Colleges Stepping Up Anti-Cheating Technology 439
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by
kdawson
from the spy-vs.-spy dept.
from the spy-vs.-spy dept.
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:5, Insightful)
Go ahead, let them cheat. They'll be paying for it once they get a job based on their "degree" and suddenly realize they don't know fuckall about what they're doing.
And the company goes: "Well I'm not hiring anyone from THAT university again".
The schools do have an incentive to curtail cheating.
Reward them (Score:2, Insightful)
You know what, if a student is capable of developing a pen-camera just to cheat on a test. Let him pass. There is a very good chance by the time he leaves school he'll be creating even better technology. God knows the West needs the innovation.
I guess I'm old fashioned (Score:4, Insightful)
I think of the purpose of education as getting an education. If you don't ever learn the material well enough to pass exams on your own, it's kind of a waste of time.
And, yeah, I get that people work for grades and the piece of paper at the end of the whole thing, but if you didn't actually learn anything apart from how to cheat well, you missed the whole point. Though you probably stand to have a lucrative career in international finance.
It's actually kind of impressive... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Surprising! (Score:5, Insightful)
"The more you copy homework, the lower your grades."
No shit, Sherlock! Does that mean that if I don't think by myself I will not really learn? Wow! Who would guess that!
Certainly not my undergraduates.
Re:I say let them cheat (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately business majors are usually the ones doing the hiring.
Re:I guess I'm old fashioned (Score:2, Insightful)
If someone "dumb" is doing better than you, you are most likely not as smart as you think you are.
Retarded (Score:5, Insightful)
They'll never stop people from cheating. They'll catch a few idiots and an equal number of innocent people. They'll raise the tension so much for the average student that they'll have to double their suicide watch programs during finals week. They'll still have a bunch of students who get away with it. Most importantly, they'll be so confident in their success that they'll do what academia does best - pat themselves on the back for wasting money while being completely oblivious to those who are outsmarting them.
Tests and anti-cheating measures are the lazy way to go about "education". But what do you expect when the most egregious cheaters, plagiarizers, and bullshitters are the professors themselves?
Write your own lectures.
Write your own tests and assignments.
Change them every year.
Change them if you have multiple testing sessions.
Don't copy them from the campus where your other professor friend works.
Don't pull shit out of the book you wrote for the class and made students buy.
Don't make students buy the book of your cohort^h^h^h^h^h^h colleague on another campus and have him reciprocate the favor, only for both of you to teach to your opinions and not what's in the assigned material.
Get TAs that speak English.
Speak English.
Respond to emails.
Update your website.
Post notes and assignments when you say you will.
Hold more than 1 office hour per week. Understand the material yourself.
Etc.
Re:I say let them cheat (Score:5, Insightful)
Schools also have an ethical responsibility to ensure that graduates actually have the skills/knowledge that the degree implies.
Give it up with the pointless arms race. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know why colleges waste time on pointless technology when there are easier and less expensive methods to stop cheating.
Instead of a 500 person lecture hall bring it down to 30 students. Watch the little bastards during a test. See little Sammy Jean pulling her skirt down in the corner? Move around the room and watch her eyes start darting around as she starts to get nervous. Walk up to her and ask, "Is everything ok?" I bet she'll probably admit to it on the spot.
Students will go and tell their friends what the questions were on a test, don't make us sign some stupid waiver saying we won't because we will. If it bothers the lecture, professor, or god forbid the do-nothing provost, change some of the questions for each section or just stop whining.
It's a pointless arms race where the kids are always going to have the one up. Stop wasting the waste of money and have your professors and TAs walk around and watch the students. Realize that making a good effort to stop 95% of cheaters will work and the other 5% will grow up to work for Lehman Brothers, Citi, or become politicians. Needlessly wasting money on anti-cheating or plagiarism tools takes away money from improving services like the shitty food in the dining halls, the rat infested dorms, or having a notable group perform on the weekend prior to finals will make your student population happier and more likely to be donating alumni in the future.
And finally, In my own not so humble opinion, the risk of getting caught just isn't worth blatantly cheating on a test. Most professors will just fail you for the semester which is more than enough of a punishment. There are the few that will go above and beyond the duty to make your life hell (suspension, expulsion), but failing a course is more than enough of an incentive to keep me from cheating.
Phew, I needed a good rant today.
