
Why I Let My Students Cheat On Their Exam - SeanDav
http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2013/04/15/why-i-let-my-students-cheat-on-the-final/ideas/nexus/
======
geebee
I loved this approach until I read the exam question. After that, I only liked
it.

It would have been more interesting to see an exam with question like "is the
population of x in hardy-weinberg equilibrium", where x is something students
should know something (but not everything) about if they've been paying
attention. It would be possible, but not easy, for a very well prepared
student to do the research and figure it out (or at least write an intelligent
answer) in an hour. Some bright students who haven't studied much probably
would be able to research quickly and come up with a good answer, especially
if they split up the task. Some people will clearly be vastly more valuable to
teams than others.

In short, I think the professor here picked a question that tilts too heavily
toward collaboration. If this approach is really going to work, you need to
induce some reluctance among the very well prepared, who may realize that
their friends who spent more time preparing for the non-collaborative physics
exam will be getting a relatively free ride.

I guess I just don't think this quite brought out the nastiness that would
truly arise in a state of nature - something of course I understand he'd
rather avoid!

------
droithomme
1\. This obviously wasn't cheating since it was within the prescribed
parameters for the exam. Some exams are open book, some are open note, some
are even take home with no limits.

2\. The highest score and thus most insightful and highest quality work,
according to the professor's own evaluation, came not from collaboration but
from one of the 3 lone wolves.

~~~
pixelcort
The average was higher than that of prior classes. Also, it is implied that
the lone wolves may have had access to some of the work the mob was producing,
enabling one of them to get ahead by simply correcting a few mistakes without
giving them back to the mob.

~~~
scott_s
She explicitly stated so: _Although the Wolves listened and contributed to
discussions, they preferred their individual variants over the Mob’s joint
answer._

------
carlob
When I was in high school my classmates and I found a document from a previous
year that amounted to a superset of all the questions my philosophy teacher
was going to put in test.

Since some of the questions were pretty hard we ended up studying really hard
together to try and crack them before tests.

Though what we did was somehow against the rules I feel I learned a lot more
by studying the questions collaboratively than by studying on my own.

I later found this form of collaboration extremely rewarding and effective
during university. We spent many afternoon trying to crack hard problem sets
and explaining them to one another.

~~~
tassl
It has always puzzled me why a professor would be willing to repeat the
answers from previous years. Some account that people that work "harder" would
be solving previous exams, but this is given that the exams are available to
all the class (which is a prerequisite for this argument to be true).

I've found myself in classes where a group had exams, problem sets and other
information from previous years (and solved) and they hid and refused to share
those.

~~~
Steuard
It is _hard_ to come up with entirely new problems for every exam every year.
That doesn't mean that doing so isn't important, but it really is time
consuming and a whole lot of work. It's also painfully easy to _think_ that
you've changed things enough for the question to be "new" compared with
examples from class or homework or previous years' tests, only for some
student to recognize it enough to regurgitate some memorized solution rather
than actually thinking.

So while I'd never say that repeating questions is a good thing, I can't be
too hard on folks who do (intentionally or not).

~~~
zarify
For some students it also can serve to mitigate exam shock (speaking to high
school level anyway, which is my area). Finding a familiar, or even roughly
familiar question can mean a nervous student has an entry point into the exam.

I quite liked the article. It'd be interesting to see if the benefits
persisted over multiple groups though. I tend to see engagement increase when
rules are changed and students need to figure out how to address the problem
in a new way, regardless of whether they are collaborating or not. (anecdotal
evidence there only sorry ;P)

------
lt
_Instead, they were changing their goal in the Education Game from “Get a
higher grade than my classmates” to “Get to the best answer.”_

The goal shouldn't be “Get a higher grade than my classmates”, it should be
“Get the highest grade possible”. And the goal for the teacher should be
“Translate each student knowledge data into a numeric value”, which is
somewhat orthogonal to the experiment.

~~~
willismichael
Shouldn't the goal be to "Learn the most possible"? I know, it's not
quantifiable, so maybe it doesn't qualify as a goal at all, but it concerns me
when people act like the purpose of education is to get grades.

~~~
cmstoken
You'd be surprised to learn how many college students goals aren't actually to
"Learn the most possible."

~~~
jasallen
It's not that any of us are surprised, it's that _that_ is the core problem
with the construct of the educational system. The system encourages this
'number juicing' through whatever means.

