I don't particularly like the idea of harassing possibly innocent students. Innocent students might be under pressure with no proof of innocence, since they assumed to be guilty. They might do a cost/benefit analysis and admit guilt.
Also if cheating is really such a concern, why not just handle it in a similar way to the american GRE's or SAT's ?
When you suggest handling it like American GREs and SATs, what do you mean? Do you mean computer-given multiple choice tests? Or is there something about how they handle paper and pencil exams that you think should be widely adopted?
A good start would be to not let students pick which seat they take the test in. They can still attempt to copy their neighbor's work but can't collude with someone to make it easy.
I think if academic integrity is huge issue, perhaps we should adopt some formal rules for all tests, rather than being at the whims of different professors, or universities.
Essentially we need some kind of check and balance before we try to discredit students on a metric like the one being described this article.
The GRE's as a specific example have a high degree of trust and a fairly proven track record for being secure and preventing cheating. It might not be that much of stretch to apply whatever they seem to be doing to combat academic integrity issues.
I think I rambled a bit, but I hope that made sense
I agree -- visually judging outliers is a pretty poor test of statistical significance. The fact that they sat near each other does give them some weight though.
The big problem is that it only works for people who share a fairly unique answer set. In other words, they need to all have a decent number of wrong answers which correlate. What about people at the bottom-right of the graph who had a high correlation simply because they answered nearly all of the questions correctly? Certainly most of them are innocent, but how would we know? It seems this technique can only finger people who cheat and still end up with a mediocre grade, not those who cheat and end up acing the exam.
Based on the policies of the two universities at which I've taught, it seems like there's no possible benefit to admitting guilt.
The only foolproof way to "convict" someone of cheating is to have (several) people witness/record the incident. If a student accused of cheating categorically denies everything, they're usually in the clear (although faculty will say nasty things in private).
Letters of recommendation have almost no bearing on life. The only exceptions are for someone headed to graduate school, but at that point they likely have a pool of faculty members from which to choose.
This varies between schools. At my current school it's fairly straightforward to say "I saw this student looking at X's paper" and show that the answers are more similar than would be expected. Multiply choice would be harder of course, but free response or incorrect math calculations are pretty convincing. Students have recourse, but the appeals process here is not much work for the faculty member making the accusation until maybe the final level.
A few years ago, I was an ESL teacher at a university in southern China. As an American I remember having a fair amount of confusion when first talking with one of the Chinese teachers at the university, who had been taught with more British English, and kept using the word "invigilate" that I had never heard of.
Cheating is a natural consequence of society putting a huge value on grade-point-averages and other dullard measures of achievement.
If I had to sit through a lecture room with 200 students (TWO HUNDRED!) and I was absolutely confident that the professor cannot possibly give a shit about my learning in this crowd, I too would cheat.
It's probably a 1st year lecture, those students that are actually concentrating in biology or a related-field already took an AP in high-school, and the rest need to fill graduation requirements with a science course. It's a test to see if you read a textbook for 20 hours.
You could use this justification to rationalize any sort of unethical behavior you like. Embezzlement is a natural consequence of society putting a huge value on owning a Benz and other dullard measures of achievement!
There is a world of difference between the importance of a GPA and the importance of a Benz.
Low GPA means no good job straight out of college (because apparently you need a 3.5+ from an ivy league school to model in excel) means in a lot of cases lesser income for the rest of your life.
Why do you think you are automatically entitled to a good job straight out of college?
Your reply vis-a-vis a Mercedes vs lifetime earnings seems to imply that you are willing to sell your integrity for some value x: $(Benz - Toyota) < x <= ~$2,000,000 (spread out over a lifetime). I'm a bit incredulous that your reply was basically that the only reason you would act ethically in my hypothetical situation was because you required a higher bribe.
I don't think one is entitled to a good job straight out of college. I do, however, think that in a marketplace saturated by unfairness (berkowitz's dad is a partner let's hire him) and bullshit (jump through these hoops to make us like you), one is entitled to employ any and all effort necessary to further one's interests.
