Slashdot Mirror
Both Students and Teachers Use Technology to Cheat
Mr. Slippery writes "Baltimore City Paper's Cyberpunk column (which, incidently, is where I first learned of /.) has an interesting bit on the impact of technology on college essays - students downloading pre-written papers off the net, and professors using automated systems to grade them. Ah, the circle is complete." This story has no "news" in it, but writer Joab Jackson's take on the subject is interesting. (Disclaimer: Joab's a personal friend - and I used to write for City Paper too. - RM.)
I've was treated very poorly by the teachers and administration in high-school, so if you are a teacher, principal, etc.; sorry, but this is my experience:
The administration at my school had a huge number of draconian rules that made even breathing difficult. We were expected to follow every rule to the letter, and anything less brought down hell on us. More than once, I was reprimanded simply for expressing an opinion that differed from that of the current speaker. There was only one "truth", and the teachers had a corner on the market. I would often find loopholes in the rules to allow me to do things that I wanted to. These efforts were not appreciated. I would be punished for "violating the spirit of the law", and the rules would quickly be changed.
The teachers, likewise had a set of rules that they were supposed to live by. They were by no means as strict, and quite fewer in number. However, they were never required to follow those rules. For example, the teachers were required to write up a Disciplinary Action Form if they sent a student to the office for disciplinary reasons. However, they rarely did. More than once I claimed that I was never sent to the office and asked them to produce the forms as proof that I had been sent. They never produced these forms, but (big surprise) I was disciplined again for my challenges. Simply standing up to ridiculousness and having an opinion are important skills that are stamped out in our schools. I'm a free-thinking individual, with no use for these fascist institutions. I'm only 20 years old, but I'll swear to anyone reading right now that I will never cripple my children by subjecting them to such a limiting, brainwashing environment.
It's so ridiculous. My school's curriculum preached the values of democracy and a free society out every orifice they had, but when it really came down to it, they practiced fascism, favoritism, and contributed to an animalistic social hierarchy favoring those who did not think for themselves. Pardon my language, but give me a fucking break! Now, the schools in my area are implementing cameras in all areas of the school, including bathrooms. It's an outright violation of privacy. A student shouldn't have to put up with anything at school that his parents don't have to put up with at work. That includes abuse by teachers and students, destruction of free will, etc. If I had to put up with anything even resembling my experience in high school at a job, I'd walk out the door in an instant. I swear, if I could fix this, I'd do it right now. It's one of the biggest tragedies in this country.
If you need to point-and-click to administer a machine,
This might be more a symptom of the high student-to-teacher ratio. The teacher is so overloaded by paperwork, he or she looks for technological assistance just to stay afloat - and when the students realize that they're not getting "human" treatment, figures that fair is fair...
This is kind of funny in a twisted sort of way - I wonder if things were allowed to continue, would there come a mass academic realization that nobody human has been generating or grading papers for years...
I would hazard a guess that we'll end up coming full circle to oral tests (or at least some kind of test involving interaction between the instructor & each student). Of course, this would require more teachers per student - but at least the teacher wouldn't be "required" to take work home with them.
:rant mode on:
I'm really angry about the current state of the US educational system. (Bias warning: my mother teaches learning-disabled kids from grades 2-5).
Both the top-level decision makers & US society seem to be more interested in paying lip-service to education than supporting it as an opportunity equalizer. I've seem _individuals_ worried about the US education system, but there seems to be a system-wide lack of respect for the importance of education for a healthy society.
The amount of work & training that "good" teachers put themselves through is easily the equal of anything I've ever done in my professional career (and I'm a 10-hour/day workaholic), but after 30+ years of service, they get paid 1/2 of what I"m getting now. As far as I'm concerned, these "good" teachers ought to be getting at least 6-figure salaries & the equivalent respect of any other professional. And they don't just have to work hard - they have to be _SKILLED_ (anybody who doesn't think this, I invite to try and "debug" a class full of 7 year-olds like they debug a set of programs or a piece of hardware)...
There ARE "bad" teachers, but I see this as more of a symptom of the lack of respect that educators get in the US society - with the proper compensation & respect, you'd get top-quality professionals, just like any other field.
