The Cheating Scandal Rocking the World of Elite High-School Math 28
America's top colleges and finance-industry recruiters have long had their eye on teenage whiz-kids who compete in a prestigious high-school math contest. Now, allegations of cheating are threatening to disrupt it. WSJ: Online leaks of tests for the country's best-known math contest -- the 74-year-old American Mathematics Competition -- are upsetting students who have spent years preparing for the exams. Ahead of the coming school year and test season, angry parents and math coaches have pushed the contest's administrator to tighten controls. The incident is the latest byproduct of a high-pressure college-admissions race that can lead students to look for any edge to get ahead.
[...] As early as elementary school, students interested in flexing their math knowledge beyond what is taught in school can participate in math clubs and competitions. Each year, more than 300,000 students through high school participate in the AMC's first round of multiple-choice tests. Several thousand top performers are invited to sit for a higher-level test, and from there, around 600 compete in national "math olympiads." The top six math students in the nation then represent the U.S. internationally; the U.S. won its ninth International Mathematical Olympiad title this summer.
Murmurs about cheating in the AMC have circulated for a few years, participants say, but reached critical levels during the past school year. The entirety of exams at each level of the competition were available online hours or days before students sat for the tests, a spokeswoman for the Mathematical Association of America confirmed. Testing sites in the U.S. and abroad receive the questions online early to give proctors time to print them out for the in-person exams.
[...] As early as elementary school, students interested in flexing their math knowledge beyond what is taught in school can participate in math clubs and competitions. Each year, more than 300,000 students through high school participate in the AMC's first round of multiple-choice tests. Several thousand top performers are invited to sit for a higher-level test, and from there, around 600 compete in national "math olympiads." The top six math students in the nation then represent the U.S. internationally; the U.S. won its ninth International Mathematical Olympiad title this summer.
Murmurs about cheating in the AMC have circulated for a few years, participants say, but reached critical levels during the past school year. The entirety of exams at each level of the competition were available online hours or days before students sat for the tests, a spokeswoman for the Mathematical Association of America confirmed. Testing sites in the U.S. and abroad receive the questions online early to give proctors time to print them out for the in-person exams.
No friggin kidding.... (Score:1)
I went to public school and fell ass backwards into one of the 1st rated classes. So I know there were test whispers and such. Anything worth having is worth earning on your own, even a C....they should of been told that I guess.....
Re:No friggin kidding.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Anything worth having is worth earning on your own
As noble as this sounds, this simply isn't how the real world actually works. In the real world, there is real money on the line for people who can secure lucrative scholarships and jobs. Money motivates cheating. This is human nature, and there is no escaping it.
Certainly some students will remain honest and not cheat. And they will be defeated by those who cheat, and the cheaters will get the jobs and the money.
No amount of "teach them to be noble" will resolve this. That strategy is doomed to fail. We must engineer the testing methodology to block efforts at cheating. It is the only reliable solution.
This simple truth applies to other aspects of modern life as well, including such things as showing results in scientific studies, obtaining positions of political power, and especially every aspect of financial management.
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Came to say this, as well as to point out that the games are generally rigged in so many different ways that cheating is just a single leaf on the branch.
Is a student who's 100% honest and works their ass off, but is only there because of legacy admissions, 'earning it for themselves?' Can they be faulted that the system gives them a leg up through circumstance of birth? Is it 'noble' to give up that slot, which will then just go to another legacy admission?
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There are different ways to cheat. You can cheat so you don't have to do the work, in which case you are cheating yourself out of the education you would have got if you'd done the work. But a student who does the work and only cheats by appropriating the credit and awards due to others doesn't harm his education unless he get caught.
You could argue the unscrupulously competitive student has a bright future ahead of himself, working for other dishonest people. Dishonesty is an asset in that case; dishone
Why? (Score:2)
But a student who does the work and only cheats by appropriating the credit and awards due to others doesn't harm his education unless he get caught.
