Survey Finds Cheating Among Students At All GPA Levels 333
An anonymous reader writes "Over a third of undergraduate students admitted to some form of cheating at one of America's top research universities, according to a survey published November in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics (abstract). The researchers expected to find more cheating among the top-performing group — and at the minimum at least some students with excellent grades cheated. Not so. As it turned out, the overall cheating rate was similar to that found in other studies, but the types of cheating and stated reasons for cheating were all over the map. Researchers uncovered one trend among the cheaters: the perception that teaching assistants either ignored or didn't care about cheating."
Academic Steriods (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Academic Steriods (Score:4, Insightful)
If ALL the students in a class feel they have to take performance enhancing drugs just to keep up, then we are putting students into an exceptionally damaging and destructive learning environment. This is going to have untold many negative consequences to our society and these students later in life.
Classes barely teach anymore, they're just practice for test taking.
Re:Academic Steriods (Score:5, Interesting)
Those are unrelated?
Sports: athletes use [illegal, or at the very least, not allowed in the league] drugs to improve their performance. Only problems occur if they get caught.
Kids follow sports. And drug usage things. Apparently, it's ok - unless you get caught. Why NOT use them in academics then?
Perhaps the real issue is that we don't value "work" and "learning" and such. I went through school; I took no drugs, I was extremely busy, and I got good grades. I learned a lot. I didn't just practice test taking.
The people I knew that used caffeine a lot either (1) worked all the time to support themselves while going to school or (2) generally partied/goofed off until the night before the test, at which time they pulled an all-nighter. Group #2 was significantly larger than #1. I actually only knew one person I'd put into group #1.
I don't think we can simply assume that students are doing the drug thing in order to "keep up" because they can't otherwise. I have met tons of students who pass off education as unnecessary, worthless, stupid, and a waste of time. It's not shocking that grades would be lower and drugs would be used as "study aids" ... as a substitute for the real "study aid," known as "time."
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Ah. That wasn't the case at my university. All the top students in my department were legit. The frat boys were the ones supplying and using drugs. It obviously varies school to school.
Correction. The top students in your department APPEARED legit. You don't know. Not for sure. One or two of them could have been popping ADHD meds and not let anyone know.
This is the first I've heard of the concept, but I have to admit, the concept of a pseudo-Nootropic like this is fascinating to me. Not enough to risk my future on trying it out, but man, it would be nice to not get distracted by things like shiny objects and the need for sleep every so often.
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As far as I can tell, the concept of cramming and pulling an all nighter with the aid of coffee has been around at least 300 years. I would wager 99% of students have used caffeine at some point to sharpen their senses while studying. Is it really that shocking and appalling that some students use more advanced chemistry for the same goals?
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I didn't mean to insinuate that performance enhancing drugs for football was okay. Merely that most kids are more interested in football, band, videogames, etc. than doing academics. My point was, if they're taking performance enhancing drugs for something most kids don't even care about, then things have gotten rather dangerous. At least with football, you could just say the kid h
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Re:It's not just drugs. Sometimes it's culture, to (Score:4, Interesting)
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Why not announce to your class in the early part of the course.
"Last Year I caught 20 people cheating. They got 0 for the assignment. They all appealed as is their right. They all dropped their appeal during the appeal process. Cheating will not be tolerated."
My Father was a teacher with a course that had prerequisite assignments before you were allowed to sit the exam. Legend has it one person did not hand in the assignments. He waited for student to hand in exam and tore it up in front of him. A leg
Re:It's not just drugs. Sometimes it's culture, to (Score:5, Insightful)
To me the douche in the story is the one who didn't do the work but still wanted a pass.
Somebody saying "no" to that person? I wish we had a few more of those.
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Some pretty jingoistic racist shit, about foreigners seeing nothing wrong with cheating.
Citation needed.
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Some pretty jingoistic racist shit, about foreigners seeing nothing wrong with cheating.
Citation needed.
While I won't cite anything, there is plenty of evidence of Bribes required in many cultures - these aren't new practices, but harken to the days when they may have been viewed as Tribute. What are you to make of such a culture, where a little dishonesty is the norm?
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Bribes aren't cheating on a test. In fact, it's typically done to dodge a "test". I will grant you though, that there are some cultures where bribes are expected. There are also cultures where the government is overthrown in a violent revolution every 50 or so years, and the rebels under the banner of "We're fighting corruption!" soon become just as corrupt and vengeful as the people they were replacing.