Unfortunately, all I see now-a-days is how to make teachers work harder with less money, complaints about how teachers aren't "doing their job" (usually associated with people who want to make their kids aren't "contaminated" by the hoipolloi in the public education system), complaints about too-high taxes (which are lower than just about any other 1st-World country), and skyrocketing corporate subsidies (with skyrocketing corporate profits).
:rant mode off:
If someone wants to write an article, they can either get their for-pay login to Lexix-Nexus and suck down a couple of pre-written articles to regurgitate as an uninspired rehash of data found elsewhere.
Or they can hop on the web for free (minus ISP connect charges etc.) and check out Slashdot, ZDNet, C|Net, PCweek, EETimes, Salon, or any of ther other "bigger" online 'zines to get pre-written articles to regurgitate as an uninspired rehash of data found elsewhere.
The people read them anyway, probably because they've been educated in the kind of environment where they've learned that the best kind of learning is to suck some data from another source or two and regurgitate it for the teacher in an uninspired essay of rehashed material.
The few percent of people who don't go for that kind of stuff are going to enjoy doing the research and the writing, or at least learn something from it on their own, despite any bad grades they might receive from a "grading machine" and either learn to regurgitate uninspired essays until they get out of school and do something they enjoy, or just drop out and use their stunning intellects to RULE THE WORLD!! (Err, sorry. I'm getting carried away. But you get the idea.)
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
I work for the Testing Center at IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis) we've been working with technology that does alot of the same things as IAE and Landauers work. We use something called the Project Essay Grader (PEG) and unlike Landauer, we don't make any fanciful claims as to what this stuff does or doesn't do. It grades papers and writting styles and nothing more.
/.ed (ie., the software can rate 1500 essays an hour but thats batch mode...it takes about a minute for every batch to start up even if its a batch of ONE). If ya want access to the demo, I can give ya a temp password.
We've been targetting this at the Indianapolis Public Schools for the last few years as well as trying to figure out uses of this for College entrance exams...along the way, we've built some damn good models for essay grading as well.
Here are the big plans we have for this :
Teachers have way too many papers to grade each and every day. The only way one learns is from writting...the years I've spent as a lit major (one of these days I'll finish that degree, but I'm geeking for a while) has taught me, classroom instruction means nothing. Ya need someone forcing ya to write and giving constructive criticisms of your work. Teachers don't have the time to grade papers, and if they do, they don't have time for a social life (ya wonder why most of them are angry and bitter).
With this software, we were actually paying teachers to grade about 3 essays (for model building purposes) and after that, they could use our grading software free of charge. What does this do for them? Well they probably had to grade the essays to begin with, and they probably had far more than 3 to deal with. Now they can assign alot more papers to the students and grade only a random sampling of them or check the ones the computer spits back out as invalid.
I wouldn't want any friggin' robot grading my paper or anyon elses, but if ya don't know if this is going to be read by a teacher or P.E.G. your gonna try harder than if ya just thought the teacher was gonna half ass it or ya thought that no person would ever read it. This was ya are forced to write, ya still get criticisms and ultimately, you should only be graded on those essays the teacher has seen and read.
The student also gets advantages from this, a student can ultimately run their own essay through the system before it ever reaches the teacher. Its not entirely accurate, much the same way that the grammer checker in Word isn't (well not much the same way cause this actually works). Either way, both the student and the teacher have advantages from using this software.
Our second usage of the PEG software comes from College Placement Exams. I design tests for a living and most of them are for helping a student choose the classes they need...very few of these are actually used to exclude students from college, but to make sure that they are in the levels they need to be. Its supprising how many Johnnys and Janeys come into school thinking they have the skills it takes to succeed and fall flat on their face. US High Schools suck and they suck big time in the state I live...if it doesn't have a basketball on the end of it, we ain't funding it. I get complaints all the time 'bout student testing and how it ain't an accurate reflection of the students actual knowledge (ie., if they've taken AP Calc, why can't they figure out simple algebra equations...) Well the test isn't about all that...College Councellors need to do their jobs as well, but most don't have the time either. These entrance exams are a help, but they are not always 100% accurate. They can give ya an aproximation of what ya know or don't know, but thats 'bout it. We're just about trying to make sure that students succeed.
