Colleges Stepping Up Anti-Cheating Technology 439
Bruce Schneier's blog highlights a New York Times piece on high-tech methods for detecting student cheating. Schneier notes, "The measures used to prevent cheating during tests remind me of casino security measures." "No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could disguise a student's speaking into a hands-free cellphone to an accomplice outside. The 228 computers that students use are recessed into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen — using, say, a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test later — is easy to spot. Scratch paper is allowed — but it is stamped with the date and must be turned in later. When a proctor sees something suspicious, he records the student's real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for evidence." The Times article quotes from research published a few months back suggesting that the more you copy homework, the lower your grades.
Re:I say let them cheat (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Maybe Find a Better University (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly. My college had an honor system. We'd have take home tests and stuff. If you were caught cheating, you got kicked out of school, plain and simple. They did boot about a dozen people a year, so the cost/benefit of cheating meant you took that D and worked harder the next time.
Re:Reward them (Score:3, Informative)
They already exist, no need to develop one to cheat with. Any moron could use one.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/techies/c521/ [thinkgeek.com]
Re:wow (Score:2, Informative)
Amen to that. The University of Michigan's College of Engineering has an honor code such that the professors and TAs are not even allowed in the room while the students are taking an exam. It'll show in your work if you cheated your way to a degree, especially in engineering. I'm curious what other universities have such policies.
And yes, universities do have an incentive to reduce cheating (they don't want other graduates to suffer from guilt by association) but like you said, it's nice not to be treated like a criminal by default.
Re:Best way to stop cheat sheets... (Score:2, Informative)
Isn't that what school is about anyways? When I went through Naval Nuclear Power School, you either got the topic or you didn't. Understanding a theory or topic is much more important than memorization. The best students weren't necessarily the best operators.
When we got to the ship, most everything is just book work, but at least we knew the background of what we were doing. No meltdowns yet.
Re:Best way to stop cheat sheets... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Best way to stop cheat sheets... (Score:3, Informative)
We had open book tests in my engineering courses.
If you didn't know your stuff, it didn't matter if you had every book on the subject, you didn't have enough time to complete the test.
Personally I programmed to study. I would write programs for my TI-89 to do everything for the test. However after writing out all the equations by hand, checking it against every possible way they could ask the question, verifying it with 5-6 different problems, checking everything again I had inadvertently memorized the equations.
It saved my ass a few times when I screwed up a sign early on.
Re:Best way to stop cheat sheets... (Score:1, Informative)
I agree. In many classes at my undergraduate program we could bring everything: old exams, cheat sheets, books. If you didn't have a firm grasp of the material, you'd never be able to copy a solution verbatim, and you'd never have enough time to learn a concept there to apply it to a new problem.
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:3, Informative)
I learned
A) How to construct Cat5e and Cat6 cables from basic supplies
B) How to setup/config a server
C) How to config a router
D) Virtualization, how to use it properly
E) Cross platform functionality.
The only thing that might go away in 10 years is that specific cabling, but the theory in cabling is always the same.
Are you telling me that writing something on paper would have been a better test of my skills?
Keep in mind this was just first year, we had 3 others to dive into.
Re:Why not do peer review? (Score:5, Informative)
"...subsequent analyses turned up an interesting trend: Copying homework is a leading indicator of becoming a business major..."
Re:Best way to stop cheat sheets... (Score:1, Informative)
Or do like one teacher I had in High School did.
On the first day, he announced that cheating would have dire consequences in his class. He was quite adamant about the point.
We did weekly quizzes (multiple-choice, open-book), ostensibly just to demonstrate our mastery of the subject material, and he'd use those quizzes to tailor the next week's lesson to review anything that students seemed to be missing. The quizzes, combined, counted as 40% of our grade. The final was the remaining 60%. "Extra Credit" projects, which were hard work, could earn you about 10% additional credits if you needed them.
But the beauty was his answer keys. They had nothing to do with the actual quiz except for the fact that not one of the responses was correct. He left them in an unlocked drawer. Not surprisingly, some enterprising young student snuck into his office, got them, photocopied them, and sold them for fun an profit to about 1/3 of the class.
A few weeks before the finals, he handed out all of the quizzes, now graded, as review material so we could go back over the material in preparation for finals (which were a mixture of multiple-choice and essay).
Can you imagine the joy on the faces of the cheaters as they opened their folder containing 30% of their grade to find out it was all marked ZERO!? That meant a perfect score on the final would earn them a 60% grade, which meant they had to work their asses off AND do all the extra credit to barely pass the class.
I had other teachers who would pull crap like asking questions similar to "If a train leaves a station at 50MPH and travels 20 miles, and consumes 10 gallons per mile, then enter 52MPG if you are not cheating on this exam. Then another train... (insert real-looking math problem here)". Their answer key would contain a number that was neither 52 nor the actual answer to the real math problem. Having your answer match the key (which was usually a nonsensical answer) was an automatic fail for the entire quiz.
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:1, Informative)
But what you don't is that even for a first year, it's more than basic, no course is needed to know how to install winserver + active directory, sorry.
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:5, Informative)
The exams themselves also tended to be modified homework problems; although not exact, they would require the same thought and techniques the homework did.
Re:Best way to stop cheat sheets... (Score:3, Informative)
Oh God, you just reminded me of my Mathematics Analysis class. This professor was a well known evil overlord in the 300-level courses. He usually made the homework so hard, it forced the class to work together to even finish say, 70% of it, after working on it until 2am.
And the final? Excuse me... finals? Yes, there were two. One of them was take-home, and looked suspiciously minuscule. Two pages. Two pages of questions for a take-home final? Ha! Easy. I'll have it done in a couple hours.
NO! For the love of God and all that is holy, NO! This is a 300-level Math course, buddy! Each question was a proof. Effectively the test took us through the steps of proving frigging calculus. I think I turned in 26 pages of proofs . . . three days of constant work later.
It was simply not possible to cheat in that class. That sadistic bastard is still my favorite professor; he even went to my wedding. :)
Re:Best way to stop cheat sheets... (Score:1, Informative)
As a current EE student, all my 300 and most 200 level courses were this way. Normally, everyone is authorized 1 or 2 sides of a page for notes/formulas or even worked out problems. If you don't understand the material, none of that does you any good.