But then none of this is academic dishonesty.
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Not sure why you need a citation when it's something you can witness with your own eyes.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_dishonesty [wikipedia.org]
Generally though, race, nationality, and class all show little correlation with academic misconduct. ... [41]
However...
In the University of California system, international students make up 10% of the student body but comprise 47% of academic dishonesty cases.[43]
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"It's not sexist to say that women are bad drivers. Look at the roads, all crashes are caused by women drivers. I'm just speaking the truth, so it isn't sexist."
"It's not racist to say that black people aren't achieving success because they're lazy. They have a culture that frowns upon academic performance, and doing well at a job. I'm just speaking the truth, so it isn't sexist."
The problem with these statements is that they are dubious and not the "self-evident truth" that the commenter would have one bel
Re:It's not just drugs. Sometimes it's culture, to (Score:5, Interesting)
Since you posted AC I just wanted to echo what you said. I'm at a Computer Science graduate school where 90% of the students are Chinese. The other day in class homework was due, and I saw students copying homework in class, just passing it down the row. They all turned it in at the end of class. Best part is, the TAs are all Chinese grad students as well, and are friends with the students. The professor didn't even come to the exam, and the Chinese TAs were almost overtly helping their friends cheat on the exam. It was absolutely infuriating. I saw it in my undergrad too, but there it was Indians. It just seems like something that these people aren't taught.
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Since you posted AC I just wanted to echo what you said. I'm at a Computer Science graduate school where 90% of the students are Chinese. The other day in class homework was due, and I saw students copying homework in class, just passing it down the row. They all turned it in at the end of class. Best part is, the TAs are all Chinese grad students as well, and are friends with the students. The professor didn't even come to the exam, and the Chinese TAs were almost overtly helping their friends cheat on the exam. It was absolutely infuriating. I saw it in my undergrad too, but there it was Indians. It just seems like something that these people aren't taught.
Just based on raw percentage (I don't have statistics on this), it is very competitive amongst foreigners to get into an American university (especially without any on-shore academic experience). Perhaps a larger percentage of these students cheated to get to the top and come here?
I didn't witness much cheating when I was in school, but I have seen grad students who seem to barely be able to write a hello-world app.
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I recall one of the professors from my undergrad made three separate versions of his tests that had some v
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There is some truth to this. I teach at an Australian university, and there are a number of people from specific cultural backgrounds who try this every year, because they come from somewhere that, what we regard as, plagiarism is acceptable.
I completely disagree with the "don't give them any chances, just send them packing". This is ludicrous. We catch a lot of these guys out (a lot of them are REALLY stupid and I actually feel embarrassed for them when we do catch them out) and, most of the time, pulling
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As a personal anecdote, semi-related, my girlfriend is from India. She has a cousin back home who is paying somebody to att
Re:It's not just drugs. Sometimes it's culture, to (Score:5, Insightful)
"They often come from a very different academic culture, where cheating is seen as perfectly acceptable."
Yep, it's the ungodly heathens. Americans don't cheat as much, because they are too dumb to go to college.
The best exams are the Open Book ones - yes, you can see answers in front of you, but your grade is based upon your understanding - if you don't already get it, you don't have enough time during the exam to read the entire book over.
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Re:It's not just drugs. Sometimes it's culture, to (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm so glad that the real world is open book.
It's really the best way - discourages lazy exam creation and shows how resourceful the student is in the subject matter.
I'm a conceptual learner, always had difficulty with memorising everything. Once I have the concept down pat, I can go seek the help I need from references. If I do not understand the concept, no number of references is ever going to bail me out.
I've certainly seen some "gifted" students hit the wall, face-on when expected to think through a problem, because they only memorized enough to fill in blanks they knew were coming.
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"They often come from a very different academic culture, where cheating is seen as perfectly acceptable."
Yep, it's the ungodly heathens. Americans don't cheat as much, because they are too dumb to go to college.
Perhaps because the cheaters here on academic visas have all the seats?
A problem easily solved, as already stated - expulsion upon the first incident of cheating.
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Imagine that (Score:2)
Students cheating and getting higher grades.
Re:Imagine that (Score:5, Interesting)
If the skills you want to form mainly involve fraud and deception rather than forging the framework for your life ahead, then they aren't going to work hard for $10/hr to ty and catch you so that you can further develop those skills.
