My students cheated... A lot
May 28, 2022 11:23 PM Subscribe
"Last semester I witnessed the worst cheating in a course I’ve ever seen. And, I’ve seen stuff.
Since this whole thing happened I’ve told the story a bunch of times, and sometimes I get requests to tell it. This is also a story for my future students about what not to do. I’m not interested in outing my students, or casting shade on them. So, this is a story about cheating, but also about how I tried to turn things around and get students to engage in my course.
It started in August 2021." (Length: long, 10k words)
It started in August 2021." (Length: long, 10k words)
tl:dr cliffsnotes ne1?
posted by fairmettle at 12:28 AM on May 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by fairmettle at 12:28 AM on May 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
I think that there is a pretty big difference between an open-book test and a shared chat where you post questions and ask people what the answer is.
posted by vernondalhart at 12:30 AM on May 29, 2022 [85 favorites]
posted by vernondalhart at 12:30 AM on May 29, 2022 [85 favorites]
At least with an open-book test, you have to look up the answer yourself.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:31 AM on May 29, 2022 [19 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:31 AM on May 29, 2022 [19 favorites]
Trying to think of any instructors I ever had who would have given students that many chances to redeem themselves, and can't come up with a single one.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:51 AM on May 29, 2022 [23 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:51 AM on May 29, 2022 [23 favorites]
This person is trying very hard to engage their students. Sounds like the students got many many chances.
Open book does not mean someone else can do it for you.
posted by lookoutbelow at 12:52 AM on May 29, 2022 [27 favorites]
Open book does not mean someone else can do it for you.
posted by lookoutbelow at 12:52 AM on May 29, 2022 [27 favorites]
So much of this read like the longest, most anxious askme
posted by ominous_paws at 12:56 AM on May 29, 2022 [59 favorites]
posted by ominous_paws at 12:56 AM on May 29, 2022 [59 favorites]
Yeah, mixed feelings.
The prof seems to have publications going back to 2007, so I assume he's not, like, brand new to teaching college-level courses. What does he think college students have done since colleges were invented? They talk, they study together, they pass answers back and forth if possible. This is what students do. There's probably a lost dialogue where Plato bemoans his students doing it.
My guess is that he just wasn't aware of this, because it probably wasn't super-obvious before the rapid transition to online instruction that happened due to the pandemic. You probably wouldn't invite your prof to come hang out in a study group the night before a big exam; somebody did invite him to the groupchat for the course. Whoops.
The idea of lurking in a non-academically-affiliated groupchat (i.e. not on Blackboard or something, but Whatsapp) and then zapping students for being in that same chat... that seems like dirty fuckin' pool.
College-level education, like so many other social interactions, depends on a bunch of polite fictions which everyone involved tacitly agrees to maintain. Among these is that the professor really enjoys teaching undergrads, and isn't very likely just teaching the course because they're required to do so in order to keep a job that lets them work in their chosen field. Similarly, there is also the polite fiction that the students are honestly interested in learning and integrating the material for future use, and not just taking the class because it's required for their major, which they need in order to keep a corporate recruiter from immediately throwing their resume in the trash.
Are there professors who honestly enjoy teaching? Of course. Are there students who are honestly interested in learning for the sake of taking away knowledge? Of course. But let's not pretend that there isn't an iron fist inside the velvet glove. Students pay universities—like the one Crump works for—ridiculous shitloads of often-borrowed money, principally so that they can get a piece of paper without which they will be increasingly locked-out of the middle class. (And so they can get a paycheck that will let them pay off the debt they contracted to pay for the diploma.) Academia has been complicit in creating this credentialist system, because it's a huge part of how higher education is funded. Crump is an active, willing participant in that system. You don't get to cash that uni paycheck and pretend you're not part of the whole fucked-up US higher-ed system, my dude.
If Crump wanted to save time and only teach the students with an honest interest in the material, he had a pretty easy and time-tested solution: just announce at the beginning of class that everyone can get a C, no questions asked, no attendance required, just by turning in a sheet of paper with their name on it at the final. (Or if that wouldn't fly with his department, he could have gone with any number of time-honored methods for telegraphing to students that you don't fucking care if they show up for class if they don't want to be there.) That's the everybody-wins outcome: he gets to teach the students who care, the students who care get a crazy-high student/teacher ratio, he doesn't waste time chasing down "cheaters", he doesn't get slagged on all the professor-rating sites and complained about to administration by angry students, and the students who are just paying for the diploma continue to keep the whole damnable system grinding along by subsidizing everyone else—just like they're intended to.
But here's what I expect will actually happen: students will realize that inviting your prof to the GC is a bad idea, and they will stop doing that. The "academic integrity" (lol the academe doth protest too much) violations will move back below his perception, where they were before. Everyone adapts to the new tools and environment of distance learning. And everyone will go back to their same polite fictions, where the teachers are passionate about teaching, the students are passionate about learning, grades are meaningful measures of anything at all, and nothing they're doing is at all related to a vast scheme to grind a few kilobucks out of every person passing from highschool to the professional class in the US.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:07 AM on May 29, 2022 [98 favorites]
The prof seems to have publications going back to 2007, so I assume he's not, like, brand new to teaching college-level courses. What does he think college students have done since colleges were invented? They talk, they study together, they pass answers back and forth if possible. This is what students do. There's probably a lost dialogue where Plato bemoans his students doing it.
My guess is that he just wasn't aware of this, because it probably wasn't super-obvious before the rapid transition to online instruction that happened due to the pandemic. You probably wouldn't invite your prof to come hang out in a study group the night before a big exam; somebody did invite him to the groupchat for the course. Whoops.
The idea of lurking in a non-academically-affiliated groupchat (i.e. not on Blackboard or something, but Whatsapp) and then zapping students for being in that same chat... that seems like dirty fuckin' pool.
College-level education, like so many other social interactions, depends on a bunch of polite fictions which everyone involved tacitly agrees to maintain. Among these is that the professor really enjoys teaching undergrads, and isn't very likely just teaching the course because they're required to do so in order to keep a job that lets them work in their chosen field. Similarly, there is also the polite fiction that the students are honestly interested in learning and integrating the material for future use, and not just taking the class because it's required for their major, which they need in order to keep a corporate recruiter from immediately throwing their resume in the trash.
Are there professors who honestly enjoy teaching? Of course. Are there students who are honestly interested in learning for the sake of taking away knowledge? Of course. But let's not pretend that there isn't an iron fist inside the velvet glove. Students pay universities—like the one Crump works for—ridiculous shitloads of often-borrowed money, principally so that they can get a piece of paper without which they will be increasingly locked-out of the middle class. (And so they can get a paycheck that will let them pay off the debt they contracted to pay for the diploma.) Academia has been complicit in creating this credentialist system, because it's a huge part of how higher education is funded. Crump is an active, willing participant in that system. You don't get to cash that uni paycheck and pretend you're not part of the whole fucked-up US higher-ed system, my dude.
If Crump wanted to save time and only teach the students with an honest interest in the material, he had a pretty easy and time-tested solution: just announce at the beginning of class that everyone can get a C, no questions asked, no attendance required, just by turning in a sheet of paper with their name on it at the final. (Or if that wouldn't fly with his department, he could have gone with any number of time-honored methods for telegraphing to students that you don't fucking care if they show up for class if they don't want to be there.) That's the everybody-wins outcome: he gets to teach the students who care, the students who care get a crazy-high student/teacher ratio, he doesn't waste time chasing down "cheaters", he doesn't get slagged on all the professor-rating sites and complained about to administration by angry students, and the students who are just paying for the diploma continue to keep the whole damnable system grinding along by subsidizing everyone else—just like they're intended to.
But here's what I expect will actually happen: students will realize that inviting your prof to the GC is a bad idea, and they will stop doing that. The "academic integrity" (lol the academe doth protest too much) violations will move back below his perception, where they were before. Everyone adapts to the new tools and environment of distance learning. And everyone will go back to their same polite fictions, where the teachers are passionate about teaching, the students are passionate about learning, grades are meaningful measures of anything at all, and nothing they're doing is at all related to a vast scheme to grind a few kilobucks out of every person passing from highschool to the professional class in the US.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:07 AM on May 29, 2022 [98 favorites]
Sorry, you are in college. This isn't high school anymore, you are there to learn and if you don't want to learn you can leave. You cheat, you deserve the punishments you get. Just because lots of students cheat and get away with it does not mean that it's ok. If anything that means it's much, much worse.
posted by aspo at 1:19 AM on May 29, 2022 [44 favorites]
posted by aspo at 1:19 AM on May 29, 2022 [44 favorites]
What do you get when you cross a law-abiding citizen with an R user?
posted by bendy at 1:22 AM on May 29, 2022 [21 favorites]
posted by bendy at 1:22 AM on May 29, 2022 [21 favorites]
But if it is considered cheating to help one another in the WhatsApp chat, why lurk in the chat analysing it, and not let the students know that this is cheating, and that there will be consequences?
Is the point to teach the students, or is the point to catch the cheaters?
I hope he spelled out clearly what constitutes acceptable open book research and what doesn't because that's not always that clear (especially to students who are new to an academic environment).
posted by Zumbador at 1:28 AM on May 29, 2022 [15 favorites]
Is the point to teach the students, or is the point to catch the cheaters?
I hope he spelled out clearly what constitutes acceptable open book research and what doesn't because that's not always that clear (especially to students who are new to an academic environment).
posted by Zumbador at 1:28 AM on May 29, 2022 [15 favorites]
I don't know. I am paid to teach, not police. I do want them to learn something, though.
Every semester a significant part of any class will hand in assignments that are clearly "written" by copy-pasting stuff found on the internet into the documents. I can easily see it, because most of my classes are not in English, and the students use google translate which is a very bad tool.
My response is to make the assignments very short. I tell them why: first of all it is a terrible waste of time for me to read through all those bad assignments. Second, the copy-paste method doesn't work if you only have 100 words to describe baroque mathematics. They still do it. The thing is, they can still get relatively good grades, because it becomes evident over the semester that they are actually learning something while they think they are cheating. The final exams are oral, and as we question them, we can hear they know the stuff. They have cheated themselves into learning something, and it is hilarious.
Every semester someone really cheats, by finding an old assignment and copying the whole thing. That is really stupid, because I'm the only professor who makes assignments like this and I have a very strong visual memory. But here's the thing, every year I change the layout, so they still have to read the stolen assignment and reconfigure it. And when they do the oral examination, they have learnt a little from that. And pass, if not with honors.
posted by mumimor at 1:51 AM on May 29, 2022 [57 favorites]
Every semester a significant part of any class will hand in assignments that are clearly "written" by copy-pasting stuff found on the internet into the documents. I can easily see it, because most of my classes are not in English, and the students use google translate which is a very bad tool.
My response is to make the assignments very short. I tell them why: first of all it is a terrible waste of time for me to read through all those bad assignments. Second, the copy-paste method doesn't work if you only have 100 words to describe baroque mathematics. They still do it. The thing is, they can still get relatively good grades, because it becomes evident over the semester that they are actually learning something while they think they are cheating. The final exams are oral, and as we question them, we can hear they know the stuff. They have cheated themselves into learning something, and it is hilarious.
Every semester someone really cheats, by finding an old assignment and copying the whole thing. That is really stupid, because I'm the only professor who makes assignments like this and I have a very strong visual memory. But here's the thing, every year I change the layout, so they still have to read the stolen assignment and reconfigure it. And when they do the oral examination, they have learnt a little from that. And pass, if not with honors.
posted by mumimor at 1:51 AM on May 29, 2022 [57 favorites]
I started back in 2019 to complete my undergrad degree, dipped in and out because shit got hard once the pandemic hit (and I was already running life on hard mode). What I can say is yeah, cheating is rampant. I see it more now that I'm in student housing and seeing how the youngins engage, and on private discords that popped up organically during the virtual stuff. Usually a discord or individual snaps would go out in blackboard side chats before professors realized what was happening.
My issue has been, since I started back at school, that I was there to learn, not get points, not get a piece of paper. Much to the frustration of my advisor.
Learning is not how college is set up. I mean, that was a criticize back when I was a fresh faced kid the first time I was attempting school. But it's even worse now. People write papers and do assignments for each other when they're swamped, trade homework, and definitely share answers on any test and quizzes the can, and so many are now "do on your own" that it fosters the ability for students to test this way.
(A friend on campus finishing his PhD has had to listen to my chorus of "But I'm here to learn, not get a piece of paper", and insists I am Kimmy Schmidt, but also to just shut up and get the grade.)
The thing is, the schools and the professors, for the most part, have brought this on themselves. In order to "modernize" and free up time from grading exams, they have online tests that are way too easy and don't require you to be in class. They're open book/open note because it would be more work to administer any other way; online proctoring is gross, and teachers have given up on the work of having tests in class (mostly).
And open book is nearly all the exams I've taken. It is, in my mind, bullshit and far too easy. Gone are the days with the cheat sheet you could bring to class where you had to carefully plan what information was important, or the physical notes and book you might have but you had to really know it to at least know where to physically look.
Yet I have relied on open book/notes as well. More than I'd like, its made me lazy but it's also saved my ass. At the same time it feels like cheating. At least with open book/open note, you also have to know at least a baseline of the course to know what you're looking for. I use it to recheck when I'm unsure, but there have been times I've felt like I was looking up an entirely new topic. (At the same time, I'm flummoxed when they release the spread of classroom scores and there are students who get d's and c's on open note/book exams.)
The thing about the way the cheating works on exams is it becomes much easier because the work is being divided up between different people. They are doing it at home or in study spaces together, etc. They can search and share, work is delegated among people in a group. Fewer errors, and everyone succeeds. In some ways, it's a fascinating collaborative dynamic that has emerged organically and slightly different for every group, every class. (One of my favorite parts about being in school now is seeing the cowpaths paved by the kids, and seeing how much they work together. It warms this gen-x girl's heart).
And why wouldn't they work together this way? From being told that they have to get this degree to have even modest success in life, having to take on massive debt to get there. And for some having visas held over their head for academic success*. So yeah, you better believe people are going to cheat, and new tools make it way more efficient.
Covid put some of this into play. But having the benefit of starting back one semester before the world went sideways, I saw that a lot of these frameworks were being put into place. And in some ways, for the best, in others though, instructors relied too heavily on tools to make THEIR jobs easier. Yes, some have tried to keep student engaged and excited, but may just offload as much work as they can to either the university's system, or one of the digital ecosystems by textbook publishers because they have already created the majority of the homework and exams, leaving professors way less to manage, and what they do have can be dumped to TAs to grade. (And my roommate is a graduated student and a TA, and somehow these systems have made more work for them too.)
I haven't had an essay question since that first pre-covid semester. Heck, I haven't written or typed more than two words on an exam or quiz since early spring 2020, before the coviding. Because open answers on tests and quizzes (and homework, for that matter) can't have the grading automated.
Far fewer papers as well. Maybe, a good class with an engaged and engaging instructor will have the final project be a paper; and it's only going to be from an instructor that cares enough to have to do the work of grading them.
*There is is a much larger, problematic issue with how students with visas are treated, but that is another story for another time.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 1:58 AM on May 29, 2022 [22 favorites]
My issue has been, since I started back at school, that I was there to learn, not get points, not get a piece of paper. Much to the frustration of my advisor.
Learning is not how college is set up. I mean, that was a criticize back when I was a fresh faced kid the first time I was attempting school. But it's even worse now. People write papers and do assignments for each other when they're swamped, trade homework, and definitely share answers on any test and quizzes the can, and so many are now "do on your own" that it fosters the ability for students to test this way.
(A friend on campus finishing his PhD has had to listen to my chorus of "But I'm here to learn, not get a piece of paper", and insists I am Kimmy Schmidt, but also to just shut up and get the grade.)
The thing is, the schools and the professors, for the most part, have brought this on themselves. In order to "modernize" and free up time from grading exams, they have online tests that are way too easy and don't require you to be in class. They're open book/open note because it would be more work to administer any other way; online proctoring is gross, and teachers have given up on the work of having tests in class (mostly).
And open book is nearly all the exams I've taken. It is, in my mind, bullshit and far too easy. Gone are the days with the cheat sheet you could bring to class where you had to carefully plan what information was important, or the physical notes and book you might have but you had to really know it to at least know where to physically look.
Yet I have relied on open book/notes as well. More than I'd like, its made me lazy but it's also saved my ass. At the same time it feels like cheating. At least with open book/open note, you also have to know at least a baseline of the course to know what you're looking for. I use it to recheck when I'm unsure, but there have been times I've felt like I was looking up an entirely new topic. (At the same time, I'm flummoxed when they release the spread of classroom scores and there are students who get d's and c's on open note/book exams.)
The thing about the way the cheating works on exams is it becomes much easier because the work is being divided up between different people. They are doing it at home or in study spaces together, etc. They can search and share, work is delegated among people in a group. Fewer errors, and everyone succeeds. In some ways, it's a fascinating collaborative dynamic that has emerged organically and slightly different for every group, every class. (One of my favorite parts about being in school now is seeing the cowpaths paved by the kids, and seeing how much they work together. It warms this gen-x girl's heart).
And why wouldn't they work together this way? From being told that they have to get this degree to have even modest success in life, having to take on massive debt to get there. And for some having visas held over their head for academic success*. So yeah, you better believe people are going to cheat, and new tools make it way more efficient.
Covid put some of this into play. But having the benefit of starting back one semester before the world went sideways, I saw that a lot of these frameworks were being put into place. And in some ways, for the best, in others though, instructors relied too heavily on tools to make THEIR jobs easier. Yes, some have tried to keep student engaged and excited, but may just offload as much work as they can to either the university's system, or one of the digital ecosystems by textbook publishers because they have already created the majority of the homework and exams, leaving professors way less to manage, and what they do have can be dumped to TAs to grade. (And my roommate is a graduated student and a TA, and somehow these systems have made more work for them too.)
I haven't had an essay question since that first pre-covid semester. Heck, I haven't written or typed more than two words on an exam or quiz since early spring 2020, before the coviding. Because open answers on tests and quizzes (and homework, for that matter) can't have the grading automated.
Far fewer papers as well. Maybe, a good class with an engaged and engaging instructor will have the final project be a paper; and it's only going to be from an instructor that cares enough to have to do the work of grading them.
*There is is a much larger, problematic issue with how students with visas are treated, but that is another story for another time.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 1:58 AM on May 29, 2022 [22 favorites]
My God, if the course was as full of waffle as his article, I'm amazed his students stayed awake long enough to cheat.
posted by StephenB at 2:16 AM on May 29, 2022 [54 favorites]
posted by StephenB at 2:16 AM on May 29, 2022 [54 favorites]
If anything I think he was too lenient, he gave them ways to redeem themselves - and they did invite him into their whatsapp chat.
Mostly I see this as him being overwhelmed by the scope of what was going on and faced with starting 70 disciplinary processes trying to figure out how to manage all that unexpected workload - sounds like the message got through though and the next class realised that they couldn't get away with that shit any more
posted by mbo at 2:20 AM on May 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
Mostly I see this as him being overwhelmed by the scope of what was going on and faced with starting 70 disciplinary processes trying to figure out how to manage all that unexpected workload - sounds like the message got through though and the next class realised that they couldn't get away with that shit any more
posted by mbo at 2:20 AM on May 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
Now that this possibly true article has been written, I wonder if word has gotten out about the professor being in the chat.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:26 AM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:26 AM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
In addition to the wordiness, I'm finding the GIFs fantastically annoying and distracting. I'm quite interested in the subject, but the writer isn't making it easy.
posted by Grangousier at 3:27 AM on May 29, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by Grangousier at 3:27 AM on May 29, 2022 [11 favorites]
While there are broader issues with professors phoning it in (because they'd rather be doing research) and with universities that are putting their students in piles of debt, a professor at CUNY willing to rewrite his entire curriculum mid-semester to try to better engage the class is probably not the best example of either of those trends. I'm also not sure this is a great example of a required course that uninterested students are apt to be taking to get a random degree to satisfy future HR people: this professor is teaching things like cognitive psychology, stats, and psychology/statistics-focused programming, and it looks like the Intro to Cognitive Psych course in question isn't actually required for even a B.S. in Psychology in his department (though majors do have to choose between it and a class on "Brain, Mind, and Behavior.")
But if it is considered cheating to help one another in the WhatsApp chat, why lurk in the chat analysing it, and not let the students know that this is cheating, and that there will be consequences?
It's pretty clear he was trying to figure out the scope of the problem and what to do about it. At that point, he had a range of bad options - if he acted before he understood what was going on, he couldn't necessarily effectively address it, but you also can't just stop teaching class for a week or two in the interim. He pretty much put the class in autopilot mode and was actively trying to get it figured out before the next major cheating opportunity (the second midterm) but ran out of time. (And then, of course, the 2nd midterm had more cheating.) As he says:
I hope he spelled out clearly what constitutes acceptable open book research and what doesn't because that's not always that clear (especially to students who are new to an academic environment).
It's generally described in both the syllabus and in some sort of broader university-wide academic integrity policy. "Open book" in every American academic environment I've been in has meant that one can draw on a variety of written resources (the precise set of resources may vary by exam and if there are limits they are generally clearly stated, but may include notes, textbooks, etc.) but that the work must be one's own - no having other people come up with the answers, definitely no copying someone else's answers word for word. (The syllabus is here and the expectation for individual work doesn't seem particularly ambiguous even in the initial version, though the bit updated mid-semester (see "Alternative Syllabus" and later) unsurprisingly goes into rather more detail.) Pre-pandemic, these sorts of exams might still happen in an exam hall, and it would be expected that students not talk to each other during the exam. The pandemic has changed that and made the sort of cheating described here much, much easier - of course there have always been study groups, but it wasn't easy to consult with them unobserved mid-exam until rather recently.
Additionally, the student responses to his "I found widespread cheating" lecture make it pretty clear that many of the students themselves understood their behavior to be beyond the pale. "Who snitched," "if i find out who snitched 🤣 we got a problem fr," "welp yall better save ya selfs whoever was writing during the exam yall know what to do," "im just not gonna use this gc no more 😂 no one can be trusted now" - none of those things are things you say when you think you have been engaging in acceptable collaborative open book research and you feel blindsided that your behavior is considered cheating, they're things you say when you think you've been caught cheating.
posted by ASF Tod und Schwerkraft at 3:53 AM on May 29, 2022 [72 favorites]
But if it is considered cheating to help one another in the WhatsApp chat, why lurk in the chat analysing it, and not let the students know that this is cheating, and that there will be consequences?
It's pretty clear he was trying to figure out the scope of the problem and what to do about it. At that point, he had a range of bad options - if he acted before he understood what was going on, he couldn't necessarily effectively address it, but you also can't just stop teaching class for a week or two in the interim. He pretty much put the class in autopilot mode and was actively trying to get it figured out before the next major cheating opportunity (the second midterm) but ran out of time. (And then, of course, the 2nd midterm had more cheating.) As he says:
I wasn’t ready to inform them about what was going on until I had processed all of the facts, so I just pressed on with the lectures. My goal was to have all of the forms filled out and emailed before the next midterm. I tried as hard as I could. But, I couldn’t get it done. I had to give the next midterm, and I knew that probably meant a bunch more cheating. I was still on the WhatsApp chat. It would be irresponsible to look away.In other words, the extended lurking was not the goal, it was a side effect of the size of the problem and the need to figure out what appropriate consequences (and the route forward for the rest of the semester) would be. (Lurking at all wasn't an active plan; he was invited onto the chat, literally forgot about it after muting it, and realized there was an issue when he stumbled on the WhatsApp photos after that first midterm with its anomalously high scores and put 2 and 2 together.)
I hope he spelled out clearly what constitutes acceptable open book research and what doesn't because that's not always that clear (especially to students who are new to an academic environment).
It's generally described in both the syllabus and in some sort of broader university-wide academic integrity policy. "Open book" in every American academic environment I've been in has meant that one can draw on a variety of written resources (the precise set of resources may vary by exam and if there are limits they are generally clearly stated, but may include notes, textbooks, etc.) but that the work must be one's own - no having other people come up with the answers, definitely no copying someone else's answers word for word. (The syllabus is here and the expectation for individual work doesn't seem particularly ambiguous even in the initial version, though the bit updated mid-semester (see "Alternative Syllabus" and later) unsurprisingly goes into rather more detail.) Pre-pandemic, these sorts of exams might still happen in an exam hall, and it would be expected that students not talk to each other during the exam. The pandemic has changed that and made the sort of cheating described here much, much easier - of course there have always been study groups, but it wasn't easy to consult with them unobserved mid-exam until rather recently.
Additionally, the student responses to his "I found widespread cheating" lecture make it pretty clear that many of the students themselves understood their behavior to be beyond the pale. "Who snitched," "if i find out who snitched 🤣 we got a problem fr," "welp yall better save ya selfs whoever was writing during the exam yall know what to do," "im just not gonna use this gc no more 😂 no one can be trusted now" - none of those things are things you say when you think you have been engaging in acceptable collaborative open book research and you feel blindsided that your behavior is considered cheating, they're things you say when you think you've been caught cheating.
posted by ASF Tod und Schwerkraft at 3:53 AM on May 29, 2022 [72 favorites]
At least with an open-book test, you have to look up the answer yourself.
And you really do need to have an idea where in the books + notes the answer is. This is not the time to have to scan a chapter hoping to get lucky.
posted by mikelieman at 3:59 AM on May 29, 2022 [10 favorites]
And you really do need to have an idea where in the books + notes the answer is. This is not the time to have to scan a chapter hoping to get lucky.
posted by mikelieman at 3:59 AM on May 29, 2022 [10 favorites]
Now that this possibly true article has been written, I wonder if word has gotten out about the professor being in the chat.
Pretty sure it's the guy with the🌵
posted by mbo at 4:00 AM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
It seems there’s an expectation of cheating and plagiarism in American academia. I’ve spent a long time in academia in the UK and Europe, and never seen any evidence of the scale of cheating mentioned in the article or comments. Of course, there will be exceptions, but culturally this seems very alien to me
posted by The River Ivel at 4:01 AM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by The River Ivel at 4:01 AM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
The real trick in engaging students is to make it so that they actually learn things when they think they are cheating. Cheating is way more fun and exciting than studying!
posted by srboisvert at 4:30 AM on May 29, 2022 [15 favorites]
posted by srboisvert at 4:30 AM on May 29, 2022 [15 favorites]
lesser weasel, thanks for sharing this - I found it interesting and informative.
"And, no I’m not that soft. It’s just, I’m not the police. Education isn’t a form of punishment. I’m trying to get students to engage in my course. Failing them all isn’t a solution."
Every educator who has to do assessment has to figure out how to deal with participants who resist honest assessment -- and I appreciate understanding better how to do that without getting punitive.
posted by brainwane at 4:36 AM on May 29, 2022 [13 favorites]
"And, no I’m not that soft. It’s just, I’m not the police. Education isn’t a form of punishment. I’m trying to get students to engage in my course. Failing them all isn’t a solution."
Every educator who has to do assessment has to figure out how to deal with participants who resist honest assessment -- and I appreciate understanding better how to do that without getting punitive.
posted by brainwane at 4:36 AM on May 29, 2022 [13 favorites]
It seems there’s an expectation of cheating and plagiarism in American academia. I’ve spent a long time in academia in the UK and Europe, and never seen any evidence of the scale of cheating mentioned in the article or comments. Of course, there will be exceptions, but culturally this seems very alien to me
Interesting you say this. It didn’t sound familiar to me, but then I did my degree in an essay-writing subject in the ancient misty days of the internet, when you couldn’t just google for other people’s essays (and I was a complete goody two-shoes).
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 4:52 AM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
Interesting you say this. It didn’t sound familiar to me, but then I did my degree in an essay-writing subject in the ancient misty days of the internet, when you couldn’t just google for other people’s essays (and I was a complete goody two-shoes).
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 4:52 AM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
I don't know, I'm in Europe, and I'm completely shocked that the prof here seems so completely shocked by this profoundly predictable turn of events.
If the exam consists of a multiple choice test or other types of recurring problems and prompts, of course people will prepare by getting hold of as many old exams as possible and share the correct answers. I've always been a very engaged student, who was truly interested in her subject, and always did all the reading, and all the homework herself, and I've always still tried to get hold of the old exams, just to be on the safe side, and readily participated in further diffusion, to level the playing field. Never once in my life I have lost a single night of sleep over that.
Now, does that mean that some people might pass a class without learning anything about the material? Sure, but it's not all that common, as long as you make sure that the pool of questions is large enough, and frequently replenished, and that students can't cooperate during the exam itself - usually by having a pen-and-paper in-class exam and tutors walking up and down the rows. Of course that last part is crucial. Because filtering out the piece of info you need at the necessary speed requires a minimum level of comprehension and is a skill worth testing, but copying answers from a classmate really isn't.
You still won't necessarily stop students from just learning the answers by heart instead of actually engaging with the material, but a rational student will usually decide against that strategy, if the pool of questions is large enough, because it's actually extremely difficult and likely unsuccesful to memorize a huge amount of info you don't actually understand.
But in order for a multiple choice exam to produce any relevant insights, there's really no way round a certain amount of policing the anti-cooperation-requirement.
Personally, I try to avoid telling students to do or not do stuff I can't check anyway. Why set them up for moral quandaries and myself for disappointment in that manner? I do only in-class exams if at all possible (open book, maybe, but you have to use an actual book, or a cheat-sheet - no phones or laptops), complemented by take-home-assignments with more open questions, which require individual answers.
If I already know I won't have enough time to properly grade those - I admit it happens, workload for teachers can be unreasonable - I tell the students that they can do the assignment in teams from the start, and then give everyone the points who has their name on the file, and extra- points for those who volunteer to present answers in the class discussion. I make sure not to weigh that portion of the grade too heavily, though, because I do realize that all you really need to do to get those points is not piss off your classmates too much, so some of them let you sign your name to their team effort. Which is however also a bit of a skill worth promoting.
Cooperation often is, and in my opinion actually should be, a big part of the student experience. Sure, some will take advantage and always mooch of the work of others if at all possible, but a lot of them eventully learn that you have to pull your weight eventually, so that people will actually want to cooperate with you in the long term. Game theory experiments tend to require a number of rounds to produce certain insights. But the path to a degree usually involves a fair number of such rounds. Ideally, students eventually learn how to distribute work evenly, and still end up doing their fair share of the work sooner or later, if not always necessarily in your class.
That said, I'm usually not supposed to grade them on social skills, so again, no way round at least one in-class exam per term, written or oral, no cooperation allowed.
posted by sohalt at 5:05 AM on May 29, 2022 [9 favorites]
If the exam consists of a multiple choice test or other types of recurring problems and prompts, of course people will prepare by getting hold of as many old exams as possible and share the correct answers. I've always been a very engaged student, who was truly interested in her subject, and always did all the reading, and all the homework herself, and I've always still tried to get hold of the old exams, just to be on the safe side, and readily participated in further diffusion, to level the playing field. Never once in my life I have lost a single night of sleep over that.
Now, does that mean that some people might pass a class without learning anything about the material? Sure, but it's not all that common, as long as you make sure that the pool of questions is large enough, and frequently replenished, and that students can't cooperate during the exam itself - usually by having a pen-and-paper in-class exam and tutors walking up and down the rows. Of course that last part is crucial. Because filtering out the piece of info you need at the necessary speed requires a minimum level of comprehension and is a skill worth testing, but copying answers from a classmate really isn't.
You still won't necessarily stop students from just learning the answers by heart instead of actually engaging with the material, but a rational student will usually decide against that strategy, if the pool of questions is large enough, because it's actually extremely difficult and likely unsuccesful to memorize a huge amount of info you don't actually understand.
But in order for a multiple choice exam to produce any relevant insights, there's really no way round a certain amount of policing the anti-cooperation-requirement.
Personally, I try to avoid telling students to do or not do stuff I can't check anyway. Why set them up for moral quandaries and myself for disappointment in that manner? I do only in-class exams if at all possible (open book, maybe, but you have to use an actual book, or a cheat-sheet - no phones or laptops), complemented by take-home-assignments with more open questions, which require individual answers.
If I already know I won't have enough time to properly grade those - I admit it happens, workload for teachers can be unreasonable - I tell the students that they can do the assignment in teams from the start, and then give everyone the points who has their name on the file, and extra- points for those who volunteer to present answers in the class discussion. I make sure not to weigh that portion of the grade too heavily, though, because I do realize that all you really need to do to get those points is not piss off your classmates too much, so some of them let you sign your name to their team effort. Which is however also a bit of a skill worth promoting.
Cooperation often is, and in my opinion actually should be, a big part of the student experience. Sure, some will take advantage and always mooch of the work of others if at all possible, but a lot of them eventully learn that you have to pull your weight eventually, so that people will actually want to cooperate with you in the long term. Game theory experiments tend to require a number of rounds to produce certain insights. But the path to a degree usually involves a fair number of such rounds. Ideally, students eventually learn how to distribute work evenly, and still end up doing their fair share of the work sooner or later, if not always necessarily in your class.
That said, I'm usually not supposed to grade them on social skills, so again, no way round at least one in-class exam per term, written or oral, no cooperation allowed.
posted by sohalt at 5:05 AM on May 29, 2022 [9 favorites]
So, I was thrilled when I received the first completed academic integrity assignment.There's something kinda perfect about that.
What did the student have to say? There were many full sentences and as I read them I got that feeling again. So, I copied and pasted some sentences into Google, and yup, the student was plagiarizing the academic integrity assignment.
posted by clawsoon at 5:07 AM on May 29, 2022 [43 favorites]
One thing I did with my kids the first time I saw one writing something that was just a bit too good (at about age 8 or 9, the internet was very young and we were very early adopters) was to sit him down and type what he'd written into google (or maybe altavista) ..... and then point out his teacher could do that too ... and then have a talk about plagiarism, definitely a teaching moment ("you can take ideas and write them in your own words, you can't take other people's words") ...... (and then quietly explain to the teacher that they could actually do that and this was totally going to be a thing)
posted by mbo at 5:09 AM on May 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by mbo at 5:09 AM on May 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
A month ago I was invigilating exams at my old university. One afternoon the exam I was working was being written in the largest gymnasium on campus, with desks for six hundred students at a go. We were setting up beforehand, placing exams on desks — there were perhaps a dozen invigilators present, scattered in groups of two or three around this cavernous gym.
The presider overseeing the exam was circulating around the room came over to my little group and let us know to be extra vigilant because this course had a reputation for — and here she discreetly mouthed the word — “cheating.” To be extremely discreet, she held up her clipboard alongside her face so that no one else could see what she had said.
Okay: thing one — the students are not yet here, so the people you are discreetly shielding from this scandalous implication are the other invigilators, whom you are about to go tell anyway. Thing two — they are standing perhaps fifteen metres away at about your seven o’clock, so it is highly unlikely they can read your lips. Thing three — you are wearing a N-95 mask, lady, so we cannot read your lips either. What on earth are you even doing?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:11 AM on May 29, 2022 [15 favorites]
The presider overseeing the exam was circulating around the room came over to my little group and let us know to be extra vigilant because this course had a reputation for — and here she discreetly mouthed the word — “cheating.” To be extremely discreet, she held up her clipboard alongside her face so that no one else could see what she had said.
Okay: thing one — the students are not yet here, so the people you are discreetly shielding from this scandalous implication are the other invigilators, whom you are about to go tell anyway. Thing two — they are standing perhaps fifteen metres away at about your seven o’clock, so it is highly unlikely they can read your lips. Thing three — you are wearing a N-95 mask, lady, so we cannot read your lips either. What on earth are you even doing?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:11 AM on May 29, 2022 [15 favorites]
He teaches psych stats courses. So is all this cheating ground zero for the next replication crisis?
posted by clawsoon at 5:16 AM on May 29, 2022 [18 favorites]
posted by clawsoon at 5:16 AM on May 29, 2022 [18 favorites]
I feel for him. That said, it seems weird to me that he waited until the end to say that he knew they were cheating. It also seems like it would have made sense to intervene earlier in the semester and switch tactics from multiple choice then. Or before the term started. And gotten in touch with his university's student conduct office for advice when he realized what was going on. His response to this seems a bit strange to me.
posted by pangolin party at 5:24 AM on May 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by pangolin party at 5:24 AM on May 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
I’ve spent a long time in academia in the UK and Europe, and never seen any evidence of the scale of cheating mentioned in the article or comments.
I'm also a UK lecturer. I think its early days to say how much cheating is going on in the new system with greater online work. I think this has started to become more concerning at my place (RG). I think a bunch of students have been running discussion groups for at least a decade. I think they do sharing of research for essays & reports. Last year we had open books online where they had 24 hours to complete the paper and am sure that there was collusion on some papers. This year online is limited to 2 hours but I still expect to see some collusion. There was a story in the THE a couple of months ago that suggested cheating is on the rise with the online switch. I think there may well be a decent sized problem brewing here.
posted by biffa at 5:26 AM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
I'm also a UK lecturer. I think its early days to say how much cheating is going on in the new system with greater online work. I think this has started to become more concerning at my place (RG). I think a bunch of students have been running discussion groups for at least a decade. I think they do sharing of research for essays & reports. Last year we had open books online where they had 24 hours to complete the paper and am sure that there was collusion on some papers. This year online is limited to 2 hours but I still expect to see some collusion. There was a story in the THE a couple of months ago that suggested cheating is on the rise with the online switch. I think there may well be a decent sized problem brewing here.
posted by biffa at 5:26 AM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
The real trick in engaging students is to make it so that they actually learn things when they think they are cheating.
Oh, they are almost certainly learning something. Not necessarily what you were supposed to grade them on though. But that kinda applies to any possible learning arrangement you could come up with.
posted by sohalt at 5:39 AM on May 29, 2022
Oh, they are almost certainly learning something. Not necessarily what you were supposed to grade them on though. But that kinda applies to any possible learning arrangement you could come up with.
posted by sohalt at 5:39 AM on May 29, 2022
It seems there’s an expectation of cheating and plagiarism in American academia.
Have you seen our corporate world?
posted by chavenet at 5:42 AM on May 29, 2022 [11 favorites]
Have you seen our corporate world?
posted by chavenet at 5:42 AM on May 29, 2022 [11 favorites]
Oh fuck I need to do some uni admin shit, like last week.
posted by pompomtom at 5:51 AM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by pompomtom at 5:51 AM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
While there are broader issues with professors phoning it in (because they'd rather be doing research) and with universities that are putting their students in piles of debt...
Well, that flashes me back. Fall semester, Junior year, all 30 of us in the program were taking a required course taught by the program head. (It was one of those courses that's only offered once every couple of years, and some people end up having to stay on an extra semester just to catch it). It was the first time a lot of us had ever met her in person.
First day of class, she looked around the room and said, "This is way too many students. I'm going to make it my mission to see that at least half of you wash out of the program." And she did. Apparently she had had no problem with the class size back when we were all admitted into the program in the first place, tuition money in hand. Then she proceeded to go on a tirade about what an insult it was for someone at her level to be expected to teach undergrads in the first place.
[And then there were her repeated denials of accommodations to students with disabilities. The department decided it was her duty as program head to investigate the complaints, and I think we all know how those investigations went. And her bizarre habit of constantly telling female students with long hair they needed to cut it short to look professional. Christ what an asshole. I shudder to think what would have happened if she'd caught any of us cheating.]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:53 AM on May 29, 2022 [20 favorites]
Well, that flashes me back. Fall semester, Junior year, all 30 of us in the program were taking a required course taught by the program head. (It was one of those courses that's only offered once every couple of years, and some people end up having to stay on an extra semester just to catch it). It was the first time a lot of us had ever met her in person.
First day of class, she looked around the room and said, "This is way too many students. I'm going to make it my mission to see that at least half of you wash out of the program." And she did. Apparently she had had no problem with the class size back when we were all admitted into the program in the first place, tuition money in hand. Then she proceeded to go on a tirade about what an insult it was for someone at her level to be expected to teach undergrads in the first place.
[And then there were her repeated denials of accommodations to students with disabilities. The department decided it was her duty as program head to investigate the complaints, and I think we all know how those investigations went. And her bizarre habit of constantly telling female students with long hair they needed to cut it short to look professional. Christ what an asshole. I shudder to think what would have happened if she'd caught any of us cheating.]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:53 AM on May 29, 2022 [20 favorites]
Am I missing something or do profs maybe not want to give all their students COVID?
Of course in-class exams aren't always possible. I'm doing them again, because I'm teaching high school, and we are actually no longer allowed to offer distance learning, where I am. But I couldn't do them during the proper lockdowns, and I also had to try other work-arounds. I also used timed open-book assignments, sometimes even with multiple choice questions, but I told students that they had to use books, and pen and paper (writing the answers on a sheet of paper, taking a photo with a smartphone, then loading it up the learning platform), and had to write the exam while turning on the camera on zoom so that I somewhat could check that they weren't using the computer or their phones while answering the questions, except for printing out the exam in the beginning, and loading up the photo of the answers in the end.