During the course of a class, if as much education is given to each individual
possible, then at the end of the class what does the actual grade matter?
These grades turn out to be a poor proxy for things like earning, ingenuity,
creativity, changing-the-world, or for that matter even grokking the
materials. The only thing for which they're (maybe) a valuable proxy is 'how
well can this student juice the grade of the next course in the line' -- a
question whose answer ultimately adds no value to society.

~~~
HarryHirsch
> These grades turn out to be a poor proxy for things like earning, ingenuity,
> creativity, changing-the-world, or for that matter even grokking the
> materials.

It's unfortunate, but in my department about 80 % of the students go up to med
school. The GPA plays a great part in determining just what school will accept
you, which in turn has _massive_ impact on your future earnings.

------
dice
I had a professor who used a similar concept of fostering active discussion
and debate within the classroom, except he did it for every lecture. He would
present a concept, then ask us a series of questions about it. Students would
first think on the question and vote on their own, then the question was
opened to discussion and debate. After the topic had been hashed out we would
re-vote. Often times the difference between the first and second votes were
significant, sometimes resolving a split opinion and other times the majority
would change their minds.

It was a lot of fun, and easily the best and most informative experience of my
educational career.

~~~
nostrademons
Most of my high school education was like this. It's fairly common in
"alternative" schools like Montessori, Waldorf, Essential, or Sudbury schools.

------
cm2012
It's not cheating if everyone is following the same rules. Cheating is almost
by definition an unfair advantage, when this was pretty close to a level
playing field.

~~~
tkahn6
And how about the students in different sections not taught by this teacher
who have a closed-book no-collaboration final exam?

------
btilly
I would be curious what the students thought of the process.

I am sure that the essay was good. I am sure that some learned a lot. But how
many just road coattails and didn't learn much other than how to copy? In a
game like this where everyone stands to gain, and nobody loses, the incentives
are to let everyone participate because the cost of riding is free. How many
took advantage of that?

Also on a task like this, individual personalities of key figures matter a
lot. My guess is that just a few individuals were responsible for a lot of the
dynamics.

The whole exercise would have been more interesting - and more competitive -
if he had started with a grading scale at the start, same rules, but said that
he would rank answers against each other, with multi-way ties being ranked at
the median of the group. (So if 5 people tie for 3rd, they will all be scored
as 5th.)

This would push cooperation/competition to a new high.

~~~
CurtMonash
That's a good approach for a generic class on game theory.

It's not so good for the specific case of animal behavior, in which the whole
herd will indeed often prosper or suffer at once.

------
nollidge
And yet again, here's 25 comments from the Hacker News Pedant Squad to remind
you that it's not REALLY cheating if the teacher lets you, in case you only
recently disembarked from an 18-wheeler full of turnips.

~~~
calibraxis
What's unfortunate about such comments is that such departures from the norm
actually are considered bad ("cheating") according to the ideology of
mainstream education. The article's author wasn't the only teacher with the
bright idea to have collaborative tests, where he was willing to answer
whatever the students asked. I know of at least one teacher who was forced to
stop.

Education could look very different, and more diverse.

Universities have certain functions in society. If they don't fulfill those
functions, they won't get government and corporate funding. Even Salman Khan
explains that one important function of schools is to subjugate, fashioning
people into obedient cogs. (In his "The One World School House", in the
chapter "The Prussian Model".)

------
guimarin
I am constantly surprised that we have a 'moral' aversion to cheating. IMO
school teaches two strategies for success. 1.) work hard within the rules and
2.) cheat but don't get caught. Each is equally valid in society, even without
a 'moral' component.

~~~
icegreentea
The 'moral' aversion to cheating I believe comes out the very game theory and
evolutionary behavior that this post talks about. When society sets up rules
and systems, there is a maximum amount of cheating/parasitism that it can
withstand before the system breaks down, and everyone (at least the majority
of the non-cheaters) loses out (assuming a 'good' system). I think we all
know/feel this at a very deep level, and understand that if we want to set up
and maintain cooperative systems, cheating and parasitism must be kept to a
sufficiently low level. Cheaters and 'goodies' all know this.

That our western civilization morality tends to align with the interests of
large-scale cooperative systems is probably no accident. I limit this to
western cause I have no clue about any other cultures and I don't want to make
an ass of myself.