If you have done the work why are you stealing credit? Someone stupid enough to do the work and then risk it all by stealing credit for someone else's work is stupid enough that they are going to crash and burn in their first year at university when almost everything is based on exams.
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Anything worth having is worth earning on your own
As noble as this sounds, this simply isn't how the real world actually works. In the real world, there is real money on the line for people who can secure lucrative scholarships and jobs. Money motivates cheating. This is human nature, and there is no escaping it.
Certainly some students will remain honest and not cheat. And they will be defeated by those who cheat, and the cheaters will get the jobs and the money.
While what you say is true sometimes karma corrects the universe. When i was in grad school, a classmate was caught cheating. The school should have kicked his ass out, but didn’t. Word got around and no one will do business with him.
Not my experience (Score:2)
Certainly some students will remain honest and not cheat. And they will be defeated by those who cheat, and the cheaters will get the jobs and the money.
That's not been my experience. Typically the people who cheat do so because they are not smart enough to be able to grasp the material and, not being very smart means that they don't cheat very well either making them easy to catch. People who are smart enough to cheat well enough to not get caught are generally smart enough to do well honestly which is much, much less risky given the nasty range of sanctions you typically get for cheating.
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Anything worth having is worth earning on your own
As noble as this sounds, this simply isn't how the real world actually works. ...
Certainly some students will remain honest and not cheat. And they will be defeated by those who cheat, and the cheaters will get the jobs and the money.
I would state it more directly and say that the world overwhelmingly teaches our kids that cheating works and that being honest imposes handicaps. This is true in basically all fields.
It is a disservice to our kids to simply tell them to be honest and to rely on a system that has been shown to overwhelmingly favor cheaters. To me, there are only two practical things to teach our kids.
One is to cheat smartly and not get caught because it's only the cheaters that get caught that don't benefit from cheating.
Th
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Yeah, we need a lot of transparency and public accountability to resolve that problem.
We have similar issues with the government protecting its evil actions as "national security secrets", and critical digital infrastructure being built on closed-source proprietary software.
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>Anything worth having is worth earning on your own, even a C....they should of been told that I guess.....
Well, there's ethical and there's practical.
Practically speaking, if you are over the first hurdle of 'good enough to get the job done', cheating to get into a field of limited opportunities is a good strategy. It's ethically incredibly wrong, but it works. You fail on both ethical and practical if you aren't past that first hurdle though.
I never could cheat. To me it's not a real win, and I want
Re: No friggin kidding.... (Score:2)
"Should have"
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Do tests really reveal value? (Score:1)
How come Grigory Perelmen turned down the Fields medal? Why did Jean-Paul Sartre refuse the Nobel Prize?
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What does that have to do with tests? Grigory Perelmen won a gold medal at the math olympiad -- so yeah it's an indicator. He also has a PhD in mathematics (presumably you can't get to the level of PhD in mathematics without tests at least in your undergrad years).
There was a Jeff Daniels movie a long time ago. (Score:3)
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It was a good movie based on the Steinmetz school cheating scandal. https://www.chicagotribune.com... [chicagotribune.com]
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Re:There was a Jeff Daniels movie a long time ago. (Score:4, Interesting)
The memorizers win mathbowls (Score:4, Interesting)
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How many ordered pairs of positive real numbers (a,b) satisfy the equation (1+2a)(2+2b)(2a+b)=32ab?
capitalism's for ph4gg0ts (Score:1)
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In any problem, half the people are saying "I have more rights, this is Your problem" and half the people are saying "It's not my fault I sat on my arse and did nothing". This is thuggery and cheating/laziness: How money rewards or motivates people is irrelevant. While the world is much-less a daily pissing contest than 40 years ago, sooner not latter, one is going to be in a room full of those self-centred people: If one doesn't know how to compete (ideally, against dictators and narcissists), the resu
Study (Score:1)