Re:I say let them cheat (Score:5, Insightful)
Earlier in my career I had great disdain for an aspect of my company's culture that seemed to venerate degreed folk simply because of the degree denying or holding back promotions of clear subject matter experts simply because they did not have the degree usually appropriate for that level. True to form, I was promoted immediately after getting my Masters. Nonetheless, I really did believe most of what we did could be trained "on the fly".
Then something changed.
I had the opportunity to mentor someone who hadn't yet finished a Bachelors degree.
I showered them with documentation, with web-based training, with tutorials and direct training. It didn't help. Others may have done well. This individual couldn't, on their own, complete the most basic assignments and froze instead of using many avenues to overcome problems or misunderstandings.
It's not a matter of what you learned to get your degree. It's that you learned how to learn. Completing a degree demonstrates your ability to complete a long-term project presumably with all the initiative, time-management and general project planning that entails.
Cheating your way through short-cuts all of that.
Re:It's better to have students that don't cheat (Score:4, Insightful)
I think I would be offended at having to affirm that I am not a cheater. Cheaters, on the other hand, wouldn't care.
Why not do peer review? (Score:5, Insightful)
Get each class to test and grade each other.
The theory will be they are best placed to honestly appraise the quality of each others' work, and to catch cheating. The practice will be that slutty chicks, trust fundies, jocks and backstabbing weasels will buy, bully or scam the highest relative grades at the expense of the plain, the poor, the timid and the trusting.
And that, class, is how you prepare yourself for surviving the next half-century climbing the greasy pole at AnyCorp Inc. You can't teach lessons like that.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:3, Insightful)
If you wouldn't agree to it yourself, why would you inflict it upon others?
Because university degrees granted by the university would become worthless otherwise. A degree claims that you've learned certain things. If a university develops a reputation for effectively rooting out cheaters, then its degrees will be more valuable than those of a university where cheating is perceived to be rampant.
As to the hypocrisy of the thing, be sure to tell your concerns to your potential employers too, so they don't hire you by accident. You seem to value some skewed illusion of fairness more than whether you get anything of value out of the deal. If I were an employer, I'd have to ask myself, "How will you screw me over to fulfill your idea/illusion of fairness?" Will you steal and sell off my IP because others don't have it yet? Will you steal valuable equipment because it's not fair that you or some needy person you know doesn't have them? Will you slack off because it's not fair that you work harder than someone else? Will you demand more privileges because the senior workers have them?
Life isn't fair nor can it meet the demands of what we think fairness should be. Do you really believe that fairness, or rather the appearance of fairness, is more important than a good, solid education?
Best way to stop cheat sheets... (Score:5, Insightful)
Technology to solve a social problem (Score:4, Insightful)
will never work.
Humans are ingenious.
Re:I say let them cheat (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem for honest students (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I say let them cheat (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheaters in a university very rarely hurt just themselves.
Re:I say let them cheat (Score:5, Insightful)
What the fuck sort of citation do you want?
How about Socrates? He once caught a student cheating. Do you know what he did? He beat the student's scrotum with a piece of wood, then expelled the student.
What about Sir Francis Bacon, while he was a professor at Oxford? There are stories of him catching a group of students cheating. Do you know what he did? He told the king, and the king had the students hanged.
What about Dr. Oppenheimer? When he caught students cheating, he wept.
Clearly, cheating is as unacceptable as it gets in academia. It's not tolerated, because it harms the very soul of what makes academia so important and valuable.
Re:Do they really think it's cheating? (Score:2, Insightful)
I am an instructor, not a professor. It is not unusual to have 150 students total in my 4 classes every semester. So I should spend 10 minutes with each student after each weekly assignment? That means 25 hours! When would you like me to prepare for class, come up with new assignments, grade quizzes, and grade tests?
Re:I say let them cheat (Score:4, Insightful)
I had the opportunity to mentor someone who hadn't yet finished a Bachelors degree.
That's a rather small sample size with which to shift your paradigm.
Re:Do they really think it's cheating? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:3, Insightful)
If I ever went back to college I'd probably take a different tactic rather than blatant copying:
- ignore the homework. Yeah it's worth 10% but tests were worth 60-70% and labs are another 20-30% so those are more important. I'd just scribble my best guess on the homework and not worry whether the final answer is right. The grad students are usually lenient, handing out 6-7% (out of 10) just because you tried.
I'd then use the freed-up 50 hours to focus on actually learning the material, plus getting prepared for the tests so I can Ace them. Plus maybe meet a girl or two, rather than be terminally single.
.