Of course that's easier to do with 20 students than with 70, and they probably still found a way to use their phones for unsanctioned purposes. The camera angles were often a bit wonky, and I didn't hound them very much about that, because let's not waste time on technical stuff in a stressful exam situation; even with the best set-up, I couldn't see the entire room; I didn't use any proctoring service, because those just stress me out too much. It was the most perfunctory anti-cooperation safeguard, more of a gesture really.
I still think you need to invest a minimum amount of effort in checking for the things you require. In my case I do have some reason to think students really didn't cooperate too much - pretty low overall scores, and no patterns of all-too-similiar mistakes.
posted by sohalt at 5:58 AM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
Of course in-class exams aren't always possible. I'm doing them again, because I'm teaching high school, and we are actually no longer allowed to offer distance learning, where I am. But I couldn't do them during the proper lockdowns, and I also had to try other work-arounds. I also used timed open-book assignments, sometimes even with multiple choice questions, but I told students that they had to use books, and pen and paper (writing the answers on a sheet of paper, taking a photo with a smartphone, then loading it up the learning platform), and had to write the exam while turning on the camera on zoom so that I somewhat could check that they weren't using the computer or their phones while answering the questions, except for printing out the exam in the beginning, and loading up the photo of the answers in the end.
Of course that's easier to do with 20 students than with 70, and they probably still found a way to use their phones for unsanctioned purposes. The camera angles were often a bit wonky, and I didn't hound them very much about that, because let's not waste time on technical stuff in a stressful exam situation; even with the best set-up, I couldn't see the entire room; I didn't use any proctoring service, because those just stress me out too much. It was the most perfunctory anti-cooperation safeguard, more of a gesture really.
I still think you need to invest a minimum amount of effort in checking for the things you require. In my case I do have some reason to think students really didn't cooperate too much - pretty low overall scores, and no patterns of all-too-similiar mistakes.
posted by sohalt at 5:58 AM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
I think that asking other students for the answers is bad because you don't learn. This is different from group work or open-book tests where you have to do some generative thinking and hence do learn. I have taken undergrad-level courses in the past few years though not during covid.
Some underlying problems seem to be:
1. Credentialism - if you have to pay a lot of money to get a degree to get a shitty job, you probably aren't that interested in the material and it's hard to do work on challenging stuff that you aren't interested in. I had to take some intro business courses for Reasons a few years ago and man it was tough to do the work, and I'm a really bookish person who has little trouble with study.
2. Temptation - you carry a little cheating machine in your pocket. I do a lot of dumb stuff that I shouldn't when it's easy to do the dumb stuff - pizza for dinner because I've got pizza, unneeded purchase because it's on sale on the internet and paying is one-click.
3. Low-quality American education. It has never occurred to me to cheat because I don't need to cheat - I read fast and fluently, I write fast and adequately, my high school education was pretty good and occurred pre-internet so I had to do the work. But what if I wasn't a good reader? What if I had a terrible high school education in a noisy classroom (I cannot believe how noisy classrooms are now; I would have failed every test if I'd had to work in so much noise) with constant access to a cheat/distraction machine in my pocket.
4. Bad paths to college. Some people go to college who are not interested in it and don't really need it, of course, but a lot of people go to college when they are not ready for it. (I would have been better off with a year or two working, and I did really well in college.) You learn better when you want to learn, even if the "want" is purely the instrumental "I want to learn X skill because if I'm good at it I can get a better job". We should set society up so that you can easily work for a couple of years and then have the full-on undergrad experience, working relatively little. Instead, if you "go back" to school, you're working full time.
5. We are all poorer. I went to a SLAC and I was probably about in the middle, money-wise. I worked about 75% time in the summers and I worked probably fifteen hours a week many weeks during term, but those were easy jobs and one of them was minding the dish machine in the cafeteria so I didn't even have a commute. I bet most of those kids in the group chat are working better than 50% time all year round, lots of them probably full time. It is stupid and absurd IMO to expect people to hold down a real job and attend college full time and get anything out of college. I feel that it's a lot to take even two demanding classes a semester while working - I tried to keep it to one when I was taking classes.
6. Class culture - if you get a few chatty and charismatic students who are big cheating enthusiasts, that boosts cheating; if those same chatty and charismatic students disapprove of cheating, you'll have a lot less of it. Unlike the other factors, this is down to luck.
posted by Frowner at 6:25 AM on May 29, 2022 [37 favorites]
Some underlying problems seem to be:
1. Credentialism - if you have to pay a lot of money to get a degree to get a shitty job, you probably aren't that interested in the material and it's hard to do work on challenging stuff that you aren't interested in. I had to take some intro business courses for Reasons a few years ago and man it was tough to do the work, and I'm a really bookish person who has little trouble with study.
2. Temptation - you carry a little cheating machine in your pocket. I do a lot of dumb stuff that I shouldn't when it's easy to do the dumb stuff - pizza for dinner because I've got pizza, unneeded purchase because it's on sale on the internet and paying is one-click.
3. Low-quality American education. It has never occurred to me to cheat because I don't need to cheat - I read fast and fluently, I write fast and adequately, my high school education was pretty good and occurred pre-internet so I had to do the work. But what if I wasn't a good reader? What if I had a terrible high school education in a noisy classroom (I cannot believe how noisy classrooms are now; I would have failed every test if I'd had to work in so much noise) with constant access to a cheat/distraction machine in my pocket.
4. Bad paths to college. Some people go to college who are not interested in it and don't really need it, of course, but a lot of people go to college when they are not ready for it. (I would have been better off with a year or two working, and I did really well in college.) You learn better when you want to learn, even if the "want" is purely the instrumental "I want to learn X skill because if I'm good at it I can get a better job". We should set society up so that you can easily work for a couple of years and then have the full-on undergrad experience, working relatively little. Instead, if you "go back" to school, you're working full time.
5. We are all poorer. I went to a SLAC and I was probably about in the middle, money-wise. I worked about 75% time in the summers and I worked probably fifteen hours a week many weeks during term, but those were easy jobs and one of them was minding the dish machine in the cafeteria so I didn't even have a commute. I bet most of those kids in the group chat are working better than 50% time all year round, lots of them probably full time. It is stupid and absurd IMO to expect people to hold down a real job and attend college full time and get anything out of college. I feel that it's a lot to take even two demanding classes a semester while working - I tried to keep it to one when I was taking classes.
6. Class culture - if you get a few chatty and charismatic students who are big cheating enthusiasts, that boosts cheating; if those same chatty and charismatic students disapprove of cheating, you'll have a lot less of it. Unlike the other factors, this is down to luck.
posted by Frowner at 6:25 AM on May 29, 2022 [37 favorites]
I didn't read it like he was lurking in the chat. I read it as, "Let's invite the prof to the chat and make him want to ignore it." I thought that was part of the cheating scheme, and it was the only clever thing the students did.
posted by emelenjr at 7:05 AM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by emelenjr at 7:05 AM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
So… I lied. I cheated. I bribed classmates to cover the cheating of other classmates. I am an accessory to plagarism. But the most damning thing of all… I think I can live with it. And if I had to do it all over again, I would. The professor was right about one thing, a guilty conscience is a small price to pay for an undergraduate degree. So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it…-- schmod, 2022
posted by schmod at 7:29 AM on May 29, 2022 [19 favorites]
I made a choose-your-own-adventure assignment where students could do anything they wanted to engage in the literature. All they had to do was tell me what they did and then provide an explanation of why they should get course credit for doing what they did.That would have been the moment that broke me. Regardless of whether or not I'd cheated, I'd have stood up in the middle of the [virtual] classroom and shouted "Okay! I'll talk!"
For a certain category of brain (ie. mine), one would gladly take the F over that assignment. Even if they hadn't actually cheated.
posted by schmod at 7:34 AM on May 29, 2022 [9 favorites]
The choose-your-own-adventure style was designed for the second/alternate syllabus, as a way to bounce back from a failing grade. If you didn’t cheat, you didn’t have to do it.
The students who didn’t cheat could do the new assignments as well, so it was more ways to an A all around. The first and second syllabus had different methods of computing a final grade, and I automatically took whichever grade was highest.
posted by lesser weasel at 7:53 AM on May 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
The students who didn’t cheat could do the new assignments as well, so it was more ways to an A all around. The first and second syllabus had different methods of computing a final grade, and I automatically took whichever grade was highest.
posted by lesser weasel at 7:53 AM on May 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
I teach math at the University level. I've mostly made my peace with how people cheat and have tried to minimize its effects and rarely have serious problems. In my lower-level classes---the sort which are largely rote applications of set procedures---there's a fair amount of in-person, timed assessment. These don't change a lot from semester to semester, and I freely give them access to previous semesters' quizzes and exams. This promotes very targeted study which some might think of as cheating, e.g. they know that the exam has, e.g. a problem which is solved by algebraic expansion to a quadratic equation without rational roots, and they learn the way to solve that exact question. To my eyes, that's perfectly fine (these rote techniques a pretty much what we're addressing knowledge of, after all), and I'd rather everyone be in a position to do that rather than just those privileged to be given a previous exam through unofficial channels. Detectable cheating in such a class is pretty rare. I basically boil it down to three sorts, only one of which I can detect: people copying idiosyncratic wrong approaches (those I catch), people able to copy correct answers word-for-word without getting caught (probably uncommon; I try to make it difficult), and people who have some capability of their own but look at others' papers to jog their memories (those are really hard to catch, but also ones with a pretty high baseline skill level).
In classes with more creativity involved (which are often smaller), I tend to incline more towards out-of-class work, and encourage collaboration. I do caution them that the words should be their own, though, that working together to develop ideas is great but that the reasoning should be filtered through their own mode of expression in the end. I rarely have to chide students that they've been in one end or the other of copying-without-comprehension, and usually not twice. That said, I have take-home exams where I stress they should only use written resources and not collaborate with each other or other humans. There might be occasional collaboration there that I can't see and I try to just live with that. I did in a recent semester have an ugly issue where nearly a third of the class had the same highly unusual answers on a take-home exams, and I ended up knocking their grade on that specific exam down by half. Didn't feel good about that, but fortunately it's a very rare necessity.
posted by jackbishop at 7:57 AM on May 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
In classes with more creativity involved (which are often smaller), I tend to incline more towards out-of-class work, and encourage collaboration. I do caution them that the words should be their own, though, that working together to develop ideas is great but that the reasoning should be filtered through their own mode of expression in the end. I rarely have to chide students that they've been in one end or the other of copying-without-comprehension, and usually not twice. That said, I have take-home exams where I stress they should only use written resources and not collaborate with each other or other humans. There might be occasional collaboration there that I can't see and I try to just live with that. I did in a recent semester have an ugly issue where nearly a third of the class had the same highly unusual answers on a take-home exams, and I ended up knocking their grade on that specific exam down by half. Didn't feel good about that, but fortunately it's a very rare necessity.
posted by jackbishop at 7:57 AM on May 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
If Crump wanted to save time and only teach the students with an honest interest in the material, he had a pretty easy and time-tested solution: just announce at the beginning of class that everyone can get a C, no questions asked, no attendance required, just by turning in a sheet of paper with their name on it at the final.
This just in: MeFite reinvents the "gentleman's C."
This has been a long time coming. I majored in psychology, and my psych 101 class was maybe the easiest college credit that I ever got that wasn't the result of testing out of a requirement, getting credit for community service, or that one community college class where the instructor said that he was giving everyone a passing grade because the subject was something that you couldn't really learn in school (this, after everyone bought an expensive textbook that we never used). In the psych class, the professor lectured, but only because he kind of had to; the grade was based entirely on quizzes, which were taken directly out of the textbook (as in the quiz questions were at the end of each chapter), and the textbook--you may have seen this coming--was written by the professor. Of course I got an A, but so did someone else in my dorm who, once he figured out the deal, never went to a single lecture, only the quizzes. If I was only in it for taking a Rocks-4-Jocks level of elective, I might not have minded, but this was my major.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:20 AM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
This just in: MeFite reinvents the "gentleman's C."
This has been a long time coming. I majored in psychology, and my psych 101 class was maybe the easiest college credit that I ever got that wasn't the result of testing out of a requirement, getting credit for community service, or that one community college class where the instructor said that he was giving everyone a passing grade because the subject was something that you couldn't really learn in school (this, after everyone bought an expensive textbook that we never used). In the psych class, the professor lectured, but only because he kind of had to; the grade was based entirely on quizzes, which were taken directly out of the textbook (as in the quiz questions were at the end of each chapter), and the textbook--you may have seen this coming--was written by the professor. Of course I got an A, but so did someone else in my dorm who, once he figured out the deal, never went to a single lecture, only the quizzes. If I was only in it for taking a Rocks-4-Jocks level of elective, I might not have minded, but this was my major.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:20 AM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
Sigh. Why did he try to run high-stakes exams through blackboard? That was his mistake, right there. It is *obvious* that this is what will happen.
I understand the fascination with student behavior, and the thrill of untangling it. But, ultimately this article could have been a single paragraph long with the headline "Here's Why I'm A Dumbass."
Part of my exasperation comes from being a CUNY adjunct, and experiencing the shutdown and the switch to online. NO ONE talked to each other, and in particular the full-timers didn't bother to talk to the adjuncts (who were all reinventing their own individual wheels for grossly inadequate pay.) In my department there were ten of us who all taught the same damn class (some tenured, some adjunct), but there was zero collaboration.
I came up with a formula that worked pretty well, I think. Turn the class into a ton of low-stakes assignments - like 50. Reading + comprehension quiz, video + comprehension quiz. Allow them to skip straight to the quiz but warn them that that's not what you want + reprimand them for doing it. (The psychology here is nuanced - if you set it up so that they are forced to click on the material, you train them to click and ignore. Letting them hang themselves and then talking to them at least makes it personal, and I dare say it wasn't a *huge* problem.)
Instead of tests, do a few short essays. Warn them in the instructions that "I really want your own thoughts here, I don't want stuff that is copied-and-pasted from the internet."
Did they learn the stuff as well as they did when we had in-person tests? I dunno, probably not quite. Did I have the tsunami of cheating and corner-cutting that this guy experienced? I really don't think so. I made the class so incremental and low-stakes that there wasn't really any point. And some students still glommed onto the material and got excited about it, coming to my zoom office hours to chat and corresponding (endlessly!) through email - the experience for the good students was pretty much the same. I don't see what more you could possibly expect.
So, the fact that this guy botched it but he still gets a half-decent salary, predictable employment, and a little office in Midwood pisses me off to no end. My experience at CUNY through the pandemic was so alienating that I have quit.
posted by anhedonic at 8:26 AM on May 29, 2022 [36 favorites]
I understand the fascination with student behavior, and the thrill of untangling it. But, ultimately this article could have been a single paragraph long with the headline "Here's Why I'm A Dumbass."
Part of my exasperation comes from being a CUNY adjunct, and experiencing the shutdown and the switch to online. NO ONE talked to each other, and in particular the full-timers didn't bother to talk to the adjuncts (who were all reinventing their own individual wheels for grossly inadequate pay.) In my department there were ten of us who all taught the same damn class (some tenured, some adjunct), but there was zero collaboration.
I came up with a formula that worked pretty well, I think. Turn the class into a ton of low-stakes assignments - like 50. Reading + comprehension quiz, video + comprehension quiz. Allow them to skip straight to the quiz but warn them that that's not what you want + reprimand them for doing it. (The psychology here is nuanced - if you set it up so that they are forced to click on the material, you train them to click and ignore. Letting them hang themselves and then talking to them at least makes it personal, and I dare say it wasn't a *huge* problem.)
Instead of tests, do a few short essays. Warn them in the instructions that "I really want your own thoughts here, I don't want stuff that is copied-and-pasted from the internet."
Did they learn the stuff as well as they did when we had in-person tests? I dunno, probably not quite. Did I have the tsunami of cheating and corner-cutting that this guy experienced? I really don't think so. I made the class so incremental and low-stakes that there wasn't really any point. And some students still glommed onto the material and got excited about it, coming to my zoom office hours to chat and corresponding (endlessly!) through email - the experience for the good students was pretty much the same. I don't see what more you could possibly expect.
So, the fact that this guy botched it but he still gets a half-decent salary, predictable employment, and a little office in Midwood pisses me off to no end. My experience at CUNY through the pandemic was so alienating that I have quit.
posted by anhedonic at 8:26 AM on May 29, 2022 [36 favorites]
Way back when I was teaching math, we had a really good online homework tool called WebWork which let us program problem sets where the actual numbers in the problem would be different for every student. (For example, Student A gets 'find the roots of the polynomial x^2 + 3x + 2' and student B gets the same words but polynomial x^2 + 5x + 6). One could also set the number of 'tries' allowed to anything. So, I would allow students 5 tries and tell them it was totally OK to work with their friends. The different numbers in the problems mostly ruled out whole-sale copying of answers. Giving multiple tries on the problem means that the first few attempts are low stakes chances for the student to give an honest attempt without feeling like they're being judged for it. In the best case, which I think wasn't uncommon, 'cheating' was happening when the student knew there was a problem in their understanding (after missing the right answer a few times), and would basically turn into peer tutoring sessions.
I would also have smaller written assignments to ensure that the students were getting some practice thinking about proofs and communicating their work. Basic idea: Let machines do the work wherever possible, because grading SUCKS. The rote computational work for math /does/ have educational value, but is also relatively easy to automate... Otherwise it wouldn't be rote. And then use the available human grading time explicitly for the pieces which require some human evaluation; it's just a better use of time.
We're weirdly getting to a place where ML might be able to help with certain kinds of questions in the humanities. Eg, automatically constructing and grading reading comprehension questions should be pretty doable. (My favorite prof in undergrad ran classes with 75 pages of reading a night, seven nights a week, and about 50% of the grade was a 'daily' in-class quiz which only checked that you'd done the reading. Actually-doing-the-reading is the lowest bar, and yet is weirdly untested. Hell, for a lot of classes, especially at the intro level, I would bet that demonstrating some understanding of the reading is /all/ we should be asking of students.)
Of course, the actual use of tech for better teaching has been rocky over the last couple decades, with incredibly uneven implementation and engagement from teaching staff... but that's a multi-page discussion I'll hold back from for the moment.
posted by kaibutsu at 8:30 AM on May 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
I would also have smaller written assignments to ensure that the students were getting some practice thinking about proofs and communicating their work. Basic idea: Let machines do the work wherever possible, because grading SUCKS. The rote computational work for math /does/ have educational value, but is also relatively easy to automate... Otherwise it wouldn't be rote. And then use the available human grading time explicitly for the pieces which require some human evaluation; it's just a better use of time.
We're weirdly getting to a place where ML might be able to help with certain kinds of questions in the humanities. Eg, automatically constructing and grading reading comprehension questions should be pretty doable. (My favorite prof in undergrad ran classes with 75 pages of reading a night, seven nights a week, and about 50% of the grade was a 'daily' in-class quiz which only checked that you'd done the reading. Actually-doing-the-reading is the lowest bar, and yet is weirdly untested. Hell, for a lot of classes, especially at the intro level, I would bet that demonstrating some understanding of the reading is /all/ we should be asking of students.)
Of course, the actual use of tech for better teaching has been rocky over the last couple decades, with incredibly uneven implementation and engagement from teaching staff... but that's a multi-page discussion I'll hold back from for the moment.
posted by kaibutsu at 8:30 AM on May 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
There was a cheating scandal in one of my programming courses in the late 90's: some of the students took the wholly inadequate assignment and used, gasp!, internet resources to solve it, with varying degrees of actual copying. The professor was outraged: we have reported you to the dean and we'll fail you all!
The students pointed out that, in the course of their research, including de-compiling the examples and poking around department servers, they also came across all of the stuff that the professor and department as a whole had plagiarized from private students and other institutions to make the course.
The blowhards deflated, the lawyers stopped sharpening their quills, and the whole issue dissolved very quickly into nothing.
More generally, and with trepidation among so many academics, I will share my unpopular opinion: Outsourcing some part of one's intellect to the web is now a core skill, including what is often, in academia, called cheating.
Teachers and courses that work toward developing and accommodating this core skill are appreciated.
posted by SunSnork at 8:46 AM on May 29, 2022 [28 favorites]
The students pointed out that, in the course of their research, including de-compiling the examples and poking around department servers, they also came across all of the stuff that the professor and department as a whole had plagiarized from private students and other institutions to make the course.
The blowhards deflated, the lawyers stopped sharpening their quills, and the whole issue dissolved very quickly into nothing.
More generally, and with trepidation among so many academics, I will share my unpopular opinion: Outsourcing some part of one's intellect to the web is now a core skill, including what is often, in academia, called cheating.
Teachers and courses that work toward developing and accommodating this core skill are appreciated.
posted by SunSnork at 8:46 AM on May 29, 2022 [28 favorites]
I get why cheating in education is bad. Also, as an SME on a team of people that sometimes don't understand why the machine in the lab is behaving funny, I deeply want them to text me if they don't immediately get it (for time sensitive stuff) so I can give them the answer and we can run a play-by-play after the process has (successfully) finished.
And as above, "Can you google the answer to this problem" is a core employment skill.
posted by Slackermagee at 8:50 AM on May 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
And as above, "Can you google the answer to this problem" is a core employment skill.
posted by Slackermagee at 8:50 AM on May 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
This person started with an inherently interesting story and somehow made it excruciatingly boring; imagine their classes
posted by nouvelle-personne at 8:53 AM on May 29, 2022 [45 favorites]
posted by nouvelle-personne at 8:53 AM on May 29, 2022 [45 favorites]
More than half of students in an upper level undergrad course plagiarized an extra credit essay assignment that I graded two sequential years at a CUNY college about 15 years ago.
The second year they were directly warned that the person grading the essay was capable of googling. Slightly more of them cheated.
The assignment was extra credit. The classes were in person. There was no textbook. The essay topic was broad enough that there were few students who chose the same topic.
If you’re interested to see this sort of thing in action, check out a local town’s essay contests - they’re almost all plagiarized.
posted by sciencegeek at 8:54 AM on May 29, 2022 [10 favorites]
The second year they were directly warned that the person grading the essay was capable of googling. Slightly more of them cheated.
The assignment was extra credit. The classes were in person. There was no textbook. The essay topic was broad enough that there were few students who chose the same topic.
If you’re interested to see this sort of thing in action, check out a local town’s essay contests - they’re almost all plagiarized.
posted by sciencegeek at 8:54 AM on May 29, 2022 [10 favorites]
And as above, "Can you google the answer to this problem" is a core employment skill.
So much of this. I don't pay people to do primary research. I pay them to solve client problems. I get the whole academia thing, but Google-fu is an actual skill in the corporate world. So is asking someone a question in Slack or sending someone an email who can answer the question for you.
posted by ryoshu at 8:58 AM on May 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
So much of this. I don't pay people to do primary research. I pay them to solve client problems. I get the whole academia thing, but Google-fu is an actual skill in the corporate world. So is asking someone a question in Slack or sending someone an email who can answer the question for you.
posted by ryoshu at 8:58 AM on May 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
Tired:Essay mills, paying someone to do your work, copy-paste wikipedia
Wired: Chegg/Course hero/bartleby/Copying sites
Inspired: Photomath for math/OpenAI-art for art homework/GPT3 for essays/image search for solutions to anything that has been posted ever to the web
posted by lalochezia at 8:59 AM on May 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
Wired: Chegg/Course hero/bartleby/Copying sites
Inspired: Photomath for math/OpenAI-art for art homework/GPT3 for essays/image search for solutions to anything that has been posted ever to the web
posted by lalochezia at 8:59 AM on May 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
Heck, even doctors are googling your symptoms in the exam room.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:04 AM on May 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:04 AM on May 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
I worked at a post BA health related specialty school, which seemed to pride itself on how much debt its students accumulated to go there. Did they cheat? Yes, and in very organized ways. But as a coworker said, for most college students who cheat to get a certificate, at last it’s not a license to kill. The students where I worked who got the certificate could now prescribe opioids, perform procedures that could kill or maim, or just generally fuck their patients over through incompetence. The faculty would moan about the cheating, the dean would have meetings to preach about dishonesty, but there was a culture there of cheating. A lot of the faculty got their certificate there…
A lot of students make economic decisions regarding their time, where is it more valuable to spend time to actually learn versus just cheat? The system fosters this by making an environment where there is a difference between how much time the students have to study versus how much time they actually have. I think a cultural change is needed.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:04 AM on May 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
A lot of students make economic decisions regarding their time, where is it more valuable to spend time to actually learn versus just cheat? The system fosters this by making an environment where there is a difference between how much time the students have to study versus how much time they actually have. I think a cultural change is needed.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:04 AM on May 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
Underpants Monster - They learned to do that at school. See my previous comment.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:06 AM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by njohnson23 at 9:06 AM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
These students are terrible and I’m sorry they have apparently missed out on learning any values earlier in life. Do they also cheat at sports? Will they lie in interviews? Cheat on their spouses? Integrity is about doing the right thing even if no one’s watching. It seems like we as a society have normalized just doing whatever, for free, because why not. And yes we have a ton of bad examples from the corporate and government worlds, but let’s not let those become the expectations we have of our kids.
posted by freecellwizard at 9:07 AM on May 29, 2022 [16 favorites]
posted by freecellwizard at 9:07 AM on May 29, 2022 [16 favorites]
Am I missing something or do profs maybe not want to give all their students COVID?
Yes, that these tools and switch to online quiz/exams were started prior to covid at my university, and continue as in class instruction has returned. And few, if any, teachers bother to even use the in-application features to make those exams less able to be cheated on.
For instance, the tool supports essay questions/open ended questions, but then they can't be automatically graded. Heaven forbid a professor have to DO WORK GRADING these days.
I realize I'm probably talking about the professors who've been the worst about this; and there have been the few that do actually care, make you write things down and send a picture, and other ways of caring. But it does see to me that many of the tools that encourage cheating only do so when an instructor is phoning it in, and there are far more that do than I am comfortable with.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 9:09 AM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
Yes, that these tools and switch to online quiz/exams were started prior to covid at my university, and continue as in class instruction has returned. And few, if any, teachers bother to even use the in-application features to make those exams less able to be cheated on.
For instance, the tool supports essay questions/open ended questions, but then they can't be automatically graded. Heaven forbid a professor have to DO WORK GRADING these days.
I realize I'm probably talking about the professors who've been the worst about this; and there have been the few that do actually care, make you write things down and send a picture, and other ways of caring. But it does see to me that many of the tools that encourage cheating only do so when an instructor is phoning it in, and there are far more that do than I am comfortable with.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 9:09 AM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
So, as a nontraditional learner this is pretty interesting to me. I'm coming back for an Associates, (plus a couple of certificates) at a Community College and I think one of the biggest differences I'm experiencing this go round is how much more engaged with the students the professors are, ESPECIALLY the folks in the department for my major, but even my low-paid-adjunct, forced-to-teach-over-zoom-and-obviously-OVER-IT, general ed teachers from earlier in this go round were really available and understanding and willing to work with me when I approached them with some struggles I was having due to my Long COVID, and then at the end of the semester when I had a family emergency situation. Like I could totally see them reworking the syllabus in the middle of the semester because the original wasn't working. And you know, maybe the difference is me, I am a very different student than I was then, and I'm sure some of my earlier teachers would've given me the same help if I knew how to ask.
Also, these teachers know group chats and the internet exist, so they make them part of the class structure. Like, at least 4 of my (now in person) classes had a discussion board that participation was part of the grade, and part of that was how well we collaborated and helped each-other. In other classes, the teacher made it very clear that people that he saw get and give feedback on projects (which had to be largely done in class for equipment reasons) would get a small bit of extra credit on the project if it would change their letter grade. They all also have all had some version of searching the internet for sources as a skill they teach. Exams have been largely open book and note. Like I can't speak for other colleges, but right now, in the program I'm in, "learning where to get answers" is totally part of the curriculum.
The thing is even in those classes, posting exam questions and answers would've gotten you a big fat F. Because it's cheating, It says so in the syllabus, and the teacher said so in class. Even the 18 year old first generation, no exposure to higher ed culture students know it. I know they knew, because after the first time I excused myself from a conversation with some vague excuse that was totally the equivalent to when I used to say to obviously underage groups trying to buy beer "Just so you know, I'm gonna have to see everyone's ID before I let you buy this" warning in that it let people know a)I knew what was going on and b) wasn't going to do anything about it in unless they put me in a position where it was them or potentially me getting in trouble, and c) I was gonna choose them getting in trouble every time. I was never approached about it by the same people again.
Also, I sure hope some of the attitude towards students in this thread isn't the norm, because man if I got talked about that way it'd sure make me feel like shit, and that's as a 40 year old dude with tons of real life experience knowing that the worst part of jobs is often the customers (or equivalent). So, I don't know gentle reminder that if you're talking about a group of people on Metafilter, there are some members of that group reading what you write.
posted by Gygesringtone at 9:13 AM on May 29, 2022 [18 favorites]
Also, these teachers know group chats and the internet exist, so they make them part of the class structure. Like, at least 4 of my (now in person) classes had a discussion board that participation was part of the grade, and part of that was how well we collaborated and helped each-other. In other classes, the teacher made it very clear that people that he saw get and give feedback on projects (which had to be largely done in class for equipment reasons) would get a small bit of extra credit on the project if it would change their letter grade. They all also have all had some version of searching the internet for sources as a skill they teach. Exams have been largely open book and note. Like I can't speak for other colleges, but right now, in the program I'm in, "learning where to get answers" is totally part of the curriculum.
The thing is even in those classes, posting exam questions and answers would've gotten you a big fat F. Because it's cheating, It says so in the syllabus, and the teacher said so in class. Even the 18 year old first generation, no exposure to higher ed culture students know it. I know they knew, because after the first time I excused myself from a conversation with some vague excuse that was totally the equivalent to when I used to say to obviously underage groups trying to buy beer "Just so you know, I'm gonna have to see everyone's ID before I let you buy this" warning in that it let people know a)I knew what was going on and b) wasn't going to do anything about it in unless they put me in a position where it was them or potentially me getting in trouble, and c) I was gonna choose them getting in trouble every time. I was never approached about it by the same people again.
Also, I sure hope some of the attitude towards students in this thread isn't the norm, because man if I got talked about that way it'd sure make me feel like shit, and that's as a 40 year old dude with tons of real life experience knowing that the worst part of jobs is often the customers (or equivalent). So, I don't know gentle reminder that if you're talking about a group of people on Metafilter, there are some members of that group reading what you write.
posted by Gygesringtone at 9:13 AM on May 29, 2022 [18 favorites]
Also to the OP: I liked the article and dug the conversational story telling mode, it might not be for everyone, but thanks for posting this.
posted by Gygesringtone at 9:21 AM on May 29, 2022 [21 favorites]
posted by Gygesringtone at 9:21 AM on May 29, 2022 [21 favorites]
This person started with an inherently interesting story and somehow made it excruciatingly boring; imagine their classes
Apparently not too shabby.
posted by BWA at 9:24 AM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
Apparently not too shabby.
posted by BWA at 9:24 AM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
Heaven forbid a professor have to DO WORK GRADING these days.
Wow. Just wow.
Last spring I had a class unexpectedly (seriously, I WAS NOT expecting this) balloon to 70+ students when I'd been anticipating 15-20.
A book-review assignment I could grade in a couple hours with 20 students is most of a day with 70+, because I am not a machine and can't read and give coherent feedback for hours on end. Multiply by A LOT of written assignments and I am one seriously fried human being. I don't know how anybody teaching writing-intensive classes (which mine was not) survives.
In the other class, I had to teach hybrid in-person/Zoom which is a cognitive disaster -- it's HARD to watch a room and a chat at the same time. For extra added fun, I had chronic absenteeism (no, it's a discussion class, not a lecture, SHOW THE EFF UP) and the general unwillingness to engage that the essayist is pointing at. I flunked two graduate students for just not turning in half the work -- maybe the third and fourth Fs in my fifteen-year history of teaching in this graduate program?
All I want is for students to meet me halfway, and I do my level best to make it worth their while. I'm amazed that the essayist still wants to teach. I have days when I sure don't -- and cheap sarcasm from folks not living this only reinforces that lack of desire.
Y'all want teachers? Good ones? Quit dissing us, plzkthx.
posted by humbug at 9:26 AM on May 29, 2022 [47 favorites]
Wow. Just wow.
Last spring I had a class unexpectedly (seriously, I WAS NOT expecting this) balloon to 70+ students when I'd been anticipating 15-20.
A book-review assignment I could grade in a couple hours with 20 students is most of a day with 70+, because I am not a machine and can't read and give coherent feedback for hours on end. Multiply by A LOT of written assignments and I am one seriously fried human being. I don't know how anybody teaching writing-intensive classes (which mine was not) survives.
In the other class, I had to teach hybrid in-person/Zoom which is a cognitive disaster -- it's HARD to watch a room and a chat at the same time. For extra added fun, I had chronic absenteeism (no, it's a discussion class, not a lecture, SHOW THE EFF UP) and the general unwillingness to engage that the essayist is pointing at. I flunked two graduate students for just not turning in half the work -- maybe the third and fourth Fs in my fifteen-year history of teaching in this graduate program?
All I want is for students to meet me halfway, and I do my level best to make it worth their while. I'm amazed that the essayist still wants to teach. I have days when I sure don't -- and cheap sarcasm from folks not living this only reinforces that lack of desire.
Y'all want teachers? Good ones? Quit dissing us, plzkthx.
posted by humbug at 9:26 AM on May 29, 2022 [47 favorites]
For those who are so dismissive of this as a valid concern based on the fact that looking online is a valued skill (which yes, that's true: it's probably at least 30% of my job, to be honest): Do you really not see a difference between having access to resources such as google and posting screenshots of questions asking for what the answer is?
posted by vernondalhart at 9:40 AM on May 29, 2022 [27 favorites]
posted by vernondalhart at 9:40 AM on May 29, 2022 [27 favorites]
Looking things up online is a skill, but the underlying skill is knowing the veracity of the information you are lookin at. If they are refreshing their memory by using the online Merck Manual then ok. But if it’s the first thing that pops up in Google, then no, Uncle Fred’s Handy Medical Tips doesn’t cut it.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:47 AM on May 29, 2022 [17 favorites]
posted by njohnson23 at 9:47 AM on May 29, 2022 [17 favorites]
I get the whole academia thing, but Google-fu is an actual skill in the corporate world.
True. But copying answers from a classmate isn't Google-fu, and neither is copy-and-pasting the answer from the first two or three Google hits, because there is really no skill involved in any of that, and the results are spotty at best. Actual Google-fu that might be useful in a corporate setting requires a minimum of assessing reliabilty and relevance before copy and pasting, which is not necessary when it's a multiple choice question from a question pool complete with answer key.
So is asking someone a question in Slack or sending someone an email who can answer the question for you.
Also true, but you will quickly burn quite a bit of social capital and goodwill from your colleagues if you do that too much, especially for the sort of basic stuff that might be covered in intro-courses. Asking questions that are too basic can cast a doubt about other aspects of performance as well. "There are no stupid questions" is not something that is always held true in every corporate setting. You really need to be somewhat strategic when it comes to picking someone to reveal ignorance of the most basic notions of your discipline to.
Of course you won't remember anything you ever studied for an exam anyway. But you need to retain at least the vaguest of notions to know whether a question is basic or not. While I don't share the moral outrage about students using obvious short cuts, I do very much fear that people who just copy the answer from the whatsapp chat don't learn enough to evaluate even that.
posted by sohalt at 9:50 AM on May 29, 2022 [22 favorites]
True. But copying answers from a classmate isn't Google-fu, and neither is copy-and-pasting the answer from the first two or three Google hits, because there is really no skill involved in any of that, and the results are spotty at best. Actual Google-fu that might be useful in a corporate setting requires a minimum of assessing reliabilty and relevance before copy and pasting, which is not necessary when it's a multiple choice question from a question pool complete with answer key.
So is asking someone a question in Slack or sending someone an email who can answer the question for you.
Also true, but you will quickly burn quite a bit of social capital and goodwill from your colleagues if you do that too much, especially for the sort of basic stuff that might be covered in intro-courses. Asking questions that are too basic can cast a doubt about other aspects of performance as well. "There are no stupid questions" is not something that is always held true in every corporate setting. You really need to be somewhat strategic when it comes to picking someone to reveal ignorance of the most basic notions of your discipline to.
Of course you won't remember anything you ever studied for an exam anyway. But you need to retain at least the vaguest of notions to know whether a question is basic or not. While I don't share the moral outrage about students using obvious short cuts, I do very much fear that people who just copy the answer from the whatsapp chat don't learn enough to evaluate even that.
posted by sohalt at 9:50 AM on May 29, 2022 [22 favorites]
And as above, "Can you google the answer to this problem" is a core employment skill.
Last night I saw a video about automatically enhanced error logging, only to learn the researchers had formalized googling / stack overflow into the IDE.
posted by pwnguin at 10:01 AM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
Last night I saw a video about automatically enhanced error logging, only to learn the researchers had formalized googling / stack overflow into the IDE.
posted by pwnguin at 10:01 AM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
Last spring I had a class unexpectedly (seriously, I WAS NOT expecting this) balloon to 70+ students when I'd been anticipating 15-20.
Do you get triple pay for that? If not, I suspect the disrespect originates with the administration.
posted by pwnguin at 10:03 AM on May 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
Do you get triple pay for that? If not, I suspect the disrespect originates with the administration.
posted by pwnguin at 10:03 AM on May 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
For one of my classes, I invite a librarian over to give a lecture on how to search the internet and also how to cite correctly. This year, he got top ratings, and the students asked me to bring him in during first semester rather than fourth. I think he's going to stay in fourth, because then they know how much they need him. But the appreciation of the lecture is something COVID brought.
posted by mumimor at 10:09 AM on May 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by mumimor at 10:09 AM on May 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
So a good portion of the students don't show up to class or read the assignment, and can't imagine how to take an open book test without cheating. I think there's a problem here that is not going to be solved by more "choose-your-own-adventure"-type assignments.
posted by jabah at 10:15 AM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by jabah at 10:15 AM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
Y'all want teachers? Good ones? Quit dissing us, plzkthx.
It might just be my university; one of the best teachers I've had is an adjunct and she's leaving after 2 years because her experience there was so frustrating and disheartening. She only mentioned it briefly in a private conversation we had, but this does not surprise me at all. I'm friend with some TAs so I hear about it from that angle; and I worked in a role that while I was a student employee, because of my professional background, I got to participate in staff meeting and see parts of how the sausage was made.
Or it might not be just my university, there are tons of anecdotes like this from other universities. And as always, there are professors that care. The professor in the article obviously did, but it reads like he really needed a kick in the pants (widespread cheating) to see he needed to do more to engage the students meaningfully.
I'm sure it isn't you, and I also see how many instructors that do care aren't given the resources they need to manage a more complex workload. But some, IDK. Some absolutely loath undergrads and thing they all are lazy, and cheat, and then create a self-fulfilling prophesy by barely phoning it in, and then doing the easiest, bare minimum exam planning which leads to multiple choice, easy to cheat answers.
This isn't just a perception as a student, I've heard about this kind of attitude from the aforementioned TA friends who've heard the instructor of their courses say exactly this.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 10:18 AM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
It might just be my university; one of the best teachers I've had is an adjunct and she's leaving after 2 years because her experience there was so frustrating and disheartening. She only mentioned it briefly in a private conversation we had, but this does not surprise me at all. I'm friend with some TAs so I hear about it from that angle; and I worked in a role that while I was a student employee, because of my professional background, I got to participate in staff meeting and see parts of how the sausage was made.
Or it might not be just my university, there are tons of anecdotes like this from other universities. And as always, there are professors that care. The professor in the article obviously did, but it reads like he really needed a kick in the pants (widespread cheating) to see he needed to do more to engage the students meaningfully.
I'm sure it isn't you, and I also see how many instructors that do care aren't given the resources they need to manage a more complex workload. But some, IDK. Some absolutely loath undergrads and thing they all are lazy, and cheat, and then create a self-fulfilling prophesy by barely phoning it in, and then doing the easiest, bare minimum exam planning which leads to multiple choice, easy to cheat answers.
This isn't just a perception as a student, I've heard about this kind of attitude from the aforementioned TA friends who've heard the instructor of their courses say exactly this.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 10:18 AM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
It seems there’s an expectation of cheating and plagiarism in American academia. I’ve spent a long time in academia in the UK and Europe, and never seen any evidence of the scale of cheating mentioned in the article or comments. Of course, there will be exceptions, but culturally this seems very alien to me
I had a professor in graduate school (who was Italian, had attended Bocconi) who at some point in our first term said "okay, in Italy cheating is very common because we see the university as a source of power and cheating is a way to seize power! but in the United States they take it more seriously, so don't cheat."
