Students Looking For Easy A Target Online Courses, Where Cheating Is Easier 241
An anonymous reader writes "As online courses become mainstream, some students are finding they are often easy to game. A group of clever students at one public university describe how they used a Google Doc during on open-book test for a new kind of 'cloud cheating.'" Instead of "cloud" all the time, can't we switch it up with "on the internet"?
Doesn't help if the final exam is in person... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've taken quite a few online courses, where the tests and quizzes during the semester were online, and I've cheated on a couple (lazy professors who actually copy/pasted questions that were easily found Googling), but the final was always a written exam taken on campus.
You can breeze through the bulk of the semester all you want with the help of the good folks at Google, but you'll be screwed at the end if you can't Google your way out of the final. And if you don't pass the final, you fail the course, regardless of your test/quiz grades.
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google (Score:4, Interesting)
Making new tests every time means we can't analyze student responses to confirm that test questions really are testing what they are supposed to be testing. When I was teaching in the classroom, I used the happy medium: I generated tests and homework with LaTeX packages that randomized numbers in the questions and the wrong answers, so I could verify phrasing and alignment with learning outcomes quite rigorously while still making sure the third period class couldn't feed useful answers and tips to the fourth period class. It works extremely well in my fields (math and physics), although I openly admit Language Arts/English and Social Studies teachers would have a tougher time of it.
Re:You ares testing students the wrong way (Score:5, Interesting)
I went to a great school that allowed calculators on calculus tests. Why? In the prof's words: "because there's no way they will help you answer the questions I wrote for you, but paperweights can be useful the way these desktops are sloped."
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google (Score:5, Interesting)
Why should people who can cram but don't know what they are doing get better marks then people who know what they are doing but are not good at craning.
This is a problem with test design, which has little to do with whether memorization is good or not.
As an undergrad engineering major, most of my advanced engineering courses were open book -- usually not just open book, but open notes, open just about anything you could carry. (One student in one course actually carried in a graduate student and was allowed to make use of him -- they changed the rule to exclude carrying in persons the next year.)
Electronic devices other than calculators were restricted I think, but this was before the age of Wi-Fi, so perhaps even laptops were allowed.
Of course, all of those exams consisted of problems unlike any of us had seen before -- they were designed to test whether you could actually think independently and apply the broad concepts of the course to new problems, rather than just regurgitating information or plugging numbers into an equation. Google would have been of little assistance with such a test.
All of that said, I do still believe that there is value in a test that is NOT open book/open notes/open Google, whatever. Most of the information I have in my head has been through extra levels of processing and understanding. For example, to memorize an equation, I usually tend to know something about why the form of the equation is the way it is, rather than just memorizing the abstract symbols.
These days, it seems many people devalue the skill of memorization, but with memorization comes the ability to internalize the content, to recall it at will, to think through it as a tool when considering various problems, even to meditate upon it. (Medieval monks tended to memorize entire books to gain greater understanding and synthesis of ideas in this way.)
All of this is unlikely if you're just cramming and memorizing the night before, because you're likely to forget all of it next week. But if you're a more mature person with different study habits and learn things gradually, review them, and go over them in preparation for the test yet again, memorization is likely to come more naturally and ultimately reflect a greater internalization of the ideas.
Re:Nonsense! (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you really surprised that someone with 12y experience can outperform someone with a 3 or 4 degree and a couple of years experience? Come back in 10y and see who is outperforming who. There are many tech level jobs that engineers are rubbish at, and many engineer jobs that techs are rubbish at. Occasionally you'll get a person that is the exception to the rule, but on the whole, you need a mix of people in your team.
Me? I'm an engineer than doesn't overly like maths, but can connect test equipment up to large generators (>400MW) and not break anything or kill myself in the process. I'm not as fast as connecting gear as an electrician/electronics tech, but I can do machine stability analysis that you need university level maths to understand (unless TAFEs and polytechs are teaching eigenvalues and eigenvectors + linearisation of non linear systems these days).
Re:more tests need to be open book / open google (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, it does take more, which is why we analyze the difficulty and discrimination of tests.
Difficulty: what percentage of the population gets the answer right?
Discrimination: sort the class by overall grade. Divide them into groups. (Thirds, quarters, etc. depending on class size.) Compare, question by question, the percentage of students in the top performing group who answer correctly to the percentage of students in the low performing group who answer correctly. A highly discriminating question should be correctly answered by the top performers but incorrectly answered by bottom performers. If the reverse is true, the question is confusing or miskeyed and needs to be adjusted accordingly.
We should also analyze how often students pick the "distractors" (i.e. incorrect answers) in multiple choice tests to determine if students answer correctly because they know the material or because the wrong answers are so obviously wrong.
Obviously, there is a lot more to it than this. The point I'm trying to make is that test structures need to be chosen and analyzed carefully to ensure validity and reliability. This can't be done by creating tests from "whole cloth" every time. Some degree of reuse needs to take place. That's why I used the LaTeX package. It can base questions on random numbers, and answers can be generated randomly or with preprogrammed algebra, so I set it up to have the correct answer, two answers generated by the most common mistakes, and a random number from a range that could make it the highest or lowest number on the list, sorted from smallest to largest. Then option e was "none of the above" for every question. I rarely used it intentionally, but it came in useful on the first couple of tests where typos in my algebra setting up the tests prevented the right answer from appearing on the list. (If you are interested, I wrote a book on assessment that you can access via my signature.)
Re:In my day there was an easier way to cheat to a (Score:5, Interesting)
I really suspect a lot of the students in the language classes I took were already fluent in the language. Boy did that suck for me.
When I was at university, I specifically chose a foreign language where I was unlikely to encounter native speakers for precisely that reason. For example, it was unwise to study Spanish because there were too many native speakers who set the curve very high and engineering curriculum was difficult enough that I couldn't afford to waste study time in non-major courses. I really didn't care much about foreign languages anyway, so the logical choices at my school where German, French or Italian. Russian and Asian languages were out because they involved learning mostly alien alphabets and grammars. I chose German because it's closer to English than either French or Italian and there were hardly any native speakers at my school. Finally, the German language has some pedigree in the engineering fields, as compared to either French or Italian, so there was at least some engineering value in a rudimentary understanding of the German language. It was easy enough to get a solid B in German without diverting too much time from my engineering studies, so that's what I did.