We got alot of other projects going on with essay grading (as well as other testing shtuff) and its not all about making ya out to be just another #. Again, unlike Landauer's work we don't claim to do everything nor do we even claim that our software understands the essay ie., ya could write gibberish if ya wanted to, but it'd have to be nonsense on par with something like Jabberwocky to get a good score.
If any one is interested in this stuff, please feel free to email me personally, I can either field the call or pass it along to my boss Dr. Mark Shermis or the creator, Dr. Ellis Page - TruJudge Inc. and his head programmer Matt Lavoie. Right now, I've just killed the PEG demo on my site as my computer is being used for a whole host of other things and I don't want it
Clif Marsiglio
Mgr., Development - IUPUI Testing Center
317.274.2897 - ccmarsig@iupui.edu
As a student in my second year of university, I really have to wonder about the quality of the education I'm recieving.
I would never copy an essay straight off the net (I can usually produce better work on my own) but the thought that a prof can use a computer to mark it, and never actually read my work frightens me...
What if there is some brilliant idea that is lost because the computer doesn't recognize creativity... only form and structure.
Reality has a liberal bias
That surprised me. Archives of old papers are nothing new; that's been happening (in-person or online, or through group libraries) probably as long as there have been paper assignments.
On the other hand, who *writes* these custom papers? Odds are, there aren't that many people who'd be interested and clued enough to do such things as use specifics from the course (such as rare primary sources cited, or previous in-class discussion), that'd actually do a halfway decent job -- particularly if you're trying something obscure. Papers on, for instance, the ability, or possible lack thereof, of BGP4 routers to automatically recover from the theoretical instance of a maliciously configured router might be a tad less usual than a trite discussion on the evolution of western fortification technology during and following the Crusades.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
As I've posted in the past, overspecialization and the believe that one doesn't need to have any knowledge outside one's own profession does a lot to contribute to this. Few people are left who see the value of a good, well-rounded education. Whether it's the kid who majors in business or CS to "make a lot of money," or the classics major who thinks that communication majors "sit around watching I Love Lucy re-runs all day," or the hard science major who has never voluntarily cracked a book of poetry in his life, or the humanities/social science majors who take watered-down math and science classes so they can keep their high GPAs with a minimum of effort, or
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
See this Salon article on computerized essay analysis and the ETS.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Grade papers on content? My, what an asocial idea. That would encourage people to use logic, include references, and do thinking. Too dangerous, because it creates citizens that can resist their government and employers effectively. Really, it's better for everyone if they just test for vocabulary and spelling. We need to teach students how superficial society can be.
It's like having humans read resumes instead of computers searching for buzzwords. Seems like a good idea, but unsavory changes might result.
My favorite professor had a worksheet he stapled to the back of each paper. Each element of the paper (relevance of topic, coherence of argument, adherence to the assignment -- things like page length and use of APA style, and spelling/grammar) were given a certain amount of points. He would put down exactly where you "lost" the points, with comments. (I usually lost a point on bad APA style because I prefer MLA. But oh well.) Then again, this is the same professor who would always tell us "I have no problem giving everyone an A. I also have no problem giving everyone an F. You control your destiny in this class."
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
According to the web site, it uses something called Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). More information on this technique is available on another web page at colorado.edu.
"Be Happy or Die." -- AoN
Design flaw #2: Bell curve based testing used as a marker of how "good" a school is. All the children are NOT going to be above average, and a reward/penalty system based on this is ludicrous.
Design flaw #3: The assumption that children and young adults are not full human beings in the same way that missionaries assumed that "savages" were not yet full human beings. Instead of accepting Jesus Christ, we have to accept the American Way of Life as our Savior. If kids were treated as rational human beings, more of them would have more incentive to ACT like rational human beings. The resemblance between schools and prisons is growing every day, and it frightens me. I've seen studies that have shown that first-time offenders sent to jail have a higher recidivism rate than those put on probation. It would be nice if those making decisions that affect today's youth would LEARN from this!
