I've had exams like that. But there's also a place for seeing what YOU know.
I actually favor oral exams whenever possible (although they've not been possible yet in my TA'ing career), for the simple reason that you can actually see what and how the student thinks, and how they go about solving a problem, rather than just getting scrawls on a piece of paper.
There is an oral exam as part of the PhD qualifying process here (physics), and it is considered perfectly acceptable to ask your committee "Hey, I forgot fact XYZ that I know I need for this problem, can you give it to me?"
I try to structure anything I teach so that the assessments aren't things you can cheat on easily, since I emphasize problem-solving skills and "I want to know what you think" questions over boilerplate problems -- because it's a better way to teach, anyway. Fortunately the classes I teach have been small enough that I've been able to get to know individual students and their abilities pretty well. And, well, I catch a lot of cheaters, without the aid of anything other than Google. Do I miss some too? I'm sure. But I catch enough.
But systems like turnitin.com and exam cameras are not the solution. They're expensive, and moreover they create entirely the wrong culture for the students. Who wants to live in a surveillance state?
The problem is that there is very little support from above for dealing with these punks.
I had a student get his dad to do his homework (very basic scientific programming -- Celsius-to-Fahrenheit converter in C) this year. Caught him, and he admitted it, but said "I didn't know that having someone else write the code for me was against the rules" and "I didn't know how to do it on my own, and wanted to turn something in." I told him that I'm not buying it, and that I was going to lower his grade by one letter grade. (This is a fairly lenient punishment!)
Well, he has his rich daddy write a five-page screed to the Dean of Science, demanding a written apology from me for being so mean to his Dudleykins.* Then he appeals to the Associate Dean for Academics, who actually buys his "I didn't know it was wrong to get someone else to do the work for me", and tells me I can't lower his grade at all.
There's also no mechanism for warning other instructors about a student that's cheated. The only thing you can do is to make a permanent notation on their transcript, but that is considered an extremely harsh punishment and the student gets all sorts of automatic appeals (and the Dean won't let you do it).
This has happened on other occasions, and this is the problem. Unscrupulous students, and they're out there, are going to cheat constantly if they know they can get by with no worse penalty than they'd get if they didn't cheat (either way they fail the class). And the administration turns me into a liar too -- my syllabus says "Cheating will be punished very harshly, don't do it", and then the administration doesn't back up their instructors.
Another hilarious cheating story: Two students from an athletic team had conspired to help each other cheat their way through freshman mechanics. They copied off of a third party and off of each other on exams. One student's lowercase mu's looked a little like N's, but it was obvious from context what they were -- \mu_s is the coefficient of static friction, etc.
Well, the other student misread his paper (having apparently not paid a bit of attention to the class), and blatantly wrote "N_s".
I caught both of them. Student #2 was completely incredulous that this handwriting analysis was enough to nail her in my book (she'd been claiming "He copied off me!")
Turns out Student #2 was already on probation after having failed classes with wild abandon, and the F she got from me was enough to get her kicked out regardless of the cheating. Student #1 tried to bribe his way out of it (with a $20 in my mailbox!), and he got punted up to the Dean of Students -- who threw him out too. At least they take bribery seriously.
You laugh, but that's a large chunk of the cheating population -- people who've gotten by through affirmative-action-type lower standards and free passes for a long time.
My student population is probably 80% Caucasian, but the cheaters I catch (N=about a dozen by now) are 40-50% minority.
This is exactly the problem. We don't need more toys, we need some actual support from the University administration when people cheat and get caught.
I had a student claim "I didn't know having my dad do my homework for me was wrong" and "It was okay since I couldn't do it on my own". I told him that I didn't buy that, so he appealed to the dean, and THE DEAN BOUGHT IT. He directed me to not lower the student's grade at all.
I had this experience too, and it pissed me off -- even more so since I know enough optics to test my eyes myself (for garden-variety myopia). Do you have a citation for the law?
It's telling how quickly Nancy Reagan turned on the radical Christians that got her husband elected once she realized that he was dying a horrible death due to a condition that could very well be treated one day by stem-cell methods.
What is a Christian other than someone who claims to follow Christ?
You (and the Episcopalians) say Christ says one thing. The Baptists say Christ said something else.
Sure, it seems to me and you that the Episcopalians are probably right. But the point is that without a *reality* to test these religious claims against ("what Christ really wanted"), there's no objective answer to who's really a Christian.
I lived in Alabama for a long time, and I can say that yes -- a majority of Christians there *do* metaphorically beat down the doors to science classrooms. The Baptist megachurch in my neighborhood showed up to my high school with pamphlets supporting young-earth creationism. I was thrown out of a Methodist Sunday School for inquiring about how Big Bang cosmology fit into Genesis (hey, I was six, and yes I was an odd little kid). I worked at a Presbyterian church for a long time that fired their pastor and changed Presbyterian sub-denominations because the Presbyterian Church (USA) wasn't homophobic enough.
The only major groups of Christians I encountered in Alabama that weren't the sorts of nutters you describe were the United Church of Christ (but not many of those) and the Episcopalians. I didn't have much contact with the Lutherans (there weren't many of them) so I can't speak for them.