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it's more like $22/hr but you're limited to being paid about 10 hours a week.
And it's not like we don't care, it's that we don't always find it, and if we do we make a judgement call on whether or not it was actually a violation or not. We just gave students a programming assignment on sockets, connecting to one of our own servers and doing some stuff. I'm sure half the class copied their generic socket connect code and simple UI verbatim from the Oracle/sun website, which they might think is cheating, b
Not so. (Score:3)
Students cheating and getting higher grades.
yet the headline says cheating occurs at all GPA levels. So unless cheating is so sporadic (i.e. negligible) that it does not alter your GPA then this seems to suggest that cheating has as much chance of raising your GPA as lowering it. that is, on average it does not work, but the average is composed of individuals it "helped" and those that it "hurt" in terms of GPA.
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Not necessarily. It could mean that it always raises your result, but some people shouldn't even have got in in the first place so need help to be at the bottom.
That said, I've taught a couple of university courses (in the UK) and I found that the weakest students were the most likely to copy someone else's work. When students are stuck, they ask someone for help. Some of them asked me, others asked their friends. Students tended to form friendships with people at a similar academic level. If a strong
How much of the cheater is in the filler classes? (Score:2, Interesting)
How much of the cheater is in the filler classes?
How meany class is there cheating where just the final test is the grade?
Re:How much of the cheater is in the filler classe (Score:5, Insightful)
A little off topic, but there's no such thing as a filler class. Only people who don't realize the full value of a well rounded education seem to consider breadth courses as a waste of time. At a time I did too, but instead of going into those classes with a bad attitude I went in and learned as much as possible. Sure I wasn't interested in things like social psychology, medieval history or graphic media, but I can talk with a lot more people about topics they're interested in because of taking courses like that.
And at most schools, if you have enough foresight you can craft your breadth courses to reinforce your major. One of my history courses I could take for my Physics breadth requirements just happened to be about the ethics of the Manhattan project... something every physicist should have to learn.
Regardless, people who choose to only expose themselves to a single subject or viewpoint are almost universally boring or close minded, or some combination of the two.
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some people cheat on the history courses or off breadth courses so they have the time to work there main courses? Why wastes time of that 10+ page history paper when you have a big work load on your main courses.
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It doesn't really matter how you justify it. Some people do the work assigned to them, and others feel it is beneath them because they have something more important to do. A university won't let a student take only science classes and graduate, nor will they allow only history classes to get a degree. Virtually every academic
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English 101, for example, is a class I would have totally cheated if I knew I could have gotten away with it. We were forced to write canned responses to Dick and Jane stories and the grades were wildly inconsistent, even though the quality of the writings were consistent. At one point a group of students complained, saying that the
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This. I had an English writing course at a junior college. I had done a fair amount of writing in high school, wrote tolerably well, knew how to use proper grammar and punctuation, etc. Most of the students could just barely put together a proper sentence on paper; most of them could not write a full paragraph that actually made a distinct point. Most of the time, I heard that the students felt like the class was a waste of time. I guess they figured they would never need to communicate in a correctly
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So, you work in academics then?
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Oh wow, you can talk with a lot more people! I sure feel a lot better about my education stalling. I bet that's what colleges have in mind when they shove courses down our throats that will never be remembered because we only have enough motivation to cram a day before the test and forget it. There's no way it has anything to do with the revenue that they gain from tuition.
Seriously, if I want to learn about history, I'm old enough to research on my own. Colleges are there to confirm that you have the prope
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I agree that these classes aren't filler. They are political indoctrination masquerading as "breadth" or whatever they want to call it. And as you say, most engineers would just craft their major to make as many of these classes reinforce their major as best they could. For those classes they couldn't, they'd either lap up, grit their teeth or mindlessly absorb the Marxist viewpoint, depending on their predilection.
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A little off topic, but there's no such thing as a filler class. Only people who don't realize the full value of a well rounded education seem to consider breadth courses as a waste of time.
That's your own opinion. Some people find no value in some classes because they believe that they'll never use them.
I wouldn't want to bother learning things that both don't interest me and that I don't believe I will use (and I'm willing to take that risk).
Regardless, people who choose to only expose themselves to a single subject or viewpoint are almost universally boring or close minded, or some combination of the two.
Again, your own opinion.
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Not to mention that some people don't want to take the classes that they see as mere "filler" because it would take time away from the things that they do care about and will actually use. Not everyone cares so much about talking to others about things that they don't even care about/won't use.