Design flaw #4: Teachers are treated like glorified baby-sitters by EVERYone -- students, parents, and administration alike. Then, they are attacked for "not teaching."
The replacement system I'd like to see: Students are free to learn at their own pace, in a manner of their choosing, and their education will be fully subsidized until they reach the age of 21. They may at any time take tests or an alternative method to prove themselves "certified" at any level in any subject. They do this when they feel ready. One of these tests would be something akin to the current GED, and would be accepted as a "general high school diploma." Anyone at this level gains emancipated minor status and the right to vote if not yet 18.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Granted, having to grade ~100 essays is not the most pleasant way to spend a weekend. My wife hates doing it, much the same way I hate having to spend the same time working on my code. But she does it because *that's her job*! A teacher that uses some software to grade the essays because they are too busy to do the work themselves is (in my opinion) not a good teacher. Period.
Kids need to write a lot. The only way to become comfortable with expressing oneself with the written word is by practice. Many of the essays my wife gives these students are not onerous to grade because she isn't looking for 5 "magic words" that indicate they've read the textbook (or, more to the point, copied the textbook). Instead, she is looking for well constructed essays that come from having to organize one's thoughts and write them in a concise format. This can be analyzed with a cursory reading. However, when the point of the assignment is to have done careful research, that's what the bulk of the grade is based on, and what she spends the most time evaluating.
And most importantly, she makes sure the amount of time she spends grading the work is proportional to the importance of the assignment. If the assignment is a position paper worth 10 points, she isn't going to spend 15 minutes reading each paper. She'll check to make sure the paper is cogent and meets the guidelines she's laid out. But if the assignment is a 10 page analytical paper worth 200 points, she's going to spend a lot of time on each one, because it's going to be an important part of the kids' final grade.
The kids aren't stupid. If they realize that the teacher isn't taking their work seriously, then the kids won't put serious effort into their work.
Think of it like this - if your boss didn't take the time to give you a fair review of your work, would you be willing to put forth extra effort for your boss? It's not a matter of "modern pedagogical theory," it's about human interaction, pure and simple.
And "grading software" is just a symptom of the breakdown in interpersonal interactions endemic to our society
... and I would like to take this opportunity to fill in a few details about it. My trusty lead programmer here at Knowledge Analysis Technologies alerted me that the slashdot community was chatting about the IEA and after reading some of the posts I thought I should join in (I'll try to read them all over the weekend).
.7 - .8 correlation. Given a set of reader scores, you cannot tell which is the human and which the computer.
First, let me give you a little history (the lingua franca article referenced in the story is a good read for a bigger history).
I am a cognitive psychologist, as are my partners Tom Landauer and Peter Foltz. I am also trained in educational psychology with an emphasis in measurement. The intelligent essay assessor started as an experiment testing our computational model of human knowledge representation. The model, called Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), is similar to other artificial neural networks, but it learns its representations from extremely large bodies of text (it is limited to text right now). If you are interested in the underlying technology, please go to our academic website lsa.colorado.edu and download some of our journal articles.
We have found in our research that LSA makes judgments about text that closely mimics human judgments on a number of standard psychological experiments (e.g. categorization and sorting tasks). We wondered if the model could judge the quality of content in student essays similar to trained readers. I have spent the last several years testing this and we have found that the IEA consistently agrees with human judges *as well as they agree with each other* when trained properly. This tends to be an inter-rater reliability of around a
When we presented our research we got so many people wanting to use it that we decided to apply for a patent on the method and to form a company to market it.
There have been a lot of misconceptions/disinformation about what it can do and how it should be used. The current form of the IEA is appropriate to use for short answer essays (aka constructed response items) for directed prompts (aka focussed questions). It is meant as a replacement for multiple choice questions on content driven material, not as a replacement for English lit and creative writing teachers. It should be used in support of the 'Writing across the curriculum' movement so that students get more of an opportunity to write (rather than just fill in bubble sheets). It is not appropriate for 'term paper' type of essays where each student response should be unique. By using short essays to assess content knowledge rather than multiple choice questions, you encourage the student to learn the material at a deeper level. It is much more difficult to *recall* the correct answer and present it than it is to *recognize* the correct answer and circle it.