At least in numbers, a plurality of Christians in the South are Southern Baptists, and they're nutters.
It's not the same elsewhere. But down in the crotch of the Bible Belt, it's scary.
I only followed one -- the Princeton Election Commission -- and it was right.
Later I heard about fivethirtyeight.com (Nate Silver), and he was right too.
I don't know of any wrong ones.
I imagine that since mathematics imposes a fairly strict, straightforward way to do it there won't be that much variance between different people doing the analysis.
Even with undergrad-level statistics, they'd be able to do better than this (hint: random shit tends toward gaussianly-distributed, and there are all those friendly equations with sqrt(N) in them that tells you how big the Gaussians are) -- and knowing that there are people like Nate Silver et al. on the loose, they should have realized they'd be caught sooner or later.
Daily Kos wasn't trying to manipulate anything -- notice that they fired R2K once fivethirtyeight's statistics showed them to be least accurate at predicting election results, long before there was any evidence of fraud?
Daily Kos' response to this was to post exactly how they knew that R2K was making stuff up, retract anything based on their numbers, and send the lawyers after R2K for fraud.
I just got back from a lattice QCD conference, and there were lots of talks on GPGPU. Everybody's falling over each other trying to implement their code on GPU's because of the performance gains.
*Every* talk mentioned Nvidia cards -- Geforce GTX nnn's, Tesla boards, Fermi boards. Nobody talked about AMD at all.
Maybe AMD does have an advantage, but nobody's using it.
So, once upon a time, there was this text editor called vi.
To make it do shit you type in cryptic commands. The one for search-and-replace is s, followed by a slash, followed by the thing you want to search for, followed by another slash, followed by the thing you want to replace it with. Because of more arcana, this will only happen once per line unless you put a g after it.
So s/cat/dog/g means "replace all occurrences of cat with dog".
Incidentally, you also have to tell vi in what range it should do this operation. So you get cryptic commands like:1,$s/cat/dog/g
Slashdot Mirror
This guy's done it to other people, too -- telling them just how their course website should be organized, interfering in grading, etc.
Short-term profit over long-term quality (that leads to long-term profit): the American way.
For you, this is true. This is because you are likely smart.
Some people are dumb, and can't do it themselves.
We've had students turn stuff in with the links still underlined in blue.
I've had exams like that. But there's also a place for seeing what YOU know.
I actually favor oral exams whenever possible (although they've not been possible yet in my TA'ing career), for the simple reason that you can actually see what and how the student thinks, and how they go about solving a problem, rather than just getting scrawls on a piece of paper.
There is an oral exam as part of the PhD qualifying process here (physics), and it is considered perfectly acceptable to ask your committee "Hey, I forgot fact XYZ that I know I need for this problem, can you give it to me?"
I'm a TA at a Research 1 university in physics.
I try to structure anything I teach so that the assessments aren't things you can cheat on easily, since I emphasize problem-solving skills and "I want to know what you think" questions over boilerplate problems -- because it's a better way to teach, anyway. Fortunately the classes I teach have been small enough that I've been able to get to know individual students and their abilities pretty well. And, well, I catch a lot of cheaters, without the aid of anything other than Google. Do I miss some too? I'm sure. But I catch enough.
But systems like turnitin.com and exam cameras are not the solution. They're expensive, and moreover they create entirely the wrong culture for the students. Who wants to live in a surveillance state?
The problem is that there is very little support from above for dealing with these punks.
I had a student get his dad to do his homework (very basic scientific programming -- Celsius-to-Fahrenheit converter in C) this year. Caught him, and he admitted it, but said "I didn't know that having someone else write the code for me was against the rules" and "I didn't know how to do it on my own, and wanted to turn something in." I told him that I'm not buying it, and that I was going to lower his grade by one letter grade. (This is a fairly lenient punishment!)
Well, he has his rich daddy write a five-page screed to the Dean of Science, demanding a written apology from me for being so mean to his Dudleykins.* Then he appeals to the Associate Dean for Academics, who actually buys his "I didn't know it was wrong to get someone else to do the work for me", and tells me I can't lower his grade at all.
There's also no mechanism for warning other instructors about a student that's cheated. The only thing you can do is to make a permanent notation on their transcript, but that is considered an extremely harsh punishment and the student gets all sorts of automatic appeals (and the Dean won't let you do it).
This has happened on other occasions, and this is the problem. Unscrupulous students, and they're out there, are going to cheat constantly if they know they can get by with no worse penalty than they'd get if they didn't cheat (either way they fail the class). And the administration turns me into a liar too -- my syllabus says "Cheating will be punished very harshly, don't do it", and then the administration doesn't back up their instructors.
Another hilarious cheating story: Two students from an athletic team had conspired to help each other cheat their way through freshman mechanics. They copied off of a third party and off of each other on exams. One student's lowercase mu's looked a little like N's, but it was obvious from context what they were -- \mu_s is the coefficient of static friction, etc.
Well, the other student misread his paper (having apparently not paid a bit of attention to the class), and blatantly wrote "N_s".
