

How do you stop online students cheating?  - ishkur101
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19661899

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randomdata
You don't need to stop the cheating if there is no reason to place value on
the outcome in the first place. It seems the deeper problem is that marks have
come to have meaning outside of their intended purpose: To provide a gauge to
see your own level of understanding. Eliminate that and the purpose of
cheating vanishes. If you score 100% on a test, but walk away knowing you have
no knowledge of the subject matter, you've only hurt yourself.

~~~
corin_
But you haven't only hurt yourself. You've also (potentially) hurt the company
that hires you based on the degree, or whatever qualification, you have -
sure, you can say it's their fault for hiring based on it - and you can hurt
the establishment that gave you the qualification as people lose faith in
them.

~~~
randomdata
That is my point though, if you remove the expectation that the grades mean
something, then there is no reason to cheat in the first place. The problem is
that we uphold the establishment as having some kind of meaning, not that
people are able to game the establishment.

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jeffreybaird
I think it is the wrong question. As Seth Godin says in his talk at TEDxYOUTH
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXpbONjV1Jc> "if something is worth
remembering it is worth looking up." Tests should be open note, open book, all
the time. If you can cheat on the test just by googling the question, the
right question isn't being asked. It is time we ask our students to start
thinking critically and not just have them bubble in memorized facts on a
scantron.

~~~
kiba
If it's worth looking up multiple times, it's worth memorization.

The reason is that being able to recall at will have a much lower latency than
a google search or tabbing through your iphone or android device.

People disparages memorization as mindless, but that's only if you memorize
mindlessly about stuff you don't need to know. You can memorize smart, such as
your multiplication table.

~~~
yohui
Conversely, if you actually find yourself looking something up multiple times,
won't you naturally start to remember it?

Our tests hark back to the days when to "look up" something meant going to the
library and flipping through an index. Internal recall will remain faster than
external look-up for some time yet, but as the balance shifts the current
setup will appear increasingly archaic.

~~~
kiba
This is only true if we don't use technology to improve our mind. Some people
like to believe that the computer will become oracle, but some human beings
takes advantage of the computer in the opposite direction to improve their
ability to recall information.

For example, human memory follows the law spaced repetition and forgetting
curve(our ability to retrieve information exponentially decay). We can take
advantage of this by remembering or exercising our memory at the last possible
to keep our knowledge. That mean we can efficiently review information as
needed. Moreover, as we constantly review information, we only have to repeat
them later and later in the future. In pyschology, spaced repetition is one of
the least taken advantage discovery. Only in the past two decade or so, did we
start using computers to speed up the process of remembering and learning.

That's only by taking advantage of human biology. it's possible in the future
that we will enhance the speed and computational ability through
bioengineering and neuroprosthetics. More over, the propagation of information
is limited by the speed of light. So it's likely those with memory at close at
hand will have an advantage over people's whose memory is far away, hence
longer latency.

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njharman
Quit worrying about it. All cheaters get is a grade, or certification or
diploma. Worry about teaching people. Worry about people learning. Quit
measuring people.

People will cheat, and maybe they are great scam artists and will be able to
cheat through the rest of their life. Those few and the others who screw
themselves by not learning aren't worth being concerned with. Spend (all) your
effort on those who want to learn.

~~~
WiseWeasel
Awarding diplomas to unqualified individuals degrades the value of the
diploma. Schools can't afford to risk their reputation; they must assess
students in some way.

~~~
njharman
Diplomas are already degraded and degrading.

Schools are worried about reputation and their profit. My point is they should
be worried about teaching.

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lawn
How do you stop offline students from cheating then?

You can't have exams for everything - for example creating or extending a big
project is best examined by labs and/or a bigger project. If you have the same
lab series for everyone students can simply copy the solution from other
students or ask someone for "help" where the help consists of explaining
exactly what to do. I know I've been guilty of helping my friends a bit too
much.

Organize groups? Some students may coast on the skills of others. We had a
programming project assignment where I wrote 95-100% of all code. In the
beginning we split it around 50/50 but it ended up with me writing it all
anyways. In another course we wrote a game in Java where my friend rougly
wrote 1-2 classes or something. I know it's unfair, but I didn't really care -
I like to code and I didn't really have to put in any effort anyways.

Cheating may be easier in online courses, but trying die hard to stop all
kinds of cheating is bound to fail, cause it's impossible.

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VBprogrammer
Two things which I remember having a significant impact on the amount of
'collaboration':

Marking against the other members of the class. I remember one project where
the performance of the code was under test and the fastest 30% got an A, the
next fastest 10% got a B etc. There was little incentive to help anyone else
beyond the most naive implementation.

Group projects, avoid the problem of collaboration by openly encouraging it.
Also has the benefit of improving the real life skills everyone will need.
Allowing members of the group to rate other members makes it obvious when
someone has simply ridden on the coat tails of the other members of the group.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Those are two things I remember hating every time I saw them implemented. In
my experience, members that ride the coat tails of other members of the group
always get far more credit than anybody else in the group gave them.