But I think that was more on order of using old exams to study from or letting someone glance at your exam, not on this order of magnitude. (And this was pre-COVID by a long shot). Also I have no idea if his comments were representative of the Italian university system, or maybe just the economics students at Bocconi in the 70s.
I haven't read the essay (eep) but I did read the discussion in the thread. I teach college, but at at a selective LAC, which has very different class sizes and mutual understanding. We had to discuss our plagiarism guidelines awhile back because they were oriented towards 'copying an essay you found on the internet.' The new ones refect a more nuanced understanding. For example, googling to figure out how to do something in a program may be cheating/plagiarism in some circumstances, but not in others, and professors need to clearly communicate that fact.
posted by dismas at 10:22 AM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
I had a professor in graduate school (who was Italian, had attended Bocconi) who at some point in our first term said "okay, in Italy cheating is very common because we see the university as a source of power and cheating is a way to seize power! but in the United States they take it more seriously, so don't cheat."
But I think that was more on order of using old exams to study from or letting someone glance at your exam, not on this order of magnitude. (And this was pre-COVID by a long shot). Also I have no idea if his comments were representative of the Italian university system, or maybe just the economics students at Bocconi in the 70s.
I haven't read the essay (eep) but I did read the discussion in the thread. I teach college, but at at a selective LAC, which has very different class sizes and mutual understanding. We had to discuss our plagiarism guidelines awhile back because they were oriented towards 'copying an essay you found on the internet.' The new ones refect a more nuanced understanding. For example, googling to figure out how to do something in a program may be cheating/plagiarism in some circumstances, but not in others, and professors need to clearly communicate that fact.
posted by dismas at 10:22 AM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
On that note, I get why he didn't talk to the students right away about their cheating. He claims it was because of the work involved, but dollars to donuts, I bet it was curiosity as well. I am getting my minor in psychology, and I have the same kind of curiosity.
As an old going back to school in such a chaotic time, I've often felt like an anthropologist observing a whole new people (and I kind of love it). Heck, I feel like he does with being invited to ad hoc digital spaces where I'm observing, feeling like I infiltrated something, AND I'M A FELLOW STUDENT.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 10:26 AM on May 29, 2022
As an old going back to school in such a chaotic time, I've often felt like an anthropologist observing a whole new people (and I kind of love it). Heck, I feel like he does with being invited to ad hoc digital spaces where I'm observing, feeling like I infiltrated something, AND I'M A FELLOW STUDENT.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 10:26 AM on May 29, 2022
"I wasn’t ready to inform them about what was going on until I had processed all of the facts, . . . I tried as hard as I could. But, I couldn’t get it done. I had to give the next midterm, and I knew that probably meant a bunch more cheating. "
Wildly unethical. I understand that he changed the exam so that cheating would be harder, but knowing that they were likely to cheat, allowing them to continue trying to cheat and then punishing them for that additional attempt is the just plain wrong. He could have postponed the exam. He could have sent out an announcement that he knew there was cheating going on with a reminder not to do it on the exam (and a clear signal that question sharing on whatsapp is cheating).
"Some students had never sent a single message in the chat until the dam broke in midterm 2. I had to add them to the list of students who cheated. So close."
Wow, what an asshole.
"The sour cherry on top was that I had to rewrite the faculty action reports for each student because of the new evidence of cheating from midterm two. I re-archived the chat and opened up RStudio."
Yeah, you set them up to fail and then think you're the one to feel sorry for?
So, much to annoy me here.
"TBH, I’m so over trying to deter my students from cheating. There are so many ways I could lock down my courses. Not interested. If real life was about being monitored by proctoring software that spies on you at home and forces you to test under duress, it would be a sad real life"
So you don't want to implement effective anti-cheating measures, but you are willing to spend weeks, weeks!, filing reports on cheating?
I can't with this guy.
posted by oddman at 10:28 AM on May 29, 2022 [16 favorites]
Wildly unethical. I understand that he changed the exam so that cheating would be harder, but knowing that they were likely to cheat, allowing them to continue trying to cheat and then punishing them for that additional attempt is the just plain wrong. He could have postponed the exam. He could have sent out an announcement that he knew there was cheating going on with a reminder not to do it on the exam (and a clear signal that question sharing on whatsapp is cheating).
"Some students had never sent a single message in the chat until the dam broke in midterm 2. I had to add them to the list of students who cheated. So close."
Wow, what an asshole.
"The sour cherry on top was that I had to rewrite the faculty action reports for each student because of the new evidence of cheating from midterm two. I re-archived the chat and opened up RStudio."
Yeah, you set them up to fail and then think you're the one to feel sorry for?
So, much to annoy me here.
"TBH, I’m so over trying to deter my students from cheating. There are so many ways I could lock down my courses. Not interested. If real life was about being monitored by proctoring software that spies on you at home and forces you to test under duress, it would be a sad real life"
So you don't want to implement effective anti-cheating measures, but you are willing to spend weeks, weeks!, filing reports on cheating?
I can't with this guy.
posted by oddman at 10:28 AM on May 29, 2022 [16 favorites]
Also, the exams were open book. As one of the students noted, you could find all the answers just by ctrl-F for keywords in the online textbook. The cheating students weren't practicing "Google-fu," they were practicing "I don't know how to Google this, can you Google it for me?"
Googling for answers is fine when you need to access well-established facts. I want my doctor to look up my symptoms if she has any doubts about what might be going on. But I also want her to have a solid understanding of human physiology and how my symptoms fit into a larger picture, otherwise I could just Google my own fucking symptoms. That understanding doesn't come from regurgitating facts from Google, or from a textbook, or from your classmates, it comes from actively engaging with the subject, thinking critically about it, asking questions and seeking answers that aren't obvious, questioning why the standard accepted answers are the right answers.
Maybe those of you who are convinced that higher education is nothing but credentialism are happy to have a system in which the sole role of a doctor is to have someone to go to who is credentialed to write you a prescription for a drug on the basis of the same Googling that you could have done yourself. Me, I think that definitely happens, and it's a big part of why our healthcare system is as broken as it is. Perhaps we've gotten the society we deserve.
posted by biogeo at 10:29 AM on May 29, 2022 [44 favorites]
Googling for answers is fine when you need to access well-established facts. I want my doctor to look up my symptoms if she has any doubts about what might be going on. But I also want her to have a solid understanding of human physiology and how my symptoms fit into a larger picture, otherwise I could just Google my own fucking symptoms. That understanding doesn't come from regurgitating facts from Google, or from a textbook, or from your classmates, it comes from actively engaging with the subject, thinking critically about it, asking questions and seeking answers that aren't obvious, questioning why the standard accepted answers are the right answers.
Maybe those of you who are convinced that higher education is nothing but credentialism are happy to have a system in which the sole role of a doctor is to have someone to go to who is credentialed to write you a prescription for a drug on the basis of the same Googling that you could have done yourself. Me, I think that definitely happens, and it's a big part of why our healthcare system is as broken as it is. Perhaps we've gotten the society we deserve.
posted by biogeo at 10:29 AM on May 29, 2022 [44 favorites]
Some absolutely loath undergrads and thing they all are lazy, and cheat, and then create a self-fulfilling prophesy by barely phoning it in.
My whole approach to cheating (i.e. trying to design a system in which it is at least inconvenient to cheat) is informed by my least favorite undergrad prof. He gave freeform, off-the-cuff lectures, mostly just repeating what was in the text, and made no effort to help the students organize the material. Then at exam time he served up the same test, year after year. A large clique from the class had access to previous tests and used that to pass.
It became clear that (a) he was using the cheating as a crutch, rather than creating a clear and organized class and (b) studying on one's own without reference to the test felt like getting ripped off. (I eventually challenged him on it, and it was clear that he was conscious it was all happening.)
Basically more than anything I do not want to be that guy, so I suppose I owe him a debt of gratitude.
posted by anhedonic at 10:41 AM on May 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
My whole approach to cheating (i.e. trying to design a system in which it is at least inconvenient to cheat) is informed by my least favorite undergrad prof. He gave freeform, off-the-cuff lectures, mostly just repeating what was in the text, and made no effort to help the students organize the material. Then at exam time he served up the same test, year after year. A large clique from the class had access to previous tests and used that to pass.
It became clear that (a) he was using the cheating as a crutch, rather than creating a clear and organized class and (b) studying on one's own without reference to the test felt like getting ripped off. (I eventually challenged him on it, and it was clear that he was conscious it was all happening.)
Basically more than anything I do not want to be that guy, so I suppose I owe him a debt of gratitude.
posted by anhedonic at 10:41 AM on May 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
Sure, to some extent "learning how to be good at cheating" is a valuable skill out in the real world. You don't need to know everything yourself. Even if learning how to cheat is a goal, these students get an F in cheating. You don't... oh for fuck's sake lots of things but for ONE, you don't immediately create a giant group and invite people you don't trust or even for the love of god KNOW, into your incriminating cheating group.
I've re-enrolled (and subsequently dropped out yet again) in undergraduate online programs, and I also used to run a professional training and qualification program. I've learned a few things about cheating, anti-cheating measures, etc. Here's a few random thoughts I had reading all the comments here:
Some of the hardest tests I've ever taken have been open book. The questions have to be written for that, though, and the test given a maximum time. You can look up any bare fact in seconds or minutes, especially now in the electronic full-text-search era. You do not have time to teach yourself, from scratch, entire concepts and application in a timed test. Nor can your buddy teach it to you on WhatsApp. The questions need to make the students USE multiple facts.
Written exams are not very good at testing for the purpose of the teacher evaluating whether the student knows enough. They're good for two things: feedback for the teacher that they may not have explained something as well as they could have, and checkpointing for the student that they have some areas to work on before the real test. The real test, for things that really matter like professional certifications, should be interactive oral interview style.
The student should understand that learning the material is in their best interest. Have them watch an advanced-level lecture in the same subject. Is this all incomprehensible to you? Are you hopelessly lost? Do you want to feel like that when you're sitting in that lecture a couple of years from now?
On the "gentleman's C" - I mean, as a student who did always do the work, that could be fine with me. I don't begrudge anyone their good deal as long as it doesn't hurt me any. But here's the thing: If doing none of the work rates a C, then I better get a minimum of a B no matter how bad my work was.
And for what it's worth, we've run into a thing at work here where we've encouraged teamwork, collaboration, relying on your team-mates, and those are all great things. I would literally reprimand someone who tried to do something important purely by their own memory without verifying their ideas in the manuals (looking it up, i.e. "cheating"), and bouncing their plans off of their colleages (ask your buddy, i.e. "cheating"). And it seems that we have also created a culture in which, when an emergent situation comes up and people have to act on their own for a while, they can't. They don't know enough. The minimum standards have fallen that much. It's a problem and I'm not sure how to raise the standard back up without seeming un-realistically draconian.
posted by ctmf at 11:36 AM on May 29, 2022 [13 favorites]
I've re-enrolled (and subsequently dropped out yet again) in undergraduate online programs, and I also used to run a professional training and qualification program. I've learned a few things about cheating, anti-cheating measures, etc. Here's a few random thoughts I had reading all the comments here:
Some of the hardest tests I've ever taken have been open book. The questions have to be written for that, though, and the test given a maximum time. You can look up any bare fact in seconds or minutes, especially now in the electronic full-text-search era. You do not have time to teach yourself, from scratch, entire concepts and application in a timed test. Nor can your buddy teach it to you on WhatsApp. The questions need to make the students USE multiple facts.
Written exams are not very good at testing for the purpose of the teacher evaluating whether the student knows enough. They're good for two things: feedback for the teacher that they may not have explained something as well as they could have, and checkpointing for the student that they have some areas to work on before the real test. The real test, for things that really matter like professional certifications, should be interactive oral interview style.
The student should understand that learning the material is in their best interest. Have them watch an advanced-level lecture in the same subject. Is this all incomprehensible to you? Are you hopelessly lost? Do you want to feel like that when you're sitting in that lecture a couple of years from now?
On the "gentleman's C" - I mean, as a student who did always do the work, that could be fine with me. I don't begrudge anyone their good deal as long as it doesn't hurt me any. But here's the thing: If doing none of the work rates a C, then I better get a minimum of a B no matter how bad my work was.
And for what it's worth, we've run into a thing at work here where we've encouraged teamwork, collaboration, relying on your team-mates, and those are all great things. I would literally reprimand someone who tried to do something important purely by their own memory without verifying their ideas in the manuals (looking it up, i.e. "cheating"), and bouncing their plans off of their colleages (ask your buddy, i.e. "cheating"). And it seems that we have also created a culture in which, when an emergent situation comes up and people have to act on their own for a while, they can't. They don't know enough. The minimum standards have fallen that much. It's a problem and I'm not sure how to raise the standard back up without seeming un-realistically draconian.
posted by ctmf at 11:36 AM on May 29, 2022 [13 favorites]
Do you want to feel like that when you're sitting in that lecture a couple of years from now?
Do you want to feel like that every day at work, after school is over?
posted by ctmf at 11:42 AM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
Do you want to feel like that every day at work, after school is over?
posted by ctmf at 11:42 AM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
I can absolutely see the appeal of the Gentleman's C in many situations - I was also a good student who didn't need that, but also never begrudged others if they got one - but as a teacher, it's simply not an option for me when I'm teaching anything foundational, which students are extremly likely to be tested about in other exams further down the line, graded by someone other than me.
posted by sohalt at 11:53 AM on May 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by sohalt at 11:53 AM on May 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
I abhor cheating, but I think the bad faith of cheating on exams is nothing compared to the bad faith of admitting students you know you have no room for in upper level courses, and that you plan to drive out of your school before they graduate no matter what it takes.
And usually what it takes is big lecture courses graded so as to fail a minimum number of students.
That's a lot of motivation to cheat.
posted by jamjam at 11:53 AM on May 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
And usually what it takes is big lecture courses graded so as to fail a minimum number of students.
That's a lot of motivation to cheat.
posted by jamjam at 11:53 AM on May 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
This is has to be one of the most interesting posts I have ever read here. And the thread is, too -- as well as one of the most humbling. If ever I was of no fixed opinion in regards to the matter at hand, this is it. But life is short and I have work to do today. The sweet peas are bolting, for one. Suffice it to say, my initial and well uninformed hot take is what Herbert Morrison said in 1937. In so many more ways than one. In so many more ways than one.
posted by y2karl at 12:13 PM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by y2karl at 12:13 PM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
My feelings about cheating are similar to the author’s, but because I have the luxury of Metafilter I want to interrogate those feelings a bit.
I support ctmf’s point that there is a certain base level of competency we need people to have for our complicated society, with all its specialized moving parts, to keep running. But I don’t actually think that’s all that’s going on in professor outrage over cheating. I say that because I think the content does not matter — I think even in a class that was an elective for everyone in the room, in a subject nobody present was majoring in, those of us who are aggrieved by cheating would still be aggrieved if we saw the behavior described in this piece. It’s not a consequentialist feeling, it’s a deontological feeling, it seems to me.
Why? Today I’m wondering if it’s because one of the roles higher education plays in this society is justifying unequal outcomes. I think for this justification to work, everyone has to agree on the basics: that the game is played by certain rules set by the professor, who is in charge. Students who cheat their way into a degree threaten the authority of the professor and risk upending the tacit agreement that "winning" by the rules of this system legitimizes differential access to wealth and power at the end of it.
I still hate cheating though! Like an illusion that doesn’t get disrupted even after I have been told how it works.
posted by eirias at 12:26 PM on May 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
I support ctmf’s point that there is a certain base level of competency we need people to have for our complicated society, with all its specialized moving parts, to keep running. But I don’t actually think that’s all that’s going on in professor outrage over cheating. I say that because I think the content does not matter — I think even in a class that was an elective for everyone in the room, in a subject nobody present was majoring in, those of us who are aggrieved by cheating would still be aggrieved if we saw the behavior described in this piece. It’s not a consequentialist feeling, it’s a deontological feeling, it seems to me.
Why? Today I’m wondering if it’s because one of the roles higher education plays in this society is justifying unequal outcomes. I think for this justification to work, everyone has to agree on the basics: that the game is played by certain rules set by the professor, who is in charge. Students who cheat their way into a degree threaten the authority of the professor and risk upending the tacit agreement that "winning" by the rules of this system legitimizes differential access to wealth and power at the end of it.
I still hate cheating though! Like an illusion that doesn’t get disrupted even after I have been told how it works.
posted by eirias at 12:26 PM on May 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
How the internet gets people to plagiarize each other
posted by chavenet at 12:41 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by chavenet at 12:41 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
More than anything else, his post makes me want to learn R.
posted by bz at 12:46 PM on May 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by bz at 12:46 PM on May 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
Students who cheat their way into a degree threaten the authority of the professor and risk upending the tacit agreement that "winning" by the rules of this system legitimizes differential access to wealth and power at the end of it.
This is such a good point.
There was recently as question on AskMetafilter about the use of personality assessment tests like the MBTI etc. in Human Resource Management. Based on the answers, I'm fairly certain that pretty much all of Metafilter would agree that you can always lie to your heart's content when doing these exercises, because gaming personality tests is always morally correct. Even most people who saw a certain limited usefulness in certain context argued that these tests shouldn't be used for staff decisions anyway, so there's really no damage at all in sabotaging anyone's efforts to do that.
I'm also in the camp of those who think that the MBTI can be easily replaced by a What-Disney-princess-are-you buzzfeed quiz, and I do very much like to think that my own exams test for something slightly more relevant than that. But I can kinda see why a student might not see it like that, and draw the same conclusions I drew about the MBTI. It makes me very sad, and certainly feel like a bad teacher, but I just can't get too morally outraged.
The problem however is not just that it delegitimizes me as a teacher, it also deligitimizes the efforts of the other students who apparently don't think the whole affair is just a joke. It can really ruin the group dynamics in a class.
Now my attitude towards the MBTI is that I wouldn't even bother to think one second about how to game it, because I obviously wouldn't want any job where that's actually used for recruiting. Maybe we would all be better off if more of my students felt that they could take that stance towards my subjects as well.
posted by sohalt at 12:50 PM on May 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
This is such a good point.
There was recently as question on AskMetafilter about the use of personality assessment tests like the MBTI etc. in Human Resource Management. Based on the answers, I'm fairly certain that pretty much all of Metafilter would agree that you can always lie to your heart's content when doing these exercises, because gaming personality tests is always morally correct. Even most people who saw a certain limited usefulness in certain context argued that these tests shouldn't be used for staff decisions anyway, so there's really no damage at all in sabotaging anyone's efforts to do that.
I'm also in the camp of those who think that the MBTI can be easily replaced by a What-Disney-princess-are-you buzzfeed quiz, and I do very much like to think that my own exams test for something slightly more relevant than that. But I can kinda see why a student might not see it like that, and draw the same conclusions I drew about the MBTI. It makes me very sad, and certainly feel like a bad teacher, but I just can't get too morally outraged.
The problem however is not just that it delegitimizes me as a teacher, it also deligitimizes the efforts of the other students who apparently don't think the whole affair is just a joke. It can really ruin the group dynamics in a class.
Now my attitude towards the MBTI is that I wouldn't even bother to think one second about how to game it, because I obviously wouldn't want any job where that's actually used for recruiting. Maybe we would all be better off if more of my students felt that they could take that stance towards my subjects as well.
posted by sohalt at 12:50 PM on May 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
Students who cheat their way into a degree threaten the authority of the professor and risk upending the tacit agreement that "winning" by the rules of this system legitimizes differential access to wealth and power at the end of it.
Nonsense. Students who cheat their way into a degree are just like all the other unprincipled assholes who are ruining the world. Donald Trump didn't get a degree from Wharton by studying hard and following the professors' rules, he did it by being born rich enough to bullshit his way through the system, and I'd bet my last dollar that he cheated every chance he got. George W. Bush's "gentleman's C" at Yale wasn't earned through hard work and being respectful of his professors' expectations. Boris Johnson quotes enough literature in his performative foppery that maybe he actually paid attention at Eton, but he clearly never bothered to critically engage with his studies enough to develop any wisdom.
Cheating isn't a threat to the capitalist system of shallow credentialism in higher education, it's the fuel that keeps it fed. And I don't think for a moment that it's the kids who really need that education, who are the first in their families to attend college, who are trying to work a job at the same time, who are hoping to get something that will break them out of the cycle of poverty, I don't think for a moment that they're the ones who are cheating their way through school. Because they're the ones who value it. Honestly, as someone whose parents did not have a college education, I find the idea that they're something just or noble in students gaming the "system" of higher education in order to gain a credential with less effort to be pretty insulting. I fucking wanted to be there, because I wanted to learn, and the fact that my college degree is worth as much as that of the jerks who just wanted to have four years to spend their parents' money on beer and parties and skim through with a degree in Business Information Technology or whatever is not something to be celebrated. Yes, it's ridiculous and faintly obscene that universities offer such programs, and I'm happy to condemn capitalism and the university administrators who've decided to play capitalism's game by offering such shallow credentials for the price of a four-year degree program. But the students who also decide to play that game aren't bucking the system, they're part of it.
posted by biogeo at 12:51 PM on May 29, 2022 [41 favorites]
Also, I apologize to anyone who got a degree in Business Information Technology, but I honestly don't think that should be a four-year college degree. Not because it's not valuable work, but because it could easily be a certificate program with work-experience training and everyone would be better off.
posted by biogeo at 12:54 PM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by biogeo at 12:54 PM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
My wife is a CUNY professor and hot damn, this was like reading her journal from the past couple years. THough she probably wouldn't have included the GIFs.
posted by Navelgazer at 12:56 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Navelgazer at 12:56 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
When folks have said that googling is a valuable job skill - well, in my current job, a lot of my work is "people email me policy and process questions and I tell them the relevant policy and process". A lot of my job is in fact looking things up on the internet, interpreting them to determine the answer and explaining them back to the asker. These questions range from extremely easy questions that require nothing more evaluating than a google search to moderately complex questions which require cross-referencing sources and consulting previous work. I am relatively new to this job, so I'm still learning the relevant policies and depend a lot on senior colleagues for help.
"I can easily pull and copy answers to these questions from the internet or get them from my peers rather than attending class, writing anything or doing group work" is not a path that would prepare you for my job. I did not get the experience I needed to do this job by googling-and-dropping; I got the experience by doing a lot of different things and having a general sense of how policy and process work. No matter how good I was at searching, I would not be able to do this job without a reasonable grounding in facts that I actually know out of my own head.
Googling is a very valuable job skill, but unless the class is structured around searching for and interpreting information, merely googling/asking for the answers doesn't actually prepare you to do search/interpretation work, which is the actual valuable job skill.
posted by Frowner at 1:00 PM on May 29, 2022 [32 favorites]
"I can easily pull and copy answers to these questions from the internet or get them from my peers rather than attending class, writing anything or doing group work" is not a path that would prepare you for my job. I did not get the experience I needed to do this job by googling-and-dropping; I got the experience by doing a lot of different things and having a general sense of how policy and process work. No matter how good I was at searching, I would not be able to do this job without a reasonable grounding in facts that I actually know out of my own head.
Googling is a very valuable job skill, but unless the class is structured around searching for and interpreting information, merely googling/asking for the answers doesn't actually prepare you to do search/interpretation work, which is the actual valuable job skill.
posted by Frowner at 1:00 PM on May 29, 2022 [32 favorites]
Ah, apologies, biogeo! I definitely am not trying to justify the existence of the Donald Trumps of the world, or to say that people can’t genuinely use college to learn and to increase their power. Clearly that happens sometimes. I just think the institution is also playing this other role too. Much like religion can provide real meaning for some even as it functions oppressively for others.
posted by eirias at 1:15 PM on May 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by eirias at 1:15 PM on May 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
I fucking wanted to be there, because I wanted to learn, and the fact that my college degree is worth as much as that of the jerks who just wanted to have four years to spend their parents' money on beer and parties and skim through with a degree in Business Information Technology or whatever is not something to be celebrated.
I mean, I do still very much feel that my degree is worth more - maybe not when it comes to getting the job, but certainly when it comes to keeping the job. Because I did do the work, and now I actually do have the skills, and that's sure useful if you don't want to feel anxious about work all the time.
Those examples you named, of course they are not going to ever feel anxious about work either. Because they know perfectly well that they're to big too fail, and will never suffer any consequences for any fuck-ups. But sadly I think that's a whole other ballpark dimension of the problem. I'm sorry to be cyncial, what I'm going to say is very bleak - but these guys, they were kinda going above and beyond just by bothering to cheat to get the degree; they would very probably have gotten just as much power and just as many opportunities without it.
posted by sohalt at 1:16 PM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
I mean, I do still very much feel that my degree is worth more - maybe not when it comes to getting the job, but certainly when it comes to keeping the job. Because I did do the work, and now I actually do have the skills, and that's sure useful if you don't want to feel anxious about work all the time.
Those examples you named, of course they are not going to ever feel anxious about work either. Because they know perfectly well that they're to big too fail, and will never suffer any consequences for any fuck-ups. But sadly I think that's a whole other ballpark dimension of the problem. I'm sorry to be cyncial, what I'm going to say is very bleak - but these guys, they were kinda going above and beyond just by bothering to cheat to get the degree; they would very probably have gotten just as much power and just as many opportunities without it.
posted by sohalt at 1:16 PM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
I would literally reprimand someone who tried to do something important purely by their own memory without verifying their ideas in the manuals (looking it up, i.e. "cheating"), and bouncing their plans off of their colleages (ask your buddy, i.e. "cheating").
In addition to the rare emergency when there's no time to ask for help, it's also very hard to tell when you've crossed the line from "stronger people help the weaker ones" to "the blind leading the blind".
posted by ctmf at 1:17 PM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
In addition to the rare emergency when there's no time to ask for help, it's also very hard to tell when you've crossed the line from "stronger people help the weaker ones" to "the blind leading the blind".
posted by ctmf at 1:17 PM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
If the question is whether cheating, or a culture of cheating, is a cause or an effect of capitalism, I think the correct answer is that it is both.
okay, in Italy cheating is very common because we see the university as a source of power and cheating is a way to seize power! but in the United States they take it more seriously, so don't cheat
An Austrian postdoc once made my and my peer's jaws drop in stunned silence when he casually told us, during the Harvard scandals, that he too had cheated in undergrad. He wrly laughed, and now I understand his point was Americans' strange way of moralizing about this kind of misses the point.
posted by polymodus at 1:21 PM on May 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
okay, in Italy cheating is very common because we see the university as a source of power and cheating is a way to seize power! but in the United States they take it more seriously, so don't cheat
An Austrian postdoc once made my and my peer's jaws drop in stunned silence when he casually told us, during the Harvard scandals, that he too had cheated in undergrad. He wrly laughed, and now I understand his point was Americans' strange way of moralizing about this kind of misses the point.
posted by polymodus at 1:21 PM on May 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
No apology needed, eiras, but it's kind of you to offer one. Obviously I have strong feelings on this, but I acknowledge your and others' differing perspectives are in good faith, even if I (strongly) disagree with them, and I value them as contributions to the discussion.
posted by biogeo at 1:25 PM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by biogeo at 1:25 PM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
And your point about higher education playing multiple roles in our society, some of them negative, is well-taken and I agree with that.
posted by biogeo at 1:26 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by biogeo at 1:26 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
Well radical integrity itself is an interesting discussion, we just talked about it back in the "cheating in a job interview" thread. There are certain jobs where showing any inclination to cheat or fudge information for your own convenience should be automatically disqualifying, because those situations are likely to come up in the course of business. Other jobs, being cut-throat and machiavellian like that is something to tout on your resume.
posted by ctmf at 1:28 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by ctmf at 1:28 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
And I don't think for a moment that it's the kids who really need that education, who are the first in their families to attend college, who are trying to work a job at the same time, who are hoping to get something that will break them out of the cycle of poverty, I don't think for a moment that they're the ones who are cheating their way through school. Because they're the ones who value it.
I'm so sorry to write this, but I feel I really need to: in my experience, those kids are some of the worst plagiarists. Along with the the privileged kids of the super rich, yes. But in that bag.
I think a lot about this, and how to address it. I've only just begun to teach first semester, and I feel there is something I can do in that introductory course. I think that for many of those students, getting into college has been a struggle, and a struggle where every trick counted. In the face of structural racism and inexplicable codes, plagiarizing has probably been the only way ahead in many high schools. (I'm not saying math has a racial bias, I'm saying English (and in my case Danish) has a racial bias, and conservative politicians are working hard to make sure it does).
posted by mumimor at 1:37 PM on May 29, 2022 [13 favorites]
I'm so sorry to write this, but I feel I really need to: in my experience, those kids are some of the worst plagiarists. Along with the the privileged kids of the super rich, yes. But in that bag.
I think a lot about this, and how to address it. I've only just begun to teach first semester, and I feel there is something I can do in that introductory course. I think that for many of those students, getting into college has been a struggle, and a struggle where every trick counted. In the face of structural racism and inexplicable codes, plagiarizing has probably been the only way ahead in many high schools. (I'm not saying math has a racial bias, I'm saying English (and in my case Danish) has a racial bias, and conservative politicians are working hard to make sure it does).
posted by mumimor at 1:37 PM on May 29, 2022 [13 favorites]
If the man had hit them with plagerism notices and shut it down when he realized what was going down I would be right there with him.
He didn't, instead he got to write this essay.
posted by pan at 1:57 PM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
He didn't, instead he got to write this essay.
posted by pan at 1:57 PM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
Standard question: Would you want to be operated on by a doctor who cheated like this in medical school?
Sure, the classes they cheated in may be irrelevant to your surgical procedure. But do you want the I-had-to-cheat doctor?
posted by AlSweigart at 2:07 PM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
Sure, the classes they cheated in may be irrelevant to your surgical procedure. But do you want the I-had-to-cheat doctor?
posted by AlSweigart at 2:07 PM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
If the man had hit them with plagerism notices and shut it down when he realized what was going down I would be right there with him.
If, in other words, he'd shunted the problem off to university bureaucracy, which tends to operate on "flunk 'em first and ask questions probably not at all." Cui bono? Where is justice, never mind humanity or heaven forbid education, in this?
And anyone who thinks "he did nothing and then wrote an essay about it" didn't actually read the essay. Which is, shall we say, perhaps indicative.
posted by humbug at 2:09 PM on May 29, 2022 [16 favorites]
If, in other words, he'd shunted the problem off to university bureaucracy, which tends to operate on "flunk 'em first and ask questions probably not at all." Cui bono? Where is justice, never mind humanity or heaven forbid education, in this?
And anyone who thinks "he did nothing and then wrote an essay about it" didn't actually read the essay. Which is, shall we say, perhaps indicative.
posted by humbug at 2:09 PM on May 29, 2022 [16 favorites]
Over the "gentleman's C" doctor?
If the man had hit them with plagerism notices and shut it down when he realized what was going down I would be right there with him.
I might have gone with an immediate "this group has been archived and is being investigated for academic dishonesty" post, myself. But really, I can't expect a college professor to be trained enough to know what to do in that situation without some amount of could-have/should-have/would-have critiquing possible.
posted by ctmf at 2:11 PM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
If the man had hit them with plagerism notices and shut it down when he realized what was going down I would be right there with him.
I might have gone with an immediate "this group has been archived and is being investigated for academic dishonesty" post, myself. But really, I can't expect a college professor to be trained enough to know what to do in that situation without some amount of could-have/should-have/would-have critiquing possible.
posted by ctmf at 2:11 PM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
I read it, he sat on the problem and treated it like an experiment. It is, in a word, gross.
posted by pan at 2:18 PM on May 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by pan at 2:18 PM on May 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
I read it, he sat on the problem and treated it like an experiment.
I mean, no, that's very clearly not what happened. Unless you've decided he's lying? In which case why believe any of the story?
posted by biogeo at 2:25 PM on May 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
I mean, no, that's very clearly not what happened. Unless you've decided he's lying? In which case why believe any of the story?
I mean, the statistical psychologist waxing poetic about all the statistical psychology he was doing didn't ping you as a bit cruddy?
posted by pan at 2:42 PM on May 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
Interesting discussion here!
As an overwhelmed grad student instructor, I could never figure out how to accomplish all the many, many tasks of teaching while doing my own work and living a life—caring for a toddler, paying bills, etc.
I’m afraid I didn’t puzzle out anything like a credo on cheating. If I caught it, I busted it. If I didn’t, I didn’t. I spent most of my teaching time trying to figure out how to convey the subject matter effectively, that is, how to teach.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 2:43 PM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
As an overwhelmed grad student instructor, I could never figure out how to accomplish all the many, many tasks of teaching while doing my own work and living a life—caring for a toddler, paying bills, etc.
I’m afraid I didn’t puzzle out anything like a credo on cheating. If I caught it, I busted it. If I didn’t, I didn’t. I spent most of my teaching time trying to figure out how to convey the subject matter effectively, that is, how to teach.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 2:43 PM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
I'm not sure some people here understand just how much extra work this professor made for himself in an attempt to save his cheating students' asses. Many, perhaps most, would have just given the students zeros on the assignments in question and reported them to the academic integrity office. Many would have just given the students failing grades for the entire class immediately; then you have to deal with their (almost certainly unsuccessful) appeal process but otherwise are rid of them unless and until they retake your class, which means less time spent determining which assignments are copied from other students and/or plagiarized. This guy instead did the necessary documentation of academic dishonesty per his institution's policy, and then created an entire second syllabus halfway through the semester that the cheaters could follow in order to save their grades and pass the course anyway. And tried to do it in a way that would be fair to the students who hadn't cheated. Honestly, it inspired me to be better and more sympathetic to students like his. The responses here attacking this generous response inspire the opposite impulse in me.
No, not in the slightest. That's just using your skillset to solve a problem. And he did it on behalf of his cheating students. If he hadn't figured out how to use R to automate the cheating detection and reporting, he would have definitely had to spend all of the time that he spent developing that second syllabus instead on doing the reporting required by his institution's policy.
Honestly I think it's the condemnation of this guy here that's gross.
posted by biogeo at 2:47 PM on May 29, 2022 [77 favorites]
I mean, the statistical psychologist waxing poetic about all the statistical psychology he was doing didn't ping you as a bit cruddy?
No, not in the slightest. That's just using your skillset to solve a problem. And he did it on behalf of his cheating students. If he hadn't figured out how to use R to automate the cheating detection and reporting, he would have definitely had to spend all of the time that he spent developing that second syllabus instead on doing the reporting required by his institution's policy.
Honestly I think it's the condemnation of this guy here that's gross.
posted by biogeo at 2:47 PM on May 29, 2022 [77 favorites]
I'm not sure some people here understand just how much extra work this professor made for himself in an attempt to save his cheating students' asses.
Absolutely. It’s a jaw-dropping amount of work to design the same class twice, the second time while you are in the middle of it. It’s a mind-blowing amount of steering into the skid at a time when I think most professors would be trapped in fury and self-loathing (because every teacher I know takes it personally when their students fail to learn — even if they know on some level that they shouldn’t — and this one stumbled into a whole hell of a lot of failure to learn).
posted by eirias at 2:52 PM on May 29, 2022 [20 favorites]
Absolutely. It’s a jaw-dropping amount of work to design the same class twice, the second time while you are in the middle of it. It’s a mind-blowing amount of steering into the skid at a time when I think most professors would be trapped in fury and self-loathing (because every teacher I know takes it personally when their students fail to learn — even if they know on some level that they shouldn’t — and this one stumbled into a whole hell of a lot of failure to learn).
posted by eirias at 2:52 PM on May 29, 2022 [20 favorites]
But universities serve two purposes, ESPECIALLY if one has any kind of academic bent. The first is learning stuff. You go to classes and learn things.
But the second purpose is so you can get a number, that says how smart and studious you are, how hard-working you are. This is a stupid shortcut: lots of really smart people with sub-3.8 GPAs, but if you want to get into a good grad school or get a lot of certain types of work, that GPA is important.
But that number is really stupid, and really biased, and it is impossible to actually do an apples-to-apples measurement of that against others. Everybody here has had a class that was really hard, where one of the other profs teaching it made it really easy.
So if you're going to put that much importance on that number, then you can probably expect that people are going to ensure that they get the high grade, which, again, is more about a number and not really about the knowledge. ESPECIALLY if the way you test the knowledge is with randomized multiple choice/true-false tests.
Because the dirty little secret is that many many profs are really smart, and not good teachers. They either don't know how to impart the knowledge, or they don't know how to ensure the students have actually learned the stuff.
So why wouldn't you expect this? Why wouldn't you expect people to learn the stuff, but also learn what they need to do to get the right number?
posted by nushustu at 2:54 PM on May 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
But the second purpose is so you can get a number, that says how smart and studious you are, how hard-working you are. This is a stupid shortcut: lots of really smart people with sub-3.8 GPAs, but if you want to get into a good grad school or get a lot of certain types of work, that GPA is important.
But that number is really stupid, and really biased, and it is impossible to actually do an apples-to-apples measurement of that against others. Everybody here has had a class that was really hard, where one of the other profs teaching it made it really easy.
So if you're going to put that much importance on that number, then you can probably expect that people are going to ensure that they get the high grade, which, again, is more about a number and not really about the knowledge. ESPECIALLY if the way you test the knowledge is with randomized multiple choice/true-false tests.
Because the dirty little secret is that many many profs are really smart, and not good teachers. They either don't know how to impart the knowledge, or they don't know how to ensure the students have actually learned the stuff.
So why wouldn't you expect this? Why wouldn't you expect people to learn the stuff, but also learn what they need to do to get the right number?
posted by nushustu at 2:54 PM on May 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
Why wouldn't you expect people to learn the stuff, but also learn what they need to do to get the right number?
From his A/B test, first to second midterm, it sounds like this was not mostly people trying to turn a B into an A (get the "right number"). It was people not learning the stuff.
It's a fine line, and very easy to rationalize to yourself that you're doing the former, when you're really doing the latter.
posted by ctmf at 2:58 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
From his A/B test, first to second midterm, it sounds like this was not mostly people trying to turn a B into an A (get the "right number"). It was people not learning the stuff.
It's a fine line, and very easy to rationalize to yourself that you're doing the former, when you're really doing the latter.
posted by ctmf at 2:58 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
I really expected "iterated prisoner's dilemma" and "gameified incremental buy-in" for the ways to get students to engage with the course material to earn a grade that says they engaged with the course material.
I found lockdown and WFH really isolating and get that the machinery of the institution expects individuals, not collectives, who share the same problems (instructors, online only, integrity of their course credits or students, building a comprehensive picture of a topic area, attaining a standard they can show the world) to find solutions for the individual, not the collective.
posted by k3ninho at 3:02 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
I found lockdown and WFH really isolating and get that the machinery of the institution expects individuals, not collectives, who share the same problems (instructors, online only, integrity of their course credits or students, building a comprehensive picture of a topic area, attaining a standard they can show the world) to find solutions for the individual, not the collective.
posted by k3ninho at 3:02 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
Because the dirty little secret is that many many profs are really smart, and not good teachers.
As a prof, let me assure you that many profs are not especially smart.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:08 PM on May 29, 2022 [22 favorites]
As a prof, let me assure you that many profs are not especially smart.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:08 PM on May 29, 2022 [22 favorites]
If the man had hit them with [plagiarism] notices and shut it down when he realized what was going down I would be right there with him. [...] He didn't, instead he got to write this essay.