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A little off topic, but there's no such thing as a filler class. Only people who don't realize the full value of a well rounded education seem to consider breadth courses as a waste of time.
That's your own opinion.
I would say that is also the "opinion" of every state academic board in the US, along with almost every education board in every country in the world. I also think it ceases to be an opinion when you can use a multitude of data points to prove that a broad education makes for a better life. YMMV
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Because memorization of random facts will make you twice as smart, of course! Also, it's because some people believe that there is value in taking irrelevant courses. Therefore, that is a fact.
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Judging by your previous also incoherent comments, including:
"When I used to have cable it sucked they cut out the sound even on the local channels so you can't even hear the local live weather report that is more detailed then then in there is a alert in $county."
I'm starting to think you're a bot, or, a partial bot. Cyborg.
Tech the test and just reading from the book lead (Score:3, Interesting)
Tech the test and just reading from the book lead to it being all about cheating or cramming for the test.
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No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
The brighter the student, the more devious the means of cheating.
Also, I've seen (and caught) students cheating to get into a prestige university school with a highly competetive enrollment. The greater the reward, the greater the desperate measures sought to achieve that award. One student in particular was found guilty of Academic Fraud and expelled from the university - criminal charges may or may not have been pressed as a follow up.
One can well imagine the anger and frustration of those students who didn't make it, when they find someone did and did so through cheating.
Needs to be more hands on testing (Score:3)
So people are forced to show what they learned and not just show it on paper.
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"Hands on testing" might not be the best way to phrase it when talking about college co-eds...
Was there really a survey? (Score:5, Funny)
They did a study of cheating, eh? With a survey? How do we know they didn't just fake the data?
How do you get away with it? (Score:2)
And, I don't mean getting busted by the graders. I mean, if you're not really learning the content, how do you get away with not understanding the fundamentals when you get to higher class levels. Seems like it would eventually catch up with you.
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This is why degrees are about as worthless as the paper they're printed on now. We've watered it down too much, it used to be having a degree was a certification that you had knowledge and skill, and
So maybe there should be apprenticeship for TECH (Score:2)
At least then employer get people who have REAL experience and skills. Not just paper skills.
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Most places call theses people Managers.
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it used to be having a degree was a certification that you had knowledge and skill
I don't think that was ever the case. Even if they didn't cheat, it is still possible that they are poor at solving problems in the real world.
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And, I don't mean getting busted by the graders. I mean, if you're not really learning the content, how do you get away with not understanding the fundamentals when you get to higher class levels. Seems like it would eventually catch up with you.
The higher the level, the more you must memorize and find means of cheating, which in iself may prove to be more effort required than necessary to understand the material. I'm certain a lovely play could be made of this just lemme plagiarise some Shakespeare...
unattributed quotes in slashdot summary (Score:2)
The slashdot summary is attributed to Soulskill, but parts of it are taken directly from TFA. Using quoted material without attribution...kind of ironic, given the topic.
TFA, including the parts copied into the summary, is so poorly written as to be unintelligible, and if you want to look at the article, only the abstract is available without going through a paywall. So...not much to discuss, is there?
As a former TA I'm not surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
I TA'd classes during my PhD. I'm in no way surprised that there is a perception that TAs don't care about cheating - the fact is that very few of them really want to catch cheaters.
I used to try hard to catch people cheating during exams, on homeworks etc, but this is actually very difficult to do. Typically you have hundreds of papers/worksheets to grade in a week and if you don't get two identical ones in a row, the odds of you remembering that a solution was done in the same way by two students is fairly low. It sticks out when two students get the same wrong answer, but even then it's difficult to prove.
However, the main thing that turns TAs off catching cheats is what happens when you do. First, you have to prove that the students in question were cheating. This is a LOT of extra work on top of your normal workload which usually exceeds your contracted hours by about 50%. Then you have to report it to the ethics committee in your department. This takes a long time, the student has the right to challenge you on everything - and believe me you'll get everything thrown at you from claims of sexual harassment to racism because you're accusing some kid of cheating. This has the knock-on effect of showing up on your SRTE (student rating of teaching effectiveness) if the cheater has friends in the class, and so you get pulled in to see the dept. head at the end of the semester because 6-7 students have called you racist on your evaluations, which in turn doesn't help if you want recommendation letters for a teaching job afterwards. Even worse if the kid is on a sports scholarship, you'll get the coach attesting to his 'good character' - so there's no way he was cheating, you just have a thing against him for some bizarre reason.
