wrong way by colinrichardday · 2012-06-03 07:08 · Score: 2

The HP-48 can do symbolic calculus, and it has been available sine the 90s.
Re:You ares testing students the wrong way by Nocturnal+Deviant · 2012-06-03 07:44 · Score: 2

What is sad, is I took the SAT for the first time(old sat) and i had an idea to pick all random bubbles, just to test for myself how well it would work...I ended up getting a 1540 on it by picking things at complete random...I didn't even bother to take it again. I had one of the best scores you could get by complete fluke....I was however confident that had I done it seriously I would have had close to the same result, maybe a bit higher maybe a bit lower.
Multiple Choice are a joke If you are trying to have someone truly learn something. You need to engage them in the subject to have them actually learn something.

--
-Noc
Re:You ares testing students the wrong way by ILongForDarkness · 2012-06-03 08:21 · Score: 2

Something that helps is having deep understanding questions not trivial calculation questions. In the real world you'll have Google and 90% of what you learn in college will not be relevant to your job and when you switch jobs it will be understood that it was 10 years ago and you need time to get up to speed. Google/internet has a very hard time of giving answers to understanding type questions (things like what causes electric current to flow on the outer edge of a conductor rather than through the whole thing). You take a while to figure it out and you either understand it or you don't versus 4 pages of DEs to solve only to find out that you made a 4th grade arithmetic error on page one. It doesn't test understanding just the ability to churn out lots of math with little errors quickly.
Re:You ares testing students the wrong way by ILongForDarkness · 2012-06-03 08:25 · Score: 2

Any sane prof would require that you show your work. In the real world you'll have calculators and other methods of checking your work. I don't see why exams need to be different. You still have to understand why an answer is right and figure out which formulas you need to get there. Trig identities for example, you can know the final answer all you want, heck sometimes the prof will give it to you as in "show that blah = blah" questions, but if you don't know the tools in the middle you'll get no where.
Re:You ares testing students the wrong way by ILongForDarkness · 2012-06-03 08:28 · Score: 2

Oh and also: I had a bunch of profs, and it made sense, that only had maybe 1-2 marks for the final answer. The other 3-8 were for steps in between. So you could get a 70-80% in a course and have a stupid arithmetic error somewhere in the question. Didn't matter it was understood that you're stressed and that in a normal situation you'd be able to be more methodical about checking your work.

Doesn't help if the final exam is in person... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-03 06:00 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

Doesn't help if the final exam is in person... by Non-CleverNickName · 2012-06-03 06:02 · Score: 2

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.

yes we need more tech / vol / apprenticeships by Joe_Dragon · 2012-06-03 06:10 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

Udacity and Pearson VUE by skedar · 2012-06-03 06:11 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

The term "cloud" by AlphaWolf_HK · 2012-06-03 06:20 · Score: 2

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

The Instructor is an Idiot by Fear+the+Clam · 2012-06-03 06:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

Re:In my day there was an easier way to cheat to a by Nidi62 · 2012-06-03 06:42 · Score: 4, Funny

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

Re:Sorry, Cloud is the new new Cyberspace by PPH · 2012-06-03 07:05 · Score: 2

Tubes. Lets call it tubes.

--
Have gnu, will travel.

Re:yes we need more tech / vol / apprenticeships by Internetuser1248 · 2012-06-03 08:45 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

Re:education is the problem by russotto · 2012-06-03 09:06 · Score: 2, Informative

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)

As long as there are real consequences for grades, it's important to stop students from cheating. Doing otherwise is not fair to the students who do not cheat, and at worst makes you a sucker if you don't cheat.

Re:people collaborate in the real work place so wh by DontScotty · 2012-06-03 10:24 · Score: 2

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.

Re:filler classes also have more cheating / essays by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-03 11:53 · Score: 4, Insightful

So that you don't sound illiterate when you post on slashdot.

Re:In my day there was an easier way to cheat to a by CodeBuster · 2012-06-03 12:59 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

Re:yes we need more tech / vol / apprenticeships by CodeBuster · 2012-06-03 13:10 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

Re:education is the problem by russotto · 2012-06-03 13:40 · Score: 2

But again, your focused on showing the students they need to prove to the world they can succeed through grades instead of focusing on education.

Yes, well, that's the point of a degree. Not just education but showing the world you are educated.

but they pass over tech school hit ground running by Joe_Dragon · 2012-06-03 14:03 · Score: 2

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.

Re:Will anyone notice... by schroedingers_hat · 2012-06-04 02:49 · Score: 2

You underestimate my ability to forget usernames/passwords and lurk for years. :)

Slashdot Mirror

Students Looking For Easy A Target Online Courses, Where Cheating Is Easier

49 of 241 comments (clear)