I doubt he was thrilled about "getting to" write this essay - "getting to" write a blogpost about the shitshow of a semester you dealt with isn't really recompense for said shitshow. More importantly, you don't just say "plagiarism, gotcha!" and it's all magically done. There's always a bunch of time-consuming bureaucracy involved, as he points out:
I don't think it was a perfect response, but at that point, the options were generally shitty. If he alerted the students but hadn't yet changed anything about the course, cheating would have continued but via another venue. But re-organizing the entire course takes time and effort, and I've never heard of a university allowing a professor to just cancel classes for a week or two mid-term to rewrite the class. Looking away from cheating he knew was going on while he started this process didn't seem like a moral option for the same reason he felt obligated to deal with the cheating at all. He had to have detailed evidence for the formal plagiarism notices because of the appeals process; getting that evidence for 70 people (with no TA to help) is a very real amount of work. And the average professor has responsibilities that go beyond teaching a single course, so both the academic integrity violation reports and the course re-design were a major extra workload, probably close to a second full-time job for a bit (if I had to guess). He explicitly states he was trying to get things dealt with before the 2nd midterm (i.e. when the cheating was lower-stakes) but just couldn't get all the work done in time. Might there have been a better way to balance all of this in media res, and avoid the extended lurking? Yeah, there might have been, but I don't think it would have been clear to me what that better way was at that "oh shit, I just detected a fuckton of cheating" moment, and depending on the university's willingness to cooperate, I'm not entirely sure what that better response would have looked like even in retrospect.
posted by ASF Tod und Schwerkraft at 3:11 PM on May 29, 2022 [15 favorites]
I doubt he was thrilled about "getting to" write this essay - "getting to" write a blogpost about the shitshow of a semester you dealt with isn't really recompense for said shitshow. More importantly, you don't just say "plagiarism, gotcha!" and it's all magically done. There's always a bunch of time-consuming bureaucracy involved, as he points out:
"There is a suggestion at my institution that I have an hour long conversation with each student about their academic integrity violation. I had about 70 violations. 70 hours? So…"That's on top of figuring out what happened and what to do about it going forward, which, again, takes planning. To avoid having to spend about 2 full workweeks literally just having meetings about this, he talks with the university about what to do:
"Instead, in consultation with the powers that be, I would inform the class as a whole about the widespread violations, and also submit individual forms for each student. Although I don’t like filling out forms, it is important that individual students receive a form, because it helps make sure they understand the accusation, the consequences, as well as their right to appeal and how to get that process rolling if necessary."He also needed to figure out what to do, since there was a wide range in involvement, and I presume most people would agree that some of the easier options (failing everyone who was ever on the chat) would not be the most just ones:
Besides filling out the forms, I had to decide on consequences for my students. There was a big range in cheating behavior.And then, of course, there's the small matter of what to do in terms of teaching the class and evaluating students going forward. (To be clear: this is not, in fact, a small matter.)
I don't think it was a perfect response, but at that point, the options were generally shitty. If he alerted the students but hadn't yet changed anything about the course, cheating would have continued but via another venue. But re-organizing the entire course takes time and effort, and I've never heard of a university allowing a professor to just cancel classes for a week or two mid-term to rewrite the class. Looking away from cheating he knew was going on while he started this process didn't seem like a moral option for the same reason he felt obligated to deal with the cheating at all. He had to have detailed evidence for the formal plagiarism notices because of the appeals process; getting that evidence for 70 people (with no TA to help) is a very real amount of work. And the average professor has responsibilities that go beyond teaching a single course, so both the academic integrity violation reports and the course re-design were a major extra workload, probably close to a second full-time job for a bit (if I had to guess). He explicitly states he was trying to get things dealt with before the 2nd midterm (i.e. when the cheating was lower-stakes) but just couldn't get all the work done in time. Might there have been a better way to balance all of this in media res, and avoid the extended lurking? Yeah, there might have been, but I don't think it would have been clear to me what that better way was at that "oh shit, I just detected a fuckton of cheating" moment, and depending on the university's willingness to cooperate, I'm not entirely sure what that better response would have looked like even in retrospect.
posted by ASF Tod und Schwerkraft at 3:11 PM on May 29, 2022 [15 favorites]
It's been a long, long time since I've read a blog post sprinkled with gifs. It feels pleasantly nostalgic.
posted by betweenthebars at 3:11 PM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by betweenthebars at 3:11 PM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
Rather than look at this as a moralist, I want to look at this as a UI designer. The professor's course was badly designed; fortunately he realized it midway through and redesigned it.
The initial version affords cheating. The tests were designed for minimal engagement: multiple choice, open book, long deadlines, and a world where people share everything by phone. Cheating was the path of least resistance, so there was a lot of it.
When he redesigned the tests to close off easy cheating methods, and added new types of tests that required actual engagement with the material, cheating nearly disappeared.
It's like pirating games. Steam showed that people would actually buy games when the price was right and the buying service was so full of useful features that it was far better than the piracy sites.
(This is not to say that the rewrite was an easy fix. Good design is hard work.)
posted by zompist at 3:36 PM on May 29, 2022 [20 favorites]
The initial version affords cheating. The tests were designed for minimal engagement: multiple choice, open book, long deadlines, and a world where people share everything by phone. Cheating was the path of least resistance, so there was a lot of it.
When he redesigned the tests to close off easy cheating methods, and added new types of tests that required actual engagement with the material, cheating nearly disappeared.
It's like pirating games. Steam showed that people would actually buy games when the price was right and the buying service was so full of useful features that it was far better than the piracy sites.
(This is not to say that the rewrite was an easy fix. Good design is hard work.)
posted by zompist at 3:36 PM on May 29, 2022 [20 favorites]
> So why wouldn't you expect this? Why wouldn't you expect people to learn the stuff, but also learn what they need to do to get the right number?
Among other things, it looks like the other post-pandemic courses he'd been teaching had been more specialized (research-focused) and also like several of them had been grad classes. The most recent listing of an Intro to Cognitive Psych course seems to predate a course listed as being in Fall 2017. I might speculate that this might have been a perfect storm of returning to teach a more introductory class where students were less prepared or invested and where the work was less project-based under circumstances where it was easier to cheat than it had been when coursework wasn't all online. (Because, again, that's something of a game-changer: many of my undergrad classes that had open-book exams would actually proactively provide us with old exams to study off of, on top of us being allowed to use notes/books/etc. on exams. It was expected that students would spend time studying together! But it was also possible to evaluate individual performance with less real-time cheating because exams were in-person, in lecture halls, and that wasn't happening in a lot of places in Fall 2021 for reasons that are pretty obvious.)
And he makes it clear that he is quite aware that there are types of collaboration and even cheating that can be pretty productive - "Sometimes cheating is so impressive that it could have been an alternative assignment in the course for a grade." But given that the tests were open book and yet people flunked the second midterm in large numbers, it looks like the students absolutely failed to learn the stuff because they were doing nothing but copying answers, which is distinct from people doing some mildly sketchy stuff to try to push their 3.7 GPA into 3.8 territory (and is more problematic). As he says, "There was a lot of cheating, but it was low quality." And that's the core problem, for someone who actually cares about students taking something away from a course.
posted by ASF Tod und Schwerkraft at 3:59 PM on May 29, 2022 [10 favorites]
Among other things, it looks like the other post-pandemic courses he'd been teaching had been more specialized (research-focused) and also like several of them had been grad classes. The most recent listing of an Intro to Cognitive Psych course seems to predate a course listed as being in Fall 2017. I might speculate that this might have been a perfect storm of returning to teach a more introductory class where students were less prepared or invested and where the work was less project-based under circumstances where it was easier to cheat than it had been when coursework wasn't all online. (Because, again, that's something of a game-changer: many of my undergrad classes that had open-book exams would actually proactively provide us with old exams to study off of, on top of us being allowed to use notes/books/etc. on exams. It was expected that students would spend time studying together! But it was also possible to evaluate individual performance with less real-time cheating because exams were in-person, in lecture halls, and that wasn't happening in a lot of places in Fall 2021 for reasons that are pretty obvious.)
And he makes it clear that he is quite aware that there are types of collaboration and even cheating that can be pretty productive - "Sometimes cheating is so impressive that it could have been an alternative assignment in the course for a grade." But given that the tests were open book and yet people flunked the second midterm in large numbers, it looks like the students absolutely failed to learn the stuff because they were doing nothing but copying answers, which is distinct from people doing some mildly sketchy stuff to try to push their 3.7 GPA into 3.8 territory (and is more problematic). As he says, "There was a lot of cheating, but it was low quality." And that's the core problem, for someone who actually cares about students taking something away from a course.
posted by ASF Tod und Schwerkraft at 3:59 PM on May 29, 2022 [10 favorites]
So, I was thrilled when I received the first completed academic integrity assignment.There's something kinda perfect about that.
What did the student have to say? There were many full sentences and as I read them I got that feeling again. So, I copied and pasted some sentences into Google, and yup, the student was plagiarizing the academic integrity assignment.
I assume you mean the delicious irony that a prof upset about students cheating by cutting and pasting and its effect on academic integrity catches them by cutting and pasting rather than relying on his own ability to remember text.
posted by srboisvert at 4:38 PM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
I just want to thank all the educators patiently explicating the situation. Love y'all. Thank you.
I started in on a huge rant, but on balance I think it's better I don't. Suffice to say that teaching and grading in These Times are harder than usual, and part of the reason for that (beyond all the obvious) is that students have bought into the credentialism such that some take shameless advantage of their kinder instructors and others cheat just as shamelessly. Threading the needle between being accommodating and being a pushover without becoming a Drill Sergeant Nasty because of the excuses and lies and contempt that are all some students have for you... is not exactly straightforward.
I'm trying. Sometimes failing. Rethinking a lot of things about how I teach, as I waver between continuing my teaching career and getting the fuck out.
The essayist is so clearly trying! Trying hard! I respect him and I believe he deserves respect.
posted by humbug at 4:48 PM on May 29, 2022 [16 favorites]
I started in on a huge rant, but on balance I think it's better I don't. Suffice to say that teaching and grading in These Times are harder than usual, and part of the reason for that (beyond all the obvious) is that students have bought into the credentialism such that some take shameless advantage of their kinder instructors and others cheat just as shamelessly. Threading the needle between being accommodating and being a pushover without becoming a Drill Sergeant Nasty because of the excuses and lies and contempt that are all some students have for you... is not exactly straightforward.
I'm trying. Sometimes failing. Rethinking a lot of things about how I teach, as I waver between continuing my teaching career and getting the fuck out.
The essayist is so clearly trying! Trying hard! I respect him and I believe he deserves respect.
posted by humbug at 4:48 PM on May 29, 2022 [16 favorites]
I assume you mean the delicious irony that a prof upset about students cheating by cutting and pasting and its effect on academic integrity catches them by cutting and pasting rather than relying on his own ability to remember text.
I was actually thinking that the OSINT skills used to peg the cheating students would be a dandy object lesson for my intro-infosec class. Fancy dinking around with text modeling aside, the cues he used are mostly well within an infosec newbie's ability to understand -- by all means go back and look, y'all, the cues are applicable to a broad variety of other surveillance contexts. So I bookmarked the essay for later use (thank you for posting, OP!). It's rare to find something this well-suited to grab student interest.
"Remembering text" isn't how most instructors notice plagiarism. (Did actually happen to me once, when the students in question plagiarized from the text of an old exam question that I happened to have written!) There's lots of cues to patchwritten and partly- or wholly-plagiarized assignments. It honestly doesn't take long to become sensitized to them, and there's also plenty of research and praxis-based writing on the subject. If a class is small enough, we also develop hunches about student capacity -- these are of course uncertain and subject to bias, so they aren't ironclad, but they can spur us to additional investigation.
Searching is just one way we confirm suspicions. We haven't actually read everything ever, even in our areas of expertise; sorry to disappoint.
posted by humbug at 5:02 PM on May 29, 2022 [11 favorites]
I was actually thinking that the OSINT skills used to peg the cheating students would be a dandy object lesson for my intro-infosec class. Fancy dinking around with text modeling aside, the cues he used are mostly well within an infosec newbie's ability to understand -- by all means go back and look, y'all, the cues are applicable to a broad variety of other surveillance contexts. So I bookmarked the essay for later use (thank you for posting, OP!). It's rare to find something this well-suited to grab student interest.
"Remembering text" isn't how most instructors notice plagiarism. (Did actually happen to me once, when the students in question plagiarized from the text of an old exam question that I happened to have written!) There's lots of cues to patchwritten and partly- or wholly-plagiarized assignments. It honestly doesn't take long to become sensitized to them, and there's also plenty of research and praxis-based writing on the subject. If a class is small enough, we also develop hunches about student capacity -- these are of course uncertain and subject to bias, so they aren't ironclad, but they can spur us to additional investigation.
Searching is just one way we confirm suspicions. We haven't actually read everything ever, even in our areas of expertise; sorry to disappoint.
posted by humbug at 5:02 PM on May 29, 2022 [11 favorites]
I assume you mean the delicious irony that a prof upset about students cheating by cutting and pasting and its effect on academic integrity catches them by cutting and pasting rather than relying on his own ability to remember text.What text was the professor supposed to rely on his ability to remember? I assumed that he looked up sentences from his students' essays and discovered that they turned out to occur in existing online essays about academic integrity. It's not immediately clear to me how memory factors into it.
posted by dfan at 5:05 PM on May 29, 2022 [12 favorites]
I have never felt a white-hot rage for any professor until reading this article. Holy shit.
Penalizing students for not reporting other students and destroying their lives and livelihoods during a global fucking pandemic? Are you kidding me? I would have taken his 'alternate syllabus' and written that not reporting other students was absolutely the very highest standards of integrity and people like him are responsible for the destruction of social trust in this country.
I don't think for a moment that it's the kids who really need that education, who are the first in their families to attend college, who are trying to work a job at the same time, who are hoping to get something that will break them out of the cycle of poverty, I don't think for a moment that they're the ones who are cheating their way through school. Because they're the ones who value it.
Hi. As a first gen university student, who is also friends with a lot of other first gen university students, let me tell you that you are absolutely wrong about this. The first gen university students are often working full time jobs on top of their college classes and are absolutely bone-deep-exhausted. I have had people in these circumstances ask me for help on tests, and while I didn't give them answers, I will literally die before reporting any of them. It has nothing to do with 'value'. They know the game is rigged against them and they are trying to get a leg up.
Because the game is absolutely fucking rigged. You cannot tell me it's an equal playing field when some people's parents are fully subsidizing their university education and housing, and all they have to do is go to class and learn 15 credits a semester, and other people are having to support a family at the same time. Somebody is already cheating by virtue of having an unfair advantage in the class: it's the children of the rich.
I didn't cheat, but I also had less temptation to; I was at the top of my class. I don't know how I would have felt if I was at the bottom, staring possibly losing the degree in the face. But I have never been as angry at the concept of "academic integrity" as I have been reading some of these comments. Academic integrity? Don't try to trap your probably low-income students, how about that for academic integrity, asshole.
posted by corb at 5:52 PM on May 29, 2022 [26 favorites]
Penalizing students for not reporting other students and destroying their lives and livelihoods during a global fucking pandemic? Are you kidding me? I would have taken his 'alternate syllabus' and written that not reporting other students was absolutely the very highest standards of integrity and people like him are responsible for the destruction of social trust in this country.
I don't think for a moment that it's the kids who really need that education, who are the first in their families to attend college, who are trying to work a job at the same time, who are hoping to get something that will break them out of the cycle of poverty, I don't think for a moment that they're the ones who are cheating their way through school. Because they're the ones who value it.
Hi. As a first gen university student, who is also friends with a lot of other first gen university students, let me tell you that you are absolutely wrong about this. The first gen university students are often working full time jobs on top of their college classes and are absolutely bone-deep-exhausted. I have had people in these circumstances ask me for help on tests, and while I didn't give them answers, I will literally die before reporting any of them. It has nothing to do with 'value'. They know the game is rigged against them and they are trying to get a leg up.
Because the game is absolutely fucking rigged. You cannot tell me it's an equal playing field when some people's parents are fully subsidizing their university education and housing, and all they have to do is go to class and learn 15 credits a semester, and other people are having to support a family at the same time. Somebody is already cheating by virtue of having an unfair advantage in the class: it's the children of the rich.
I didn't cheat, but I also had less temptation to; I was at the top of my class. I don't know how I would have felt if I was at the bottom, staring possibly losing the degree in the face. But I have never been as angry at the concept of "academic integrity" as I have been reading some of these comments. Academic integrity? Don't try to trap your probably low-income students, how about that for academic integrity, asshole.
posted by corb at 5:52 PM on May 29, 2022 [26 favorites]
I'm a professor who also regularly teaches a large lecture class that had always met in-person until the pandemic moved everything online. I want to point out that large lecture classes are inherently different beasts than other sorts of classes I teach, like small grad seminars or medium-sized upper-level undergrad courses. They have always had the highest levels of cheating behavior, because, frankly, students are a lot less likely to be personally invested in them. Students often resent feeling forced to take them, as requirements for their major, or for general education distribution credits, and they want to do the least possible work in them to get out the grade they find tolerable--which incentivises cheating.
When you hold those classes face-to-face, you can prevent a good deal of that by giving in-person exams that are not multiple choice. Being forced to write out short-answer or essay responses in their own words in a proctored lecture hall makes it difficult to cheat. It also generates a lot more work for the instructor (and any TAs they have) than a multiple-choice scantron exam. And that's why even though most instructors know that a scantron exam is a pedagogically poor evaluation method, and the easiest to cheat at, they remain in such common use in large courses. It's not that professors are "lazy." It's that teaching is so undervalued in the tenure process outside of a small handful of elite private liberal arts colleges, and anyway, the majority of these classes are not taught by tenure-track faculty. They are taught by lecturers performing academic piecework for paltry pay, scrambling with no job security and high teaching loads. We instructors have heavy workloads that just keep growing, and since we are given no more time or money to teach a class of 300 than a class of 30, imperfect time-saving evaluation methods like scantron exams rationally continue to be employed.
(I don't want to be overly cynical, but I feel like US universities today exist to extract profit from both students and
instructor service-professionals, and pass it on to the academic bourgeoisie of deans and provosts and chancellors with MBAs.)
Anyway, cheating in large lecture classes is hardly a problem born of the pandemic and the move online. True, the main tactic used to prevent cheating in face-to-face lecture classes is to have students take exams in heavily-proctored rooms. That's not possible in an online setting, and the currently-offered technological solution of online proctoring is basically evil. The technology winds up flagging as suspected cheating such things as having a disability, being pregnant and having to use the bathroom frequently, having dark skin the camera reads poorly because it was calibrated to best capture light skin, etc..
There's nothing about online instruction that makes it uniquely susceptible to cheating problems. Under ideal circumstances, I find teaching online to be the venue in which I least have to worry about cheating. The reason is that it is pretty easy to make every assignment unique to every student in the class. For example, when we are covering childhood gender socialization in a course of mine, I assign each student a different toy marketing webpage to analyze using the unit readings. If each student is creatively analyzing a different toy or news article or corporate logo or eugenic poster, assigned to them with the URL for easy access, the motivations and opportunity for cheating are low. The main barrier to individualizing assignments like this is that it requires a lot of instructor time. In a class of 35, it's not too bad, but in a class of 100, that's a lot of URLs to locate for each week's assignment preparation, and grading 100 essays every week in a single class is burdensome. And so instructors are incentivised to rely on multiple choice exams in Blackboard or whatever course instruction platform they are using--especially under circumstances such as we all faced moving courses online unexpectedly when Covid hit. The Spring 2020 semester of the "pivot" was the biggest lift, but let me tell you, every single course rebuild is a lot of work, and so many institutions gave instructors basically zero support.
So my thoughts on the cheating documented in Crump's blog post are (1) there is nothing new or unique about students being more likely to cheat in large lecture classes; (2) there are clear solutions--Crump enumerates a lot of them, fortunately avoiding the discriminatory and dystopian "solution" of supposed anti-cheating AI services; and (3) the solutions were not initially implemented by Crump, or thousands of other instructors who moved courses online, because it is a huge amount of labor for a large lecture class, while textbooks publishers are constantly pushing instructors to just link their proprietary quiz banks of multiple choice tests. Only because Crump had the resources and the obsessiveness that allowed him to spend weeks of a semester working on nothing but his teaching for a single class was he able rebuild his course midstream in a way that then led to it involving much more work on his part to ensure little cheating. Personally, I salute that he did that. But there's also a level of privilege involved that many instructors of large lecture classes lack that must be acknowledged.
As for the students' behavior--there is a major difference between asking "Is B the answer to question 28?" and Googling the actual substance matter and figuring it out. These were, after all, open-book tests. Googling the answer violates no rules, and it it forces at least some learning upon students who are skipping lectures and never doing their readings. Asking other people to identify which letter goes with which number on the quiz violates the rules and undermines that learning opportunity.
But I suspect that the reason people may feel like they should tolerate the cheating is because the WhatsApp group chat in Crump's class really seems to have spawned something wonderful. As someone who taught through the pandemic, I can tell you that many of my students suffered from extreme feelings of isolation and anomie. Surveying them about their mental health, it was clear that depression and anxiety were through the roof. I did my best to make all my classes require interactive discussion exercises every week, which helped a little, but as those were structured, short exchanges only about course concepts, they only generated a modest amount of solidarity. Because I ask them about these things, I know that many felt despondent over lack of community and the small acts of social support that make a person feel secure. That WhatsApp chat looks like a hugely valuable venue in which real social solidarity was generated.
I'd wish that I could set up a group chat like that and have it serve the course-community-generating function the WhatsApp chat served in Crump's class. But students are resistant to using top-down, instructor-provided group forums, and inhibited when they know the professor can read what they post. How to disentangle the solidarity-generating function from the ease of cheating in a forum like this is, to my mind, the key question to ponder.
posted by DrMew at 6:21 PM on May 29, 2022 [18 favorites]
When you hold those classes face-to-face, you can prevent a good deal of that by giving in-person exams that are not multiple choice. Being forced to write out short-answer or essay responses in their own words in a proctored lecture hall makes it difficult to cheat. It also generates a lot more work for the instructor (and any TAs they have) than a multiple-choice scantron exam. And that's why even though most instructors know that a scantron exam is a pedagogically poor evaluation method, and the easiest to cheat at, they remain in such common use in large courses. It's not that professors are "lazy." It's that teaching is so undervalued in the tenure process outside of a small handful of elite private liberal arts colleges, and anyway, the majority of these classes are not taught by tenure-track faculty. They are taught by lecturers performing academic piecework for paltry pay, scrambling with no job security and high teaching loads. We instructors have heavy workloads that just keep growing, and since we are given no more time or money to teach a class of 300 than a class of 30, imperfect time-saving evaluation methods like scantron exams rationally continue to be employed.
(I don't want to be overly cynical, but I feel like US universities today exist to extract profit from both students and
instructor service-professionals, and pass it on to the academic bourgeoisie of deans and provosts and chancellors with MBAs.)
Anyway, cheating in large lecture classes is hardly a problem born of the pandemic and the move online. True, the main tactic used to prevent cheating in face-to-face lecture classes is to have students take exams in heavily-proctored rooms. That's not possible in an online setting, and the currently-offered technological solution of online proctoring is basically evil. The technology winds up flagging as suspected cheating such things as having a disability, being pregnant and having to use the bathroom frequently, having dark skin the camera reads poorly because it was calibrated to best capture light skin, etc..
There's nothing about online instruction that makes it uniquely susceptible to cheating problems. Under ideal circumstances, I find teaching online to be the venue in which I least have to worry about cheating. The reason is that it is pretty easy to make every assignment unique to every student in the class. For example, when we are covering childhood gender socialization in a course of mine, I assign each student a different toy marketing webpage to analyze using the unit readings. If each student is creatively analyzing a different toy or news article or corporate logo or eugenic poster, assigned to them with the URL for easy access, the motivations and opportunity for cheating are low. The main barrier to individualizing assignments like this is that it requires a lot of instructor time. In a class of 35, it's not too bad, but in a class of 100, that's a lot of URLs to locate for each week's assignment preparation, and grading 100 essays every week in a single class is burdensome. And so instructors are incentivised to rely on multiple choice exams in Blackboard or whatever course instruction platform they are using--especially under circumstances such as we all faced moving courses online unexpectedly when Covid hit. The Spring 2020 semester of the "pivot" was the biggest lift, but let me tell you, every single course rebuild is a lot of work, and so many institutions gave instructors basically zero support.
So my thoughts on the cheating documented in Crump's blog post are (1) there is nothing new or unique about students being more likely to cheat in large lecture classes; (2) there are clear solutions--Crump enumerates a lot of them, fortunately avoiding the discriminatory and dystopian "solution" of supposed anti-cheating AI services; and (3) the solutions were not initially implemented by Crump, or thousands of other instructors who moved courses online, because it is a huge amount of labor for a large lecture class, while textbooks publishers are constantly pushing instructors to just link their proprietary quiz banks of multiple choice tests. Only because Crump had the resources and the obsessiveness that allowed him to spend weeks of a semester working on nothing but his teaching for a single class was he able rebuild his course midstream in a way that then led to it involving much more work on his part to ensure little cheating. Personally, I salute that he did that. But there's also a level of privilege involved that many instructors of large lecture classes lack that must be acknowledged.
As for the students' behavior--there is a major difference between asking "Is B the answer to question 28?" and Googling the actual substance matter and figuring it out. These were, after all, open-book tests. Googling the answer violates no rules, and it it forces at least some learning upon students who are skipping lectures and never doing their readings. Asking other people to identify which letter goes with which number on the quiz violates the rules and undermines that learning opportunity.
But I suspect that the reason people may feel like they should tolerate the cheating is because the WhatsApp group chat in Crump's class really seems to have spawned something wonderful. As someone who taught through the pandemic, I can tell you that many of my students suffered from extreme feelings of isolation and anomie. Surveying them about their mental health, it was clear that depression and anxiety were through the roof. I did my best to make all my classes require interactive discussion exercises every week, which helped a little, but as those were structured, short exchanges only about course concepts, they only generated a modest amount of solidarity. Because I ask them about these things, I know that many felt despondent over lack of community and the small acts of social support that make a person feel secure. That WhatsApp chat looks like a hugely valuable venue in which real social solidarity was generated.
I'd wish that I could set up a group chat like that and have it serve the course-community-generating function the WhatsApp chat served in Crump's class. But students are resistant to using top-down, instructor-provided group forums, and inhibited when they know the professor can read what they post. How to disentangle the solidarity-generating function from the ease of cheating in a forum like this is, to my mind, the key question to ponder.
posted by DrMew at 6:21 PM on May 29, 2022 [18 favorites]
I have had a student who copied another student's essay, badly find replaced, and after being caught did it again. Another copied the example essay. There is an element of sheer what the fuckery when you manage plagiarism.
I don't teach life and death type subjects. Which tend to be extremely difficult to do quizzes and exams for. The early intro stuff, yes, but not later. Being able to automate some of it in undergrad first year subjects had been wonderful for giving me space to mark and teach.
But I've also taken over three courses now that we're hastily and very very badly converted online. I'm talking a word doc quiz that had an incorrect answer key (that was almost impossible to find in the files). PDFs for discussion. Spending 90% of my teaching time redoing outdated and badly designed material just so my students can hopefully learn something means I don't have as much time to do the higher level metadesign. Which I may or may not be paid for anyway. I am an adjunct, I have a set number of hours, and consistently going over them is par for the course but also detrimental to me and the system. It results in the online course being a bunch of noncontextualised pdfs and PowerPoints because there aren't enough hours to actually redo it all (and at least my pay includes a per-student set time for marking that is inextricably linked to enrolment so I'm better off than many of my peers).
Redesigning a course halfway through is no easy feat. Redesigning assessment too? In my department and uni that is impossible in admin terms. Once it's in the syllabus you have very little leeway. This guy created so many different ways to re-engage students who had engaged in a kind of cheating that also disproportionately puts work onto others.
He touches on it with the snitch hunt. Students who cheated actively pushed work onto those who did not. That is a kind of behaviour that we do see in the workplace and we know is bad for business and bad for humans on any side. The overworker who consistently hauls their department over the line creates unreasonable expectations. The underworker who doesn't learn, and is incapable, remains so. Incentivising that is bad pedagogy at the very least, immoral at worst.
Cheating on the academic integrity assignment is...superb. I think I'd have laughed til I cried. And I nearly did again with the comment that somehow using Google to confirm plagiarism is also cheating. It isn't that you don't use Google (or text-matching software in my case) to assist you in answering whatever it is, it's that you actually work through the problem using what you gathered. It's meant to give you information, now answers.
And that's where my field does often shine. Because my students can google and get information, but if they use that an an answer they're often challenged by its dissonance with what they actually think. The media literacy of upcoming students (and established ones and professionals) is often dire and it is that expectation that the information is the answer for all situations. It isn't. That's what a lot of those extra questions and so on the lecturer created were aimed at. Get the information, however you want, but that's not the answer. And for a lot of folk it's seemingly impossible to retrain them away from that expectation.
The class I'm teaching right now has every student pick a specific object for the entire semester. It makes grading a trial but it's produced some interesting work and discussions. And it emphasises that distinction between information gathering and analysis producing an argument.
The aversion to open book usage illustrates that clearly - even though the correlation between information and answer is close on 1:1 in that situation by the sounds of it, the expectation was an answer that didn't necessitate any engagement with the information.
Would I have taken the exact same steps? God no. I set up the group chat for my students then left. I have an area for discussion for the class that is monitored and marked on engagement. They know everything goes through the text similarity checker. I have given them the information. Their job, when studying, is to synthesise it (in my field - ones with lots of memorisation are different). I google actor names and film dates and specific definitions all the time, not to mention the weird jumbles of words trying to remember a theorist. That's information gathering. Answering and learning isn't just having that material handy in your brain or on your phone. I'm first in family and working class and there are times I am bewildered by University and academia, and feel like a fraud, or know it's an absolutely rigged game to play. But I'm not going to create a situation where poor work practices and bad media literacy are going to get you ahead in the game.
posted by geek anachronism at 6:31 PM on May 29, 2022 [12 favorites]
I don't teach life and death type subjects. Which tend to be extremely difficult to do quizzes and exams for. The early intro stuff, yes, but not later. Being able to automate some of it in undergrad first year subjects had been wonderful for giving me space to mark and teach.
But I've also taken over three courses now that we're hastily and very very badly converted online. I'm talking a word doc quiz that had an incorrect answer key (that was almost impossible to find in the files). PDFs for discussion. Spending 90% of my teaching time redoing outdated and badly designed material just so my students can hopefully learn something means I don't have as much time to do the higher level metadesign. Which I may or may not be paid for anyway. I am an adjunct, I have a set number of hours, and consistently going over them is par for the course but also detrimental to me and the system. It results in the online course being a bunch of noncontextualised pdfs and PowerPoints because there aren't enough hours to actually redo it all (and at least my pay includes a per-student set time for marking that is inextricably linked to enrolment so I'm better off than many of my peers).
Redesigning a course halfway through is no easy feat. Redesigning assessment too? In my department and uni that is impossible in admin terms. Once it's in the syllabus you have very little leeway. This guy created so many different ways to re-engage students who had engaged in a kind of cheating that also disproportionately puts work onto others.
He touches on it with the snitch hunt. Students who cheated actively pushed work onto those who did not. That is a kind of behaviour that we do see in the workplace and we know is bad for business and bad for humans on any side. The overworker who consistently hauls their department over the line creates unreasonable expectations. The underworker who doesn't learn, and is incapable, remains so. Incentivising that is bad pedagogy at the very least, immoral at worst.
Cheating on the academic integrity assignment is...superb. I think I'd have laughed til I cried. And I nearly did again with the comment that somehow using Google to confirm plagiarism is also cheating. It isn't that you don't use Google (or text-matching software in my case) to assist you in answering whatever it is, it's that you actually work through the problem using what you gathered. It's meant to give you information, now answers.
And that's where my field does often shine. Because my students can google and get information, but if they use that an an answer they're often challenged by its dissonance with what they actually think. The media literacy of upcoming students (and established ones and professionals) is often dire and it is that expectation that the information is the answer for all situations. It isn't. That's what a lot of those extra questions and so on the lecturer created were aimed at. Get the information, however you want, but that's not the answer. And for a lot of folk it's seemingly impossible to retrain them away from that expectation.
The class I'm teaching right now has every student pick a specific object for the entire semester. It makes grading a trial but it's produced some interesting work and discussions. And it emphasises that distinction between information gathering and analysis producing an argument.
The aversion to open book usage illustrates that clearly - even though the correlation between information and answer is close on 1:1 in that situation by the sounds of it, the expectation was an answer that didn't necessitate any engagement with the information.
Would I have taken the exact same steps? God no. I set up the group chat for my students then left. I have an area for discussion for the class that is monitored and marked on engagement. They know everything goes through the text similarity checker. I have given them the information. Their job, when studying, is to synthesise it (in my field - ones with lots of memorisation are different). I google actor names and film dates and specific definitions all the time, not to mention the weird jumbles of words trying to remember a theorist. That's information gathering. Answering and learning isn't just having that material handy in your brain or on your phone. I'm first in family and working class and there are times I am bewildered by University and academia, and feel like a fraud, or know it's an absolutely rigged game to play. But I'm not going to create a situation where poor work practices and bad media literacy are going to get you ahead in the game.
posted by geek anachronism at 6:31 PM on May 29, 2022 [12 favorites]
How to disentangle the solidarity-generating function from the ease of cheating in a forum like this is, to my mind, the key question to ponder.
I don't know, but I often think about this in terms of the courses I took as part of my physics curriculum, in contrast to all the other courses I took. Physics is kind of an unusual discipline in that its curriculum is very standard, because pretty much everyone agrees on what the important fundamentals are that an undergraduate should know by the time they're finished, and those fundamentals haven't changed in probably 50 years at least, and the basic pedagogical approach tends to be quite similar everywhere, at least in the US. Everyone I've ever talked to who majored in physics had a broadly similar experience as an undergraduate, no matter where they went to school.
In every one of my physics classes, homework was a significant fraction of the grade, though its real function was to prepare us for the exams. There were no "group assignments" as such (except in some lab classes), but students were encouraged to form study groups and work together on the homework. The department had a special lounge set aside, with access for majors only, intended for students to get together and work on homework, if they chose. I happened to live in a dorm with several other physics majors so we usually did our homework together in our dorm's lounge. Typically, we'd start working on the homework independently, and then congregate in the study lounge as the deadline approached to check in together and get mutual aid. I was far from the best physics student in the group, but in any given homework set there were usually one or two problems that would stump most of the group, which one of us would have the right insight to get and share with everyone else. Although some of us were clearly better than others and more likely to be the one with the right answers, everyone always had a turn being the "smart one" who got the hard question. Sometimes none of us could get it and someone would go check in with a different study group, which it turned out had the answer. It was exactly the kind of situation that is hoped for by doing "group projects," and one I basically never experienced outside of physics classes, regardless of whether there was an explicit attempt to make the work collaborative. In terms of generating solidarity and a sense of camaraderie, it was incredibly powerful, and in terms of improving the pedagogy, it was essential. Overall I was fortunate to have some great physics professors, but there were one or two classes that would have been completely worthless if not for my study group. I haven't seen or heard from most of my physics classmates in many years now, but I still think of them fondly as siblings-in-arms, who went through something really challenging together and came out the other side stronger for it. And as I said before, when I've talked about this subsequently with other people who studied physics at other institutions, some of them older than me, some of them younger than me, pretty much everyone nods and says they had the same experience.
What's interesting to ask is why people didn't cheat. Copying answers was irrelevant because you weren't primarily graded on whether you got the right answer; in many cases the answer was provided, and your job was to provide a derivation showing why that was the right answer. But it would still be pretty easy for a study group to, say, divide up the homework set so each person only had to do one or two problems, then just copy each others' solutions. But as far as I know that never really happened, and it would have been unthinkable in my study group. For one thing, you'd be placing an awful lot of trust in your classmates; the occasional wrong answer being propagated through a study group wouldn't have been unusual, but if everyone consistently made the same mistakes it would be pretty obvious what was going on. More importantly, perhaps, I think everyone understood that the homework was intended to prepare us for the exams, and cheating on the homework would only doom us on the exams, where that type of cheating would be impossible (although for online exams, that's probably not true).
But maybe the most important explanation is that if you were inclined to cheat your way through a physics degree, what would be the point? It'd be easier and safer to just switch to a different major, many of which would probably be more valuable if all you cared about was the credential. As someone who double-majored in physics and biology, I can say that while the level of intellectual rigor I encountered in my biology coursework was absolutely no less than that in my physics coursework, in terms of actual effort required it was almost always considerably less demanding. (Ornithology was the notable exception. My worst grade in college, despite loving the material. In retrospect I should not have taken it at the same time as quantum mechanics, but who knew those would be such a bad pairing?) And many of my classmates did make that determination over the first couple of years, switching from physics to other fields that would give them a solid credential while requiring less effort. Which is a decision I absolutely respect! The only reason to kick your own ass with a curriculum as demanding as physics is because you love the material too much not to. So the people inclined to cheat in order to get the credential pretty much self-selected out of the program.
So I don't know what the best answer is, but one answer seems to be, make the class hard. Really, really hard, so hard that it's unreasonable to expect people to do it on their own. And then don't expect them to do it on their own. Make the instinct to collaborate and help each other part of the curriculum, and make it hard enough that just copying answers isn't a viable solution. Make it hard enough that those providing help feel they deserve help in return, and hard enough that those receiving help feel obligated to do the work of reciprocating, so that the students' sense of fairness eliminates freeloaders. And make it hard enough that those who'd be motivated to cheat decide to take a different class instead.
The problem, of course, is that assessing assignments like that is hard work, too. Just about all of my physics classes had 20 students or fewer, and my professors still often needed TAs to help them grade. And hard assignments that involve working through a mathematical derivation don't really apply to most disciplines; the essay question is analogous, but probably even harder to grade. Since universities keep packing more and more students into a finite number of classrooms while pushing more and more of the teaching load onto overworked and undersupported adjuncts, in order to maximize the tuition/payroll ratio, that level of labor simply isn't sustainable. Under the constraints of universities trying to survive and thrive within capitalism, I don't know what is.
posted by biogeo at 7:39 PM on May 29, 2022 [21 favorites]
It's so off topic but Frowner:
4. Bad paths to college. Some people go to college who are not interested in it and don't really need it, of course, but a lot of people go to college when they are not ready for it. (I would have been better off with a year or two working, and I did really well in college.) You learn better when you want to learn, even if the "want" is purely the instrumental "I want to learn X skill because if I'm good at it I can get a better job". We should set society up so that you can easily work for a couple of years and then have the full-on undergrad experience, working relatively little. Instead, if you "go back" to school, you're working full time.
I have been working at a private high school for the past four years (this was--unexpectedly--my last semester) and the absolute wild-eyed pearl clutching I get from other staff when I don't pump the kids with COLLEGE IS THE PATH THE ONLY PATH THE ONE TRUE PATH GO TO COLLEGE NOW rhetoric but suggest "take your time" and "community college" and "not everyone needs to go to college right away or at all" and bring up being careful about debt. I'm out here trying but I'm in the minority. Most of the staff are more middle-class backgrounds but our students are an interesting mix (thanks, sliding scale tuition), and I am from a working class background and wonder if that has something to do with it. I brought up in a meeting ONCE about which of the community colleges in the state is actually really good and transfers with X university well and they looked at me like I wanted to advise students to lick pond scum for a living.
posted by wellifyouinsist at 8:16 PM on May 29, 2022 [11 favorites]
4. Bad paths to college. Some people go to college who are not interested in it and don't really need it, of course, but a lot of people go to college when they are not ready for it. (I would have been better off with a year or two working, and I did really well in college.) You learn better when you want to learn, even if the "want" is purely the instrumental "I want to learn X skill because if I'm good at it I can get a better job". We should set society up so that you can easily work for a couple of years and then have the full-on undergrad experience, working relatively little. Instead, if you "go back" to school, you're working full time.
I have been working at a private high school for the past four years (this was--unexpectedly--my last semester) and the absolute wild-eyed pearl clutching I get from other staff when I don't pump the kids with COLLEGE IS THE PATH THE ONLY PATH THE ONE TRUE PATH GO TO COLLEGE NOW rhetoric but suggest "take your time" and "community college" and "not everyone needs to go to college right away or at all" and bring up being careful about debt. I'm out here trying but I'm in the minority. Most of the staff are more middle-class backgrounds but our students are an interesting mix (thanks, sliding scale tuition), and I am from a working class background and wonder if that has something to do with it. I brought up in a meeting ONCE about which of the community colleges in the state is actually really good and transfers with X university well and they looked at me like I wanted to advise students to lick pond scum for a living.
posted by wellifyouinsist at 8:16 PM on May 29, 2022 [11 favorites]
College STEM prof here. (Also a first-Gen student and the child of poor parents, FWIW.)
I didn’t read the article, because I have enough of my own discouraging stories of student cheating that I’m not inclined to read someone else’s. But I’ve been intrigued by the discussion here. My own two cents…
Holding students accountable for certain academic standards undoubtedly does play into pre-existing socioeconomic inequity. I recall it dawning on me, as an adult, just how many advantages affluent students had that I never enjoyed. Families who were affluent, who never experienced food or housing insecurity as I did. Parents who stayed together and maintained a stable home. Parents who knew about and valued and championed college, and how to prepare for it. Knew which prep schools to attend, or which test prep courses to take, or which extramural activities to sign up for, and had the money to pay for it all. Parents or friends of the family who were well-placed occupationally and could offer summer internships or jobs to the high schooler to bolster their college applications, or who could proofread, coach, or even write their application letters. Affluent students who could afford to focus on school without having to hold down a full-time job.
When students who come out of environments like that are placed in a class with students who don’t have those advantages, there’s no question about the inequity, I see it all the time in my classes.
But the thing is, in a society in which there is vast socioeconomic inequity, a college experience can help to even the playing field for many. This process is far, FAR from perfect. But without some mechanism to reflect the merits of an individual student’s competency, then I believe that the fall-back mechanism would be to rely on the socioeconomic indicators that underlying the original inequity.
