Ask HN: Has anybody observed cheating?

Specifically in the classroom? Or just cheating in higher education in general?

I get emails from students asking me to complete their CS assignments with reasonable frequency. Because I'm a prick (and actually worked for my degrees), I'll more often than not determine the school and class and fire off an email to their lecturer or professor.

I went to a very large public university. The engineering program was so-so, and they valued ABET over actual learning.

Senior Design was known as the "gauntlet," not necessarily due to the actual building of something, but for the 100-page research paper that they required. They assumed that if each member of the team writes about 25 pages, then they must understand the underlying concepts.

This didn't affect me as much as it did my team. As you can tell, my long-windedness knows no bounds when behind a keyboard. My team however had the collective grammatical know-how of [insert punchline here].

It was my job to proofread the paper. It was straight copy and paste. Utter bullshit.

And I understand that it was my ethical obligation to correct this, if not report it. But it was clearly stated at the beginning of the class: "if one fails, you all fail." I was not prepared to deal with that. So I compromised my standards and just finished the assignment.

I knew that there wouldn't be repercussions; all they do is count the number of pages, make sure there isn't too much whitespace, and that there's no more than 50% of space devoted to pictures.

What can be done? With this particular example there was a large discrepancy with the overall goals that should have been, the goals that were, and the metrics that they measured it.

The funniest cheating I have seen in a "class room" was during a philosophy class. Tests for the class were multiple choice and given out on a computer. Every student for some reason good two guesses for each question and there were five answers. This meant that you needed to work with two other people and you could get all the answers right. So during the tests you would hear. Fred - "A" nope. Stan - "B" nope, Jeff - "C" yes. Then everyone would enter C for question one and then repeat.

It was quite hilarious actually.

Well for tests, let students have a formula sheet. I don't understand why in this day and age we need to learn everything by heart, when in the real world everything is 1 search query away.

Or you can just forbid all TI calculators with memory, and just have them work with a $10 special(but thats just a way to screw over the kids).

Then you can have smaller classes. Its a little harder to cheat in a 20 person class, compared to a 300 person auditorium.

For big projects etc, split those in a lot of parts. This way the students won't be tempted to cheat, when they remember that they have a 40 page paper due tomorrow.

My brother had an issue where he had finished a programming assignment early. Some other people found out and asked for help. Being the good-natured (totally naive) freshman he was, he sat down and started to explain his own code to them. Sure enough, they ended up asking the age old question, "I just need to look at it for a while. Could you just send me the code?" Nothing happened until grades came out and he failed. Weeks of interrogations and protests later, he finally cleared his name.

Moral of the story? Never send a copy of your code.

Hey, your email isn't listed in your profile -- if you want people to be able to see it, you need to relist it in the about me section.

I think cheating is the tip of the iceberg, the root problem being that the system over-emphasizes marks. Students who genuinely care about learning the material have no incentive to cheat. Cheating is just the symptom; the cause is the prevailing attitude that high marks are the ultimate goal of school.

If marks and learning were perfectly correlated it wouldn't be a problem, but trying to quantify something as abstract as knowledge is bound to have a large margin of error which students will exploit (by cheating or otherwise) if the incentives encourage it.

The most serious form of cheating I ever experienced was Junior year in high school. It was a Spanish 3 class taught by an eldarly women, who reportedly had a stroke over the summer (which I attribute the entire incident to as I can only hope no sane person would do what she did.)

Anyway, she was not teaching the class. I would go in there and sit and she would mumble on in English about nothing in particular. After about three weeks of this, I got a bunch of students together and we all complained to the head of the Spanish Language department (large school, many spanish classes). He said okay, and he told the teacher he was going to observe the class.

Well, the day he observed was the first day she taught the class anything. Of course, it was the material we should of known after a month of Spanish 3 so everybody had trouble following.

This went on three or four times until midterm exams. For the midterm, we had a standardized spanish test. Since he hadn't taught us anything, except when being observed, students knew nothing. I studied my butt off but that didn't matter. She stood in front of the class and read all the answers from the test.

I complained to the school and they had a huge investigation, and basically thought I lied about the whole thing. Why would a teacher give the entire class the answers? The real part that gets me is that nobody had the integrity to come forward and complain. They had to discretely question students.

Long story short, truth came to light and she found out I was the one who reported her. She was not fired, but kept "teaching". For some insane reason, she started changing the answers on my tests and quizes so I started out scoring everybody by huge margins.

In the end, everybody who had her as a teacher failed the final for the class, but the school system changed all our grades to As in some weird sort of cover up.

She still teaches to this day, at a different school, however.

I'm currently in a Masters program for Information Systems and one of my peers had the joy of having the professor of the class ask him why his answers and another student's were so astoundingly similar. Having worked with this gentleman a lot on the homework, this particular assignment even, I knew that he wasn't the one cheating. Apparently one of our classmates had asked to see his work to "verify" and instead had copied it. Granted, allowing someone to see your answers could be considered cheating, but one assumes that the other person isn't a complete imbecile and has actually done the work. I think that level of trust is even more likely at the graduate level when your peers are all well into adulthood and should know better.

We were both pretty ticked to find this out. I was mostly ticked because I had worked with the one for several hours trying to help him understand the questions and how to get to the answers (without ever giving him the answers) and so knew how hard he had worked to get that lab done. Having someone weasel his work off of him was just rather foul.

We both didn't understand his motivation either. Why pay close to $800/credit just to risk losing it as well as not getting anything except a piece of paper at the end. I know that paper can get you in the door, but it is also really obvious when you don't actually know your stuff.

This was on of the more technical of the classes. It dealt with web services.

Last semester someone in my signals class started an exam before we were told to begin. The prof took the test and that student got an F.

I loved it.