Finally, when you show that two students mysteriously answered the same wrong way to the same questions in a row on a test, and you caught them talking during the test, what punishment does the university give out? They make the kid re-sit the test. So the upshot of your efforts are that you've wasted a whole bunch of your time, got a ton of hassle that you didn't need, and the cheater simply has longer than his peers to prepare for a new test which the lecturer is often too lazy to make sufficiently different from the previous one, so the cheater is ready for the questions.
I'd still try to catch cheaters as often as I could, because it was the right thing to do. But it was so much trouble for most people, and you became a 'troublemaker' if you did it, that most of us didn't want the hassle. Even when you explained to the classmates that the cheater was cheapening their degree and ruining their scores, they still thought that you were some kind of monster for punishing their friend.
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I was a TA as well. It's very easy to suspect cheating, but it's hard to prove. I thought the danger of false positives was too high to act against people who I'm pretty sure were cheating.
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I've never suspected students of cheating during exams, but I do notice it when grading homeworks and two students who turn in their homework assignment one after another have identical wrong answers, or answers identical to the solutions manual which any determined student can usually get.
Most of the time I did not take action when I suspected it, due the lack of complete certainty, the hassle you describe, and the fact that many professors did not encourage taking it seriously since the test scores were w
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What you describe is certainly true for TAs, but it can be even worse for the Prof, particularly if the evidence is not iron-clad and the cheating egregious. And if the media get wind of a prof being accused of racism and sexual harassment, you can be sure that the story won't be about frivolous and baseless allegations from a student caught cheating.
When I was a TA we used to catch cheaters on a fairly regular basis, but typically it was not worth the effort to take official action, so the students were es
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Yes, you tell the professor. Who then calls you and the students in to her office, and informs you that you have to take this to the ethics committee, and that you have to present your case against the students to them etc etc. Maybe things happen differently for you, but in my experience if I was the one who caught the cheat, I was the one who had to deal with all the inquests, departmental meetings and so forth. And it was a huge PITA that got in the way of my own work.
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^^this
Having been an "unofficial" TA for EE and and official one for Comp Sci classes, I can tell you that going to the professor is exactly what to do. //begin rant
I once turned in a physics paper that I had done in Adobe InDesign because it required so many charts, graphs, math notation, etc. and the TA in our recitation ask me to stay after class and talk to him about my homework. In no uncertain terms he told me I cheated on the paper, even though no one had ever turned in the same paper. He was just
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I've catched students cheating
Was it an English exam?
Surprise! (Score:2)
Some cheaters are good at what they do, and so they get an A. Some of them are good, just not great, and they get a B. Some of them are alright, but not really much better than average and they end up getting a C. Some of them just didn't try hard enough, and they get a D. Then there are the cheaters who get caught, and they get an F.
It's not surprising that cheating crosses all GPA levels. Only if we could catch them all, would they all be failed.
What about the other 2/3rds? (Score:2)
Teachers either make it too easy or too hard (Score:2)
If memory serves... (Score:5, Interesting)
Memories can be tricky, but my recollection of high school was that the "smart kids" who got good grades were generally the most rampant cheaters. These were the kids who were in the honors society and went to ivy league schools, and they cheated every damned day so I wouldn't expect that the behavior changed when they went to college. It was almost an institution: They would copy each other's homework at lunch. They would help each other plagiarize the papers they wrote. They would get together and devise ways to sneak answers into tests. It was cooperative and competitive cheating, as much a part of the process as studying.
If you asked them about it, they'd tell you that it was because they were taking tons of AP courses, and they didn't have time to do it all. Of course, part of the problem was the school's approach to honors/AP coursework: it wasn't necessarily more advanced, it was often enough just *more*. More memorizing, more busywork, and more time consuming. There were kids going home with 10 hours of homework for the night, and so they'd cope by splitting up the work and copying each others' answers.
And I'll repeat: these were the "smart kids". They were the "good kids". In a sense, what they were doing *was* smart. They were stuck in a bureaucratic system, and so they gamed the system. They got what they wanted, even if it wasn't "fair".
I'm surprised it's only 30% (Score:2)
From a certain point of view (Score:3)
I wasn't cheating, I was crowd sourcing my exam.
I wasn't cheating, I was engaged in a team building exercise.