That is to say, a student of a poor family, who earns a 3.8 gpa, has a very good chance of being viewed favorably when compared with a student of an affluent family who has a 2.8. So while the meritocracy of academia is flawed, it at least can serve as a means of modulating some of the socioeconomic advantage enjoyed by the affluent, and permitting kids of poverty the opportunity to document and demonstrate their technical training, not to mention their general intellectual ability and determination and work ethic, to potential employers.
This is why I am a proud educator. I love teaching my undergrad students. I deeply care about them and want them to succeed. I consider myself a coach and guide and their best ally in their academic quest. My RateMyProfessors ratings and comments echo this, as do my student evals. And when I’m able to write a Letter of Recommendation for a student, and they let me know they got into the Biochemistry program at Johns Hopkins, or the PharmD program at UNC, or the Chemistry program at UCLA or Cal-Tech, it makes my day. And some even write me years later to let me know they graduated with a doctorate and to thank me for being there for them at the beginning, which is worth more to me than gold.
Especially when I know that they had extra challenges to overcome. I will bend every rule to the breaking point to support students who need accommodations because of their work or family or health or other obligations or considerations. I’ll give them second and third chances, postponed deadlines, modified test-taking, alternate assignments, point-boosting activities, extra credit problems, drop-the lowest-two quizzes, and grace margins. All stipulated up front in the syllabus.
But, all that being said, I will not (knowingly) let them cheat.
Ultimately, it is my professional responsibility to the students inclined to cheat, as well as to their fellow students who are following the rules, to their future academic advisors and employers, to the taxpayers who pay my salary, and to society at large to maintain some semblance of an academic standard.
Otherwise, that “Gentleman’s C” given to a student who didn’t actually learn anything in my class means they advance into a more challenging course or grad program in which they will certainly fail and likely wash out. Or if they make it through more advanced courses due to cheating, then they become the kind of co-worker that everybody hates to work with — and is possibly a danger to others — because of their incompetence. That’s not being kind, or compassionate, or equitable to anyone.
An absolutely true anecdote, if I may, that I share with students in each of my classes…
In 2008, at the very end of the spring semester, I became very ill and nearly died. I tried to tough it out until the end of the semester, and submitted final grades on Friday. Two days later on Sunday night, I was lying in the hospital bed, awaiting a surgery which I’d been told had a fair chance of not working, and that there was a not insignificant chance I would die in the procedure.
The door to my room opened, and after my eyes focused and I saw who it was, I said “Adam! What a small world! You know…it gives me more pleasure than you can imagine…for me to be able to inform you…that you earned an A in my class.”
We live in a flawed, unfair world. But anyone who is looking up at you from their hospital bed — or trusting you to design a building that won’t collapse, or to defend them in a court of law — should be able to gain some degree of reassurance from knowing that you earned your credentials, and the fundamental legitimacy to be doing what you’re doing. through a rigorous process of training and assessment.
Academic integrity doesn’t fix the world. It doesn’t even fix academia. But the alternative, in my mind, is so much worse.
Just my two cents.
posted by darkstar at 8:34 PM on May 29, 2022 [50 favorites]
I didn’t read the article, because I have enough of my own discouraging stories of student cheating that I’m not inclined to read someone else’s. But I’ve been intrigued by the discussion here. My own two cents…
Holding students accountable for certain academic standards undoubtedly does play into pre-existing socioeconomic inequity. I recall it dawning on me, as an adult, just how many advantages affluent students had that I never enjoyed. Families who were affluent, who never experienced food or housing insecurity as I did. Parents who stayed together and maintained a stable home. Parents who knew about and valued and championed college, and how to prepare for it. Knew which prep schools to attend, or which test prep courses to take, or which extramural activities to sign up for, and had the money to pay for it all. Parents or friends of the family who were well-placed occupationally and could offer summer internships or jobs to the high schooler to bolster their college applications, or who could proofread, coach, or even write their application letters. Affluent students who could afford to focus on school without having to hold down a full-time job.
When students who come out of environments like that are placed in a class with students who don’t have those advantages, there’s no question about the inequity, I see it all the time in my classes.
But the thing is, in a society in which there is vast socioeconomic inequity, a college experience can help to even the playing field for many. This process is far, FAR from perfect. But without some mechanism to reflect the merits of an individual student’s competency, then I believe that the fall-back mechanism would be to rely on the socioeconomic indicators that underlying the original inequity.
That is to say, a student of a poor family, who earns a 3.8 gpa, has a very good chance of being viewed favorably when compared with a student of an affluent family who has a 2.8. So while the meritocracy of academia is flawed, it at least can serve as a means of modulating some of the socioeconomic advantage enjoyed by the affluent, and permitting kids of poverty the opportunity to document and demonstrate their technical training, not to mention their general intellectual ability and determination and work ethic, to potential employers.
This is why I am a proud educator. I love teaching my undergrad students. I deeply care about them and want them to succeed. I consider myself a coach and guide and their best ally in their academic quest. My RateMyProfessors ratings and comments echo this, as do my student evals. And when I’m able to write a Letter of Recommendation for a student, and they let me know they got into the Biochemistry program at Johns Hopkins, or the PharmD program at UNC, or the Chemistry program at UCLA or Cal-Tech, it makes my day. And some even write me years later to let me know they graduated with a doctorate and to thank me for being there for them at the beginning, which is worth more to me than gold.
Especially when I know that they had extra challenges to overcome. I will bend every rule to the breaking point to support students who need accommodations because of their work or family or health or other obligations or considerations. I’ll give them second and third chances, postponed deadlines, modified test-taking, alternate assignments, point-boosting activities, extra credit problems, drop-the lowest-two quizzes, and grace margins. All stipulated up front in the syllabus.
But, all that being said, I will not (knowingly) let them cheat.
Ultimately, it is my professional responsibility to the students inclined to cheat, as well as to their fellow students who are following the rules, to their future academic advisors and employers, to the taxpayers who pay my salary, and to society at large to maintain some semblance of an academic standard.
Otherwise, that “Gentleman’s C” given to a student who didn’t actually learn anything in my class means they advance into a more challenging course or grad program in which they will certainly fail and likely wash out. Or if they make it through more advanced courses due to cheating, then they become the kind of co-worker that everybody hates to work with — and is possibly a danger to others — because of their incompetence. That’s not being kind, or compassionate, or equitable to anyone.
An absolutely true anecdote, if I may, that I share with students in each of my classes…
In 2008, at the very end of the spring semester, I became very ill and nearly died. I tried to tough it out until the end of the semester, and submitted final grades on Friday. Two days later on Sunday night, I was lying in the hospital bed, awaiting a surgery which I’d been told had a fair chance of not working, and that there was a not insignificant chance I would die in the procedure.
The door to my room opened, and after my eyes focused and I saw who it was, I said “Adam! What a small world! You know…it gives me more pleasure than you can imagine…for me to be able to inform you…that you earned an A in my class.”
We live in a flawed, unfair world. But anyone who is looking up at you from their hospital bed — or trusting you to design a building that won’t collapse, or to defend them in a court of law — should be able to gain some degree of reassurance from knowing that you earned your credentials, and the fundamental legitimacy to be doing what you’re doing. through a rigorous process of training and assessment.
Academic integrity doesn’t fix the world. It doesn’t even fix academia. But the alternative, in my mind, is so much worse.
Just my two cents.
posted by darkstar at 8:34 PM on May 29, 2022 [50 favorites]
A lot of people talking about teachers who "don't care enough" and all I have to say to that is that, dividing by the number of classes I teach and the number of students in each class, I have exactly $4.60 to invest per student every week. I spend that on making sure I am imparting the information as effectively as possible for those who want to learn, and following up with those who don't to try and get them engaged anyway. There is absolutely not enough left over for me to put effort into ferreting out cheating.
I would like to be able to care but I am too fucking busy with my second and third jobs to do so.
posted by brook horse at 9:02 PM on May 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
I would like to be able to care but I am too fucking busy with my second and third jobs to do so.
posted by brook horse at 9:02 PM on May 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
*$4.60 worth of time and energy... missed the edit window.
posted by brook horse at 9:08 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by brook horse at 9:08 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
read the whole piece (tho not all the comments here) and i have to say the prof is a great communicator and seems to be, if anything, on the kind and naive side of the spectrum, not a disciplinarian by any means.
the students who cheated, or a good portion of them, seem like full and entire pieces of shit. uncurious, foolish, dipshits who can't even cheat well and then threaten each other for being snitches. what were they even there to do?
and no, i don't buy the argument that credentialism and our overall society is at fault for these losers. this wasn't some hardass prof extracting pain from their students mid pandemic. it was an open book open note online class! the prof was going out of their way to be accomodating, and these fuckers took advantage. you don't want to be there? then don't. go to trade school. apprentice somewhere. work retail. be a fucking decent person.
sure cheating is ubiquitous and always has been. but there's also different degrees of cheating. two kids texting about the questions? the prof never would've known or cared. but this bullshit was shameless and egregious and the worst offenders 100% should've been failed and expelled.
posted by wibari at 10:21 PM on May 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
the students who cheated, or a good portion of them, seem like full and entire pieces of shit. uncurious, foolish, dipshits who can't even cheat well and then threaten each other for being snitches. what were they even there to do?
and no, i don't buy the argument that credentialism and our overall society is at fault for these losers. this wasn't some hardass prof extracting pain from their students mid pandemic. it was an open book open note online class! the prof was going out of their way to be accomodating, and these fuckers took advantage. you don't want to be there? then don't. go to trade school. apprentice somewhere. work retail. be a fucking decent person.
sure cheating is ubiquitous and always has been. but there's also different degrees of cheating. two kids texting about the questions? the prof never would've known or cared. but this bullshit was shameless and egregious and the worst offenders 100% should've been failed and expelled.
posted by wibari at 10:21 PM on May 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
Sorry, you are in college. This isn't high school anymore, you are there to learn and if you don't want to learn you can leave.
lol, c'mon.
It's 2022. College is what highschool used to be. If you don't have a diploma, you're pretty much fucked in terms of professional or administrative-class jobs. Even with the exorbitant cost of college education in the US, it's still just about the highest-ROI investment you can make (which is why we allow people to borrow against their future earnings to pay for it).
It's a pay-to-play system: you pay, you get the diploma, you get a job that doesn't involve slipping a disc in your back before you're 30. Maybe. That ladder is being hauled up a bit more every day—better get that diploma now, before the job requires a masters or a PhD.
Diplomas aren't a certificate of competence. They're a goddamn receipt. Anyone doing new-hire recruiting understands this, or they're not very good at their job. Assessing competence is what interviews are for, and why they're so high-stakes in unregulated fields.
Anyone who doesn't realize that... I don't even. Maybe it was different decades ago; I really wouldn't know. But that's damn sure how it is right now. (I'm skeptical it was all that different, because I know professors who taught in the 60s and 70s and had no-fail policies to keep students from getting drafted. Going to college for reasons that have nothing to do with learning isn't new.)
And this is more true the more "elite" the school. It's well known that you basically can't flunk out of the Ivies if you're paying the rack rate. Not a real shocker—everyone knows that people who are as dumb as fucking rocks can get Ivy League diplomas. The reason those diplomas are worth anything is because they're an imprimatur of social class, not ability.
It's even more true in graduate programs, which are increasingly table stakes for many jobs. In my grad program—regarded as one of the top 3 in the world for the subject matter—we had tons of students whose employers were paying tuition. They did. not. fail. I could always tell when a bunch of them had bombed an exam, because suddenly that exam would magically turn into a "pre-test", and there'd be another opportunity to retake it (if you wanted to), plus a bunch of "study sessions" and "extra credit" and other stuff would suddenly appear. (And god, the TAs, those poor bastards. They had to do the real dirty work of getting all the crap essays and stuff into not-laughable shape. Here's hoping their reward in heaven is great, because it sure didn't seem like they were getting it in life.)
In fields where a certain amount of knowledge is actually required to do the job, there are almost always professional exams or certification tests on top of the academic courses. Because nobody assumes that the diploma means much. You went to nursing school? Nice. Nobody cares until you pass the NCLEX. Same for doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, etc. (CS/CEng/IT/Consulting/Wall Street lack universal professional certifications for newcomers, so new-hires tend to need either a bunch of subject-matter certifications to get that first job, or have to pass interviews designed to assess "fit", however defined in that industry.)
Sure, there are countervailing forces—many professional schools market themselves heavily based on their professional-exam pass rates, so they'll basically do the dirty work of weeding out students before they get to the test, so as not to risk their stats and the school's ranking. But—again, shocker—they generally do that weeding-out pretty far along in the process, and in any profession you can always find schools who are willing to take your money and give you a crack at the certification tests, if you're determined to. (This used to be the domain of the Caribbean med schools and 'close cover before striking' law schools, but is increasingly where you find for-profits.)
If this professor wants to launch a one-man crusade against the entire modern US academic system, well, good luck with that. Maybe he'll do fine, because students will rate him and he'll develop a reputation as a hardass, and the only students who'll take his class are the ones who are honestly interested. Great. But somewhere else, someone will just hire a different professor who's a bit more "student focused", and they'll figure out how to get those less-engaged (but still paying!) students through the class and onward to graduation. Because that's how shit gets paid for. Nothing is going to fundamentally change or improve as a result of his effort; all he's doing is wasting a bunch of time slicing-and-dicing chat logs in R (which, if that's how he decides to spend his time, cool I guess, but there are probably more interesting datasets) when he could have been spending time with the subset of students who are actually in his class to learn. It doesn't seem like a win to me.
Because rationally, even if I was a student who was 100% "there to learn", why would I want to take a course from a professor who's going to spend a whole bunch of time looking for cheaters? That doesn't do anything for me.
And that would have been the really interesting experiment, IMO: give all the cheating students a one-time, take-it-or-leave-it offer, where they can never show up to his office or class again, and get a D. Not even a gentleman's C (which typically implies you at least show up to class, in my experience), just a not-fail. I wonder how many would have taken that deal and walked out, never to trouble him again? How much time would he have saved, and been able to spend improving his curriculum?
This isn't a total abstract exercise; I had a college professor who pretty much gave out that deal on the first day. (Technically, the deal was that you converted from letter-grade to pass/fail and you got a P, but you were not allowed to come to class or office hours or otherwise waste her time.) It was one of the best classes, with the most engaged students, that I ever took. The jocks who were only there because they heard the class was a "gut" traded high-fives on the way out, and we never saw them again. Win win.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:27 PM on May 29, 2022 [11 favorites]
lol, c'mon.
It's 2022. College is what highschool used to be. If you don't have a diploma, you're pretty much fucked in terms of professional or administrative-class jobs. Even with the exorbitant cost of college education in the US, it's still just about the highest-ROI investment you can make (which is why we allow people to borrow against their future earnings to pay for it).
It's a pay-to-play system: you pay, you get the diploma, you get a job that doesn't involve slipping a disc in your back before you're 30. Maybe. That ladder is being hauled up a bit more every day—better get that diploma now, before the job requires a masters or a PhD.
Diplomas aren't a certificate of competence. They're a goddamn receipt. Anyone doing new-hire recruiting understands this, or they're not very good at their job. Assessing competence is what interviews are for, and why they're so high-stakes in unregulated fields.
Anyone who doesn't realize that... I don't even. Maybe it was different decades ago; I really wouldn't know. But that's damn sure how it is right now. (I'm skeptical it was all that different, because I know professors who taught in the 60s and 70s and had no-fail policies to keep students from getting drafted. Going to college for reasons that have nothing to do with learning isn't new.)
And this is more true the more "elite" the school. It's well known that you basically can't flunk out of the Ivies if you're paying the rack rate. Not a real shocker—everyone knows that people who are as dumb as fucking rocks can get Ivy League diplomas. The reason those diplomas are worth anything is because they're an imprimatur of social class, not ability.
It's even more true in graduate programs, which are increasingly table stakes for many jobs. In my grad program—regarded as one of the top 3 in the world for the subject matter—we had tons of students whose employers were paying tuition. They did. not. fail. I could always tell when a bunch of them had bombed an exam, because suddenly that exam would magically turn into a "pre-test", and there'd be another opportunity to retake it (if you wanted to), plus a bunch of "study sessions" and "extra credit" and other stuff would suddenly appear. (And god, the TAs, those poor bastards. They had to do the real dirty work of getting all the crap essays and stuff into not-laughable shape. Here's hoping their reward in heaven is great, because it sure didn't seem like they were getting it in life.)
In fields where a certain amount of knowledge is actually required to do the job, there are almost always professional exams or certification tests on top of the academic courses. Because nobody assumes that the diploma means much. You went to nursing school? Nice. Nobody cares until you pass the NCLEX. Same for doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, etc. (CS/CEng/IT/Consulting/Wall Street lack universal professional certifications for newcomers, so new-hires tend to need either a bunch of subject-matter certifications to get that first job, or have to pass interviews designed to assess "fit", however defined in that industry.)
Sure, there are countervailing forces—many professional schools market themselves heavily based on their professional-exam pass rates, so they'll basically do the dirty work of weeding out students before they get to the test, so as not to risk their stats and the school's ranking. But—again, shocker—they generally do that weeding-out pretty far along in the process, and in any profession you can always find schools who are willing to take your money and give you a crack at the certification tests, if you're determined to. (This used to be the domain of the Caribbean med schools and 'close cover before striking' law schools, but is increasingly where you find for-profits.)
If this professor wants to launch a one-man crusade against the entire modern US academic system, well, good luck with that. Maybe he'll do fine, because students will rate him and he'll develop a reputation as a hardass, and the only students who'll take his class are the ones who are honestly interested. Great. But somewhere else, someone will just hire a different professor who's a bit more "student focused", and they'll figure out how to get those less-engaged (but still paying!) students through the class and onward to graduation. Because that's how shit gets paid for. Nothing is going to fundamentally change or improve as a result of his effort; all he's doing is wasting a bunch of time slicing-and-dicing chat logs in R (which, if that's how he decides to spend his time, cool I guess, but there are probably more interesting datasets) when he could have been spending time with the subset of students who are actually in his class to learn. It doesn't seem like a win to me.
Because rationally, even if I was a student who was 100% "there to learn", why would I want to take a course from a professor who's going to spend a whole bunch of time looking for cheaters? That doesn't do anything for me.
And that would have been the really interesting experiment, IMO: give all the cheating students a one-time, take-it-or-leave-it offer, where they can never show up to his office or class again, and get a D. Not even a gentleman's C (which typically implies you at least show up to class, in my experience), just a not-fail. I wonder how many would have taken that deal and walked out, never to trouble him again? How much time would he have saved, and been able to spend improving his curriculum?
This isn't a total abstract exercise; I had a college professor who pretty much gave out that deal on the first day. (Technically, the deal was that you converted from letter-grade to pass/fail and you got a P, but you were not allowed to come to class or office hours or otherwise waste her time.) It was one of the best classes, with the most engaged students, that I ever took. The jocks who were only there because they heard the class was a "gut" traded high-fives on the way out, and we never saw them again. Win win.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:27 PM on May 29, 2022 [11 favorites]
I'm in administration/management at a college and cheating is something that is very much a massive problem everywhere, exacerbated by having to move so much online. Not because it makes it any easier to cheat (although it does), but because the level of engagement with students is simply not there when a teacher only ever experiences their students as a tiny blurred video. This means it's less obvious to a teacher when work submitted by a student is not their own work. Online plagiarism checkers are becoming more and more vague in their results because there are only so many ways you can express knowledge and every sample added to the mix makes them a tiny bit less useful.
It's not that hard, though, to make cheating more difficult, with simple tactics like time-limiting tests (a common thing with in-person testing, but not so much online). A multiple-choice test with a strict time limit and well-designed questions will very quickly sort out who knows the material and who doesn't. Making sure there are at least two answers that, to those not being well and truly across the content, could be correct sorts out the good listeners from the good guessers. Not using exact terms from the course content within questions or answers makes it hard to ctrl-f the answers and that, combined with the time limit, means there's little opportunity for anyone to share the answers because they just won't have time. There are lots of possible technical solutions that could help, but LMSs often don't offer these by default, even if teachers had time to do things like creating large question banks to randomise tests.
I agree with everything ctmf said here and want to add to this specifically:
'...people have to act on their own for a while, they can't. They don't know enough'
This is a really key thing in the cheating debate. Sure, in the 'real world', you can always search for a solution to something and it would be unusual not to be able to find at least a start to any workplace issue on the Internet. But that itself creates the problem it's trying to solve - there are so, so many wrong solutions online for any given situation that it's much easier to find wrong answers than correct ones. As the store of readily available 'information' gets bigger and bigger, it's not enough just to be able to search for a solution, because you may not have the knowledge to separate the right solution from someone's half-baked nonsense. One of the best things a formal education can give you is the ability to critically evaluate possible solutions and choose the one that is most correct. Accepting that it's OK to just find your exam answers on the internet is merely perpetuating this problem.
I think you can, though, design around this problem for some assessment tasks by accepting that your students will search for answers on the Internet and actually make that the assignment - search a solution to a given problem, choose one and defend (in your own words) why it's a good solution. But that, of course, takes time to mark and, well, who has time for that?
posted by dg at 10:30 PM on May 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
It's not that hard, though, to make cheating more difficult, with simple tactics like time-limiting tests (a common thing with in-person testing, but not so much online). A multiple-choice test with a strict time limit and well-designed questions will very quickly sort out who knows the material and who doesn't. Making sure there are at least two answers that, to those not being well and truly across the content, could be correct sorts out the good listeners from the good guessers. Not using exact terms from the course content within questions or answers makes it hard to ctrl-f the answers and that, combined with the time limit, means there's little opportunity for anyone to share the answers because they just won't have time. There are lots of possible technical solutions that could help, but LMSs often don't offer these by default, even if teachers had time to do things like creating large question banks to randomise tests.
I agree with everything ctmf said here and want to add to this specifically:
'...people have to act on their own for a while, they can't. They don't know enough'
This is a really key thing in the cheating debate. Sure, in the 'real world', you can always search for a solution to something and it would be unusual not to be able to find at least a start to any workplace issue on the Internet. But that itself creates the problem it's trying to solve - there are so, so many wrong solutions online for any given situation that it's much easier to find wrong answers than correct ones. As the store of readily available 'information' gets bigger and bigger, it's not enough just to be able to search for a solution, because you may not have the knowledge to separate the right solution from someone's half-baked nonsense. One of the best things a formal education can give you is the ability to critically evaluate possible solutions and choose the one that is most correct. Accepting that it's OK to just find your exam answers on the internet is merely perpetuating this problem.
I think you can, though, design around this problem for some assessment tasks by accepting that your students will search for answers on the Internet and actually make that the assignment - search a solution to a given problem, choose one and defend (in your own words) why it's a good solution. But that, of course, takes time to mark and, well, who has time for that?
posted by dg at 10:30 PM on May 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
I've read a few papers over the years under disciplines such as education studies, developmental psychology, critical pedagogy, and just sociology in general. Those researchers tend to be more reformist and/or more radical than the status quo. I think coming from those disciplines, you could certainly make an argument that cheating is fundamentally a structural issue, and must be approached as such. Not seeing structural issues is what leads to reactionary phenomena such as mass cheating, or to piecemeal solutions and working academics frustrated that their own methods aren't enough to prevent cheating, etc.
Anyways I'd like to point out that based on just general interest reading in these areas, one can easily see there are entire disciplines that have been working on these questions and issues, even if indirectly. Perhaps it should be noted that much typical discussion doesn't seem to be aware of these sources at all.
posted by polymodus at 12:19 AM on May 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
Anyways I'd like to point out that based on just general interest reading in these areas, one can easily see there are entire disciplines that have been working on these questions and issues, even if indirectly. Perhaps it should be noted that much typical discussion doesn't seem to be aware of these sources at all.
posted by polymodus at 12:19 AM on May 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
>There's lots of cues to patchwritten and partly- or wholly-plagiarized assignments. It honestly doesn't take long to become sensitized to them, and there's also plenty of research and praxis-based writing on the subject. If a class is small enough, we also develop hunches about student capacity -- these are of course uncertain and subject to bias
One of my favorite little stories from my undergrad is my first German lit class. I got the bright idea to minor in German, so we took German 101, 102, 201, and then this little beginner's German Lit class.
With only three semesters of German under our belts - starting from square one the first semester - you can imagine how this went. We read a series of little short stories, essays, and such of intermediate difficulty. Probably about 6th or 8th grade level stuff if you were a native speaker. Even this was some levels above what we were really capable of understanding, and most of it more or less bounced right off.
For the final, we were to read a short novella and then write something like an 8-12 page essay on it.
None of us had ever written an essay in German before - maybe a few sentences or a paragraph or two, but never anything as involved as an entire essay.
Since this was hard and a pretty big project, I did the normal thing and . . . procrastinated mightily.
The evening before the essay was due, it was time to knuckle down. I re-read the novella, started putting a few things down, started getting into the swing of it a little, pretty soon got really caught up in it, pulled an all-nighter and slipped the completely handwritten finished product under the professor's door at about 7:55am. (Due by 8:00.)
During that night, though, something happened that I have experienced just a few times in my life. That is, most of the time you just progress on a fairly predictable schedule, 1-2-3, step by step. But once in a while, if you've put in the leg work, and skills and ideas have had some time to gestate, then then you are put under some time pressure to produce something - and then a bit of magic happens. You just move right up to the next level - a bit of magic, really.
It's exactly what they mean by the term "quantum leap" - just a rather sudden jump up to the next level, rather than a steady linear progression.
(As usual, Bill Watterson has insight in the root cause here.)
So in the end I was fairly pleased with the result of this little project. I felt like it represented some real progress - and of course, curious to see what the professor might think of it.
So the final day of class comes. He hands back the essays and there is my "masterwork" with B written at the top.
This surprised me more than a little. So I stopped by his office to find out what was up.
His explanation: "There is no way someone with only four semesters of German could have written an essay at that level without outside help."
My jaw dropped and I'm pretty sure he took my complete inability to articulate anything as confirmation that, yup, here is our world class cheater. I was so completely taken aback that I couldn't really even say or explain anything.
The thing is, I was so dumb, wouldn't have even known anyone to ask for help. I didn't know anyone who spoke German any better than I did. There was no internet in those days.
I had been there when the essay was written, start to finish. And there was nothing more in the room where that essay was written, start to finish, other than me, the novella, a dictionary, the grammar book we'd used for the first three semesters, and some blank paper.
No other person, no other thing, no other resources.
I guess my point is, sometimes as a teacher, your hunches about student ability are all wrong - it was in fact a fairly small class and the professor should have had a more or less decent idea of the ability level of the various students. In this case, apparently though, he didn't.
And the fact that the student isn't able to, or simply doesn't - for whatever reasons - defend him or herself is not really confirmation of your vague suspicions.
Relevant to this discussion, though, is how he handled this presumed case of cheating. If he had lodged a formal complaint, that was something taken very seriously at that school. It would have been a lot work for him and a lot of disruption for me - and all for nothing. It might have led to a more extended discussion of the situation that would have clarified things. But just as likely it would have been a giant useless cluster#*$@.
Instead he gave it the "Coward's B" which sent the message he wanted to while also being very difficult to dispute. (B isn't a bad grade by any means.)
So that is a nice bureaucratic solution, but I have to say - as someone who has spent more than 20 years teaching in various capacities since that time - that it was a real opportunity missed, as well.
It could have been an opportunity to connect with a potentially promising student who has just taken a giant leap forward in developing the skills you hope as a teacher and as a university that he will. Instead, as you can see by the many paragraphs of ink I'm spilling on this some decades later, it led to a decidedly far more mixed outcome.
posted by flug at 2:03 AM on May 30, 2022 [25 favorites]
One of my favorite little stories from my undergrad is my first German lit class. I got the bright idea to minor in German, so we took German 101, 102, 201, and then this little beginner's German Lit class.
With only three semesters of German under our belts - starting from square one the first semester - you can imagine how this went. We read a series of little short stories, essays, and such of intermediate difficulty. Probably about 6th or 8th grade level stuff if you were a native speaker. Even this was some levels above what we were really capable of understanding, and most of it more or less bounced right off.
For the final, we were to read a short novella and then write something like an 8-12 page essay on it.
None of us had ever written an essay in German before - maybe a few sentences or a paragraph or two, but never anything as involved as an entire essay.
Since this was hard and a pretty big project, I did the normal thing and . . . procrastinated mightily.
The evening before the essay was due, it was time to knuckle down. I re-read the novella, started putting a few things down, started getting into the swing of it a little, pretty soon got really caught up in it, pulled an all-nighter and slipped the completely handwritten finished product under the professor's door at about 7:55am. (Due by 8:00.)
During that night, though, something happened that I have experienced just a few times in my life. That is, most of the time you just progress on a fairly predictable schedule, 1-2-3, step by step. But once in a while, if you've put in the leg work, and skills and ideas have had some time to gestate, then then you are put under some time pressure to produce something - and then a bit of magic happens. You just move right up to the next level - a bit of magic, really.
It's exactly what they mean by the term "quantum leap" - just a rather sudden jump up to the next level, rather than a steady linear progression.
(As usual, Bill Watterson has insight in the root cause here.)
So in the end I was fairly pleased with the result of this little project. I felt like it represented some real progress - and of course, curious to see what the professor might think of it.
So the final day of class comes. He hands back the essays and there is my "masterwork" with B written at the top.
This surprised me more than a little. So I stopped by his office to find out what was up.
His explanation: "There is no way someone with only four semesters of German could have written an essay at that level without outside help."
My jaw dropped and I'm pretty sure he took my complete inability to articulate anything as confirmation that, yup, here is our world class cheater. I was so completely taken aback that I couldn't really even say or explain anything.
The thing is, I was so dumb, wouldn't have even known anyone to ask for help. I didn't know anyone who spoke German any better than I did. There was no internet in those days.
I had been there when the essay was written, start to finish. And there was nothing more in the room where that essay was written, start to finish, other than me, the novella, a dictionary, the grammar book we'd used for the first three semesters, and some blank paper.
No other person, no other thing, no other resources.
I guess my point is, sometimes as a teacher, your hunches about student ability are all wrong - it was in fact a fairly small class and the professor should have had a more or less decent idea of the ability level of the various students. In this case, apparently though, he didn't.
And the fact that the student isn't able to, or simply doesn't - for whatever reasons - defend him or herself is not really confirmation of your vague suspicions.
Relevant to this discussion, though, is how he handled this presumed case of cheating. If he had lodged a formal complaint, that was something taken very seriously at that school. It would have been a lot work for him and a lot of disruption for me - and all for nothing. It might have led to a more extended discussion of the situation that would have clarified things. But just as likely it would have been a giant useless cluster#*$@.
Instead he gave it the "Coward's B" which sent the message he wanted to while also being very difficult to dispute. (B isn't a bad grade by any means.)
So that is a nice bureaucratic solution, but I have to say - as someone who has spent more than 20 years teaching in various capacities since that time - that it was a real opportunity missed, as well.
It could have been an opportunity to connect with a potentially promising student who has just taken a giant leap forward in developing the skills you hope as a teacher and as a university that he will. Instead, as you can see by the many paragraphs of ink I'm spilling on this some decades later, it led to a decidedly far more mixed outcome.
posted by flug at 2:03 AM on May 30, 2022 [25 favorites]
flug, that is really sad. From the teacher's point of view, it is also an extremely rare occurrence. I think I've tried it twice during 30+ years of teaching, and one of the times it was indeed very elaborate cheating.
There was this one student who consistently handed in perfect but very weird (architecture) projects after not having done the work, and one night before the due date, I saw her parents in the studio with her. They probably didn't expect me to be there so late, but I had forgotten my keys. It turned out her dad was a civil engineer, hence the weirdness/perfection combo. I fumed, but my colleagues told me to let it go. The other students resented the fact that we knew it but didn't act on it. In the end, she was caught in a way we couldn't ignore and it was indeed a huge clusterfuck. Students who cheat this seriously should be expelled early on, because the longer you let them continue, the worse it gets, and then you get to the lawyering phase.
Obviously, this doesn't apply to you, and I would have invited you to a talk before grading. There are absolutely some students who experience an epiphany in the last days before an assignment is due, though usually there will be some hints that it happened. Maybe I'll get a last minute mail with an interesting question, or something in the assignment will be particularly good, because that is what triggered the epiphany.
One student I remember experiencing this after I helped him "cheat", obviously it wasn't really cheating, but I think he originally thought it was. He had a terrible writer's block, and a depression, and I suggested he should follow an example from the course very closely, but apply it to his own assignment. The contexts were so different, I knew he couldn't do it by merely plagiarizing. And suddenly everything clicked! He understood the course and the subject and came into a flow where he just did everything well and with ease. I often wonder what happened later to this guy, but I've forgotten his name.
I now do what my seventh grade math teacher did: ask the students to hand in the course notes along with the finished assignment. I've made a whole system for handling this, and it takes me mere minutes to see wether the notes are real or not. I don't know if that would have helped you?
posted by mumimor at 2:53 AM on May 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
There was this one student who consistently handed in perfect but very weird (architecture) projects after not having done the work, and one night before the due date, I saw her parents in the studio with her. They probably didn't expect me to be there so late, but I had forgotten my keys. It turned out her dad was a civil engineer, hence the weirdness/perfection combo. I fumed, but my colleagues told me to let it go. The other students resented the fact that we knew it but didn't act on it. In the end, she was caught in a way we couldn't ignore and it was indeed a huge clusterfuck. Students who cheat this seriously should be expelled early on, because the longer you let them continue, the worse it gets, and then you get to the lawyering phase.
Obviously, this doesn't apply to you, and I would have invited you to a talk before grading. There are absolutely some students who experience an epiphany in the last days before an assignment is due, though usually there will be some hints that it happened. Maybe I'll get a last minute mail with an interesting question, or something in the assignment will be particularly good, because that is what triggered the epiphany.
One student I remember experiencing this after I helped him "cheat", obviously it wasn't really cheating, but I think he originally thought it was. He had a terrible writer's block, and a depression, and I suggested he should follow an example from the course very closely, but apply it to his own assignment. The contexts were so different, I knew he couldn't do it by merely plagiarizing. And suddenly everything clicked! He understood the course and the subject and came into a flow where he just did everything well and with ease. I often wonder what happened later to this guy, but I've forgotten his name.
I now do what my seventh grade math teacher did: ask the students to hand in the course notes along with the finished assignment. I've made a whole system for handling this, and it takes me mere minutes to see wether the notes are real or not. I don't know if that would have helped you?
posted by mumimor at 2:53 AM on May 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
sigh... this was a psych 101 course - an intro course. The material isn't 400-level senior work in a STEM program. This is psych for people who don't want to take psych - and psych majors who have to take this survey course to start their degree. This can be identified by clicking off the blog and clicking on the courses he teaches - including the original syllabus and the subsequent class that he created afterward.
The professor wrote the textbook. The textbook is free on the tab at the top of his page that says 'books'. If you want - you can personally survey the course. Here's a hint - the material isn't particularly hard. If you want hard, look at some of his other courses and other textbooks on other material.
If you are curious about the packages he uses to detect plagarism - something that has plagued psych 101 courses since the dawn of universities (but programs to detect have not), once again - THE EXACT PACKAGE he created is available in his apps section. If you want to know - if anything you've ever written for him as a student is plagarized - it is straight forward to see exactly where the citation weaknesses are in your paper - although, yes, that does require an understanding of R, which neither I nor likely he, would expect you to have while taking a 101 level intro to psych course.
With respect to socio-economic bias - as an intro course, as a multiple choice test, as a freely provided textbook and with a turn-on tune-out course - I don't and won't accept that cheating is 'ok' for those students with less means. Nope. I don't care what background you have - you are taking curriculum that has been taught before by different professors - and in its original form has a significant enough testbank such that this is not revolutionary content - BASIC competency is what is expected to pass the exam.
And with that, I'm 90% aligned - I totally disagree on his silence, but just about him not sharing with his class at the time - clearly he had enough evidence earlier and clearly he had archives of chat and shared contents. That should have been the point to inform the class. F for timing, but at least he took the course and offered an alternative way to succeed.
Last note - don't lie to your professors. It doesn't bode well with how you'll achieve success with your employers.
posted by Nanukthedog at 3:27 AM on May 30, 2022 [17 favorites]
The professor wrote the textbook. The textbook is free on the tab at the top of his page that says 'books'. If you want - you can personally survey the course. Here's a hint - the material isn't particularly hard. If you want hard, look at some of his other courses and other textbooks on other material.
If you are curious about the packages he uses to detect plagarism - something that has plagued psych 101 courses since the dawn of universities (but programs to detect have not), once again - THE EXACT PACKAGE he created is available in his apps section. If you want to know - if anything you've ever written for him as a student is plagarized - it is straight forward to see exactly where the citation weaknesses are in your paper - although, yes, that does require an understanding of R, which neither I nor likely he, would expect you to have while taking a 101 level intro to psych course.
With respect to socio-economic bias - as an intro course, as a multiple choice test, as a freely provided textbook and with a turn-on tune-out course - I don't and won't accept that cheating is 'ok' for those students with less means. Nope. I don't care what background you have - you are taking curriculum that has been taught before by different professors - and in its original form has a significant enough testbank such that this is not revolutionary content - BASIC competency is what is expected to pass the exam.
And with that, I'm 90% aligned - I totally disagree on his silence, but just about him not sharing with his class at the time - clearly he had enough evidence earlier and clearly he had archives of chat and shared contents. That should have been the point to inform the class. F for timing, but at least he took the course and offered an alternative way to succeed.
Last note - don't lie to your professors. It doesn't bode well with how you'll achieve success with your employers.
posted by Nanukthedog at 3:27 AM on May 30, 2022 [17 favorites]
Just as a general thing, when people are accused of cheating when they actually did very good work, they remember it for a long, long time.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:51 AM on May 30, 2022 [14 favorites]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:51 AM on May 30, 2022 [14 favorites]
What is the comment that will get me the most favorites?
Is the answer “B”?
posted by Monochrome at 6:58 AM on May 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
Is the answer “B”?
posted by Monochrome at 6:58 AM on May 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
Something that never occurred to me before reading darkstar’s story, because I was born yesterday, is: gee, how many people that I work with got through college in this manner?
It’s probably not that many, actually, because I work in academic research, and the non faculty jobs don’t pay well enough to attract a lot of people who aren’t there for one of our missions (whether that’s the disease we work on or the general project of scientific exploration). I feel like my workplace has a really high density of curious and hard working people. So I’m just going to stay born yesterday, I think.
But my life in general… What proportion of college students cheat? What proportion of college graduates cheated while there? (These might be different.) polymodus’ point that there are empirical questions here that others have doubtlessly explored already is well taken.
posted by eirias at 7:04 AM on May 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
It’s probably not that many, actually, because I work in academic research, and the non faculty jobs don’t pay well enough to attract a lot of people who aren’t there for one of our missions (whether that’s the disease we work on or the general project of scientific exploration). I feel like my workplace has a really high density of curious and hard working people. So I’m just going to stay born yesterday, I think.
But my life in general… What proportion of college students cheat? What proportion of college graduates cheated while there? (These might be different.) polymodus’ point that there are empirical questions here that others have doubtlessly explored already is well taken.
posted by eirias at 7:04 AM on May 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
What proportion of college students cheat?
To really keep you up at night: what proportion of doctors cheated their way through med school? How many lawyers cheated all the way through the bar? I learned a long time ago that credentials are the starting point for evaluating someone's professional ability, but are no guarantee of even basic competence, in any field.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:17 AM on May 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
To really keep you up at night: what proportion of doctors cheated their way through med school? How many lawyers cheated all the way through the bar? I learned a long time ago that credentials are the starting point for evaluating someone's professional ability, but are no guarantee of even basic competence, in any field.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:17 AM on May 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
I did chemistry at UG level, back in ye day. A whole bunch of my class cheated, to the extent of working out the expected yield of experiments then pinching that amount of the specific chemical from the stores, borrowing prior work from students in years above, etc.
posted by biffa at 8:52 AM on May 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by biffa at 8:52 AM on May 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Hi. As a first gen university student, who is also friends with a lot of other first gen university students, let me tell you that you are absolutely wrong about this.
Just wanted to say that’s been what I am observing too. Of course I’m only exposed to a small slice, though, for a variety of reasons, probably more than many current students. And it’s not that they don’t value the experience, but it’s absolutely secondary. The degree is a path to a better life, and if they or their family or friends are struggling, someone will step in to help out, and it’s definitely what we would call cheating. Sometimes in big ways.