Of course, this in itself says nothing about the goodness of the system.
Cheating a bad system is always an interesting thought experiment. Breaking
bad systems and replacing with a new, better one often requires a great degree
of 'cheating'. All sorts of interesting things here.

~~~
guimarin
I think this is a complex and naunced issue. I have a number of thoughts on
your arguments.

Society doesn't set up rules and systems, they seem to emerge as a consequence
of beneficial cooperative behavior towards a 'goal'. When it's no longer
beneficial to cooperate towards a goal, over say other strategies like
cheating, the rules are overlooked, passed, or changed as quickly as they
emerged. The prevalence of War as a way to 'rebalance' resources comes to mind
immediately, but so too does the reality that only 2% of people pay use taxes.

To your point about parasitism. Human societies are always in a state of
change with respect to sociological and technological concerns, and the
success of a society in achieving its 'goals' seems largely dependent on how
well it adapts to this change. The parasitism you've described seems to be
more a reality of economics than society in general, and though your point
seems valid on its face, You wouldn't say that the success companies like
Uber, which are cheating parasites by your definition, is really a net
negative for the society.

to your point about morality. I believe morality is really orthogonal to this
issue and should be considered from different viewpoints in different contexts
because humans can hold contradictory points of view and still remain
'functioning'. History holds many examples of individuals who challenge what
is 'moral' in a society through cheating, and they are sometimes lauded,
sometimes not. I think of the narrative surrounding Rosa Parks on one side (
in support of cheating ) and the story of Cincinnatus ( in support of not
cheating ) when considering morality in the context of the cooperation
cheating dichotomy.

and you're right, this is a very interesting topic, definitely outside the
scope of this small classroom experiment.

~~~
icegreentea
I think we're really agreeing on your first point, and really just have a
difference in choice of language. I was kind of sloppy, and used society as
kind of a shorthand for the type of emergence you describe. In fact, I would
go as far to say that a given society is the very type of emergent phenomena
that you describe, and exists as a kind of a high (perhaps highest?) level
system that we tend to exist and work within.

Regarding the second point, I really tried to cover this angle with my little
bit about 'goodness' of a system, and also vastly over simplified things.
Obviously different people in a system are effected by it to different
extents, and can play vastly different roles. Many of the statements I was
making were with regard to systems with all members are on roughly the same
footing. Imagine an honour system for paying for soda, an agreement that
everyone on a street clears their own segment of sidewalk of snow, that type
of thing. My assumption was that systems and agreements where everyone is more
or less on the same footing are generally beneficial to everyone.

Obviously, the situation with regards to taxis and Uber is different. The
majority of people are just consumers. They don't really care as long as they
are provided the same benefit (reasonably priced, safe, quick, point to point
transport). The taxi companies on the other hand are in a completely different
position, and in fact, from their position, Uber is definitely a cheating
parasite, and a net negative for the taxi companies. I think this falls under
my lazy little blurb regarding 'breaking bad systems'.

------
forgotAgain
So is the article title another experiment in Behavioral Ecology?

------
tenpoundhammer
The most accurate measurement of what a person has learned over a period of
time is their ability at which they are generally able to discuss a subject.
The best exam would be a personal exam in which the teacher orally administers
a series of generalized questions and explorers the subject matter with each
student to understand their actual level of understanding.

While it would take a long time to administer these tests for every student it
would provide a lot of value for many subjects, while a written test would
still be important to determine particular skill sets for certain subjects
like math.

Any average student can jam a notecard full of likely facts or cram facts into
their head the night before an exam, without learning much. Likewise working
as a team to generate the best answer can allow people to receive a high grade
without knowing much.

There is also the fact that even a well read student with a good understanding
of the subject matter can a fail a test because they don't have a the
particular points asked on the test.

~~~
lifesavers
I like this approach as well (in theory) and only have some "anecdotal"
experience - if you can call it that.

My family originated from East Europe and as such most of my family elders
have an old school Soviet experience in education. Consequently they have
little knowledge and no experience when it comes to modern-day Western
education infrastructure. For instance, my parents were genuinely surprised to
hear that I wrote written exams and submitted them only to be reviewed at face
value - which is the experience of nearly all undergrads I expect. Their
experience was that, even in a "straight-forward" subject like Mathematics,
they had to first submit a written response to a problem set in an examination
type settings - and then upon completion they would have to explain their
solution and approach one-on-one with a faculty member who would only then
submit a grade.

Obviously this was done to weed out the cheaters who couldn't explain why they
had to correct answers to all the questions. But the result can't be ignored
that one-on-one oral examinations, while not exactly pragmatic, are very
effective!

------
songzme
It should be fair to note that experiments like this can only work in small
groups. In much larger class sizes chaos will ensue.

It will also be an interesting experiment to take a large group of students,
split them into groups, and then give out exams to each group. By adding a
factor of competitiveness test scores might even go higher. Competition is
everywhere in nature.