We currently want the IEA to be used as an interactive tutoring system for writing -- if you go to our website you will see some demonstrations of its use. We are interested primarily in formative assessment allowing revision rather than summative assessment to rank the students. Our goal is to help students learn. Our latest demonstration ties the technology to specific textbooks. You can have a list of essay questions at the end of each chapter of a textbook. After reading the text you choose a question then write an answer. The feedback will tell you whether or not you learned the information that the author of the textbook thought was important and where in the textbook you can find that information.
We honestly think that this system will help students learn and communicate. The press, to their discredit, has focussed on 'cheating teachers' implying that this system is a way for them to get out of their jobs. This is absurd. Look at any professor in college with several hundred students in a class or any teacher in K-12 with over-burdened resources and you will see that they rarely can afford the time to assign essay questions, so students never get the opportunity to write. This system gives students that opportunity. In some ways it is better than teachers (speed of feedback, objectivity, consistency) and in many ways it is worse than teachers (limited capabilities of understanding novel approaches, needs to be specifically trained for each domain/question), but we never wanted to see it as a replacement for teachers, rather as another tool for them to use in the daunting task of education.
I do appreciate the intelligent (for the most part) conversation you have brought to this subject. I look forward to continuing this discussion.
Cheers, Darrell
dlaham@knowledge-technologies.com
Hello, vis a vis, per say, imagine that! If you compare the logarithamic pseudo double sine could represent paradigm shift technology internet and if I dare say so myself ology scientific method methodology sine quo non ...
Result: You get an A!
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The bottom line is simple educational theory.
You start with a list of learning objectives. You come up with an assessment process which measures a student's achievement of those learning objectives.
Lazy educators focus on "end products" and "right answers" rather than learning processes. These are easily spoofed.
The corporate culture of "I want something delivered by tomorrow, no matter what" supports this kind of "educational production". Mainstream media makes an attempt at being outraged by cheats, but essentially the bottom line is that most organisations would rather hire a doofus MSCP than a less qualified person who really knew what they were doing. Not many people really want to spend the time measuring whether a job actually gets done properly (whether it's education or a LAN rollout) - they just want a set of bits of paper that tells them it's someone else's fault if things go wrong.
Competition is getting us to a point where this isn't good enough anymore. I think you'll start to see qualifications from places which focus on a student's ability to create/buy/steal end products lose their value, compared to those which measure learning more effectively.
Danny
Knowledge from other areas can help you improve your work in your primary field. I'm convinced that we'd have much betmore ter software if we had our programmers write poetry - and better poetry if we trained our poets in logic.
It is a tiny mind that can find joy and success in only one field of human endeavour.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
{shrug} I don't know about you, but at my high school, one could take courses that would actually force students to learn useful skills such as analytical, even-headed assessment. When you've got an hour to formulate and write a logical examination of even remotely complex historical issues, instead of simply regurgitating names, dates and quotes, that matters -- especially when you know that the teacher is perfectly willing to penalize responses that suffer excessively from a confirmatory bias...
...a firm background in mathematics and logic would obviously complement that. I'm not sure that many high schools really expose students to proving systems, symbolic logic and so forth, however, so that perhaps needs be supplied outside the system. Pity, that. ({sigh} Mentat training, anyone? Heh.)
It's also a decent way to boost writing skills. All the ideas and skills in the world don't mean jack if you're incapable of communicating, and arguably C or differential calculus are not suitable general-purpose languages for conversing with one's fellows.
This is particularly important because out there, you're going to be expected to be able to work with others...
And so forth.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Multiple-choice exams?
Erm. Four years as an undergrad, in my second as a grad, and I could probably count the number of my courses that even had a single multiple-choice question in them on one hand -- and I'm not a freakish mutant...
Heck, even in our CS classes, we sometimes give questions that include words like 'critique' and 'assess'. Why? 'coz we want to gauge understanding...
I would think that, if *anybody* would reject multiple-choice, it'd be an English department, since writing is so obviously fundamental to it. That's so utterly... FUBAR.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Both sides of the issue in this column point to the same problems:
1. A society that considers someone who put in practically no effort through 16 years of schooling more "educated" than someone who has learned through the "school of hard knocks." This is, of course, complete and utter bullshit, yet it persists.