(I, incidentally, am met with curiosity and astonishment when I turn away offers to do assignments for me when I’m behind. But I’m here for different reasons and part of that is going to be looking back and knowing I did it. Some days though, with the universities unfriendliness towards neurodiversity, I wonder why.)
posted by [insert clever name here] at 8:58 AM on May 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
Just wanted to say that’s been what I am observing too. Of course I’m only exposed to a small slice, though, for a variety of reasons, probably more than many current students. And it’s not that they don’t value the experience, but it’s absolutely secondary. The degree is a path to a better life, and if they or their family or friends are struggling, someone will step in to help out, and it’s definitely what we would call cheating. Sometimes in big ways.
(I, incidentally, am met with curiosity and astonishment when I turn away offers to do assignments for me when I’m behind. But I’m here for different reasons and part of that is going to be looking back and knowing I did it. Some days though, with the universities unfriendliness towards neurodiversity, I wonder why.)
posted by [insert clever name here] at 8:58 AM on May 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
I have Retraction Watch on my weekly reading list. Maybe it should be required reading for students.
Yes it sucks to get caught cheating at school, it must suck many times more to get caught after spending decades building a reputation.
posted by Dr. Curare at 9:14 AM on May 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
Yes it sucks to get caught cheating at school, it must suck many times more to get caught after spending decades building a reputation.
posted by Dr. Curare at 9:14 AM on May 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
“But that itself creates the problem it's trying to solve - there are so, so many wrong solutions online for any given situation that it's much easier to find wrong answers than correct ones. As the store of readily available 'information' gets bigger and bigger, it's not enough just to be able to search for a solution, because you may not have the knowledge to separate the right solution from someone's half-baked nonsense.”
Just agreeing with this comment.
One of the O-Chem lab courses I teach uses a very popular and commonly used lab techniques textbook. Part of their lab reports require answering questions from the text, as well as answering additional questions I have written. Since the text is widely used, and there are tens of thousands of O-chem students in the US answering those questions every semester, the answers are out there, easily found on the Internet. And for that matter, there is nothing preventing them from crowd-sourcing the answers in the class.
I tell my students up front that I know this is the case. And that the reason I still assign the questions is that they are nevertheless fundamental concepts that O-Chem students need to master, if they want to pass the Final Exam in this course, and eventually get a good score on the MCAT, and be well-prepared for their Biochem course and others. So if they cheat and just look up the answer, or ask the answer from a classmate, then they’ll get one point of credit for the question, but will be eroding their future preparedness. And, what’s more, if I find that they have plagiarized any of their answers — from the Internet or from each other — I will give them a zero for that whole section of the report (worth about 10%, or a letter grade, of the assignment).
Now, I’m sure that many students look up the answers or get help from their classmates, but then restructured their text in such a way that it shows they’ve engaged with the material with some understanding. But a handful of students not only cheat on those questions, but do so in such a way that it’s very obvious plagiarism. And to the point made above, sometimes, they plagiarize from an answer that is, in the famous words of Wolfgang Pauli, not even wrong.
So yes, it’s important to be able to look up information on the Internet and use those resources. But without having learned something, and developed even the most fundamental understanding of the material, you can find yourself waxing eloquent about “resonance stabilization due to the delocalization of electrons in the double bonds of cyclopentane”, and earning yourself an invitation to the professor’s Office Hours on Monday to explain your radical new theories on bond order in cycloalkanes.
posted by darkstar at 10:24 AM on May 30, 2022 [10 favorites]
Just agreeing with this comment.
One of the O-Chem lab courses I teach uses a very popular and commonly used lab techniques textbook. Part of their lab reports require answering questions from the text, as well as answering additional questions I have written. Since the text is widely used, and there are tens of thousands of O-chem students in the US answering those questions every semester, the answers are out there, easily found on the Internet. And for that matter, there is nothing preventing them from crowd-sourcing the answers in the class.
I tell my students up front that I know this is the case. And that the reason I still assign the questions is that they are nevertheless fundamental concepts that O-Chem students need to master, if they want to pass the Final Exam in this course, and eventually get a good score on the MCAT, and be well-prepared for their Biochem course and others. So if they cheat and just look up the answer, or ask the answer from a classmate, then they’ll get one point of credit for the question, but will be eroding their future preparedness. And, what’s more, if I find that they have plagiarized any of their answers — from the Internet or from each other — I will give them a zero for that whole section of the report (worth about 10%, or a letter grade, of the assignment).
Now, I’m sure that many students look up the answers or get help from their classmates, but then restructured their text in such a way that it shows they’ve engaged with the material with some understanding. But a handful of students not only cheat on those questions, but do so in such a way that it’s very obvious plagiarism. And to the point made above, sometimes, they plagiarize from an answer that is, in the famous words of Wolfgang Pauli, not even wrong.
So yes, it’s important to be able to look up information on the Internet and use those resources. But without having learned something, and developed even the most fundamental understanding of the material, you can find yourself waxing eloquent about “resonance stabilization due to the delocalization of electrons in the double bonds of cyclopentane”, and earning yourself an invitation to the professor’s Office Hours on Monday to explain your radical new theories on bond order in cycloalkanes.
posted by darkstar at 10:24 AM on May 30, 2022 [10 favorites]
I've read about medical students vandalizing reference books in the library to keep other students from using them. It's not good that students are doing cooperative cheating, but it's less awful in some ways.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:26 AM on May 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:26 AM on May 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
High school teacher. You can make the course as low-impact as you like, and some students will cheat anyway. They'll cheat because they have been cheating for the last 10 years of school and not been called out in it.
For instance, I had a student two years ago who failed on an attendance requirement because they were absent for every test and every quiz - once a week - it would have been easier for them just to learn the material.
I've had students turn in presentations where every line is copy-pasted.
But going with the "gotcha" route, getting the admin involved, is a fool's case. Admin does not want to be involved; they want you, as the teacher, to correct the issue. Getting admin involved by mass-reporting the whole class is a way of passing the buck.
As high school teachers, we tell the students they could be failed out of college, but depending on the college one goes to that's not true. Another form of passing the buck.
And then being obsessed with catching the cheaters, obsessed with making everyone do their own work, backfires too. It creates a bad class culture that's telling students they are expected to be cheaters.
Anyway there's not one answer to this problem, not a single magic technique you can use to get rid of all cheaters. Individualizing the work and making all tests except 3-4 very low stakes, and being very clear about the consequences of cheating on those 3-4 is the best way ive found.
Also, offering those opportunities for retakes and corrections. What's the POINT of cheating in that situation?
posted by subdee at 11:42 AM on May 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
For instance, I had a student two years ago who failed on an attendance requirement because they were absent for every test and every quiz - once a week - it would have been easier for them just to learn the material.
I've had students turn in presentations where every line is copy-pasted.
But going with the "gotcha" route, getting the admin involved, is a fool's case. Admin does not want to be involved; they want you, as the teacher, to correct the issue. Getting admin involved by mass-reporting the whole class is a way of passing the buck.
As high school teachers, we tell the students they could be failed out of college, but depending on the college one goes to that's not true. Another form of passing the buck.
And then being obsessed with catching the cheaters, obsessed with making everyone do their own work, backfires too. It creates a bad class culture that's telling students they are expected to be cheaters.
Anyway there's not one answer to this problem, not a single magic technique you can use to get rid of all cheaters. Individualizing the work and making all tests except 3-4 very low stakes, and being very clear about the consequences of cheating on those 3-4 is the best way ive found.
Also, offering those opportunities for retakes and corrections. What's the POINT of cheating in that situation?
posted by subdee at 11:42 AM on May 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
I also want to say, when only a few students in a class are cheating it's a much easier problem to solve. You can refer them to admin, or just wait for them to realize that this isn't how the course is run and let peer pressure and class culture do the work for you. When the whole class is cheating, it is a much harder problem to solve.
Also, it's not always a problem that starts and ends with your classroom. You know? It goes back to every other teacher these students have ever had. It also has something to do with admin and admin policies around academic dishonesty.
posted by subdee at 11:51 AM on May 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
Also, it's not always a problem that starts and ends with your classroom. You know? It goes back to every other teacher these students have ever had. It also has something to do with admin and admin policies around academic dishonesty.
posted by subdee at 11:51 AM on May 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
The (Length: long, 10k words) warning in the OP seems to have licensed some long comments . . .
30 years ago I was asked to teach a course on Practical Computer Programming for Geneticists. The assessment was to write a program to count the different codon triplets in DNA sequence, check that it worked, print it out, sign and submit it. Rather than all independently write such a program (boring and "peripheral"), most of them embarked on one of three creative solutions.
a) subcontract the task to a math-major friend
b) form groups and thrash out a solution together
c) copy a colleague's program
All of these were "plagiarism" and the smart students were fully aware of this. So they changed the code to individualise it, but they were insufficiently experienced ("ah, bless!") to realise that there is an infinity of different ways to crack that problem and merely changing the names of the variables doesn't make it an original enterprise:
Tom Lehrer expressed it rather well:
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize!
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.
Many years later I had a Masters student for whom English was their 4th language. A key plank in their anti-plagiarism protocol was a thesaurus. But this was sometimes over- enthusiastically applied. In the first paragraph of the first draft of their thesis the US FDA was bafflingly rendered as The Nourishment and Medicine Directorate.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:29 PM on May 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
30 years ago I was asked to teach a course on Practical Computer Programming for Geneticists. The assessment was to write a program to count the different codon triplets in DNA sequence, check that it worked, print it out, sign and submit it. Rather than all independently write such a program (boring and "peripheral"), most of them embarked on one of three creative solutions.
a) subcontract the task to a math-major friend
b) form groups and thrash out a solution together
c) copy a colleague's program
All of these were "plagiarism" and the smart students were fully aware of this. So they changed the code to individualise it, but they were insufficiently experienced ("ah, bless!") to realise that there is an infinity of different ways to crack that problem and merely changing the names of the variables doesn't make it an original enterprise:
READ A,B,C READ X,Y,Z N = A*16 + B*4 + C M = Z + 4*Y + X*16 CODON(N)=CODON(N)+1 TRIPL(M)=TRIPL(M)+1I dutifully read through all these parallel attempts and saw that I could draw a phylogenetic tree of their relationships. I also had to gaze blankly at a lot of really hairy code that I couldn't follow and clearly had been written by a nerd under contract. I hauled each student into a small room for a ten minute viva on 'their' program. That worked a treat. I'd point to a random line on the print-out and ask "What's going on here?". The competent students would say something like "I'm iterating the central module and tallying up the count for each codon" while the passengers would stutter. Those youngsters have all grown up now and several of them have written Nature papers and are running their own research groups. Clearly being incompetent in FORTRAN isn't much handicap to a successful life in science and co-operative FORTRAN coding is probably a positive asset: batting ideas off each other is a key builder of creativity.
Tom Lehrer expressed it rather well:
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize!
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.
Many years later I had a Masters student for whom English was their 4th language. A key plank in their anti-plagiarism protocol was a thesaurus. But this was sometimes over- enthusiastically applied. In the first paragraph of the first draft of their thesis the US FDA was bafflingly rendered as The Nourishment and Medicine Directorate.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:29 PM on May 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
From what I've been told at my alma mater, cheating referrals went way up.
On a related note, I really enjoyed this post by Athena Scalzi on how her academic career is frustrating as hell, but also she talks about this kind of thing in her geology class.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:07 PM on May 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
On a related note, I really enjoyed this post by Athena Scalzi on how her academic career is frustrating as hell, but also she talks about this kind of thing in her geology class.
Well, every test was open book, and every lab was group work. I never really learned anything. I just scraped by on what info I could find in the book and the hard work of my fellow classmates. If it hadn’t been for the girl sitting next to me, and the entire textbook at my fingertips, I genuinely don’t think I would’ve come even remotely close to passing.And really, the whole college experience is jumping through hoops so you get a degree so hopefully you aren't ruled out of jobs due to a lack of college degree (which happened to a former coworker of mine trying to get a permanent job here doing exactly what she already did as a temp). And in the end, how much stuff do you remember from college? I had to waste a lot of time memorizing details about paintings for art history, you think that had ANY relevance to my life or stuck in my brain after the final? Of course not.
On the bright side, I wasn’t the only one that had no idea what the hell was going on in class. In fact, before every class, all ten of my classmates and I would talk about how we didn’t understand a single thing, how we just bullshitted every question, squeaked by on answers we found online, none of it truly made any sense to us. We just needed to pass, that doesn’t mean we actually had to learn anything.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:07 PM on May 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
High school teacher. ... But going with the "gotcha" route, getting the admin involved, is a fool's case. Admin does not want to be involved; they want you, as the teacher, to correct the issue.
That's not quite true at the university level. At the university level what the admins want, in order of priority, is for
(1) The problem to go away as fast as possible so they can get back to spending all the university's money hiring their friends' cousins' dogs' chewtoys as Assistant Vice Associate Provosts for Excellence instead of hiring professors or IT professionals or clinical psychologists
(2) The student not to be unhappy enough that they take their direct or indirect tuition dollars away
(3) Nothing to be imposed that's serious enough that someone might actually sue over it without a truly ludicrous level of proof
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 1:27 PM on May 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
That's not quite true at the university level. At the university level what the admins want, in order of priority, is for
(1) The problem to go away as fast as possible so they can get back to spending all the university's money hiring their friends' cousins' dogs' chewtoys as Assistant Vice Associate Provosts for Excellence instead of hiring professors or IT professionals or clinical psychologists
(2) The student not to be unhappy enough that they take their direct or indirect tuition dollars away
(3) Nothing to be imposed that's serious enough that someone might actually sue over it without a truly ludicrous level of proof
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 1:27 PM on May 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
which happened to a former coworker of mine
Just happened to me, and I'm over 50 years old, applying for a position in which I have 30 years of well-documented performance in every component of the job description. Apparenty not having passed ENC-101 when I was a teenager means I must have been fooling everyone. For 30 years. A bad performance risk, clearly.
posted by ctmf at 1:41 PM on May 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
Just happened to me, and I'm over 50 years old, applying for a position in which I have 30 years of well-documented performance in every component of the job description. Apparenty not having passed ENC-101 when I was a teenager means I must have been fooling everyone. For 30 years. A bad performance risk, clearly.
posted by ctmf at 1:41 PM on May 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
Quite a distance here between the people who see education as a hoop to jump through/a box to check and those who see it as imparting functionally relevant knowledge. In reality, of course, it's both.
Having worked with someone who cheated/lied her way into a training position (only discovered after she killed someone), I have no tolerance for cheaters of whatever socioeconomic background. In my admittedly limited experience in education, the group most likely to cheat are rich white men, which might stem from the fact that they are used to getting a free pass. Or maybe the others are just better at not getting caught.
posted by basalganglia at 2:17 PM on May 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
Having worked with someone who cheated/lied her way into a training position (only discovered after she killed someone), I have no tolerance for cheaters of whatever socioeconomic background. In my admittedly limited experience in education, the group most likely to cheat are rich white men, which might stem from the fact that they are used to getting a free pass. Or maybe the others are just better at not getting caught.
posted by basalganglia at 2:17 PM on May 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
Quite a distance here between the people who see education as a hoop to jump through/a box to check and those who see it as imparting functionally relevant knowledge. In reality, of course, it's both.
I think that it fundamentally and honestly cannot be both, and I think that we are absolutely doing a disservice to students by pretending that we can.
First, if education is a mandatory box to check in order to get a job that can feed your family, and you as a student cannot afford to repeat any classes, then it is fundamentally a high-stress situation which is going to negatively impact anyone who is already marginalized. You have a situation where students must pass the class, come hell or high water - because if they don't, they won't have a job. And let's be honest here - most of the jobs that require a college degree are not high-stakes life-and-death jobs. Being an administrative assistant requires a college degree these days. Not because the job itself requires the knowledge of a college degree, because a college degree is being used as a sorting function to keep out the "wrong" sort of people.
Secondly, the process of imparting knowledge requires understanding, not rote memorization. The process of imparting and assessing knowledge requires short-answer questions, and meetings with students, and participation in class, and open and honest discussion. It requires actual feedback on essays, so that people can actually improve. It requires the freedom to fail without it ruining your life's aspirations. It requires the ability to meet with professors and talk about things you don't understand about the course.
But universities are unwilling to cut into their profit margins, and they're getting more and more students due to the need for box-checking, so professors are teaching often 120 students in a semester. Even assuming only one hour of meetings to explain material and help someone understand, that's three weeks of full-time work over the course of a semester. And now let's talk grading and correcting work. The average reading rate is about 250 words a minute - let's bump that up to 350 a minute for university professors. My last two papers I wrote were roughly 17,000 words and 10,000 words, minus footnotes. Splitting the difference, that's about 40 minutes to seriously read a 400-level paper - for 120 students, that's another 2 weeks of full time work not even counting corrections and responses.
If we want to talk academic integrity and learning: how many professors are giving serious, thoughtful feedback on these papers? How many of them are even checking the painstakingly arranged citations? (And I don't mean just checking to see if it matches Chicago; I mean, cross-checking it with the papers being cited). Not many of them in my experience - and I can't say I really blame them. They have terrible working conditions, and are between a rock and a hard place. But at the same time - no professor is openly saying on their syllabus, "I don't really read your papers, I just kind of skim them and make a grade based at best on an easy rubric. They're not saying on the syllabus, "Let's face it, I'm giving all your material to the TA to make corrections on, and if I don't have a TA, you're not getting them". I've been very fortunate in my academic career to have two professors - out of dozens - who genuinely had the time and ability to impart knowledge to me; both had smaller class sizes. I learned incredible things in their classes that I still remember years later. But for everything else? It's cram and forget because how could it not be?
So it feels very much like a double standard - it's not considered an offense against academic integrity to phone it in when grading the student's work, but it is considered an offense against academic integrity to laze on the work being submitted. Why is that? To me, it reads like it's about preserving structures of power, but I'm open to hearing other thoughts.
posted by corb at 3:59 PM on May 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
I think that it fundamentally and honestly cannot be both, and I think that we are absolutely doing a disservice to students by pretending that we can.
First, if education is a mandatory box to check in order to get a job that can feed your family, and you as a student cannot afford to repeat any classes, then it is fundamentally a high-stress situation which is going to negatively impact anyone who is already marginalized. You have a situation where students must pass the class, come hell or high water - because if they don't, they won't have a job. And let's be honest here - most of the jobs that require a college degree are not high-stakes life-and-death jobs. Being an administrative assistant requires a college degree these days. Not because the job itself requires the knowledge of a college degree, because a college degree is being used as a sorting function to keep out the "wrong" sort of people.
Secondly, the process of imparting knowledge requires understanding, not rote memorization. The process of imparting and assessing knowledge requires short-answer questions, and meetings with students, and participation in class, and open and honest discussion. It requires actual feedback on essays, so that people can actually improve. It requires the freedom to fail without it ruining your life's aspirations. It requires the ability to meet with professors and talk about things you don't understand about the course.
But universities are unwilling to cut into their profit margins, and they're getting more and more students due to the need for box-checking, so professors are teaching often 120 students in a semester. Even assuming only one hour of meetings to explain material and help someone understand, that's three weeks of full-time work over the course of a semester. And now let's talk grading and correcting work. The average reading rate is about 250 words a minute - let's bump that up to 350 a minute for university professors. My last two papers I wrote were roughly 17,000 words and 10,000 words, minus footnotes. Splitting the difference, that's about 40 minutes to seriously read a 400-level paper - for 120 students, that's another 2 weeks of full time work not even counting corrections and responses.
If we want to talk academic integrity and learning: how many professors are giving serious, thoughtful feedback on these papers? How many of them are even checking the painstakingly arranged citations? (And I don't mean just checking to see if it matches Chicago; I mean, cross-checking it with the papers being cited). Not many of them in my experience - and I can't say I really blame them. They have terrible working conditions, and are between a rock and a hard place. But at the same time - no professor is openly saying on their syllabus, "I don't really read your papers, I just kind of skim them and make a grade based at best on an easy rubric. They're not saying on the syllabus, "Let's face it, I'm giving all your material to the TA to make corrections on, and if I don't have a TA, you're not getting them". I've been very fortunate in my academic career to have two professors - out of dozens - who genuinely had the time and ability to impart knowledge to me; both had smaller class sizes. I learned incredible things in their classes that I still remember years later. But for everything else? It's cram and forget because how could it not be?
So it feels very much like a double standard - it's not considered an offense against academic integrity to phone it in when grading the student's work, but it is considered an offense against academic integrity to laze on the work being submitted. Why is that? To me, it reads like it's about preserving structures of power, but I'm open to hearing other thoughts.
posted by corb at 3:59 PM on May 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
As I've mentioned on here before, I'm an academic. In fact, my work is in a field that overlaps with the author's field. I've poured my life into science and education, and I recently chose to work at a uni that goes the extra mile to support under-served populations.
Despite a few really lovely comments, this is a really depressing thread. I've sort of noticed this in the last few years on metafilter with the facile comments disparaging education, universities, the entire field of psychology research and my own field as well, but this thread makes it clear how many people on metafilter cynically look down on people like me and my friends.
I read the post and thought - wow, that guy seems great. And he tried so hard. I hope maybe I get to meet him some time. Despite perhaps the dark spaces you all have experienced, yes there are still a LOT of us working as hard as we can to make the world even the tiniest bit better in this sphere. Yeah, some of us are stupid enough to think our futile little exercises in things like academic integrity are our way of pushing against the boundaries of the worst of society and asshole fascism. And to pour so much of ourselves into this that we share these stories in our own wordy nerdy gif-filled personal voices with no attempt at monetizing or trimming the prose into something pop media friendly. (Heaven forbid a professor write a long post on his personal blog on his personal lab's webpage!)
Yeah, we're dumb enough to think that some people like to learn, and we're dumb enough to try and find ways to create that spark in for others.
Sorry. Not Sorry.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 4:02 PM on May 30, 2022 [41 favorites]
Despite a few really lovely comments, this is a really depressing thread. I've sort of noticed this in the last few years on metafilter with the facile comments disparaging education, universities, the entire field of psychology research and my own field as well, but this thread makes it clear how many people on metafilter cynically look down on people like me and my friends.
I read the post and thought - wow, that guy seems great. And he tried so hard. I hope maybe I get to meet him some time. Despite perhaps the dark spaces you all have experienced, yes there are still a LOT of us working as hard as we can to make the world even the tiniest bit better in this sphere. Yeah, some of us are stupid enough to think our futile little exercises in things like academic integrity are our way of pushing against the boundaries of the worst of society and asshole fascism. And to pour so much of ourselves into this that we share these stories in our own wordy nerdy gif-filled personal voices with no attempt at monetizing or trimming the prose into something pop media friendly. (Heaven forbid a professor write a long post on his personal blog on his personal lab's webpage!)
Yeah, we're dumb enough to think that some people like to learn, and we're dumb enough to try and find ways to create that spark in for others.
Sorry. Not Sorry.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 4:02 PM on May 30, 2022 [41 favorites]
Yeah, between this thread and the one a little while ago about cheating in job interviews that ctmf referenced above, it's been pretty eye-opening how much of a gulf there is between my core values and those of a significant fraction of my fellow Mefites. It's certainly demoralizing to read justifications for why lying and cheating is perfectly fine as long as the right people do it, ignoring that being coerced into abandoning one's integrity is itself a terrible harm, and more demoralizing to read attacks on an honest person who's trying to act with patience and compassion even in the face of others' demonstrated lack of integrity, and give them opportunities to pull back from their mistakes and experience the pleasure of learning and of achievement through hard intellectual work.
It's demoralizing, but it's also heartening to see that so many other people here do actually value personal integrity, honesty, openness, curiosity, and compassion. I really, really appreciate the comments from so many educators here sharing their experiences. Y'all are heroes. Don't let the nihilists get you down.
posted by biogeo at 4:30 PM on May 30, 2022 [33 favorites]
It's demoralizing, but it's also heartening to see that so many other people here do actually value personal integrity, honesty, openness, curiosity, and compassion. I really, really appreciate the comments from so many educators here sharing their experiences. Y'all are heroes. Don't let the nihilists get you down.
posted by biogeo at 4:30 PM on May 30, 2022 [33 favorites]
Rock 'em Sock 'em, thank you. Thank you.
posted by biogeo at 4:39 PM on May 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by biogeo at 4:39 PM on May 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
Standard question: Would you want to be operated on by a doctor who cheated like this in medical school?
Did they pass the board exam? We can talk about how evil MBAs infect the system, but one thing this gets right is to separate the high stakes exam from the instructor, eliminating the "gentleman's C" solution school deans implicitly approve of.
But we probably don't need that level of security for open book Psych 101 exams.
posted by pwnguin at 5:07 PM on May 30, 2022
Did they pass the board exam? We can talk about how evil MBAs infect the system, but one thing this gets right is to separate the high stakes exam from the instructor, eliminating the "gentleman's C" solution school deans implicitly approve of.
But we probably don't need that level of security for open book Psych 101 exams.
posted by pwnguin at 5:07 PM on May 30, 2022
I'm another whose career has suffered due to the lack of a degree. I don't really have anyone else but myself to blame for this, but spending many years as a single parent trying to balance full-time work with full-time parenting meant the effort to complete was more than the energy I had at the time. I've been casually looking for a better position for a couple of years now and, while I largely accept it as just the way things are, I occasionally get frustrated when I see who gets jobs that I am massively more experienced for in every way, but don't have the magical piece of paper. Oh well, such is life.
I missed saying earlier that I was impressed by the effort the teacher put in to not just play gotcha with the cheats, but instead to put together a whole program that let them get out of it gracefully even after being caught red-handed. They could have easily just failed everyone at the first stage it was clear the cheating was widespread, but they put in a lot of effort to determine not only who was cheating but the individual level of cheating involved and come up with proportionate penalties.
With the benefit of hindsight, the only thing I think they could have done better was to give the students a heads-up that they knew there was some cheating going on and that it must stop or there would be consequences. There were no doubt some students that got caught up by seeing an easy out and took it where they wouldn't have otherwise (yes, they still cheated, of course). A bit of early correction may have bumped some back on the straight and narrow. As they pointed out, though, that would also have driven the more egregious cheating underground.
I am one that certainly appreciates the effort that teachers put in and understand the moral quandaries that can arise - situations where there is an obvious and easy solution are rare in the classroom. I often feel the need to point out to staff in admin roles that the reason our jobs exist is because of the students and our sole responsibility is to provide the resources for them to succeed, they are not a nuisance or an interruption to our day. The divide that often exists between teaching and admin staff frustrates me enormously.
posted by dg at 5:07 PM on May 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
I missed saying earlier that I was impressed by the effort the teacher put in to not just play gotcha with the cheats, but instead to put together a whole program that let them get out of it gracefully even after being caught red-handed. They could have easily just failed everyone at the first stage it was clear the cheating was widespread, but they put in a lot of effort to determine not only who was cheating but the individual level of cheating involved and come up with proportionate penalties.
With the benefit of hindsight, the only thing I think they could have done better was to give the students a heads-up that they knew there was some cheating going on and that it must stop or there would be consequences. There were no doubt some students that got caught up by seeing an easy out and took it where they wouldn't have otherwise (yes, they still cheated, of course). A bit of early correction may have bumped some back on the straight and narrow. As they pointed out, though, that would also have driven the more egregious cheating underground.
I am one that certainly appreciates the effort that teachers put in and understand the moral quandaries that can arise - situations where there is an obvious and easy solution are rare in the classroom. I often feel the need to point out to staff in admin roles that the reason our jobs exist is because of the students and our sole responsibility is to provide the resources for them to succeed, they are not a nuisance or an interruption to our day. The divide that often exists between teaching and admin staff frustrates me enormously.
posted by dg at 5:07 PM on May 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
These comments are so interesting; I was not expecting such a strong divide in the interpretations of his actions.
I thought the essay was so fascinating in the way he responded to the situation. I am a person with an overdeveloped sense of justice and a strong personal need to follow the rules, and so I struggle to navigate circumstances where students are caught cheating. I understand the many valid reasons that lead students into believing cheating is their best option, and the students who cheat most egregiously are usually the ones without the resources or background to be sophisticated enough to maintain the fiction so I can give them this “gentleman’s C” people are talking about. I get so emotional when I spot cheating because I know someone else is doing the exact same thing because they have the financial resources or social capital to cover their tracks. And catching someone who cheated without those resources makes me a weapon that reinforces inequities, either by punishing the unsophisticated/under resourced cheating or by holding rule-followers to a higher standard because they were SO unsophisticated they didn’t even realize they COULD cheat.
So this essay read like a fantasy in many ways, what could the world look like if one had all the time and resources necessary to determine every instance of cheating with overwhelming evidence. Like beyond a reasonable doubt, Crump could prove who did what and when. Like, wow, he had them dead to rights. I dream of having such well-founded confidence.
And, instead of punishing them, he goes another way. He finds a solution that welcomes students into trying again, doesn’t negate the work of students who didn’t cheat, and upholds at least some standard of rigor at the same time. And when students screw up a SECOND time, he makes the offer AGAIN. Compassion at the moment a student is most in need, when it is least justified. I need that modeled more in my professional life.
I agree with everyone arguing that grades perpetuate inequity: rich kids walk into the classroom with a bigger advantage than those who don’t have the same resources. But I am really impressed at the way Crump found a way out of the false conclusion that, “grades are a lie so just let kids cheat so they get the piece of paper they need for a good life.” His revised course syllabus agrees grades are a lie, so here are a million ways for you to accomplish the exact lie you want while hopefully also encouraging you to truly engage with the OTHER lie that you’re actually here to learn. His revised syllabus allows students to score up to 150% in the class — in a way that’s clearly signposted for everyone with equal access, including the students who are apparently so naïve that they didn’t realize 70% of their classmates were cheating. (Seriously, I feel so bad for that silent 30% — if I learned that almost all of my peers were having fun in a giant group chat AND saving themselves the time and effort of actually learning while I was alone and busting my butt, college-aged me would’ve had a hard time not taking that personally as proof that I deserved to be a friendless loser forever, even though objectively it’s probably because I was too dumb to notice the WhatsApp invite in the day 1 chat and not active exclusion. My low self esteem would’ve created a mighty narrative about why I personally wasn’t invited.)
My brain has spun all day on his solution, trying to find ways to make the philosophy of, “grades are a lie so let’s make that lie work for you” fit into my own classes. Crump was wise enough to realize his students made a (bad) choice and reacted not by attempting to eliminate their future choices but instead expand on them to help students realize their own power to make good choices is really, really cool. I learned a lot and will hopefully be better in the future for having read this essay, and all the comments here.
posted by lilac girl at 5:18 PM on May 30, 2022 [22 favorites]
I thought the essay was so fascinating in the way he responded to the situation. I am a person with an overdeveloped sense of justice and a strong personal need to follow the rules, and so I struggle to navigate circumstances where students are caught cheating. I understand the many valid reasons that lead students into believing cheating is their best option, and the students who cheat most egregiously are usually the ones without the resources or background to be sophisticated enough to maintain the fiction so I can give them this “gentleman’s C” people are talking about. I get so emotional when I spot cheating because I know someone else is doing the exact same thing because they have the financial resources or social capital to cover their tracks. And catching someone who cheated without those resources makes me a weapon that reinforces inequities, either by punishing the unsophisticated/under resourced cheating or by holding rule-followers to a higher standard because they were SO unsophisticated they didn’t even realize they COULD cheat.
So this essay read like a fantasy in many ways, what could the world look like if one had all the time and resources necessary to determine every instance of cheating with overwhelming evidence. Like beyond a reasonable doubt, Crump could prove who did what and when. Like, wow, he had them dead to rights. I dream of having such well-founded confidence.
And, instead of punishing them, he goes another way. He finds a solution that welcomes students into trying again, doesn’t negate the work of students who didn’t cheat, and upholds at least some standard of rigor at the same time. And when students screw up a SECOND time, he makes the offer AGAIN. Compassion at the moment a student is most in need, when it is least justified. I need that modeled more in my professional life.
I agree with everyone arguing that grades perpetuate inequity: rich kids walk into the classroom with a bigger advantage than those who don’t have the same resources. But I am really impressed at the way Crump found a way out of the false conclusion that, “grades are a lie so just let kids cheat so they get the piece of paper they need for a good life.” His revised course syllabus agrees grades are a lie, so here are a million ways for you to accomplish the exact lie you want while hopefully also encouraging you to truly engage with the OTHER lie that you’re actually here to learn. His revised syllabus allows students to score up to 150% in the class — in a way that’s clearly signposted for everyone with equal access, including the students who are apparently so naïve that they didn’t realize 70% of their classmates were cheating. (Seriously, I feel so bad for that silent 30% — if I learned that almost all of my peers were having fun in a giant group chat AND saving themselves the time and effort of actually learning while I was alone and busting my butt, college-aged me would’ve had a hard time not taking that personally as proof that I deserved to be a friendless loser forever, even though objectively it’s probably because I was too dumb to notice the WhatsApp invite in the day 1 chat and not active exclusion. My low self esteem would’ve created a mighty narrative about why I personally wasn’t invited.)
My brain has spun all day on his solution, trying to find ways to make the philosophy of, “grades are a lie so let’s make that lie work for you” fit into my own classes. Crump was wise enough to realize his students made a (bad) choice and reacted not by attempting to eliminate their future choices but instead expand on them to help students realize their own power to make good choices is really, really cool. I learned a lot and will hopefully be better in the future for having read this essay, and all the comments here.
posted by lilac girl at 5:18 PM on May 30, 2022 [22 favorites]
This teacher really did go above and beyond to give students a chance to learn. So much so that IMO the extra effort made the problems worse, and the professor became part of the problem.
It reminds me of a codependent relationship where there's one clear "bad" party (say, an addict) and one party who paints themselves as all good since they work so hard to fix the addict and put up with so much from the addict... But in reality their efforts and their martyrdom further enables the addiction. Much worse if they're suffering the misapprehension that past trauma excuses the addict.
It's plain unprofessional that the professor became such a martyr "for the sake of the students". He really needs to set some boundaries for himself, boundaries that describe reasonable extra efforts to help his students when needed, boundaries that allow him to let his students face the consequences of their actions after such reasonable efforts - be that getting an F or getting reported to the college or whatever, and perhaps most importantly, boundaries that let him blow the whistle on institutions that leave teaching staff with zero resources to combat cheating and students with no consequences for cheating.
When he chose to take on the immense, unboundaried extra burdens he described, all he did was ENABLE both his cheating students and exploitative institution that profits from ignoring academic dishonesty.
posted by MiraK at 5:47 PM on May 30, 2022 [12 favorites]
It reminds me of a codependent relationship where there's one clear "bad" party (say, an addict) and one party who paints themselves as all good since they work so hard to fix the addict and put up with so much from the addict... But in reality their efforts and their martyrdom further enables the addiction. Much worse if they're suffering the misapprehension that past trauma excuses the addict.
It's plain unprofessional that the professor became such a martyr "for the sake of the students". He really needs to set some boundaries for himself, boundaries that describe reasonable extra efforts to help his students when needed, boundaries that allow him to let his students face the consequences of their actions after such reasonable efforts - be that getting an F or getting reported to the college or whatever, and perhaps most importantly, boundaries that let him blow the whistle on institutions that leave teaching staff with zero resources to combat cheating and students with no consequences for cheating.
When he chose to take on the immense, unboundaried extra burdens he described, all he did was ENABLE both his cheating students and exploitative institution that profits from ignoring academic dishonesty.
posted by MiraK at 5:47 PM on May 30, 2022 [12 favorites]
I think that’s very true, and a major failure that educators are liable to fall into. Administrators at all levels have pushed hard on the line of, “grace to the student” since covid began, and applying a similar filter 2+ years in as people did in the first months of shutdown is questionable at best.
I certainly feel a pressure, even before covid but certainly after, to bend to anything students need. I’m told frequently that my primary job is to inspire hope in students so they keep trying. No failure matters so long as they’re willing to try again, even if it’s in the last week of the semester.
That’s part of why I’m so impressed with Crump’s eventual solution: there is so much base-covering it lays bare the worst student behavior of “I don’t care til finals week.” Grades are a fiction, yes; but if you truly subscribe to that then you’ll spot the multiple(!) ways to game the system early on. In fact, I’ll tell you in week 1 the ways to “cheat” to win… which makes actual cheating less appealing in contrast to course-sanctioned actions. The transparency also makes rule-breaking attempts more obvious.
It totally sucks that these days the best defense in education is a good offense. But I’ve had multiple parents in my public school demand for me to take an entire semester’s coursework during finals week, and my (K-12 public school) colleagues have been explicitly directed by their bosses to accept every single piece of work from the entire semester on the last day. When management demands both “grace” to everyone and simultaneous “rigor to the standards,” classroom-level teachers must experience a wringer semester like Crump. Many need several such semesters before they find whatever cheat code proves simultaneous “grace” and “rigor” to their powers that be. It’s probably also a weakness that many educators are lawful good/neutral/evil, while administration tends to be true neutral these days. Hard to think of a circumstance that’s more likely to exploit an educator’s heroic martyr failure mode.
posted by lilac girl at 6:46 PM on May 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
I certainly feel a pressure, even before covid but certainly after, to bend to anything students need. I’m told frequently that my primary job is to inspire hope in students so they keep trying. No failure matters so long as they’re willing to try again, even if it’s in the last week of the semester.
That’s part of why I’m so impressed with Crump’s eventual solution: there is so much base-covering it lays bare the worst student behavior of “I don’t care til finals week.” Grades are a fiction, yes; but if you truly subscribe to that then you’ll spot the multiple(!) ways to game the system early on. In fact, I’ll tell you in week 1 the ways to “cheat” to win… which makes actual cheating less appealing in contrast to course-sanctioned actions. The transparency also makes rule-breaking attempts more obvious.
It totally sucks that these days the best defense in education is a good offense. But I’ve had multiple parents in my public school demand for me to take an entire semester’s coursework during finals week, and my (K-12 public school) colleagues have been explicitly directed by their bosses to accept every single piece of work from the entire semester on the last day. When management demands both “grace” to everyone and simultaneous “rigor to the standards,” classroom-level teachers must experience a wringer semester like Crump. Many need several such semesters before they find whatever cheat code proves simultaneous “grace” and “rigor” to their powers that be. It’s probably also a weakness that many educators are lawful good/neutral/evil, while administration tends to be true neutral these days. Hard to think of a circumstance that’s more likely to exploit an educator’s heroic martyr failure mode.
posted by lilac girl at 6:46 PM on May 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
applying a similar filter 2+ years in as people did in the first months of shutdown is questionable at best.
I mean, the pandemic is still going on. People are still getting COVID, dealing with having been exposed to COVID, loss from COVID, fear of spreading COVID, suffering from long haul COVID, loss of work from COVID, etc., etc., etc.
Two years is not a hell of a lot of time for an entire generation of young people (And returning students like myself), to get over trauma.
Like I feel you that teachers are included in the group of people still suffering from being in the middle of a global pandemic, and they should be absolutely be extended the same grace as students.... but we're still in the middle of a global pandemic.
posted by Gygesringtone at 8:09 PM on May 30, 2022 [12 favorites]
I mean, the pandemic is still going on. People are still getting COVID, dealing with having been exposed to COVID, loss from COVID, fear of spreading COVID, suffering from long haul COVID, loss of work from COVID, etc., etc., etc.
Two years is not a hell of a lot of time for an entire generation of young people (And returning students like myself), to get over trauma.
Like I feel you that teachers are included in the group of people still suffering from being in the middle of a global pandemic, and they should be absolutely be extended the same grace as students.... but we're still in the middle of a global pandemic.
posted by Gygesringtone at 8:09 PM on May 30, 2022 [12 favorites]
I’ve spent a long time in academia in the UK and Europe, and never seen any evidence of the scale of cheating mentioned in the article or comments.
I imagine it really depends on the university.
We had a lot of small tutorial groups where this kind of thing simply wouldn't work but most of the grades were ultimately down to final exams which were of course, proctored. I get the feeling that American colleges put a lot more emphasis on regular coursework as part of the grade. We had coursework which would be returned marked but it wasn't part of my grade studying physics in England in 2007, that was almost entirely exam based. So you could "cheat" on the regular problem sets but there wouldn't be much point!
Interestingly, I was one of the people who didn't care at all about cheating in job interviews in the previous thread but I react completely differently to academic dishonesty. That's despite the fact that I've never done any teaching but I do a lot of interviewing and hiring so you would kind of expect it to be the other way around if anything.
posted by atrazine at 3:16 AM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
I imagine it really depends on the university.
We had a lot of small tutorial groups where this kind of thing simply wouldn't work but most of the grades were ultimately down to final exams which were of course, proctored. I get the feeling that American colleges put a lot more emphasis on regular coursework as part of the grade. We had coursework which would be returned marked but it wasn't part of my grade studying physics in England in 2007, that was almost entirely exam based. So you could "cheat" on the regular problem sets but there wouldn't be much point!