~~~
OnyeaboAduba
I spent some of my highschool years in a differnt country in boarding school
and grades and class rank where constantly posted for everyone to see It
brought out a real competitive spirit in me and in the whole class and maybe a
little shame for the the people at the bottom of the list . I thought It was a
very effective tool in keeping the class as whole engaged but that type of
thing would never be allowed in the US for multitude of reasons.

~~~
songzme
The reason that class ranking is not prevalent in US is because of publicly
shaming the students who are not doing as well as the other.

This can be mitigated if students are working in groups, and group scores are
posted instead of individual scores. This way, a group who is scoring low can
help and inspire each other to do well and share the pain (shame)

~~~
rdouble
In American public schools, class ranking leads to public shaming of the
students who _are_ doing well...

~~~
aspensmonster
Depends on the school. At the public high school I attended --several years on
various top 100 lists and top 10 in the state-- class ranking was most
definitely a shaming of the "weird" minority of kids who were taking "normal"
classes. These normal classes were on a completely different scoring tier that
ensured the students taking them could not even break the 50th percentile. And
coming from Texas, where getting into the top 10 percent of your graduating
class is an automatic ticket to any state university, the competition was most
definitely fierce.

------
CurtMonash
I'm a big fan of unusual approaches to testing, good as I was at the
conventional kind.

In high school astronomy, we could bring in a few pages of notes. I once wrote
out the notes in great detail, FORGOT THEM AT HOME, and got the highest score
on the test.

In college I learned a lot studying for tests, both multiple choice (geology)
and essay (history), where the questions were highly predictable.

I love the test Hilary Putnam announced the first day of every class:

Part 1: Write a suitable question for this class. Part 2: Answer it. You will
be graded on both parts.

(Note: The recursive answer of giving him his own question back turns out to
be infinitely long.)

I once gave an open book test, saying exam questions would be chosen only from
problems I'd assigned for homework. Students still did badly. (Ouch.)

------
keerthiko
I saw this on a Naruto episode first
(<http://www.hulu.com/watch/36407#i0,p20,s1,d0>), about 6 months before I
started college.

For those who don't want to watch the episode, it's a written exam ninja
trainees (genin) need to take to be promoted to ninja squad leader (chuunin).
Any team (of 3) that has a single member fail will be failed as a group. If
any ninja gets caught cheating they will be given a warning, and after three
warnings they will be failed.

 _SPOILER (no really, the episode is great in this context even if you don't
like/watch anime much)_ The intelligent (but not book-smart) notice the
leniency of the anti-cheating-system and the carefully worded instructions to
"not get caught", and then find ways to obtain answers from "sources",
qualified chuunin who were intentionally planted in the exam hall who knew the
answers, or to collaborate with teammates. _End plot summary_

I think it's important to teach kids not just _the_ answers to problems posed,
but also ways to _find_ them. If it's too easy for them to find answers
without rigid rules, it probably means that he problems we are posing them are
not hard or thought-provoking enough in the first place.

Edited for a missed phrase

~~~
nsxwolf
Interestingly this is the only episode of Naruto I've ever seen. I remember
being quite impressed at how cerebral it was, as I was expecting to see a
bunch of ninjas running around slicing off each other's heads.

------
temp453463343
This is a completely idiotic way of testing people. I could have come into
class not knowing anything, waited till the end of the test and then offered
100 dollars to anyone to be allowed to copy their whole test. And I would have
passed the class?

It kinda reminds me of CS-whores. The one or two CS girls in each graduation
class that regularly used sex-appeal/flirtation to get CS guys to do their
homework (very successfully too!).

At some point your no longer testing people's knowledge and creative thinking,
but their social skills and ability to manipulate others (and maybe their
breast size/size of their 6 pack).

I feel like the professor treated this like a sick little game and enjoyed
himself while doing it.

At the end of the day you are competing against your peers either through a
curve, or through your raw grades because you're all going into the same
fields and are competing for the same jobs with your GPAs. Making a system
where cut-throat behavior is encouraged and putting down your pays off is
really sad.

~~~
MJR
I completely disagree. I found this to be an excellent example of real world
training. I worked through college in IT and from that job on, working in the
real world was exactly like this. We worked on projects with teams of people.
We looked for the best possible solutions to every problem we faced. Even when
working alone on something, you had your peers as resources. You weren't
locked in a closet coding on a computer, offline, without access to books or
other tools. That's what test taking was like for me.

Some people, like me, are experiential learners. Others find their best
thoughts through discussion and the evolution of ideas. I would have loved to
have taken many classes like this. Fortunately, that's what the real world has
been like for me - being a member or leading a team to produce the best
product we can, either as a team, department or company. As you called it my
"pay off" is education. I found mine through methods like this. Not through
memorizing facts and methods just to pass a test.