2. Pressure on students by bad/uncreative teachers to come up with "the right answer" rather than an answer that actually shows some thought. Required rather than suggested topics for essays, teachers who grade based on their own personal biases rather than for content, and "students" who'd rather be doing anything but going to school all contribute to the problem.
Fix problem #1, and problem #2 might be less of an issue. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a classroom full of people who honestly wanted to be there and who were THINKING about what they were doing?
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
All in all I don't think there is much of a threat to education, although it may widen the gap between students who are in school for a reason and students who are just there. I don't want to sound hypocritical, I hate most classes as much as the next student, but I am usually able to drag myself to class on the promise of learning something useful.
As for the grading software, I'm not sure I would be opposed to it. I have been both the victim and benefactor of subjective teachers. Nothing is more depressing than having a teacher who gives you the same low grade no matter how hard you work, or more effort sapping than a teacher who gives any drivel you write an A. It would seem the smart thing to do, if you are going to be using software, is establish a database of papers available n-line, and compare students' papers to them, putting warning flags up for similarities.
Over all I don't see a huge problem. No self-respecting student would hand in a paper written by someone else. And no self-respecting professor would let software grade papers for him.
Spencer Ogden
Well, except in Kansas.
But it makes sense. If teachers change the criteria for a passing grade to the criteria in some software - which can be inferred by analyising its behavior, or REing the program - than students don't have to learn anything. Just successfully spoof the program. Or learn only what the program needs them to know, and nothing more. (so if it tests on 1st, 16th and current presidents, who cares about 2-15, 16-the last guy)
It wasn't so bad when the students just had to spoof the teacher. At least crappy teachers (a good teacher's going to use this? schwa, right) were generally crappy in different ways.
I fondly remember my HS math teacher who didn't teach me a thing except that my vision had deteriorated to the point when I needed to get glasses to see the board. Taught myself the whole thing in summer school, got an A and bitched her out. Ah, the memories....
Sadly, there will be some problems, and they're the same sort of homogenization problems that are evident in computing. MS will practically cut off your arms to make sure that one size fits all. Now we'll be penalizing creativity because it doesn't match a statistical model of the ideal paper.
In the old system of course, bad teachers are just as bad as this software, and good teachers way better. There was a chance, at least, that you'd get the good teacher. Now there will be only one teacher - the program. Monocultures strike again....
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Big Brother wasn't the final judge of course, but it was very good at picking up cheaters. At least I think it was. I'm sure it missed anyone smart enough to think about how Big Brother must work. So I guess it picked up lazy and dumb cheaters, but not lazy and smart cheaters. Which isn't a bad compromise if you think about it.
This is quite different from the sort of tool described in the cited article. I think it is an arguably good use of technology on the teachers' "side".
Why not wire this system into Slashdot, to perform moderation?
I'm half serious... It seems to me that most offtopic, flamebait, or troll posts could be flagged by a statisical analysis pretty easily. It would be a little harder to pick out the better posts, but probably not impossible. The archive of thousands of comments that have already been moderated by humans could be used to train the system.
MSK
The way people were graded when I was in school was that 68% (if I remember right) got a C, and the rest were distributed under the nice model of a bell curve. A teacher explained if he were to give us all A's, he would have to do some serious explaining to the administration about how brilliant we were. That, I think is what education should be all about: to nurture and build confidence for willingness to learn. Taken by itself, the bell curve just promotes brutal competition.
So what does the bell curve have to do with cribbing essays and work from the net? It raises competition. The art of education becomes cheating. Whoever is the most innovative cheater, wins. Its because when the grades go up, the level of work must increase to equalize the grades. So, more people suffer from burnout and turn to cheating. Its a race.
I graduated in 1992 with an engineering degree and get to see where the cheaters are today. It brings me great joy to see that they are employed, but in places like Walmart, approving checks, and meanial jobs like that. Those who do not have a clue now will never get it on their own later.
Imagine students and teachers all battling it out and competing against eachother like a game of chess. Who's going to win? It doesn't seem a very efficient method of education to me.