ACE - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xGYn_NWa5E [youtube.com]
Re:I say let them cheat (Score:3, Insightful)
You hire them as techs and are flexible enough with your promotion system so that they can be rewarded if they show a high aptitude.
(In practice very few companies actually do this)
Re:Retarded (Score:2, Insightful)
Tests and anti-cheating measures are the lazy way to go about "education". But what do you expect when the most egregious cheaters, plagiarizers, and bullshitters are the professors themselves?
Some of this might be fine if all you do is teach, but many professors do research, and for those professor who have yet to obtain tenure, many of these suggestions you've made are unrealistic. Not to mention that none of your examples have anything to do with professors plagiarizing, bullshitting, and cheating. Also, some of your complaints have nothing to do with professors at all.
Write your own lectures. Write your own tests and assignments. Change them every year. Change them if you have multiple testing sessions.
Most professors usually write their own lectures. I've only had one professor who recycled lectures from another professor, and he ended getting fired for failing too many students. He also wasn't there to do research, either. I don't see how this is a problem--especially if you're writing your own exams based off the lecture material. Changing exams every year is a lot of work. Writing a fair exam is hard, especially if it's been a long time since you first learned the material. It's doable, and definitely more realistic than writing new exams every semester. Eventually this will slow down, because there is so many ways you can rewrite exams without making similar questions to previous exams or unfair exams. One professor of mine had the students write the exams and gave bonus points to those who wrote questions he felt good to be on an exam. I found those exams more difficult than usual.
Don't copy them from the campus where your other professor friend works. Don't pull shit out of the book you wrote for the class and made students buy. Don't make students buy the book of your cohort^h^h^h^h^h^h colleague on another campus and have him reciprocate the favor, only for both of you to teach to your opinions and not what's in the assigned material.
I've never had a problem with buying a textbook my professor wrote. That happened once, and the textbook was cheap as well and did better than equivalents costing over 100 dollars more.
Get TAs that speak English.
TAs are just grad students who need funding to survive. Teaching positions are in greater numbers, and there are many grad students who are still struggling with English having just came over to do a graduate degree. Fortunately, TAs rarely teach major lectures. If you're taking a lab, you shouldn't be relying on the TA to teach you the material--only to present it in a way so you know what to expect for a lab or an exam.
Speak English.
In the sciences, professors get hired based on their research credentials. Having an amazing teacher doesn't bring in the big bucks, but someone who can bring in amazing grant money, publish in amazing journals, and pass grad students can.
Respond to emails.
I agree with this one.
Update your website.
Unless you're required to go to a website for some sort of class project or whatever, I don't understand this suggestion.
Post notes and assignments when you say you will.
Agreed
Hold more than 1 office hour per week.
This is a waste of time if you do active research. Most of my professors I've had were willing to set aside time if you couldn't make it to office hours or if the office hour wasn't enough. More often than not, professors end up sitting in their offices alone during that hour--as some of mine have complained. I'm a TA for a lab, and unless one of their homework assignments requires to make a graph in Excel, I'm usually pretty lonely during my office hours.
Understand the material yourself
I haven't had too much
Re:Retarded (Score:4, Insightful)
I still remember my highschool physics teacher. He took almost exactly the problems we'd dealt with in class, but added irrelevant data to the problem. If you had memorized the forumlae but didn't understand the concepts, you probably wouldn't do so well. If you understood the material, the irrelevant values and facts stood out.
That and when he started the exam he pointed out he'd written it himself (doing the answers) with full work in about 2h50, and we had 3h to complete it. Only if you knew the material as well as he did would you get a perfect grade.
I despise easy grades -- they're meaningless.
Schools as filters vs. dumbing down (Score:3, Insightful)
Babies are born knowing how to learn; people only need to relearn that if it has been stomped out of them, as is done through most conventional compulsory schooling. This is not to disgree that college can also be an effective filter for businesses to use to obtain compliant workers who know certain basic skills and who also are unlikely to seriously challenge authority. Related links:
http://ilabs.washington.edu/news/scientist_in_the_crib.html [washington.edu]
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm [chomsky.info]
http://www.educationrevolution.org/ [educationrevolution.org]
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm [johntaylorgatto.com]
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html [the-open-boat.com]
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html [holtgws.com]
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends on the individual. *SOME* people can read help files and figure all of that out, sure. Some can get the "Networking for dummies" book and figure it out. And some learn it in college.
Re:I say let them cheat (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey, lemme introduce you to something. It's called a "period." It's a punctuation mark to separate thoughts expressed in text. You might want to learn a bit more about it on your own, since your own time in academia seemed to fail you so thoroughly.