~~~
temp453463343
While I agree that the process is more similar to the "real world" - the
fundamental problem is that the grading is not. When you work as a team
towards some goal whoever is evaluating you is doing so based on your
contribution to the team.

Here the fundamental scoring method is still the test, so an individual's
motivation is to do better for himself; the teams success is secondary (and if
the test is curved it may be non existent). Free riders aren't punished or
penalized and all sorts of outside influences come in where people start
trading on money/sex/favors/friendships/etc.

Arguably those outside influences exist in the real world, but why create a
system that explicitly has no mechanisms to counteract them? (ie. the prof
says you can do anything that is legal and doesn't try to catch "cheaters")

------
lnanek2
Too bad no one tried to sabotage the consensus answers. You could get
responsibility for writing one of the group answers, write it wrong, then turn
in your own test with it correct. Inject false data into discussions, etc.. It
isn't really game theory without some interesting gains and loses due to
cooperation or deception.

------
f4stjack
Actually this is not cheating. Cheating means copying somebody's content with
or without his permission in an exam where this kind of information sharing is
forbidden.

In here, the lecturer specifies that information sharing is not forbidden.
Therefore technically this is not "cheating". But it is wonderful to see when
you remove the outside limiting factors and let the phenomena occurs in its
own volition. Probably this will be one of the courses the participant
students will never forget, instead of courses where you "memorize" everything
until the last exam.

Kudos to Mr. Nonacs.

------
avalaunch
I wonder if this was being graded on a curve. If so, an interesting strategy
would have been to sabotage the group effort while secretly preparing a "lone
wolf" answer. The saboteur could continually steer the conversation in the
wrong direction and possibly even alter the group answer to something absurd
before it was turned in.

Or if he wanted to concentrate on his own work, he could bring some headphones
to tune out the horrendous noise coming from outside the classroom where his
friends happen to be practicing for their upcoming rock gig.

------
danpalmer
This reminds me of a slightly, although not entirely, related paper that I
read a while ago titled "Embracing the Kobayashi Maru – Why You Should Teach
Your Students to Cheat". I've linked to it in this item:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5609346> because I think it is different
enough to warrant a separate discussion.

------
acjohnson55
A collaborative assignment is a really solid education tool.

What's missing is an explanation of why the author thinks this led to an
objective evaluation of what individual students learned _before_ test day (if
he does indeed think that). That is the point of an exam. Imagine if med
students could collaborate on their boards. It would pretty well invalidate
the purpose.

------
guimarin
This would have been more interesting to me as a study in game theory, if some
of the 'mob' had given false or incomplete answers to the rest of the group on
a minority of the questions, saving the 'fully-correct' answers for
themselves. That way, if there was a curve they would benefit totally from the
'mob' and still come out ahead of it.

~~~
SEMW
Surely one of the main points of the exercise was that, precisely because
there _wasn't_ a curve, whole-class cooperation can result in everyone in the
class getting a higher score (20% higher) than they usually would.

Grading on a curve wouldn't be the same game just 'more interesting', it'd be
a completely different game, and one that's lost most of the "To win at some
games, cooperation is better than competition" aspect.

------
Brashman
I like this idea, except that I'd be worried about money entering into the
scheme. In a real world setting, it's not unreasonable to pay someone to do
the work for you, but in a school/learning setting, I dislike the possibility
of people paying their way out of the work.

------
sriram_sun
Here is what I would like the professor to do. Follow up with a "normal" test
and see how the students perform. If the class average was greater that prior
year performances, the co-operation actually helped in drilling the concepts
in.

------
Millennium
So really, this was was a class project involving a scenario that
superficially resembled cheating on an exam, rather than actually cheating on
an exam.

------
Siecje
You should have had more questions to have more strategy. That was a pretty
easy test... You also gave them an easy way out if it was too hard...

------
auctiontheory
If you enjoy this kind of thinking, you'll love Dan Ariely's Behavioral
Economics class when it next comes to Coursera.

~~~
SilasX
Because we'll enjoy cheating on it so much more, or something?