I caught both of them. Student #2 was completely incredulous that this handwriting analysis was enough to nail her in my book (she'd been claiming "He copied off me!")
Turns out Student #2 was already on probation after having failed classes with wild abandon, and the F she got from me was enough to get her kicked out regardless of the cheating. Student #1 tried to bribe his way out of it (with a $20 in my mailbox!), and he got punted up to the Dean of Students -- who threw him out too. At least they take bribery seriously.
*q.v. Harry Potter
You laugh, but that's a large chunk of the cheating population -- people who've gotten by through affirmative-action-type lower standards and free passes for a long time.
My student population is probably 80% Caucasian, but the cheaters I catch (N=about a dozen by now) are 40-50% minority.
This is exactly the problem. We don't need more toys, we need some actual support from the University administration when people cheat and get caught.
I had a student claim "I didn't know having my dad do my homework for me was wrong" and "It was okay since I couldn't do it on my own". I told him that I didn't buy that, so he appealed to the dean, and THE DEAN BOUGHT IT. He directed me to not lower the student's grade at all.
I had this experience too, and it pissed me off -- even more so since I know enough optics to test my eyes myself (for garden-variety myopia). Do you have a citation for the law?
This.
It's telling how quickly Nancy Reagan turned on the radical Christians that got her husband elected once she realized that he was dying a horrible death due to a condition that could very well be treated one day by stem-cell methods.
What is a Christian other than someone who claims to follow Christ?
You (and the Episcopalians) say Christ says one thing. The Baptists say Christ said something else.
Sure, it seems to me and you that the Episcopalians are probably right. But the point is that without a *reality* to test these religious claims against ("what Christ really wanted"), there's no objective answer to who's really a Christian.
I lived in Alabama for a long time, and I can say that yes -- a majority of Christians there *do* metaphorically beat down the doors to science classrooms. The Baptist megachurch in my neighborhood showed up to my high school with pamphlets supporting young-earth creationism. I was thrown out of a Methodist Sunday School for inquiring about how Big Bang cosmology fit into Genesis (hey, I was six, and yes I was an odd little kid). I worked at a Presbyterian church for a long time that fired their pastor and changed Presbyterian sub-denominations because the Presbyterian Church (USA) wasn't homophobic enough.
The only major groups of Christians I encountered in Alabama that weren't the sorts of nutters you describe were the United Church of Christ (but not many of those) and the Episcopalians. I didn't have much contact with the Lutherans (there weren't many of them) so I can't speak for them.
At least in numbers, a plurality of Christians in the South are Southern Baptists, and they're nutters.
It's not the same elsewhere. But down in the crotch of the Bible Belt, it's scary.
The trouble with religion is that only God can say who's being a true Christian, and he's not saying.
Part of genuine civil liberty is the ability to be as big of a dick to the cops as you want and not get arrested.
I only followed one -- the Princeton Election Commission -- and it was right.
Later I heard about fivethirtyeight.com (Nate Silver), and he was right too.
I don't know of any wrong ones.
I imagine that since mathematics imposes a fairly strict, straightforward way to do it there won't be that much variance between different people doing the analysis.
I dunno, but apparently they do, considering that the people who did poll meta-analysis predicted the election results to high precision...
Left compared to what?
Compared to most of the world CNN is center-right. Compared to the US as a whole they seem moderate. Compared to you they probably seem left.
I'd like to see another poll, of both Fox News watchers and Daily Kos readers, with one question:
"Do you know what a Gaussian is?"*
Fox watchers don't even have the resources /to/ question the polling data.
I know 2/3 of the discretionary federal spending is on the military -- so who's wasting my tax money, again?
That's a political problem, not a technical one.
This is what gets me, too.
Even with undergrad-level statistics, they'd be able to do better than this (hint: random shit tends toward gaussianly-distributed, and there are all those friendly equations with sqrt(N) in them that tells you how big the Gaussians are) -- and knowing that there are people like Nate Silver et al. on the loose, they should have realized they'd be caught sooner or later.
Daily Kos wasn't trying to manipulate anything -- notice that they fired R2K once fivethirtyeight's statistics showed them to be least accurate at predicting election results, long before there was any evidence of fraud?
This, exactly.
Daily Kos' response to this was to post exactly how they knew that R2K was making stuff up, retract anything based on their numbers, and send the lawyers after R2K for fraud.
I just got back from a lattice QCD conference, and there were lots of talks on GPGPU. Everybody's falling over each other trying to implement their code on GPU's because of the performance gains.
*Every* talk mentioned Nvidia cards -- Geforce GTX nnn's, Tesla boards, Fermi boards. Nobody talked about AMD at all.
Maybe AMD does have an advantage, but nobody's using it.
So, once upon a time, there was this text editor called vi.
To make it do shit you type in cryptic commands. The one for search-and-replace is s, followed by a slash, followed by the thing you want to search for, followed by another slash, followed by the thing you want to replace it with. Because of more arcana, this will only happen once per line unless you put a g after it.
So s/cat/dog/g means "replace all occurrences of cat with dog".
Incidentally, you also have to tell vi in what range it should do this operation. So you get cryptic commands like :1,$s/cat/dog/g