Interestingly, I was one of the people who didn't care at all about cheating in job interviews in the previous thread but I react completely differently to academic dishonesty. That's despite the fact that I've never done any teaching but I do a lot of interviewing and hiring so you would kind of expect it to be the other way around if anything.
posted by atrazine at 3:16 AM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Even though I think (my own and others’) fury at cheating should be interrogated, even though I think not every end that’s being served by higher education is a meritorious one, I’d stop well short of the assertions I’m seeing here that cheating is fine. I’m reminded of an advice columnist’s answer I read many years ago: Jack stole a can of tomatoes
I can’t in general support the idea that we have a duty to cheat unfair systems and I can’t support the specific idea that higher education is pointless (I’ve spent roughly half my life affiliated with one university or another). That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think carefully about the power that professors wield and how to wield it as fairly and humanely as possible.
posted by eirias at 4:28 AM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
I can’t in general support the idea that we have a duty to cheat unfair systems and I can’t support the specific idea that higher education is pointless (I’ve spent roughly half my life affiliated with one university or another). That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think carefully about the power that professors wield and how to wield it as fairly and humanely as possible.
posted by eirias at 4:28 AM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
> Interestingly, I was one of the people who didn't care at all about cheating in job interviews in the previous thread but I react completely differently to academic dishonesty.
Me too. But there's a huge difference between lying to get through an interview and cheating to get a degree: if you lie on an interview and it turns out you can't do the job, you'll get fired after a few weeks or months. The potential for damage is small. But when you cheat to get your degree, it's a credential you get to keep for life, and you have the power to swindle people all your life. The stakes are a lot higher and it's the responsibility of the institution granting your credential to do the necessary due diligence to make sure you've actually earned it.
If they don't, it's like if an employer refuses to fire employees incapable of doing their jobs. A fundamental failure that defeats the whole purpose of their organization.
posted by MiraK at 6:24 AM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Me too. But there's a huge difference between lying to get through an interview and cheating to get a degree: if you lie on an interview and it turns out you can't do the job, you'll get fired after a few weeks or months. The potential for damage is small. But when you cheat to get your degree, it's a credential you get to keep for life, and you have the power to swindle people all your life. The stakes are a lot higher and it's the responsibility of the institution granting your credential to do the necessary due diligence to make sure you've actually earned it.
If they don't, it's like if an employer refuses to fire employees incapable of doing their jobs. A fundamental failure that defeats the whole purpose of their organization.
posted by MiraK at 6:24 AM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
.... I’d stop well short of the assertions I’m seeing here that cheating is fine.
I really hope that nothing I've written here is misconstrued as me asserting that cheating is fine. Understandable =/= fine.
But it's true, I do understand why some students think it's a victimless crime. They don't think that they're deceiving their future employer (or clients, or business partners, etc.). They will tell you that of course they want to do a good job; they fully intend to earn their money's worth then, once they actually get paid. They expect that they will have to learn the most important stuff on the job anyway, and that they won't actually need much of what I'm testing them on after graduation.
They aren't entirely wrong. It's not at all unlikely that they won't ever need a fair bit of stuff I teach them, at least not in their jobs. I'm not even feeling bad about it. I think that a good education will give you quite a bit more (and sadly, sometimes also quite a bit less) than access to a job, and that's just how it is. But if they only care about the job part, I think that's sad, and shortsighted, etc., but it's their right. The best things about education are a gift that you are always free to reject.
So my exams aren't strictly about job skills, and of course that's a bad incentive for the kind of students who only cares about job skills. Which sucks for them, but won't change, because as I said, I'm not even feeling bad about it. Point is, even if I thought that exams should be all about job skills, which, again, I really don't, I would never promise my students that they will always have a practical application for the stuff I teach. Because I don't think that's a promise I could responsibly make.
I mean, I do have a rough idea what they might need in the sort of jobs they might go for after graduating from the type of school I teach at - I certainly know what I needed at my job, before I went into teaching - and it's obviously quite a bit more than most of them are able to see now, and I do really do my level best to drive that point home to them. I have a rough idea; I can make educated guesses; my guesses are going to be a lot more educated than theirs, so I strongly feel they should listen to me. But I don't know. I don't know what sort of the job they will really go for, I don't know in what ways these jobs will change. Job requirements are not at all a static affair, and I think it's a fool's game to make them the holy grail of education. What you should really want, as a teacher, I feel, is to get students to a point where they can value knowledge for its own sake, at least a little bit.
But sometimes you just won't get there. And then these kids just won't see who they're harming by cheating. And I will do my best to prevent that, because I do think it means they're wasting a lot of time they could just as well spend actually learning something. But I won't always succeed. And then those exams really will just be hoops for them to jump through, and their grades really will be meaningless. It becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy.
It's a suboptimal outcome - again, one I will go to greath lengths to prevent, I very much don't think cheating is fine - but I really don't think it means that that anyone who cheats on an exam is bound to turn into a horrid mini-Trump who expects to get away with bullshit for the rest of their lifes. There was a fair bit of cheating going on in my cohort, when I was a student - low-level, but frequent - and as fas as I can tell, most of those classmates turned into competent professionals anyway, who are very likely not doing worse jobs in their field than I do in mine. I still think I got more out of school than they did. Because it's not all just about jobs. But it's easy to see how mileages may vary here.
posted by sohalt at 9:07 AM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
I really hope that nothing I've written here is misconstrued as me asserting that cheating is fine. Understandable =/= fine.
But it's true, I do understand why some students think it's a victimless crime. They don't think that they're deceiving their future employer (or clients, or business partners, etc.). They will tell you that of course they want to do a good job; they fully intend to earn their money's worth then, once they actually get paid. They expect that they will have to learn the most important stuff on the job anyway, and that they won't actually need much of what I'm testing them on after graduation.
They aren't entirely wrong. It's not at all unlikely that they won't ever need a fair bit of stuff I teach them, at least not in their jobs. I'm not even feeling bad about it. I think that a good education will give you quite a bit more (and sadly, sometimes also quite a bit less) than access to a job, and that's just how it is. But if they only care about the job part, I think that's sad, and shortsighted, etc., but it's their right. The best things about education are a gift that you are always free to reject.
So my exams aren't strictly about job skills, and of course that's a bad incentive for the kind of students who only cares about job skills. Which sucks for them, but won't change, because as I said, I'm not even feeling bad about it. Point is, even if I thought that exams should be all about job skills, which, again, I really don't, I would never promise my students that they will always have a practical application for the stuff I teach. Because I don't think that's a promise I could responsibly make.
I mean, I do have a rough idea what they might need in the sort of jobs they might go for after graduating from the type of school I teach at - I certainly know what I needed at my job, before I went into teaching - and it's obviously quite a bit more than most of them are able to see now, and I do really do my level best to drive that point home to them. I have a rough idea; I can make educated guesses; my guesses are going to be a lot more educated than theirs, so I strongly feel they should listen to me. But I don't know. I don't know what sort of the job they will really go for, I don't know in what ways these jobs will change. Job requirements are not at all a static affair, and I think it's a fool's game to make them the holy grail of education. What you should really want, as a teacher, I feel, is to get students to a point where they can value knowledge for its own sake, at least a little bit.
But sometimes you just won't get there. And then these kids just won't see who they're harming by cheating. And I will do my best to prevent that, because I do think it means they're wasting a lot of time they could just as well spend actually learning something. But I won't always succeed. And then those exams really will just be hoops for them to jump through, and their grades really will be meaningless. It becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy.
It's a suboptimal outcome - again, one I will go to greath lengths to prevent, I very much don't think cheating is fine - but I really don't think it means that that anyone who cheats on an exam is bound to turn into a horrid mini-Trump who expects to get away with bullshit for the rest of their lifes. There was a fair bit of cheating going on in my cohort, when I was a student - low-level, but frequent - and as fas as I can tell, most of those classmates turned into competent professionals anyway, who are very likely not doing worse jobs in their field than I do in mine. I still think I got more out of school than they did. Because it's not all just about jobs. But it's easy to see how mileages may vary here.
posted by sohalt at 9:07 AM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
you don't want to be there? then don't. go to trade school. apprentice somewhere.
I know this varies regionally but if you can't hack undergrad without cheating in this manner you aren't going to be able to hack a four year apprenticeship program.
My final exam came after four years of classwork. Class work which weeds out about half the initial cohort. The open book exam book only addresses 70% of the questions by design. The book itself is a legal document and written as such with all the plain language clarity you'd expect. And despite the weeding and progressive preparation roughly half of 4th year apprentices in my jurisdiction fail to obtain the 70% required to pass that exam. Tradework often requires as much education as a bachelors program with the added bonus of a significant chance of being crippled for life or killed for making a mistake in training.
And people for the most part can't get away with cheating as a practical manner. An apprentice spends a good chunk of their education with a 1:1 ( or even 1:2, 1:3 or higher) student:teacher ratio. Those instructors have to personally sign off that the apprentice can perform trade tasks. Companies fire apprentices who can't perform and they end up unable to get their required hours in.
posted by Mitheral at 9:14 AM on May 31, 2022 [7 favorites]
I know this varies regionally but if you can't hack undergrad without cheating in this manner you aren't going to be able to hack a four year apprenticeship program.
My final exam came after four years of classwork. Class work which weeds out about half the initial cohort. The open book exam book only addresses 70% of the questions by design. The book itself is a legal document and written as such with all the plain language clarity you'd expect. And despite the weeding and progressive preparation roughly half of 4th year apprentices in my jurisdiction fail to obtain the 70% required to pass that exam. Tradework often requires as much education as a bachelors program with the added bonus of a significant chance of being crippled for life or killed for making a mistake in training.
And people for the most part can't get away with cheating as a practical manner. An apprentice spends a good chunk of their education with a 1:1 ( or even 1:2, 1:3 or higher) student:teacher ratio. Those instructors have to personally sign off that the apprentice can perform trade tasks. Companies fire apprentices who can't perform and they end up unable to get their required hours in.
posted by Mitheral at 9:14 AM on May 31, 2022 [7 favorites]
I know this varies regionally but if you can't hack undergrad without cheating in this manner you aren't going to be able to hack a four year apprenticeship program.
That's another reason why some of my students just don't feel bad about cheating at exams. They already know that they won't easily get away with cheating at work, or during on the job-training - they're still in high school, but a lot of them work weekend-shifts, etc. and all of them have to show a certain number of practical work experience during summer holidays before they are even allowed to graduate - so they are not impressed by my "it's a slippery slope! What if you get so used to relying on cheating that you won't ever attempt anything without it?"-argument.
posted by sohalt at 9:34 AM on May 31, 2022
That's another reason why some of my students just don't feel bad about cheating at exams. They already know that they won't easily get away with cheating at work, or during on the job-training - they're still in high school, but a lot of them work weekend-shifts, etc. and all of them have to show a certain number of practical work experience during summer holidays before they are even allowed to graduate - so they are not impressed by my "it's a slippery slope! What if you get so used to relying on cheating that you won't ever attempt anything without it?"-argument.
posted by sohalt at 9:34 AM on May 31, 2022
Every single person in my husband's four-year apprenticeship program - except one - cheated on every test lmao. (Union electrician apprenticeship.). It was more or less expected that you would cheat.
As a teacher, for me this comes down less to what students get out of the course when they cheat vs don't and more of a class management issue. High school students who expect to blatantly cheat on the test can be blatantly disrespectful, talking through the lecture, playing games in class, creating chaos during exams to distract from cheating. In my experience the job of the teacher is to say something and students respect you much more if you do say something and if you catch cheaters and impose a penalty. We all have our roles to play.
Possibly college students would be a bit classier about it and cheat in a more circumspect and respectful way... But judging from those group chats, maybe not. The class as a whole will have a better culture and be more rewarding to teach and more rewarding for the majority of students when they AREN'T putting answers in the group chat they invited the professor into.
Also I want to say, the idea that this professor did more work than he had to by creating the alternate syllabus - yes and no. It was work to create, but he mentions needing to do it for a future asynchronous class anyway. And it may have been less work, or more rewarding work (even the grading), than going through a long appeals process with every failed student who chose to contest.
Sometimes as a teacher doing more work on the planning *is* the path of least resistance. Considering how serious the problem was, there wasn't an easy way out of this besides letting them all get away with it, which would just have recreated this same problem every semester from then on.
I'll put it this way. Once you allow blatant widespread disrespectful cheating to become the norm, what even is the point of teaching the class anymore? At that point you DO turn it into a hoop to jump through, when it easily could have been something else, something more worthwhile.
posted by subdee at 9:57 AM on May 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
As a teacher, for me this comes down less to what students get out of the course when they cheat vs don't and more of a class management issue. High school students who expect to blatantly cheat on the test can be blatantly disrespectful, talking through the lecture, playing games in class, creating chaos during exams to distract from cheating. In my experience the job of the teacher is to say something and students respect you much more if you do say something and if you catch cheaters and impose a penalty. We all have our roles to play.
Possibly college students would be a bit classier about it and cheat in a more circumspect and respectful way... But judging from those group chats, maybe not. The class as a whole will have a better culture and be more rewarding to teach and more rewarding for the majority of students when they AREN'T putting answers in the group chat they invited the professor into.
Also I want to say, the idea that this professor did more work than he had to by creating the alternate syllabus - yes and no. It was work to create, but he mentions needing to do it for a future asynchronous class anyway. And it may have been less work, or more rewarding work (even the grading), than going through a long appeals process with every failed student who chose to contest.
Sometimes as a teacher doing more work on the planning *is* the path of least resistance. Considering how serious the problem was, there wasn't an easy way out of this besides letting them all get away with it, which would just have recreated this same problem every semester from then on.
I'll put it this way. Once you allow blatant widespread disrespectful cheating to become the norm, what even is the point of teaching the class anymore? At that point you DO turn it into a hoop to jump through, when it easily could have been something else, something more worthwhile.
posted by subdee at 9:57 AM on May 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
He finds a solution that welcomes students into trying again, doesn’t negate the work of students who didn’t cheat, and upholds at least some standard of rigor at the same time. And when students screw up a SECOND time, he makes the offer AGAIN. Compassion at the moment a student is most in need, when it is least justified.
So I think I'd like to dig into this a little bit, because incredibly thoughtful people like you are having responses of "so compassionate", whereas to me his actions seemed incredibly uncompassionate. I wonder if we could dig a little into the meat of things?
First, he said that he would penalize and give zeros on some assignments to people who simply existed in the chat, who didn't ask questions about the tests or provide answers on the tests, because he thought it was a violation of academic integrity. He works at Brooklyn College, their academic integrity policy is here. Much to my appreciation as a CUNY school that strives for equity and solidarity, it does not, in fact, list that students are required to report suspected instances of other students cheating. So it appears to me that he went beyond the policy that was required, and was actually harsher on the students than the college would have been.
Secondly, the academic integrity policy suggests, as he admits, that students should be confronted. He could have simply downloaded the info, left the chat, and then gave the group presentation on cheating that he ultimately wound up doing. Instead, he waited for, by his admission, "several weeks" until he could prove all of it. That means several weeks more of zero assignments for students. There's a reason professors are expected to call it out early - and in part, that is because it makes it easier to recover from. By several weeks later, it would be nearly impossible to complete so many additional assignments in the appropriate time.
Thirdly, he made his class actively less accessible during a pandemic in order to deter cheaters, by changing the midterm from a choose-your-own-time test to one with an extremely narrow window. If you weren't able to make the time slot of the midterm? Have a family emergency? An identified disability that affects test-taking? Whoops, guess you're out of luck.
Fourthly, he did not consider the likely and probable outcome of him changing the tests as an anti-cheating measure without identifying the source of the problem and where he got the info. At that point, he had all the data he needed that cheating was occurring. Leaving aside the morality of his allowing the cheating to continue so he could get more evidence of it, by not identifying himself, he made it more likely that students believed other students were betraying them. He's kind of appalled at the paranoia and the fact that students were being messaged as potential snitchers, but he made that happen. He's a psychology professor - I can't believe that he didn't know that would be a probable outcome.
posted by corb at 9:58 AM on May 31, 2022 [8 favorites]
So I think I'd like to dig into this a little bit, because incredibly thoughtful people like you are having responses of "so compassionate", whereas to me his actions seemed incredibly uncompassionate. I wonder if we could dig a little into the meat of things?
First, he said that he would penalize and give zeros on some assignments to people who simply existed in the chat, who didn't ask questions about the tests or provide answers on the tests, because he thought it was a violation of academic integrity. He works at Brooklyn College, their academic integrity policy is here. Much to my appreciation as a CUNY school that strives for equity and solidarity, it does not, in fact, list that students are required to report suspected instances of other students cheating. So it appears to me that he went beyond the policy that was required, and was actually harsher on the students than the college would have been.
Secondly, the academic integrity policy suggests, as he admits, that students should be confronted. He could have simply downloaded the info, left the chat, and then gave the group presentation on cheating that he ultimately wound up doing. Instead, he waited for, by his admission, "several weeks" until he could prove all of it. That means several weeks more of zero assignments for students. There's a reason professors are expected to call it out early - and in part, that is because it makes it easier to recover from. By several weeks later, it would be nearly impossible to complete so many additional assignments in the appropriate time.
Thirdly, he made his class actively less accessible during a pandemic in order to deter cheaters, by changing the midterm from a choose-your-own-time test to one with an extremely narrow window. If you weren't able to make the time slot of the midterm? Have a family emergency? An identified disability that affects test-taking? Whoops, guess you're out of luck.
Fourthly, he did not consider the likely and probable outcome of him changing the tests as an anti-cheating measure without identifying the source of the problem and where he got the info. At that point, he had all the data he needed that cheating was occurring. Leaving aside the morality of his allowing the cheating to continue so he could get more evidence of it, by not identifying himself, he made it more likely that students believed other students were betraying them. He's kind of appalled at the paranoia and the fact that students were being messaged as potential snitchers, but he made that happen. He's a psychology professor - I can't believe that he didn't know that would be a probable outcome.
posted by corb at 9:58 AM on May 31, 2022 [8 favorites]
An identified disability that affects test-taking? Whoops, guess you're out of luck.
He is required to provide accommodations for students with documented disabilities. (Leaving aside that obtaining documentation can be a huge barrier for some students.) He would have to allow extended time for those whose accommodations required it, just like for any timed assessment.
posted by BrashTech at 10:10 AM on May 31, 2022 [7 favorites]
He is required to provide accommodations for students with documented disabilities. (Leaving aside that obtaining documentation can be a huge barrier for some students.) He would have to allow extended time for those whose accommodations required it, just like for any timed assessment.
posted by BrashTech at 10:10 AM on May 31, 2022 [7 favorites]
corb, thank you for setting out more of the things that made me uneasy.
Something else that stood out for me was that the lecturer thought he'd been hacked at first because of seeing Whatsapp photos that had been downloaded to his phone.
That suggests he's not at all familiar with how the tech works, and maybe not in a position to make judgements about penalising students who use that tech.
Did he check whether people were added to the group without even being aware of it? Or just never visited it?
Or shared a friend's phone?
The way he dealt with the situation, to me, feels like an inexperienced teacher. Well meaning but over enthusiastic, inconsistent, and unpredictable.
I like to be open with my students, discuss things with them, and set things up so they know what behaviour is acceptable, and what is not.
It's too easy to spend all your energy on the students who suck up all the oxygen by being in your face, cheat, and complain and miss the quiet ones who are facing struggles of their own, but still manage to hand in on time, attend all their classes, do their best.
posted by Zumbador at 10:41 AM on May 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
Something else that stood out for me was that the lecturer thought he'd been hacked at first because of seeing Whatsapp photos that had been downloaded to his phone.
That suggests he's not at all familiar with how the tech works, and maybe not in a position to make judgements about penalising students who use that tech.
Did he check whether people were added to the group without even being aware of it? Or just never visited it?
Or shared a friend's phone?
The way he dealt with the situation, to me, feels like an inexperienced teacher. Well meaning but over enthusiastic, inconsistent, and unpredictable.
I like to be open with my students, discuss things with them, and set things up so they know what behaviour is acceptable, and what is not.
It's too easy to spend all your energy on the students who suck up all the oxygen by being in your face, cheat, and complain and miss the quiet ones who are facing struggles of their own, but still manage to hand in on time, attend all their classes, do their best.
posted by Zumbador at 10:41 AM on May 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
It was obvious that lots of cheating was going on, and that some students may or may not be actively participating in cheating and/or the chat itself.
...
At the end of the day, I would have to file individual forms for each student, so I needed to figure out what each student did, and also what the consequences would be.
...
I wrote a script to split the chat by user and time. I could see what each student wrote/posted and when they sent it.
...
I read through the thousands of texts to figure out what exactly went down, and tallied up for each student whether an academic integrity violation occurred for each quiz, assignment or midterm.
...
Some students cheated on fewer assignments. Some students were clearly participating in the chat and not reporting the cheating. Some students didn’t send any texts.
It seemed like one of the major concerns, and one of the reasons it all took so much time and effort, is that the prof was required to figure out exactly what each student did or did not do in the chat. And every one of them needed their own form and individual report. That definitely makes it hard to deal with it simply or collectively, but I also wouldn't worry too much about the students who didn't post or use the group chat, since that was the exact thing that had to be determined .
("it is important that individual students receive a form, because it helps make sure they understand the accusation, the consequences, as well as their right to appeal and how to get that process rolling if necessary").
The penalty for being around the cheating but not reporting it was zero on all extra credit assignments, which doesn't seem extraordinarily harsh.
posted by goblin-bee at 12:12 PM on May 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
...
At the end of the day, I would have to file individual forms for each student, so I needed to figure out what each student did, and also what the consequences would be.
...
I wrote a script to split the chat by user and time. I could see what each student wrote/posted and when they sent it.
...
I read through the thousands of texts to figure out what exactly went down, and tallied up for each student whether an academic integrity violation occurred for each quiz, assignment or midterm.
...
Some students cheated on fewer assignments. Some students were clearly participating in the chat and not reporting the cheating. Some students didn’t send any texts.
It seemed like one of the major concerns, and one of the reasons it all took so much time and effort, is that the prof was required to figure out exactly what each student did or did not do in the chat. And every one of them needed their own form and individual report. That definitely makes it hard to deal with it simply or collectively, but I also wouldn't worry too much about the students who didn't post or use the group chat, since that was the exact thing that had to be determined .
("it is important that individual students receive a form, because it helps make sure they understand the accusation, the consequences, as well as their right to appeal and how to get that process rolling if necessary").
The penalty for being around the cheating but not reporting it was zero on all extra credit assignments, which doesn't seem extraordinarily harsh.
posted by goblin-bee at 12:12 PM on May 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
Because the professor was unaware of a shitty setting on a (terrible-but-often-necessary, facebook owned, privacy disaster) app, you're inferring that he is unable to evaluate the content or participation on a social media platform? And you're suggesting that an associate professor (thus presumably tenured) is an inexperienced teacher? As well as suggesting that someone who took the time to methodically document the exact role played by each student on the platform based on concrete evidentiary data (like, oh, the approach a well trained scientist might take for any data source) is "unpredictable" and "inconsistent"?
It's one thing to suggest a critique, but these are both uncharitable and poorly supported inferences.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 12:15 PM on May 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
It's one thing to suggest a critique, but these are both uncharitable and poorly supported inferences.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 12:15 PM on May 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
>someone who took the time to methodically document the exact role played by each student on the platform based on concrete evidentiary data (like, oh, the approach a well trained scientist might take for any data source) is "unpredictable" and "inconsistent"?
Pretty sure Zumbador was using the words "unpredictable" and "inconsistent" to describe other things that the professor did, not the thoroughness of his documentation practices.
> one of the reasons it all took so much time and effort, is that the prof was required to figure out exactly what each student did or did not do in the chat. And every one of them needed their own form and individual report.
This was a complete WTF moment in the story for me. He also mentions, IIRC, that filling out each individual's form takes 45 minutes? And that he was expected to have 60 minute one-on-one discussions with each of the 70 students? IDK whether he failed to take this up with the college or whether the college actually insisted on this insane procedure being followed even in the case of en masse cheating, but holy shit that is an insane procedure and completely inappropriate for the problem, especially since as tenured & salaried faculty the prof would have to do all this on his own time. It's one among the long list of institutional/systemic failures that has enabled this level of cheating.
> It's not at all unlikely that they won't ever need a fair bit of stuff I teach them, at least not in their jobs. -- posted by sohalt
> Every single person in my husband's four-year apprenticeship program - except one - cheated on every test lmao. (Union electrician apprenticeship.). It was more or less expected that you would cheat. -- posted by subdee
^^^ More examples of institutional failures, which is the true cause of cheating.
On this thread we are all saying cheating is "bad" in the moral sense - students are doing something wrong, tut tut. But actually cheating is "bad" in the most literal, concrete sense - the educational institution is manufacturing defective products, so to speak. The entire point and primary task of the educational institution is being defeated when students cheat, and yet the institution has no policies capable of addressing the issue, no resources allocated towards preventing it. It's un. fucking. believable. The very foundations of the concept of education is decaying because these institutions are doing zero quality control on their primary product. Why? Because it costs too much. It would hurt their profits. Yay capitalism!
Catching students cheating is a lot like an e-coli outbreak in a lettuce farm ... except with no food safety standards or processes the farm needs to follow, no mandated checks to detect the e-coli, and no government money to fund food safety inspectors. There's also nobody reporting on the hundreds of people who get sick and die from the outbreaks, because who has money to waste on tracking the consequences of their poisoned produce?
Once in a thousand outbreaks, one very earnest manager catches farm workers taking shits in the lettuce fields. He
- doesn't freak out about the risk of e-coli,
- doesn't raise the alarm with the farm owners or the public about an impending outbreak,
- doesn't even dream of suggesting adequate funding for proper toilets for employee use,
- doesn't concern himself with demanding guidelines for hygienic handling of food in the farm
... because it doesn't even occur to him to think about this problem in terms of food safety or institutional policies or systemic oversight.
Instead, this manager looks at the issue as a problem of bad manners. He thinks to himself, "Oh my goodness! Such bad etiquette! If they get used to shitting in the fields, why, someday they might think it's fine to shit in a car! Or on a boat! In the rain! Or on a train! Tut tut. The workers in my farm should be DIGNIFIED, damn it. I believe in Farm Worker Dignity."
So he meticulously documents the problem of undignified behavior. Tracks who takes shits in the lettuce fields and how often. Compiles a spreadsheet. Then he unexpectedly switches up lunch time to the end of the workday, and all the workers are bamboozled! Nobody can take a shit in the fields because nobody ate anything all day! What a genius move! Then he fills out 70 lengthy reports, one for each individual miscreant with documented evidence of undignified behavior, and submits it to the farm owners. Worker pay gets docked, repeat offenders are fired. Manager gives workers a lengthy lecture on the importance of dignity. What a hero, amirite.
We are missing the point of the cheating issue just as hard. It's a real and serious problem but we keep thinking of cheating as if it's the same as catching a child with their hand in the cookie jar. But it's not! We have to stop treating this as an individual moral failing. It's 100% institutional failure, and educational institutions get to conveniently evade responsibility when we focus on wagging fingers at students.
posted by MiraK at 4:04 PM on May 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
Pretty sure Zumbador was using the words "unpredictable" and "inconsistent" to describe other things that the professor did, not the thoroughness of his documentation practices.
> one of the reasons it all took so much time and effort, is that the prof was required to figure out exactly what each student did or did not do in the chat. And every one of them needed their own form and individual report.
This was a complete WTF moment in the story for me. He also mentions, IIRC, that filling out each individual's form takes 45 minutes? And that he was expected to have 60 minute one-on-one discussions with each of the 70 students? IDK whether he failed to take this up with the college or whether the college actually insisted on this insane procedure being followed even in the case of en masse cheating, but holy shit that is an insane procedure and completely inappropriate for the problem, especially since as tenured & salaried faculty the prof would have to do all this on his own time. It's one among the long list of institutional/systemic failures that has enabled this level of cheating.
> It's not at all unlikely that they won't ever need a fair bit of stuff I teach them, at least not in their jobs. -- posted by sohalt
> Every single person in my husband's four-year apprenticeship program - except one - cheated on every test lmao. (Union electrician apprenticeship.). It was more or less expected that you would cheat. -- posted by subdee
^^^ More examples of institutional failures, which is the true cause of cheating.
On this thread we are all saying cheating is "bad" in the moral sense - students are doing something wrong, tut tut. But actually cheating is "bad" in the most literal, concrete sense - the educational institution is manufacturing defective products, so to speak. The entire point and primary task of the educational institution is being defeated when students cheat, and yet the institution has no policies capable of addressing the issue, no resources allocated towards preventing it. It's un. fucking. believable. The very foundations of the concept of education is decaying because these institutions are doing zero quality control on their primary product. Why? Because it costs too much. It would hurt their profits. Yay capitalism!
Catching students cheating is a lot like an e-coli outbreak in a lettuce farm ... except with no food safety standards or processes the farm needs to follow, no mandated checks to detect the e-coli, and no government money to fund food safety inspectors. There's also nobody reporting on the hundreds of people who get sick and die from the outbreaks, because who has money to waste on tracking the consequences of their poisoned produce?
Once in a thousand outbreaks, one very earnest manager catches farm workers taking shits in the lettuce fields. He
- doesn't freak out about the risk of e-coli,
- doesn't raise the alarm with the farm owners or the public about an impending outbreak,
- doesn't even dream of suggesting adequate funding for proper toilets for employee use,
- doesn't concern himself with demanding guidelines for hygienic handling of food in the farm
... because it doesn't even occur to him to think about this problem in terms of food safety or institutional policies or systemic oversight.
Instead, this manager looks at the issue as a problem of bad manners. He thinks to himself, "Oh my goodness! Such bad etiquette! If they get used to shitting in the fields, why, someday they might think it's fine to shit in a car! Or on a boat! In the rain! Or on a train! Tut tut. The workers in my farm should be DIGNIFIED, damn it. I believe in Farm Worker Dignity."
So he meticulously documents the problem of undignified behavior. Tracks who takes shits in the lettuce fields and how often. Compiles a spreadsheet. Then he unexpectedly switches up lunch time to the end of the workday, and all the workers are bamboozled! Nobody can take a shit in the fields because nobody ate anything all day! What a genius move! Then he fills out 70 lengthy reports, one for each individual miscreant with documented evidence of undignified behavior, and submits it to the farm owners. Worker pay gets docked, repeat offenders are fired. Manager gives workers a lengthy lecture on the importance of dignity. What a hero, amirite.
We are missing the point of the cheating issue just as hard. It's a real and serious problem but we keep thinking of cheating as if it's the same as catching a child with their hand in the cookie jar. But it's not! We have to stop treating this as an individual moral failing. It's 100% institutional failure, and educational institutions get to conveniently evade responsibility when we focus on wagging fingers at students.
posted by MiraK at 4:04 PM on May 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
IDK whether he failed to take this up with the college or whether the college actually insisted on this insane procedure being followed even in the case of en masse cheating,
I totally believe that. At its most basic, "due process" means letting the person know with specificity exactly what you're accusing them of, and giving them a meaningful opportunity to respond. He might have been able to get away with a form statement to copy-paste in everyone's block listing generically what the group did wrong, but that would not be meeting the intent of due process.
I am surprised there's no student board he could have referred the whole mess to and dumped his evidence on them. I don't really think this is a good use of an active faculty member's time. But someone's got to do it, or decide to let the whole thing go.
posted by ctmf at 4:42 PM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
I totally believe that. At its most basic, "due process" means letting the person know with specificity exactly what you're accusing them of, and giving them a meaningful opportunity to respond. He might have been able to get away with a form statement to copy-paste in everyone's block listing generically what the group did wrong, but that would not be meeting the intent of due process.
I am surprised there's no student board he could have referred the whole mess to and dumped his evidence on them. I don't really think this is a good use of an active faculty member's time. But someone's got to do it, or decide to let the whole thing go.
posted by ctmf at 4:42 PM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
IDK whether he failed to take this up with the college or whether the college actually insisted on this insane procedure being followed even in the case of en masse cheating, but holy shit that is an insane procedure and completely inappropriate for the problem
Yeah, it's clear that the academic dishonesty procedure was geared towards dealing with discrete incidents of individuals behaving badly, and that's why he had to do this incredible amount of work sorting it out. It sounds like the policy had never imagined the problem of mass collaborative cheating, and the procedures didn't scale. At the same time, you couldn't just say "yep fail everyone who ever looked at the group chat, done"; that would also be obviously unfair, against due process, and easily subject to appeals. Clearly a real, serious problem that you'd hope the school is now working to adapt to! Some kind of support system for the professor who has to deal with all this would be a start. (He mentions he didn't even have a TA to offload grunt work onto! Talk about unfair.)
That said, the very next sentence after the one about how he's expected to have an hour-long meeting with each student is: Instead, in consultation with the powers that be, I would inform the class as a whole about the widespread violations, and also submit individual forms for each student.
So I take that to mean he did take it up with the college, and the college didn't insist on the obviously inadequate procedure being followed to the letter.
posted by goblin-bee at 4:56 PM on May 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
Yeah, it's clear that the academic dishonesty procedure was geared towards dealing with discrete incidents of individuals behaving badly, and that's why he had to do this incredible amount of work sorting it out. It sounds like the policy had never imagined the problem of mass collaborative cheating, and the procedures didn't scale. At the same time, you couldn't just say "yep fail everyone who ever looked at the group chat, done"; that would also be obviously unfair, against due process, and easily subject to appeals. Clearly a real, serious problem that you'd hope the school is now working to adapt to! Some kind of support system for the professor who has to deal with all this would be a start. (He mentions he didn't even have a TA to offload grunt work onto! Talk about unfair.)
That said, the very next sentence after the one about how he's expected to have an hour-long meeting with each student is: Instead, in consultation with the powers that be, I would inform the class as a whole about the widespread violations, and also submit individual forms for each student.
So I take that to mean he did take it up with the college, and the college didn't insist on the obviously inadequate procedure being followed to the letter.
posted by goblin-bee at 4:56 PM on May 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
I’ve been interrogating my reactions to this over the last few days and appreciate the push that corb gives. I try really hard to follow my general belief that a nice teaching philosophy is all fun and games until it hits the grade book, because that’s the place where the power differential between a teacher and student is most on display. Honestly that’s why this essay has been so thought-provoking for me, since it seems to me like the eventual solution takes some important steps in dismantling the power difference and (hopefully) the potential for unjust outcomes. I am quite interested in the insights that a) why not offer ridiculously high opportunities for extra credit, and b) why not offer the meaningful choice of multiple pathways to get to the grade destination a student wishes. It made me interrogate my own thoughts on extra credit especially, which is something I usually take a pretty hard line on. That’s probably not a line of thinking that interests many others, so I won’t go into it. But I do appreciate the the depth to which Crump went in redesigning his course from first principles, and honestly I think the inordinate time he spent “catching” every act of cheating probably helped shape the much-kinder outcome than if he’d failed them all and let appeals sort ‘em out.
That said, saying I love his destination doesn’t mean I support every moment of his journey. I’d like not to be thrust into the role of apologist, though I do think the conclusion of “let me pause and redesign rules that are both clearer and more fair to you” eases the injustices Crump committed along the way. (I absolutely agree were injustices along the way.) If I were to put myself in a similar position of what to do after randomly discovering a large, organized cheating ring that most but not all of my students were in on and add a time-boxed pressure to decide immediately on a course of action, I doubt the solution I’d reach would have worked out as well for the students’ grades and discipline files. Honestly, undergoing what sounds like such a thorough reporting and appeals process for 70ish students where I had to fight each one individually and repeatedly rehash every mistake I made that accidentally encouraged students to cheat would probably burn me out of the profession. Compared to that most likely alternative, I think Crump’s choices are in no way ideal but within the realm of livably imperfect.
That said, I think the nature of a group chat put him in an impossible decision: there is no way to determine who truly existed in the chat and never once looked at the cheating that occurred within it, and who “existed” in the chat but absolutely used everyone else’s active collaboration to cheat without ever actively participating. The second instance to me clearly falls under the “obtaining unfair advantage” part of the integrity policy.
The question becomes, how do you identify that first group? The ones who knew it was occurring, didn’t narc, and (presumably) stayed in the gc because it was an important social connection 6/7 days a week (as Crump pointed out). I suppose there’s a smaller possible subset of people who were in the gc and didn’t know it was happening, but it doesn’t sound like it was very subtle. To me, options look like a) punish nobody, which sucks for the 30% not in the gc, b) punish everyone which sucks for the gc observers, c) devise and implement a way to sort them out, which means you need time, possibly several weeks (which he did), or d) create some way for students to self-identify their observer status and explain it in a way outside the high-stakes report and appeals process (which he also did… he identified at least one conversation where a student changed Crump’s point of view). Given not-desirable options a and b, Crump’s decision to take a harder line in the class while identifying a pathway to informally appeal seems like a practical solution.
Secondly, the academic integrity policy suggests, as he admits, that students should be confronted… Instead, he waited for, by his admission, "several weeks" until he could prove all of it. That means several weeks more of zero assignments for students. There's a reason professors are expected to call it out early - and in part, that is because it makes it easier to recover from. …
This is a decision I think he made a compassionate call on. Given the volume of students, a single face-to-face with each of them was entirely impractical, so I support his decision to wait several weeks while he brainstormed a fair solution. He points out acted under the advice of university admins, first of all. And the pause to redesign the course allowed students to recoup all of their lost points in the final third-ish of the course. This includes test 1, presumably a major grade — if Crump had hard frozen their grades with a “here’s your 0 for everything you’ve cheated on so far,” a 0 on a test would’ve been worse for students than the solution he eventually designed. A decent number of students would not have been able to recover from that.
Thirdly, he made his class actively less accessible during a pandemic in order to deter cheaters, by changing the midterm from a choose-your-own-time test to one with an extremely narrow window…
I agree entirely. I think a better solution would have been to delay the test by a week, explain the cheating and redesigned syllabus option, then warn them the next test would be different and how. I think the 30% of non-gc students were actively harmed here. I like to think I’d have left the gc after archiving everything, but probably would have stayed in it until I could meet with my supervisor, who’s likely to be quite tech illiterate, and know for sure they aren’t the kind of person who needs to be directly holding my phone watching the live chat go by.
…by not identifying himself, he made it more likely that students believed other students were betraying them. He's kind of appalled at the paranoia and the fact that students were being messaged as potential snitchers, but he made that happen. …
If I were in the 30% of non-gc students, I’d argue a negative classroom culture already exists so it’s all beyond saving anyway. I’d feel pretty betrayed, and I’d have good reason to feel so — because my fellow students already actively betrayed me. That said, corb has a point that Crump should’ve foreseen the threats of violence and mitigated that threat. Mostly I’m really surprised he didn’t dramatically reveal himself at the lecture’s end to the tune of “Agatha All Along,” but he must not have my penchant for dramatics and tone discordant memes.
I see places where Crump erred. (I won’t go so far to say “and writing this blog post was the biggest error of all!” because I really think it will make my classroom a better place… but the presentation could’ve been better.) I guess where I see compassion in his response, despite the errors, is that the next-most-likely outcome was an institutional approach with formal bureaucracy and consequences, which suck for all. He could’ve done that, absolutely. And that some students continued to cheat despite clear directions suggests it may have been the correct response. But he didn’t, and I find that very admirable.
posted by lilac girl at 6:03 PM on May 31, 2022 [8 favorites]
That said, saying I love his destination doesn’t mean I support every moment of his journey. I’d like not to be thrust into the role of apologist, though I do think the conclusion of “let me pause and redesign rules that are both clearer and more fair to you” eases the injustices Crump committed along the way. (I absolutely agree were injustices along the way.) If I were to put myself in a similar position of what to do after randomly discovering a large, organized cheating ring that most but not all of my students were in on and add a time-boxed pressure to decide immediately on a course of action, I doubt the solution I’d reach would have worked out as well for the students’ grades and discipline files. Honestly, undergoing what sounds like such a thorough reporting and appeals process for 70ish students where I had to fight each one individually and repeatedly rehash every mistake I made that accidentally encouraged students to cheat would probably burn me out of the profession. Compared to that most likely alternative, I think Crump’s choices are in no way ideal but within the realm of livably imperfect.
That said, I think the nature of a group chat put him in an impossible decision: there is no way to determine who truly existed in the chat and never once looked at the cheating that occurred within it, and who “existed” in the chat but absolutely used everyone else’s active collaboration to cheat without ever actively participating. The second instance to me clearly falls under the “obtaining unfair advantage” part of the integrity policy.