~~~
VBprogrammer
Yeah, that is true, but I think that is probably a valuable life lesson!

~~~
TallGuyShort
So was being bullied - my point was that using group projects as a method to
prevent cheating is much less trivial than I think you were implying.
Encouraging collaboration and communication is a good thing, but in my
experience, there is still plenty of cheating.

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thebooktocome
You can't even stop offline students from cheating, so what hope is there for
online students?

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forgottenpaswrd
You can't. Make people travel to a controlled place for examination if you
need the certification, teach using online tools.

The real cost of University(specially in Europe where University is
affordable, not like in the US) is living abroad most of the year. Making it
1% offline and 99% online is a good compromise.

Another possibility is asking your students real innovative work and make
copying a must!!(organize people in working groups like in real life).

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jzd131
I think it comes down to one statement: Life is open Google, so school should
be also.

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TomGullen
You can't. Always going to be ways to cheat. Wouldn't be that hard either.
Webcam/screen share? Just have another computer hooked up out of view behind
your monitor with all the information on it.

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xradionut
You can't. The only way is to have in-person proctored labs and exams. Or they
can wait for a rigorous job interview and fail in Real Life.

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scotty79
Another application:

How do you stop remote workers from slacking off?

~~~
taytus
Paying them in milestones basis.

~~~
scotty79
That helps only if remote workers are able to motivate themselves sufficiently
without supervision. Some people fail to work remotely because without the
boss to keep them in line they fail to motivate themselves.

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zupreme
The simple answer to the question, "How do you stop online students cheating?"
is that you don't. You discard the idea of "cheating" altogether.

In days not so long past, rote learning was important because, in many
professions, there was no way to access the source data within a reasonable
amount of time within the arena where that information would be useful. A trip
to the library in the middle of the workday was generally not feasible.
Pausing to locating and consulting the correct medical textbooks in the middle
of an operation was dangerous and could have proven fatal to the patient.

Contrast that with the current state of the world where, in the vast majority
of cases, the answers to many questions and the solutions to many problems can
be located within minutes or even seconds from a smartphone or tablet. Combine
that with widespread wireless broadband access in the developed world and it
becomes obvious that not only is rote memorization of many facts, figures,
formulae, and so forth not needed, it may actually be counterproductive.

I say counterproductive because, due to the way university-level education
works much of what you are learning, especially in technical disciplines, is
obsolete by the time you learn it. That's not a swing at formal education,
mind you. I'm not asserting that what is learned at a university is not
useful. I'm asserting that by the time you memorize that information it is
highly likely that some other development has arisen which either invalidates
or supersedes what you just recorded.

What I believe would be more productive than online universities worrying
about cheating would be to more aggressively time-limit their exams. Doing so
would at least validate how quickly students are able to gather and synthesize
information to arrive at correct conclusions - a skill set that will serve
them well even in today's rapid-access-to-information world.

~~~
fr0sty
> Doing so would at least validate how quickly students are able to gather and
> synthesize information to arrive at correct conclusions - a skill set that
> will serve them well even in today's rapid-access-to-information world.

That only works if you can prevent the student from simply hiring an expert to
take their tests for them.

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indiecore
I'd say you can't. People are always going to try to game the systems and
that's why a certification given to you in person is always going to be more
credible than something gained online.

I think ultimately the rigor for actual "testing" is going to have to come
from whoever is accepting applications from these types of degree holders,
sure you might be able to apply to graduate school with them but you'd
probably have to sit an additional test that "standard" degree holders
wouldn't or in the case of a job interview there would have to be a bit more
rigor in testing the applicant.

Cheating on an online course right now seems so...pointless, the only reason
for them at the moment is to enrich yourself and learn something but if people
start accepting them in the same way we accept a standard degree we'll see a
massive drop in the value of all degrees.