Monitor the surveyees (Score:2)
Homework vs. Exams (Score:3)
teaching assistants (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm an instructor at a university, and about 10 minutes before I saw this story, I overheard some TA's deciding that trying to deal with the cheaters wasn't worth the extra time it would take in consultation with the professor.
Yep, the biggest thing enabling cheating is that it's a major inconvenience to punish.
The system cheats (Score:2)
In the 80's we cheated like hell (Score:5, Insightful)
This one time we took 27 hours studying every problem in the book- including making a test of all the example problems and doing them until we could see the answer and write the problem.
For 2 of of us- it turned out the professor had gotten cute and made a test entirely out of example problems. They finished in 15 minutes and aced it. I finished mine in about 40 minutes and aced it.
Oh wait.. I guess that wasn't cheating. And I was working a full time job taking 13 hours at the time. So anyone who isn't working full time just doesn't have an excuse.
The closest I came to cheating ever was buying solution books with every category of problem with solutions and working them until I understood them and buying an extremely powerful calculator which was allowed.
Cheating doesn't pay. You don't know the material - it makes the next class even harder. The only class you'd be justified to cheat in would be one that didn't matter at all to your degree. In which case- why are you taking it?
The more you know- the less afraid you are and the easier later classes will be.
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Also was a student judge for one cheating case. Was a girl- she even copied the exact errors from the other student. She got an F for the class and that was it. I think that's fair-- the penalty should not be completely draconian. Kids make mistakes.
I cheated ... (Score:5, Funny)
I cheated. I brought a slide rule.
Pre-Med Students Were The Worst... (Score:5, Interesting)
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This is true, Asian students tend to gather in small packs with a "leader" who knows more than the others in that subject, unless the Professor specifically states that this will not be tolerated.
By the by, most of my Professors promoted discussion among students for assignments. And I have seen that people who participate in group discussions, do tend to learn more than someone else with a similar technical background, who prefers to fly as a maverick.
so it's the collge system that needs updateing? (Score:2)
If group work leads to better learning and is like the REAL WORK place then maybe need to get away from the idea of your own your own when it comes to class work and tests?
Is so it the old fashioned ideas of the college systems for the middle ages that need to change?
At least in the tech field we should be looking at what the tech schools DO right and use that to make CS better and we should also look at the trades / apprenticeships to make the tech schools better as well.
A lot of cert tests are the same pe
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If group work leads to better learning and is like the REAL WORK place
I'm sorry, what the parent is talking about is not group work. But you are correct in that it is more like the real world, where few people do the majority of the work, and the rest marginally contribute and get full credit
You have to be very careful with "group" work. I was lucky enough to find a group of students who could bounce ideas off each other to finish homework asignments in advanced physics classes. We would each contribute pretty equally to the solution, and we each learned how to think like the
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But then there's the other side where you have one people who is just coming up with all the answers and the rest copy. There's no learning going on there. It's just copying down the answer.
Job security. If I led a study group and came up with all the answers that everyone else copied down, then I know that they don't know what we learned, and I know I won't have to worry about competing against them for jobs. I don't think this is the right way to go about things, but it's how our job market is set up.
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Maybe we need to test people in groups on projects and not on there own.
Sure. If you plan to hire that entire group and not the individuals who are part of it.
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Grades are there to make one look good. Nobody wants their grades to be accurate (unless "accurate" already means "perfect"), so everyone shares the same basic incentive to cheat.
I was in Honors classes during my college days. Letter grades were awarded based upon how you defended your work during the term, not the actual work itself. A shame more professors don't have the time it takes to interview each of their students upon Final day.
On professor in particular shared with me his view on students who expected highest marks. Those students had always had high marks and believed they continued to deserve them, even if their work was average.
Still, the grades won't guarantee they'
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It has nothing to do with the students, and everything to do with the environment.
That statement is absurd.
Were it true, you would see 100% of the students in a class cheating or 0% of them. You would never see one or ten out of a class doing it.
Your claim is just an example of the lack of individual responsibility common today. "It wasn't my fault, it was the ENVIRONMENT made me do it! Fix my environment and I'll stop being a cheater and follow the rules. Yes, I swear it. You can trust me."
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It has nothing to do with the students, and everything to do with the environment.
You mean their upbringing - as the twig is bent, so grows the tree.
I wonder how many politicians cheated in school vs. their classmates.
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That's a cheater's mentality and rationalization. Not everyone cheats.
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