In my engineering classes, almost all the tests were open book and open notes. The hardest classes only had two problems per exam and the teacher wrote those questions the day of the exam - so cheating wasn't really an option, which would explain the 30% pass rate in some of the classes... We also had to walk through six feet of snow, uphill, both ways.

Do you know what - I've often wondered about cheating in the Higher Education context.

Is it really cheating? When you're spending $,000's a year to learn, does it really ever benefit anyone?

Maybe that's the thing - Higher Education is increasingly under pressure as a business. It's getting hard to fail/expel someone. On the other hand, universities trade on their reputation, so they need to walk a fine line.

Higher Ed is free in Germany - and someone can probably correct me - but they also have no entry criteria (I might be off-base, but it's less retrictive either way). So you can sign up for Engineering there if you want to, but you soon fail if you can't meet the requirements.

A roommate of mine from college graded papers for an introductory astronomy class (a class commonly taken to fulfill a distribution requirement for those majoring in the humanities); one of the students in the class (after, apparently, not going to class between the third week and the midterm), copied his entire midterm exam from the person sitting in front of him, almost word for word.

It's not that the content of Physics classes makes it harder to cheat (although this might be true); students cheat when they don't love the subject (and believe that they will get away with it). This is why you see much higher rates of cheating in disciplines people often learn for money rather than curiosity (business, engineering, law, computer science, and medicine).

Unfortunately, people aren't likely to love these fields any more any time soon. Nor are they likely to stop pursuing them despite their dislike for the content (as long as the resulting job is respected/pays well). Which only leaves making it clearer that they won't get away with it, or making the penalty for getting caught outweigh the advantage of doing it. The former is a topic worthy of active research. The latter is probably not helpful, since (at least at the university I went to) the penalty is already so severe that I can only assume that people cheat purely from a lack of expectation of getting caught.

The best case I've seen was at a certain SAT center. A group of 5 people went together with the idea to copy off each other. However, the proctor had each one draw a number from a hat to determine where he was going to sit. Since they ended up sitting in different parts of the room, the plan was thwarted.

A few minutes later, the proctor realized she had messed up the seating. People were supposed to seat on every other row, but there were two rows one right after the other. She said "Why don't you move around a bit?" at which point everyone got up and the 5 people in the group sat together.

All of them had a 790.

The instructor for our discrete math class has a most hilarious way of catching cheaters: he sets up trap sites regarding the problems that he googlebombs to be on the front page of the results. Every student signed a document at the beginning stating that they acknowledged googling for solutions was cheating, but 20/195 people still managed to be caught cheating on the first assignment.

I can't be too specific about the circumstances ...

A colleague of mine was teaching a class, and after a few weeks set a test. He also took a note of who sat where, and noted that three friends, A, B and C, were sitting together in the back. When he graded the test he found that on question 3, A and B had identical incorrect answers, whereas on question 7, B and C had identical incorrect answers. He joked that this showed that A and C were conspiring to make it appear that B was cheating, but the evidence was clear - cheating had occured. He decided it was an interesting lesson for him, and it was OK since that test only counted for 5% of the final grade.

For the next test he created two, nearly identical tests, differing only in the actual numbers. All the calculations were identical, just the numbers were different. He gave these out alternately.

As office hours approached on the day after the graded tests were returned, there was a very long queue. He invited the first student in, who immediately started complaining that on question 6, he and his friend had identical answers, but his friend got full marks and he got zero. "But the questions are different," said my colleague. "But the answers are the same - why don't we get the same grade?" complained the student. After running around that little loop for a while the light dawned, the student became very thoughtful, and left. "Next!" said my colleague. No one came in, and when he checked, the queue was gone.

The students complained to the Dean, and my colleague was told in no uncertain terms that it was unacceptable to give different tests. In particular, it was unfair not to have warned them, or made it obvious. The students had no way of knowing that they were equivalent, it was impossible to prove that they were equivalent, so he was instructed to give identical tests to everyone.

On the next test he handed out alternate blue and yellow test sheets. There was muttering, but no outright complaints. Within an hour, however, he was summoned to the Dean's office. "You were told to give identical tests!" shouted the Dean. "I did", said my colleague. "They were on different colored paper, but they were identical tests."

The reaction from the Dean was, says my colleague, remarkably similar to that of the student discovering that the tests were different.

Fortunately that was the last "in class" test. The final loomed, and one by one the students dropped the course. The final test was only taken by 12 of the initial 40 students, and all passed. Interestingly, of those that dropped out, several were later disciplined for cheating in other classes.

So the evidence suggests that cheating occurs.

But we knew that.

In college when I graded introductory programming assignments, there was the time a student turned in a printout of their program and execution trace for an assignment.

Unfortunately they forgot to remove the email headers from the other student who sent it to them.

I dual-majored in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering at a 95% engineering school. Cheating occured very often, and I would venture to guess that a majority of the students cheated at some point during their college career, usually in the form of finding a "crib", or previous test from that professor and memorizing the answers.

In my opinion, the greatest cause for cheating was severely unrealistic expectations from the professors. They often expected a far greater amount of memorization and understanding than could possibly be accomplished in the amount of time given to learn the material.

When confronted, their answer was almost universally that "you will have to know it in the real world, and people's lives could depend on your work." However, this logic is severely flawed in that, in the real world, we are given more than 2 hours to complete a set of tasks. And we have the internet and textbooks at our grasp if we need a refresher on a specific equation or concept. And others will be checking our work, especially if people's lives depend on it.

This discrepency between professor expectations and real-world expectations I think gave many students the view, "if the professors aren't playing fair, then why should I?"

As a result, I saw much much less cheating when the professors "played fair", meaning they made the tests open-book and/or open-note. However, there was probably also much less legitimate understanding of the material come test time. So, I'm not really offering up a solution. Just my observations.