Re:It's better to have students that don't cheat (Score:3, Insightful)
If they haven't learned values by the time they're in college, they're not going to learn them there. The cheaters were proud that they could lie and swear they didn't cheat; cheaters lie, and liars cheat. Honor codes mean nothing to a person with no honor.
Re:I say let them cheat (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, unless you're dead-set on working for a giant corporation, it's not that hard to find companies in any field that don't have a massive management system and an HR department. There are lots of small businesses where the handful of people who actually run the company are also the people who do most of the work.
It's not a big secret that large companies tend to develop big bureaucracies. If you go get a job at one of those companies, you shouldn't be surprised that you end up in the middle of that mess. If you don't want to deal with that, then go work for somewhere smaller.
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:3, Insightful)
You are an ass. Please explain why those skills are not useful? I suppose you left school (assuming you went) to take a position as a Sr Douchebag making $100K, right?
That's an interesting test, especially if you are looking to be a system administrator at some point. That test touches upon all sorts of skill sets and shows at least a base competency is several real world technologies - OSes (Windows/Linux), Networking (multiple levels of OSI), hardware and virtualization. It also shows that someone can be self-reliant (no google), knows how to troubleshoot and can also read a man/help page.
I couldn't have done something like this when I was in school. Heck, most "IT Professionals" I know today probably couldn't do it either. It amazes me how people get stuck in a niche. Linux admins not knowing anything about Windows and vice-versa. Network guys that don't really understand networking (routing, protocols, etc), but can copy a switch port config like nobodies business.
Please enlighten us to all great things you did 10 years ago that are relevant today...
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:1, Insightful)
I have a couple problems with this.
First of all, at the point where you're studying the material (or, "actually learning" as you put it), you might as well be doing the homework. As a student, I can state that at least at my (rather good) university, the homework actually teaches you things that otherwise weren't covered in class, were only touched on, or were fully covered. I've yet to come across severe gruntwork for the sake of gruntwork.
Second, your argument about ignoring is just a bad tactic (and I say that having both done and not done homework). First, doing homework gives you a buffer in case you don't ace the tests (which are, in my experience, usually closer to the 40-50% mark, including the final). Second, doing homework will increase your score by helping teach you the material. Often, some test questions are gimmes from the homework, which other students will have much less time to do. They'll also have practice from doing those types of problems and know what kinds of mistakes they tend to make, while you will probably take longer and you'll be more error prone.
Third, even if you ace the exam, its usually curved anyway. If the top 10% gets a 60 thats an A, you getting a 90 or a 95 isn't worth squat, since you'll still only get that high score on the test portion. You probably won't be able to get an A in the class since you have a crappy homework score. At least at my university, the TAs can tell if you're writing short, worthless scribbles versus actually attempting the work.
Lastly, most of the teachers I know were willing to look at borderline grades and curve them. Their criteria, though, were either homework or attendance (which is a bit unrelated). If they saw that you put in the work they wanted, then you were rewarded. Doubly so if you would talk to your prof about homework problems when you struggled.
Trust me, I've tried. It's a bad call.
Re:I say let them cheat (Score:3, Insightful)
- Do you want a doctor operating on you who cheated his way through medschool and can't tell the difference between your appendix and your spleen?
- Do you want an engineer who can't do basic structural analysis building the bridge you are going to be driving over?
Actually lets move away from degrees and just look at plain qualifications:
- The electrician who isn't qualified wires your house arse-about and you get electrocuted?
- Or what about the person who is performing CPR on your pregnant wife and just rolled her onto her right hand side in the recovery position. They qualified by cheating off someone who knew that pregnant women should NEVER be rolled on their right hand side, and now they are both dead because of it.
My degree has on it the words "[name] having fulfilled the conditions prescribed by the University is, on this day, conferred with the degree of [degree]". This is a promise of the institution that the person holding this piece of paper is competent enough to hold the degree. My first aid certificate says something similar that I have fulfilled the requirements and that I have shown to be competent to hold the title of senior first aider.
So yes it is the university's problem ethically. If the student is wasting their time and money and cheating they should not be conferred with the degree. Yeah they are there to provide a learning environment in the exchange for cash, but they also need to police what they are guaranteeing when they are giving people degrees. Otherwise the piece of paper isn't worth any more than the degrees you can buy online from the Cayman Islands, and this ethical responsibility is what should be setting our excellent worldwide institutions apart from the frauds.