
Catching a Cheater Online  - ghosh
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/catching-a-cheater-online/284461/
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icelancer
As stated in the article, cheating has mostly to do with the fact that what is
being taught is a bunch of crap - and the final product (a college degree) is
seen as a piece of paper that grants them access to the next level.

Cheating in academia is exactly the same as piracy: It is a service problem.
If classes taught useful information/skills in a non-boring way, cheating
would be significantly reduced.

It takes a special kind of myopic/arrogant person to find out that students
are cheating on their exams and think that the problem has nothing to do with
them.

~~~
Steuard
What you're describing may be part of the issue, I can't argue with that, but
come on. There are lots of reasons that people might cheat in classes that
they enjoy or that they recognize is useful. I've been lucky enough to have
very little cheating in my classes, but it's easy enough to imagine.

Let's say Johnny wants to be a doctor more than anything in the world. He
knows that he needs two semesters of Organic Chemistry on his transcript to
get in to med school, and that if his grades aren't top notch he won't be able
to compete. Johnny likes his Chem prof (and the grading is fair), but he's
only managing B-'s on his exams. He sees his dream fading away. Sure, he could
say, "Huh. I guess I'm not cut out to be a doctor." But don't you think some
students out there would consider cheating under those circumstances?

Or maybe Johnny consciously chose to go to a college that has a strong culture
of giving students a "well-rounded" education (by whatever internal
definition) and insists that students take a wide variety of classes from
different disciplines. That's not Johnny's cup of tea: he just wants a
computing degree. He could easily have chosen a different school, but he
didn't. Now he just wants to focus on his CS classes, so when he's stuck with
a course in English or History he decides to cheat so he doesn't have to think
about it. Do you really want to say that's the _teacher 's_ fault?

~~~
Fuxy
You have a valid point in the first one but in the second case cheating is
harmless.

He has no intention of applying the knowledge he would have attained in the
classes he cheated on.

Every student should be allowed to choose his own classes with as little
requirements imposed by the school as possible.

That's not to say there couldn't be a list of recommendations preferably with
an explanation why for students that have no idea what to take but forcing
them is a bad idea.

Stop wasting students time with useless classes just so you can have a
standard set of classes for each field.

~~~
bigd
In both cases cheating is a sympthom of a larger issue: in case 1, requiring
your doctor has an A grade to in organic chemistry is BS.

~~~
zacinbusiness
I don't think that expecting a doctor to do well in o-chem is a bad idea. Why?
Organic chemistry is considered by many people to be extremely difficult
because it forces those who are really skilled at it to have strong intuitive
skills and to practice those skills. And that's definitely something that I
want my doctor to be good at: diagnostic and intuition.

~~~
maxerickson
The hard work part of orgo is memorization.

~~~
zacinbusiness
The easy part of organic chemistry is taking the first course where you
memorize a lot of stuff, but if you move forward to useful things then there's
no way to memorize it all which is why you have to actually be intelligent,
rather than simply being able to memorize and regurgitate.

~~~
maxerickson
My understanding was that Orgo I is often considered the "weeder course" for
people on a path for med school. At my university, the last 3rd of the first
course was pretty much all memorization that facilitated Orgo II (I know this
because I wasn't planning on taking II and decided not to do a great job on
the memorization but still did good enough in the class).

~~~
zacinbusiness
That's what I'm saying - memorization is useful enough for basic concepts but
it won't help you pass the MCAT.

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markovbling
The methods they're using to catch 'em are interesting:

From a Guardian article linked to in the OP: "Special software that recognises
students' typing speeds and rhythms is used to verify identity, preventing
somebody else from taking an assessment on their behalf."

Reminds me of a post I saw on HN a couple days ago about a company that used
"stylometry" to reveal J.K. Rowling was the author of a book she'd written
under a pen name and had applied the same techniques to determine Newsweek had
the wrong Nakamoto.

Scary times when not only our browsing history and online activity is being
tracked but also the very essence of our communication styles too.

And by "scary", I mean awesome :)

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mathattack
I've never bothered cheating. If a class bored me, I wouldn't bother. I took
the hardest classes that I could, and was happy if I learned something even if
the grade wasn't perfect.

That said, I do get why people do it. So much incentive is put on grades,
rather than what you know. And it many cases, it is arbitrary. You get good
grades for spitting back what the teacher wants, even if they are no smarter
than you. (There are great teachers out there, but the mean teacher's
standardized test scores are less than the mean student entering college)

While I get it, it really pissed me off when I saw it in action. Especially in
grad school. I wanted to say, "Come on, grades don't matter in grad school. Do
you really need to cheat?" Sometimes it was telling someone "I'm just auditing
the class, can I have your notes and homework answers from last year?" Other
times it was sitting for the same exam twice in different sections. When I saw
it happen, I could never trust the person again.

~~~
dllthomas
_" If a class bored me, I wouldn't bother. I took the hardest classes that I
could, and was happy if I learned something even if the grade wasn't
perfect."_

Very much matches my experience, in school at the tail end of the first tech
bubble. I'd say "I'm taking X, Y, and Z because they sound interesting," and
others would say "but those sound hard, I'm taking A, B, and C, because I've
heard they're an easy A." Always bothered me a bit.

 _" You get good grades for spitting back what the teacher wants, even if they
are no smarter than you."_

There are certainly bad teachers, and occasionally that's due to stupidity,
but I object to the notion that "teacher being smarter than you" is important.
Hopefully they know _more_ about the material, but even if they know less _but
a substantially different set than you know_ you have plenty to learn from
them, and if they are skilled _at teaching_ they might be quite useful even
without that.

Having said that, I recall being quite annoyed when a teacher tested on the
particular mnemonic devices she'd presented rather than the things they were
supposed to help us remember...

~~~
mathattack
It wasn't until I got to AP Computer Science in school that I had a teacher
that knew the material. From 4th grade up until then the teachers were faking
it. I guess that's why I am biased on this point. :-)

I hear you on the pneumonics. Better to learn the essence.

~~~
dllthomas
When I was high-school age, there wasn't any AP Computer Science, though I was
taking intro CS courses at the local community college from someone who more
or less got it. I hadn't suffered through tons of teachers trying to teach me
CS without grokking it before that (though occasionally after...), but I can
guess at the kind of sensitivity that might produce. I certainly don't claim
that lack of deep familiarity is a virtue! I just claim that it's not _always_
as big a hindrance as one might think (depending...).

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zachlatta
"When Students cheat on exams it's because our School System values grades
more than Students value learning." \- Neil deGrasse Tyson