Back when I was in school, it was paper and pencil. It was a drag without the calculators, but it was fair.
Whatever happened to going to school to LEARN something? My sister in law is in her senior year at college and on the honor roll. She pesters friend's and family to do her work for her, pays someone to type and prepare all of her papers, and spends most of her own time primping in front of a mirror. Oh, and she is majoring in elementary education (there goes another generation...)
What passes for education today is what is going to make us a nation of fry chefs tommorow (no insult intended toward actual fry chefs.) It's like these Microsoft Certified Training Courses I'm attending - the focus is NOT on learning the subject matter, it's on passing the test so you can have a neat little paper signed by Bill Gates that says "I'm a Systems Engineer!" and in reality signifies nothing. But as long as you get the certification, degree or whatever, that is all that counts anymore - not your ability to perform in the real world.
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
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Mike Hoye
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Mike Hoye
I've noticed an interesting trend. When you go to a larger, respected university, what you are actually paying for is class sizes numbering in the hundreds and a bunch of TA's to do the teaching for the professors. Why the hell should I be paying a premium to be taught by a student? (No disrespect intended for some of the wonderful TA's I've met).
...but it's harder to cheat with source.
For one thing, profs may let their TAs completely restructure and revamp the specifications and code. If your submission does not link or otherwise meet the specs, then you've got problems...
The other thing is that it's harder to automatically compare the structure of papers than it is the structure of programs. If you just rename variables and functions and so forth, it's not that unlikely it'll be noticed.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Interesting reaction. Sorry for being vague and bogus, however I didn't think a quick post to this discussion required a full exposition of the details of the method. That is why I gave a URL for our papers. However, since you obviously 'get' the math, you probably also know that *all* artificial neural networks are instantiated in matrix algebra. So why do you grumble? I really don't see this as a valid criticism. As you saw from our papers we use a linear learning method, singular value decomposition, the general method from which principal components analysis comes. Using this method and some pretty hefty computers we can use training data that are similar in size to the amount of information a person would have learned from. Non-linear learning methods would never settle when presented with 10-20 million running words of data. Vector space models of knowledge representation are an 'old' idea, traceable back to the 'semantic differential' of Charles Osgood in the '50s. I inherited the name Latent Semantic Analysis from its originators, Landauer, Dumais,Furnas, Deerwester, and Harshman of Bellcore from their first paper/patent on using the technique for information retrieval 10 years ago. (BTW, Tom Landauer is my PhD advisor, my partner and co-inventor of the IEA.) It is not only a method for information retrieval, it is also one of several respected psychological models of memory that are neurally plausible. I suppose they could have called it 'just another application of algebra (JAAA)', but then it would be confused with all the other technology out there. I also don't see anything wrong with using an old idea to help solve an old problem. It wasn't until the last few years that computers got powerful enough to do a matrix decomposition on matrices of this size. *It is not just keyword matching.* It is primarily the dimension reduction step that makes this method significantly different from simple keyword matching. Check out the Landauer & Dumais 1994 Psychological Review paper for details if interested.
Assigning papers that call for the rote repetition of researched facts (I wish there were another r-word in there) is like forcing musicians to hand-craft their own instruments?
Serious Musicians building their own instruments (at least once) would be a good thing. Just like Serious Programmers writing their own programming languages or compilers or whatever else good Computer Science Courses have them do.
Now the author is right in that repeating the same facts on some assigned topic isn't all that useful. But isn't the point of education to teach people how to find things out for themselves? (Okay, maybe I'm an idealist.)
If I were a teacher, I'd rather have one student sweating over a stack of books in the library for the first time in his life turn in a list of facts he culled from that stack, giving credit to those books, than a dozen students (like I was) who can crack a book and write a nice essay that doesn't say much but winks at the author.
Yeah, essays for sale and graders for sale subverts this process... but plagiarism was always a problem with education, and graduate assistants have been doing the grading for a long time anyway. That's not a reason to get rid of meaningless assignments. At the very least, it prepares students for the Real World. (As I'm contemplating a two-hour meeting to present some guy with a box of cigars....)
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