The question becomes, how do you identify that first group? The ones who knew it was occurring, didn’t narc, and (presumably) stayed in the gc because it was an important social connection 6/7 days a week (as Crump pointed out). I suppose there’s a smaller possible subset of people who were in the gc and didn’t know it was happening, but it doesn’t sound like it was very subtle. To me, options look like a) punish nobody, which sucks for the 30% not in the gc, b) punish everyone which sucks for the gc observers, c) devise and implement a way to sort them out, which means you need time, possibly several weeks (which he did), or d) create some way for students to self-identify their observer status and explain it in a way outside the high-stakes report and appeals process (which he also did… he identified at least one conversation where a student changed Crump’s point of view). Given not-desirable options a and b, Crump’s decision to take a harder line in the class while identifying a pathway to informally appeal seems like a practical solution.
Secondly, the academic integrity policy suggests, as he admits, that students should be confronted… Instead, he waited for, by his admission, "several weeks" until he could prove all of it. That means several weeks more of zero assignments for students. There's a reason professors are expected to call it out early - and in part, that is because it makes it easier to recover from. …
This is a decision I think he made a compassionate call on. Given the volume of students, a single face-to-face with each of them was entirely impractical, so I support his decision to wait several weeks while he brainstormed a fair solution. He points out acted under the advice of university admins, first of all. And the pause to redesign the course allowed students to recoup all of their lost points in the final third-ish of the course. This includes test 1, presumably a major grade — if Crump had hard frozen their grades with a “here’s your 0 for everything you’ve cheated on so far,” a 0 on a test would’ve been worse for students than the solution he eventually designed. A decent number of students would not have been able to recover from that.
Thirdly, he made his class actively less accessible during a pandemic in order to deter cheaters, by changing the midterm from a choose-your-own-time test to one with an extremely narrow window…
I agree entirely. I think a better solution would have been to delay the test by a week, explain the cheating and redesigned syllabus option, then warn them the next test would be different and how. I think the 30% of non-gc students were actively harmed here. I like to think I’d have left the gc after archiving everything, but probably would have stayed in it until I could meet with my supervisor, who’s likely to be quite tech illiterate, and know for sure they aren’t the kind of person who needs to be directly holding my phone watching the live chat go by.
…by not identifying himself, he made it more likely that students believed other students were betraying them. He's kind of appalled at the paranoia and the fact that students were being messaged as potential snitchers, but he made that happen. …
If I were in the 30% of non-gc students, I’d argue a negative classroom culture already exists so it’s all beyond saving anyway. I’d feel pretty betrayed, and I’d have good reason to feel so — because my fellow students already actively betrayed me. That said, corb has a point that Crump should’ve foreseen the threats of violence and mitigated that threat. Mostly I’m really surprised he didn’t dramatically reveal himself at the lecture’s end to the tune of “Agatha All Along,” but he must not have my penchant for dramatics and tone discordant memes.
I see places where Crump erred. (I won’t go so far to say “and writing this blog post was the biggest error of all!” because I really think it will make my classroom a better place… but the presentation could’ve been better.) I guess where I see compassion in his response, despite the errors, is that the next-most-likely outcome was an institutional approach with formal bureaucracy and consequences, which suck for all. He could’ve done that, absolutely. And that some students continued to cheat despite clear directions suggests it may have been the correct response. But he didn’t, and I find that very admirable.
posted by lilac girl at 6:03 PM on May 31, 2022 [8 favorites]
I like that whatever side you lean towards, this is a good thread to read before doing anything rash if this happens to you, or to have read and thought about before this happens to you. A lot of thoughtful points all around.
posted by ctmf at 6:24 PM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by ctmf at 6:24 PM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
I do think that, having not thought about it beforehand, Crump did his best to do what he thought was right, not what was the easiest thing.
posted by ctmf at 6:26 PM on May 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by ctmf at 6:26 PM on May 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
Professor Crump
Refused to slump,
Saw online cheating as a riddle
(Whose solution more or less split MeFi down the middle!)
posted by Calvin and the Duplicators at 6:37 PM on May 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
Refused to slump,
Saw online cheating as a riddle
(Whose solution more or less split MeFi down the middle!)
posted by Calvin and the Duplicators at 6:37 PM on May 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
I guess where I see compassion in his response, despite the errors, is that the next-most-likely outcome was an institutional approach with formal bureaucracy and consequences, which suck for all. He could’ve done that, absolutely. And that some students continued to cheat despite clear directions suggests it may have been the correct response. But he didn’t, and I find that very admirable
Thank you, this is very helpful!
I think that part of my own understanding gap may be that I exist in the social science space, and a particular social science space where a lot of the professors are fairly radical people who spend a lot of time intentionally thinking about the equity of their classes, the power dynamics between themselves and students, trying to avoid punitive models, doing a lot of contract grading, and also the examining the contrast of the interests of professors and the interests of the administration, which is trying to squeeze every drop of profit out of them and bust their unionizing while limiting the academic space as a space for ideas to flourish and develop.
So it struck me as immediately jarring and mean-spirited for someone to take the approach: "well, 70% of my class is cheating, they must be bad people who deserve to be punished" - there was so much moralizing about the students - rather than "What happened in my class such that 70% of the class is cheating? Are there too many readings? Do people not understand the material? Are my questions difficult to understand? Should I allow for a grace period on quizzes on an individual basis?" It also seemed unfair to me for him to punish the collective as individuals - we know that group behavior creates circumstances that individuals would not have engaged in and may even feel ashamed of.
I think personally, I would have felt reporting 70% of the class to administration and bureaucracy and letting them fail to be an absolutely inconceivable circumstance, and so I was frustrated that he even considered it. But you make an excellent point that it's important to judge people for their choices from the options they see, and he may simply not have seen other options. The administration route may have seemed logical to him, and it seems that he could not conceive of a situation where people weren't punished in some way. While that bothers me, it's not like he had the option of going to Metafilter and consulting us on the matter. And in a Covid shutdown, it's less possibly to casually walk over to a colleague's office and talk it through. I don't want to completely shut down appreciate someone for taking the more compassionate of the options they saw, even if I think they could have gone further.
posted by corb at 7:04 PM on May 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
Thank you, this is very helpful!
I think that part of my own understanding gap may be that I exist in the social science space, and a particular social science space where a lot of the professors are fairly radical people who spend a lot of time intentionally thinking about the equity of their classes, the power dynamics between themselves and students, trying to avoid punitive models, doing a lot of contract grading, and also the examining the contrast of the interests of professors and the interests of the administration, which is trying to squeeze every drop of profit out of them and bust their unionizing while limiting the academic space as a space for ideas to flourish and develop.
So it struck me as immediately jarring and mean-spirited for someone to take the approach: "well, 70% of my class is cheating, they must be bad people who deserve to be punished" - there was so much moralizing about the students - rather than "What happened in my class such that 70% of the class is cheating? Are there too many readings? Do people not understand the material? Are my questions difficult to understand? Should I allow for a grace period on quizzes on an individual basis?" It also seemed unfair to me for him to punish the collective as individuals - we know that group behavior creates circumstances that individuals would not have engaged in and may even feel ashamed of.
I think personally, I would have felt reporting 70% of the class to administration and bureaucracy and letting them fail to be an absolutely inconceivable circumstance, and so I was frustrated that he even considered it. But you make an excellent point that it's important to judge people for their choices from the options they see, and he may simply not have seen other options. The administration route may have seemed logical to him, and it seems that he could not conceive of a situation where people weren't punished in some way. While that bothers me, it's not like he had the option of going to Metafilter and consulting us on the matter. And in a Covid shutdown, it's less possibly to casually walk over to a colleague's office and talk it through. I don't want to completely shut down appreciate someone for taking the more compassionate of the options they saw, even if I think they could have gone further.
posted by corb at 7:04 PM on May 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
one answer seems to be, make the class hard. Really, really hard, so hard that it's unreasonable to expect people to do it on their own. And then don't expect them to do it on their own. Make the instinct to collaborate and help each other part of the curriculum, and make it hard enough that just copying answers isn't a viable solution
But you've got to watch out for situations where, for instance, the one girl in the class doesn't feel comfortable joining one of the all-male study groups and ends up doing all the work completely by herself. She had a really rough and discouraging semester.
posted by straight at 7:15 PM on May 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
But you've got to watch out for situations where, for instance, the one girl in the class doesn't feel comfortable joining one of the all-male study groups and ends up doing all the work completely by herself. She had a really rough and discouraging semester.
posted by straight at 7:15 PM on May 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
corb, I so love your comment. The reflective questions you list are ones I push myself really hard on, but I’ll admit they don’t come naturally to me because I’m both a letter of the law brown-noser and also a teacher in a field where praxis is much more valued than theoretical frameworks. I’m currently in that magical summer moment where everything seems possible so it seems super doable to redesign everything so that my practice aligns with values, but I don’t have many colleagues who share my same structural justice bent. I don’t have many people who enjoy talking through “goal = x, so what’s best practice?”
If you don’t mind, I’d love to hear your take on what Crump should’ve done from the moment of discovery. A separate but parallel inquiry, what’s the right structure to avoid that crazy outcome altogether? Is Crump’s ultimate solution flawed, or just the execution? (While acknowledging this is all a journey, and clearly as someone only partway through it every step along it is valuable.)
posted by lilac girl at 7:45 PM on May 31, 2022
If you don’t mind, I’d love to hear your take on what Crump should’ve done from the moment of discovery. A separate but parallel inquiry, what’s the right structure to avoid that crazy outcome altogether? Is Crump’s ultimate solution flawed, or just the execution? (While acknowledging this is all a journey, and clearly as someone only partway through it every step along it is valuable.)
posted by lilac girl at 7:45 PM on May 31, 2022
I suspect what drives my very different reaction to lying in a job interview vs cheating academically, again despite the former being something that could conceivably be done to me and the latter not, is that I don't instinctively think of academia as meaningfully part of "power". I mean, obviously everything is, but it doesn't feel as thoroughly sullied as the world of employment.
That said, corb has a point that Crump should’ve foreseen the threats of violence and mitigated that threat.
Surely even in the US that is asking a bit much of a professor?
On this thread we are all saying cheating is "bad" in the moral sense - students are doing something wrong, tut tut. But actually cheating is "bad" in the most literal, concrete sense - the educational institution is manufacturing defective products, so to speak. The entire point and primary task of the educational institution is being defeated when students cheat, and yet the institution has no policies capable of addressing the issue, no resources allocated towards preventing it. It's un. fucking. believable. The very foundations of the concept of education is decaying because these institutions are doing zero quality control on their primary product. Why? Because it costs too much. It would hurt their profits. Yay capitalism!
I think this actually gets at the heart of what probably drives the bifurcation in responses. Here is my theory:
1) Virtually everyone on MetaFilter has an instinctive and deep reverence for education and knowledge. It's a text heavy forum that encourages long, well informed, comments in a world where almost literally nowhere else does that online.
2) Some people think of colleges as places which are primarily about education. If you believe that, then cheating is not just ridiculous (you are literally paying to cheat yourself) but also inherently dishonouring something which is pure and holy.
3) Others, without thinking that education is any less important than the previous group, think of colleges as primarily gatekeeping institutions that charge money to issue credentials required to access vast areas of American professional and para-professional life. If colleges aren't *really* about education then reverence for the latter doesn't translate to the former. People in this group might note that the system essentially requires vast numbers of people who do not have a particular reverence for knowledge and learning to be pressed through the sausage machine. They might also note that an institution which plays a part in separating teenagers from tens of thousands of dollars just so they can do a job that doesn't involve the frying of chicken cannot perhaps hide behind a sort of semi-monastic identity as a place separate from The World without seeming ridiculous.
It can, of course, be true that one's own experience was primarily about education while still recognising the other aspects of the system. It also requires a little reflection. Sure, I can say that for me the education was paramount and I would rather have that and no certificate rather than the other way around but it has not escaped my attention that I have over the years encountered highly paid colleagues who seemed like they learned nothing from their "education" but never a colleague who was very clever but didn't have a degree (since we wouldn't hire them).
posted by atrazine at 10:34 PM on May 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
That said, corb has a point that Crump should’ve foreseen the threats of violence and mitigated that threat.
Surely even in the US that is asking a bit much of a professor?
On this thread we are all saying cheating is "bad" in the moral sense - students are doing something wrong, tut tut. But actually cheating is "bad" in the most literal, concrete sense - the educational institution is manufacturing defective products, so to speak. The entire point and primary task of the educational institution is being defeated when students cheat, and yet the institution has no policies capable of addressing the issue, no resources allocated towards preventing it. It's un. fucking. believable. The very foundations of the concept of education is decaying because these institutions are doing zero quality control on their primary product. Why? Because it costs too much. It would hurt their profits. Yay capitalism!
I think this actually gets at the heart of what probably drives the bifurcation in responses. Here is my theory:
1) Virtually everyone on MetaFilter has an instinctive and deep reverence for education and knowledge. It's a text heavy forum that encourages long, well informed, comments in a world where almost literally nowhere else does that online.
2) Some people think of colleges as places which are primarily about education. If you believe that, then cheating is not just ridiculous (you are literally paying to cheat yourself) but also inherently dishonouring something which is pure and holy.
3) Others, without thinking that education is any less important than the previous group, think of colleges as primarily gatekeeping institutions that charge money to issue credentials required to access vast areas of American professional and para-professional life. If colleges aren't *really* about education then reverence for the latter doesn't translate to the former. People in this group might note that the system essentially requires vast numbers of people who do not have a particular reverence for knowledge and learning to be pressed through the sausage machine. They might also note that an institution which plays a part in separating teenagers from tens of thousands of dollars just so they can do a job that doesn't involve the frying of chicken cannot perhaps hide behind a sort of semi-monastic identity as a place separate from The World without seeming ridiculous.
It can, of course, be true that one's own experience was primarily about education while still recognising the other aspects of the system. It also requires a little reflection. Sure, I can say that for me the education was paramount and I would rather have that and no certificate rather than the other way around but it has not escaped my attention that I have over the years encountered highly paid colleagues who seemed like they learned nothing from their "education" but never a colleague who was very clever but didn't have a degree (since we wouldn't hire them).
posted by atrazine at 10:34 PM on May 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
But you've got to watch out for situations where, for instance, the one girl in the class doesn't feel comfortable joining one of the all-male study groups and ends up doing all the work completely by herself.
An important point, for sure. Ideally you want to use selection and recruitment tools to avoid the situation of only having one girl in the class. Fortunately for us, while there was definitely a strong male bias in our physics classes (as is unfortunately typical), I don't recall the skew ever being quite that bad.
I'm sure the women in our physics classes would have their own tales to tell about the downsides and challenges of being in a male-dominated field and bad behavior by their male classmates, but I do recall one incident that also highlights another benefit of the kind of solidarity that our curriculum engendered. One year the department had to hire an adjunct instructor at the last minute due to some unexpected conflict for the professor who'd been scheduled to teach our Junior-level mechanics course. The person they hired turned out to be the sort of man who doesn't exactly cross any lines as far as sexual harassment or discriminatory language or anything clearly actionable, but also just clearly doesn't listen when women are talking, and responds to them in a way that makes it clear he's talking down to them. I'm sure you're all familiar with the type.
On the first or second day of class, he pulled that shit on the top student in our class, who happened to be a woman. I don't want to make it sound like the male students in the class were all enlightened feminists or anything, but from that moment forward he was dead to us, and no one took him seriously for the rest of the semester. There was very much a "you fuck with one of us, you fuck with all of us" sentiment about it. That guy was not rehired to teach after that semester.
Three semesters later, when I graduated, our department held exit interviews to get feedback on our experience in the program (this was extremely unusual at our university, by the way). The interviewer, an emeritus faculty member who didn't really know any of us, asked me if there were any particularly negative experiences with the teaching in the department that I wanted to share. I said pretty much everything had been quite good, except for that one guy, and as I began to describe the situation, the interviewer smiled and said something like "I think everyone has told me about him today. I'll definitely let the chair know you're all unanimous about this one." A year and a half later, and we still all wanted to be damn sure no one else had to deal with the kind of smug minimizing that one instructor had inflicted on the women in our class.
posted by biogeo at 10:35 PM on May 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
I have over the years encountered highly paid colleagues who seemed like they learned nothing from their "education" but never a colleague who was very clever but didn't have a degree (since we wouldn't hire them).
My mother, who doesn't have a degree, started working for the copyright office of the Library of Congress as a typist back in the '70s, and gradually worked her way up the ranks. She ultimately was promoted into a job that would normally have required a bachelor's degree (possibly even a master's) no matter the level of experience, but her record at the Library was so strong that they were able to make an exception for her. She's one of the smartest people I know, but I think she was probably part of the last generation for which that pathway was open for people without degrees, no matter how talented and experienced they are. College education is valuable for those that make use of it, but definitely isn't the only pathway to intelligence or ability, and credentialism is bullshit.
posted by biogeo at 10:45 PM on May 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
College education is valuable for those that make use of it, but definitely isn't the only pathway to intelligence or ability, and credentialism is bullshit.
That's the crux of the problem that people in academia often have real difficulty with for there being these two constant, yet opposing notions about the value of education. Teachers, rightly, celebrate the value of an education for its own sake. They want to keep the Humanities alive, for example, and share the vast history of thought and appreciation build up around those disciplines. When they speak of the importance of higher education, that is the ideal that clearly comes through.
But at the same time, the University system has become a job training program of sorts, where the knowledge itself may not be especially applicable to jobs one might find, but the demand for the degree is of increasing importance for better income opportunities. The University system, having been designed in a different era, is able to make bank off of this by alluding to the value of education and the romantic ideals associated with that, but by treating students as commodities that exist for their benefit rather than the University existing for the students either as a path to better jobs or education for its own sake.
If the goal was self betterment through education, then all the crap around requirements, grades, class hours, and all the many hoops one needs to jump through to graduate are unnecessary obstacles to giving the individual student a chance to gain the most they can from the teaching. Schools, though, are selective, they choose students not by those who most need the "better" teaching, but by those most fully established as being best positioned to succeed without it and then claim credit for their output. The allure of the romance of learning and the college life acts more as a necessary, hopefully enjoyable, but ultimately minimally important step to getting a higher paying job in circumstances where the knowledge gained has little relevance to the job one later obtains. The abilities the student carries into the University are those that will serve them in the job world more directly than what was learned, the University just imposes themselves between the job seeker and the market as a third party guarantor of effort. If it were otherwise, then the skills and knowledge would have a more direct reflection of the needed abilities to succeed in a job outside the University system.
Given that imposition, the University acts as much as a blockage to those who can't or don't want to attend and the larger the demand for higher education grows the less useful the outcomes are for even those who do attend given the selectivity making where one gets a degree as important as if one does and the imbalance of high paying jobs to graduates. Unlike, say, a hospital, at least in concept understanding that race and other factors are still in play, access does not guarantee outcome when jobs are the goal. Like a hospital getting in should give all those who attend the same standards of interest and care and thus entrance and outcome are strongly linked. In Universities you may get the same education as the person next to you, but the when the goal is the job later, then access becomes severed from outcome, it is a guarantee of nothing more than the diploma at the end and debt. Huge debt that is the whole point of the enterprise, the college industry that has attached themselves so tightly to the idea of "knowledge" that it has become impossible to separate the two, even as costs continue to rise unabated as the idealists and pragmatic tug the concept in two distinctly different and opposing ways.
Arguments over things like cheating or debt forgiveness that don't try to parse out the industrial wants of the system from the needs of the student and society continue to allow the system to act as an imposition of contradictory purpose serving itself first and the good of the students and needs of society secondarily. I love what academia does in the abstract. I'd fund research institutions to just further study of the world if I had the power, but teaching, research, jobs and knowledge for its own sake don't coexist as happily as often pretended by those supporting the system as it is, so deciding what the best approach to cheating or so many other things might be is to assert a belief in "this" part of the system while ignoring the opposing elements or, as in the case of the article, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable and making a choose your own adventure like choice over the path you think best.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:48 AM on June 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
That's the crux of the problem that people in academia often have real difficulty with for there being these two constant, yet opposing notions about the value of education. Teachers, rightly, celebrate the value of an education for its own sake. They want to keep the Humanities alive, for example, and share the vast history of thought and appreciation build up around those disciplines. When they speak of the importance of higher education, that is the ideal that clearly comes through.
But at the same time, the University system has become a job training program of sorts, where the knowledge itself may not be especially applicable to jobs one might find, but the demand for the degree is of increasing importance for better income opportunities. The University system, having been designed in a different era, is able to make bank off of this by alluding to the value of education and the romantic ideals associated with that, but by treating students as commodities that exist for their benefit rather than the University existing for the students either as a path to better jobs or education for its own sake.
If the goal was self betterment through education, then all the crap around requirements, grades, class hours, and all the many hoops one needs to jump through to graduate are unnecessary obstacles to giving the individual student a chance to gain the most they can from the teaching. Schools, though, are selective, they choose students not by those who most need the "better" teaching, but by those most fully established as being best positioned to succeed without it and then claim credit for their output. The allure of the romance of learning and the college life acts more as a necessary, hopefully enjoyable, but ultimately minimally important step to getting a higher paying job in circumstances where the knowledge gained has little relevance to the job one later obtains. The abilities the student carries into the University are those that will serve them in the job world more directly than what was learned, the University just imposes themselves between the job seeker and the market as a third party guarantor of effort. If it were otherwise, then the skills and knowledge would have a more direct reflection of the needed abilities to succeed in a job outside the University system.
Given that imposition, the University acts as much as a blockage to those who can't or don't want to attend and the larger the demand for higher education grows the less useful the outcomes are for even those who do attend given the selectivity making where one gets a degree as important as if one does and the imbalance of high paying jobs to graduates. Unlike, say, a hospital, at least in concept understanding that race and other factors are still in play, access does not guarantee outcome when jobs are the goal. Like a hospital getting in should give all those who attend the same standards of interest and care and thus entrance and outcome are strongly linked. In Universities you may get the same education as the person next to you, but the when the goal is the job later, then access becomes severed from outcome, it is a guarantee of nothing more than the diploma at the end and debt. Huge debt that is the whole point of the enterprise, the college industry that has attached themselves so tightly to the idea of "knowledge" that it has become impossible to separate the two, even as costs continue to rise unabated as the idealists and pragmatic tug the concept in two distinctly different and opposing ways.
Arguments over things like cheating or debt forgiveness that don't try to parse out the industrial wants of the system from the needs of the student and society continue to allow the system to act as an imposition of contradictory purpose serving itself first and the good of the students and needs of society secondarily. I love what academia does in the abstract. I'd fund research institutions to just further study of the world if I had the power, but teaching, research, jobs and knowledge for its own sake don't coexist as happily as often pretended by those supporting the system as it is, so deciding what the best approach to cheating or so many other things might be is to assert a belief in "this" part of the system while ignoring the opposing elements or, as in the case of the article, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable and making a choose your own adventure like choice over the path you think best.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:48 AM on June 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
Humanities isn't just kept alive by some well intentioned desire for learning - I'm in humanities and social sciences and what I need my students to be able to do is crucial to their ability to understand more than just the text that's been set. I'm an adjunct anyway, I don't get to choose it, but what I teach is critical thinking and information analysis. Different modes in different fields, or more or less theoretical depending on that too. But when I'm teaching young journalists and comms students what I'm teaching them is how an information society functions in a capitalist world. When I'm teaching them about the gothic I'm teaching them to identify structures in narratives that also occur outside the genre (aka the Dracula as xenophobia analysis).
If I let them take only answers, not information, I am hampering them in whatever it is they choose to do. Same with history, or philosophy. There is much of the same underlying ideal - we can identify these structures and how they affect the material around us - within almost all humanities fields. To assume our students are there for a love of learning devalues that, and as I said earlier - finding the answer is not finding the information.
Would I have done what Crump did? Apart from not knowing R, probably not. But I do a lot of work in intro to academics and info literacy so that's the actual praxis I'd be working from. The tension between that, and ticking off what makes my classes have 'job ready skills' is there, definitely, as is credentialism and creeping credential scope, but there are solid reasons that students need the skill to parse information and not just locate an answer.
(See: every AskMe and Twitter thread where folk offer up whatever they found on Google while answering specific and detailed questions that demonstrate why that easily googled answer is wrong)
posted by geek anachronism at 3:01 AM on June 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
If I let them take only answers, not information, I am hampering them in whatever it is they choose to do. Same with history, or philosophy. There is much of the same underlying ideal - we can identify these structures and how they affect the material around us - within almost all humanities fields. To assume our students are there for a love of learning devalues that, and as I said earlier - finding the answer is not finding the information.
Would I have done what Crump did? Apart from not knowing R, probably not. But I do a lot of work in intro to academics and info literacy so that's the actual praxis I'd be working from. The tension between that, and ticking off what makes my classes have 'job ready skills' is there, definitely, as is credentialism and creeping credential scope, but there are solid reasons that students need the skill to parse information and not just locate an answer.
(See: every AskMe and Twitter thread where folk offer up whatever they found on Google while answering specific and detailed questions that demonstrate why that easily googled answer is wrong)
posted by geek anachronism at 3:01 AM on June 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
It's not at all unlikely that they won't ever need a fair bit of stuff I teach them, at least not in their jobs. -- posted by sohalt
^^^ More examples of institutional failures, which is the true cause of cheating.
Once again, because it's just that important to me: There are, of course, institutional failures, but that's not one of them.
I completely agree that all this moralizing isn't getting us anywhere. But I think it's precisely this confusion of education with job training that's fueling a lot of that pointless moralizing: Cheating students are deceiving their future employers, etc.
No, they aren't, mostly. Because a lot of grades really won't say that much about their suitability for any given job. That's just one of the functions of grades, and one they will always serve worst, and really not the one that should be prioritzed, if you ask me. I also, truly, deeply, frankly feel that prioritizing it won't improve much, because it's a fool's errand. We can't perfectly match our assessements to the specific job requirements of any given job they might conceivably pursue after that type of school, with that sort of degree. There will always be students who will feel that any given learning objective won't be needed for whatever path they're planning to take, and they will likely be right, or at least feel proven right, because you generally don't miss knowledge you just never look for an application of.
A function that grades can fill a lot better is giving the student feedback on their progress in their learning process. Did they understand the requirement? Could they accurately assess the effort required to obtain their particular goals with regard to the grade? Did they plan for sufficient measures to achieve the goal? Well, if they didn't, grades are the required signal to course-correct. Students need to know where they stand to develop and adjust suitable strategies.
Those are super useful meta-skills in all areas of life, not just with regard to employement, and sure, not completely irrelevant to employers either. But again, grades are at best a proxy for that sort of competence to a third party, because they can also easily be derailed by outside stuff all the time - you need perfectly well how much effort was required, you made an appropriate plan, and then you got sick, or someone else in your family did, etc, etc. Sometimes all grades show to third parties is how stable someone's life is, and how easy it is for them to stick to plans. (Again, sadly, not irrelevant to employers. Because an employee with a stable life is just more convenient. It's the biggest reasons, why grades suck, and making them more "job relevant", even if that were possible, wouldn't change that at all.)
But ultimately, only the students themselves can ever accurately assess how meaningful their grades actually are. And if they decided that their grades are meaningless, there's no way for me to make them meaningful.
posted by sohalt at 3:11 AM on June 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
^^^ More examples of institutional failures, which is the true cause of cheating.
Once again, because it's just that important to me: There are, of course, institutional failures, but that's not one of them.
I completely agree that all this moralizing isn't getting us anywhere. But I think it's precisely this confusion of education with job training that's fueling a lot of that pointless moralizing: Cheating students are deceiving their future employers, etc.
No, they aren't, mostly. Because a lot of grades really won't say that much about their suitability for any given job. That's just one of the functions of grades, and one they will always serve worst, and really not the one that should be prioritzed, if you ask me. I also, truly, deeply, frankly feel that prioritizing it won't improve much, because it's a fool's errand. We can't perfectly match our assessements to the specific job requirements of any given job they might conceivably pursue after that type of school, with that sort of degree. There will always be students who will feel that any given learning objective won't be needed for whatever path they're planning to take, and they will likely be right, or at least feel proven right, because you generally don't miss knowledge you just never look for an application of.
A function that grades can fill a lot better is giving the student feedback on their progress in their learning process. Did they understand the requirement? Could they accurately assess the effort required to obtain their particular goals with regard to the grade? Did they plan for sufficient measures to achieve the goal? Well, if they didn't, grades are the required signal to course-correct. Students need to know where they stand to develop and adjust suitable strategies.
Those are super useful meta-skills in all areas of life, not just with regard to employement, and sure, not completely irrelevant to employers either. But again, grades are at best a proxy for that sort of competence to a third party, because they can also easily be derailed by outside stuff all the time - you need perfectly well how much effort was required, you made an appropriate plan, and then you got sick, or someone else in your family did, etc, etc. Sometimes all grades show to third parties is how stable someone's life is, and how easy it is for them to stick to plans. (Again, sadly, not irrelevant to employers. Because an employee with a stable life is just more convenient. It's the biggest reasons, why grades suck, and making them more "job relevant", even if that were possible, wouldn't change that at all.)
But ultimately, only the students themselves can ever accurately assess how meaningful their grades actually are. And if they decided that their grades are meaningless, there's no way for me to make them meaningful.
posted by sohalt at 3:11 AM on June 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
I need my students to be able to do is crucial to their ability to understand more than just the text that's been set
But that clearly isn't why a large portion of the student body attending classes are there. They want a degree, so cheating is just felt an easier path to getting that. I personally don't need a defense for the humanities or social sciences, but the question of why there is such a disconnect between learning and degree seeking and how that affects students is a real problem.
Some areas of study clearly need to have strict rules around cheating and the acquisition of needed information, the society depends on that, but other branches of knowledge aren't as easily relegated to testing and uniform proofs of ability and, ideally, they would be more flexible in their standards. Students who want to learn can be disadvantaged by inflexible standards in those areas requiring a different approach to proof of knowledge. The why and the how though are caught up in larger systemic problems.
posted by gusottertrout at 3:18 AM on June 1, 2022
But that clearly isn't why a large portion of the student body attending classes are there. They want a degree, so cheating is just felt an easier path to getting that. I personally don't need a defense for the humanities or social sciences, but the question of why there is such a disconnect between learning and degree seeking and how that affects students is a real problem.
Some areas of study clearly need to have strict rules around cheating and the acquisition of needed information, the society depends on that, but other branches of knowledge aren't as easily relegated to testing and uniform proofs of ability and, ideally, they would be more flexible in their standards. Students who want to learn can be disadvantaged by inflexible standards in those areas requiring a different approach to proof of knowledge. The why and the how though are caught up in larger systemic problems.
posted by gusottertrout at 3:18 AM on June 1, 2022
To sum up, I think grades should be mostly for students, rather than employers. It's all pointless unless we get students to understand that the grades are actually for them, not for anyone else, so if they're cheating, they're really cheating themselves. But it's also very obvious to me why in this day and age, lots of students won't be able to see it that way.
posted by sohalt at 3:19 AM on June 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by sohalt at 3:19 AM on June 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
There's also the public as a stakeholder. It's important for researchers to be able to do decent statistical analysis because bad research can have large bad effects.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:56 AM on June 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:56 AM on June 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
An important point, for sure. Ideally you want to use selection and recruitment tools to avoid the situation of only having one girl in the class.
The one girl is a placeholder for the student who has problems with group work. They could be neural atypical or restrictively religious or have english as a second language or a mature student or a single.parent working two jobs or undergoing chemo or whatever.
posted by Mitheral at 5:04 AM on June 1, 2022 [7 favorites]
The one girl is a placeholder for the student who has problems with group work. They could be neural atypical or restrictively religious or have english as a second language or a mature student or a single.parent working two jobs or undergoing chemo or whatever.
posted by Mitheral at 5:04 AM on June 1, 2022 [7 favorites]
I don't know about anyone else, but my undergraduate grades only mattered twice, ever. Like I have literally only provided a transcript that had my grades on it two times in as many decades.
One was for that magical first job out of college, because the company in question was trying some experiment about setting initial salaries based on an algorithm that took GPA into account. (I thought this was dumb because it effectively penalized people who had taken harder courses, and said so, and was pretty quickly given a salary adjustment. No word on whether they are still using that system.)
The second time was when I was applying to grad school, because academic institutions seem to feel the need to at least pretend to care about other institutions' grades. I don't think it really affected the admissions decision, though, which hinged mostly on standardized testing (GMAT) for those not coming from "affiliates" (companies who had a relationship with the school to train their employees; they didn't have to test).
My graduate program grades have mattered zero times, ever. I suppose if I went for a PhD, they'd probably ask and I'd have to figure out how to get a transcript coughed up.
Whether you have a diploma matters. Where you get it from, can matter. What major or concentration you have it in, and to a lesser extent what coursework you take, can matter. Graduating SCL or with Honors might matter, because it sounds impressive. But they're basically yes/no checkboxes outside the world of academia and its local orbit.
I realize my earlier comments sounded pretty critical on the concept of higher education generally, which is not entirely the case. I enjoyed the hell out of college; it was a great experience. (I wish I'd been able to afford doing it at a much slower pace, TBH.) But as an industry, US higher ed is enormously fucked.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:38 PM on June 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
One was for that magical first job out of college, because the company in question was trying some experiment about setting initial salaries based on an algorithm that took GPA into account. (I thought this was dumb because it effectively penalized people who had taken harder courses, and said so, and was pretty quickly given a salary adjustment. No word on whether they are still using that system.)
The second time was when I was applying to grad school, because academic institutions seem to feel the need to at least pretend to care about other institutions' grades. I don't think it really affected the admissions decision, though, which hinged mostly on standardized testing (GMAT) for those not coming from "affiliates" (companies who had a relationship with the school to train their employees; they didn't have to test).
My graduate program grades have mattered zero times, ever. I suppose if I went for a PhD, they'd probably ask and I'd have to figure out how to get a transcript coughed up.
Whether you have a diploma matters. Where you get it from, can matter. What major or concentration you have it in, and to a lesser extent what coursework you take, can matter. Graduating SCL or with Honors might matter, because it sounds impressive. But they're basically yes/no checkboxes outside the world of academia and its local orbit.
I realize my earlier comments sounded pretty critical on the concept of higher education generally, which is not entirely the case. I enjoyed the hell out of college; it was a great experience. (I wish I'd been able to afford doing it at a much slower pace, TBH.) But as an industry, US higher ed is enormously fucked.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:38 PM on June 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
There is something compelling about grades.
I teach an online course. Graphic Design for beginners. Realistically, it's all about the skills. The students get a certificate to say they passed, but it's not accredited.
Students get written feedback on their practical design assignments, as well as a percentage that's matched to a grading scale, for example "64 % According to the grading scale, this means that the work was good, but some significant areas could be improved"
So the percentage grade a student gets is just another way of expressing the written feedback, and as long as they get over the passing grade, it genuinely makes no difference what grade they get in terms of the impact on the rest of their lives.
But the number of students who get upset if they get a 75 ("excellent work" according to the marking scale) , and not 100%, or appeal their grade even though they passed the course is really interesting to me.
I understand why this happens. It's creative work, so it feels validating to get a really high % even if rationally, that % doesn't have any intrinsic meaning. Verbal feedback is a lot more useful in terms of learning how to improve your skills, but students prefer to get x % rather than "you did an excellent job with the colours, but the typeface you chose is difficult to read and seems a bit over formal for this design"
It helps to explain how we assess creative work, and we always share the marking criteria as part of the assignment, but some students just can't get past their internal scale of "x% means y".
posted by Zumbador at 10:12 PM on June 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
I teach an online course. Graphic Design for beginners. Realistically, it's all about the skills. The students get a certificate to say they passed, but it's not accredited.
Students get written feedback on their practical design assignments, as well as a percentage that's matched to a grading scale, for example "64 % According to the grading scale, this means that the work was good, but some significant areas could be improved"
So the percentage grade a student gets is just another way of expressing the written feedback, and as long as they get over the passing grade, it genuinely makes no difference what grade they get in terms of the impact on the rest of their lives.
But the number of students who get upset if they get a 75 ("excellent work" according to the marking scale) , and not 100%, or appeal their grade even though they passed the course is really interesting to me.
I understand why this happens. It's creative work, so it feels validating to get a really high % even if rationally, that % doesn't have any intrinsic meaning. Verbal feedback is a lot more useful in terms of learning how to improve your skills, but students prefer to get x % rather than "you did an excellent job with the colours, but the typeface you chose is difficult to read and seems a bit over formal for this design"
It helps to explain how we assess creative work, and we always share the marking criteria as part of the assignment, but some students just can't get past their internal scale of "x% means y".
posted by Zumbador at 10:12 PM on June 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
> But the number of students who get upset if they get a 75 ("excellent work" according to the marking scale) , and not 100%, or appeal their grade even though they passed the course is really interesting to me. ... some students just can't get past their internal scale of "x% means y".
But why would anyone set a marking scale where 75% means "excellent work"? What happens when the percentage gets higher? Do the adjectives become more and more florid, like 85% is "fabulous work," and 95% means "stupendous work," and 100% might mean "amazeballs work"? Or... does the scale max out at 75%, and there's actually no difference between marking work at 75% vs 95%, except the number is different?? Haha it's really bizarre either way!
It kinda reminds me of Jason Mendoza in The Good Place explaining the rating system used by his dance crew, where the scale goes from 0 to 13, but 8 is the highest score you can get (YouTube clip).
If the percentage really doesn't hold any significance and doesn't matter, insisting on awarding percentages with such counterintuitive meanings just seems like someone is deliberately trying to mess with students' heads, lol.
posted by MiraK at 6:20 AM on June 5, 2022
But why would anyone set a marking scale where 75% means "excellent work"? What happens when the percentage gets higher? Do the adjectives become more and more florid, like 85% is "fabulous work," and 95% means "stupendous work," and 100% might mean "amazeballs work"? Or... does the scale max out at 75%, and there's actually no difference between marking work at 75% vs 95%, except the number is different?? Haha it's really bizarre either way!
It kinda reminds me of Jason Mendoza in The Good Place explaining the rating system used by his dance crew, where the scale goes from 0 to 13, but 8 is the highest score you can get (YouTube clip).
If the percentage really doesn't hold any significance and doesn't matter, insisting on awarding percentages with such counterintuitive meanings just seems like someone is deliberately trying to mess with students' heads, lol.
posted by MiraK at 6:20 AM on June 5, 2022
I don't really like percentage scores either. Percent of what? Percent of questions I happened to ask, answered more or less correctly. But for one thing, there's no such thing as knowing 100% of all there is to know, so should that be impossible? Or is it, 100% of the absolutely critical things, in which case getting less than 100% should be a failure.
What if passing is 75%, so I ask five absolutely critical must-know things, and you miss one. 80%, pass.
The thing is, not all questions are created equal. That's why I like the theory that the test is for the student's own assessment of how they're doing - what they have a good handle on and what they probably want to spend some more time on. That kind of defies a summary statistic like total % of questions correct, because the value is in knowing which questions, and then caring enough to do something about it.
posted by ctmf at 3:24 PM on June 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
What if passing is 75%, so I ask five absolutely critical must-know things, and you miss one. 80%, pass.
The thing is, not all questions are created equal. That's why I like the theory that the test is for the student's own assessment of how they're doing - what they have a good handle on and what they probably want to spend some more time on. That kind of defies a summary statistic like total % of questions correct, because the value is in knowing which questions, and then caring enough to do something about it.
posted by ctmf at 3:24 PM on June 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
What y'all are describing is specifications grading. I don't use it, but many of my colleagues do, some of whom are quoted in the article.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:32 AM on June 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 4:32 AM on June 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
Right now, I am helping a colleague with his course, because he has a lot of urgent administrative tasks. It is SO interesting to look "behind the scenes" at someone else's course structure, teaching and evaluation. I have to say, he creates a lot of work for himself, which then either has to be automated or outsourced to TAs because he literally doesn't have the hours, I can see how this could lead to cheating, and it is quite similar to how the author of the article here organized his class to begin with, though the subject matter is completely different.
I'll have to ask, but I suspect that my colleague wants to maintain a high level of engagement from the students, but my sense is that contrariwise, they are demotivated by all the tests and sub-assignments. I have never been in a class where so many students were late for class every time, and so few asked questions.
posted by mumimor at 7:53 AM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'll have to ask, but I suspect that my colleague wants to maintain a high level of engagement from the students, but my sense is that contrariwise, they are demotivated by all the tests and sub-assignments. I have never been in a class where so many students were late for class every time, and so few asked questions.
posted by mumimor at 7:53 AM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
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The lecturer has open book quizzes, but doesn't like students helping one another over WhatsApp chat, that's considered cheating. They consider the behaviour problematic enough that they spend a lot of time analysing it, but... They don't talk to their students about it?
Then there is this:
I also gave a penalty for anyone involved in the chat, even if they didn’t explicitly cheat. The penalty was zero on any extra credit assignments.
I'm going to read the rest now but this is very odd.
posted by Zumbador at 12:07 AM on May 29, 2022 [15 favorites]