> "one is entitled to employ any and all effort necessary to further one's interests"
This is a classic mentality of victimization. By focusing on the theoretical harm that been done to the extent of all other considerations, you can justify anything. It's a dangerous mentality that has resulted in many evils throughout history. Hell, this is the same justification ISIS originally used when recruiting Sunnis who were tired of corruption and discrimination at the hands of the Shia Iraqi government, only with the economic context replaced by a political one.
A more mature ethical position would recognize that in some environments, while evil has been done which harms or disadvantages you, the strategy of employing "any and all effort necessary to further one's interests" is likely what gave the advantage to those who have allegedly disadvantaged you. If you successfully follow through with this attitude you'll likely perpetuate a cycle.
If you are going to cheat, break rules, or whatever you should do so because those rules or prohibitions have little or no moral and social value in the context in which they exist. If GPA is just a meaningless filter enabling incompetent HR departments at BigCo to trim down their resume pile, then sure, game the system to your advantage. But don't draw the conclusion that you are morally entitled to do whatever it takes to promote your own interests. That path leads to psychopathy.
> because apparently you need a 3.5+ from an ivy league school to model in excel
It's not that you need those credentials to model in Excel. Rather, you're signaling that you have a proven capability to work long hours, deal with bullshit, work "within the system", etc. It's not about intelligence.
>> It's not that you need those credentials to model in Excel.
> Rather, you're signaling that you have a proven capability to work long hours, deal with bullshit, work "within the system", etc. It's not about intelligence.
I'm going to argue the opposing part for a bit here: So OP's response should be (something along these lines):
HA, there you admit it's putting up with bullshit! But if it's bullshit what's wrong with cheating on it as long as I get to where I want (within the system)!
Rather I would suggest the premise that there is an ethical guideline to behaviour should rest, on our ability to validate the consequences of this behaviour. So in the embezzlement behaviour clearly there is a deceived party and someone suffers. In the student cheating behaviour perhaps there is a deceived party (the future employer) - but it's not clear whether someone suffers or not, are biology 101 grades a good indicator of anything (i.e. future performance), should students caught copying biology 101 exams be exorcised from their academic institution with prejudice?
My take on it is that least in the US there is an overtly-strong caveat for this kind of thing (i.e. even copying assignments), while we are generally accepting of various other forms of deceit (i.e. sociopathy).
That said in my personal experience standardized tests are a good deal better than attendance grades, participation grades, national honor society, club activities or whatever other bs people have to put up with in highschool.
> In the student cheating behaviour perhaps there is a deceived party (the future employer) - but it's not clear whether someone suffers or not, are biology 101 grades a good indicator of anything (i.e. future performance), should students caught copying biology 101 exams be exorcised from their academic institution with prejudice?
The future employer might be deceived, but the other students who did not cheat are the real injured parties. They will have a lower GPA either in relative to the cheaters (no curve); or possibly absolutely if the class is graded on a curve.
>The future employer might be deceived, but the other students who did not cheat are the real injured parties. They will have a lower GPA either in relative to the cheaters (no curve); or possibly absolutely if the class is graded on a curve.
I'm not promoting cheating on tests - but.., I do think the value of a class is primarily in the education and not the grade; therefore in my opinion students aren't being cheated, because they all learn as much as they want to learn. Where as if the grade were the value - people should not have been forced into such a course in the first place!
Although, obviously the system (or mostly employers) need some objective metrics for assessment and they have made them (perhaps poorly in some aspects but what systems aren't?)
You can't cheat once you're in the workplace (at least, not in the same "directly copy other people's work" or "look up the answers during the test" way). So if you cheat your way through school, you haven't really proven that you have what it takes to do the things your degree indicates.
To use the biology 101 example - if you can't spend 10 hours/week studying/learning material that you don't really care about and that is irrelevant to your life, how are you going to spend 60-80 hours a week doing that in your excel-modeling job?
It isn't? Surely you can work long and hours and deal with bullshit at a community college, or even McDonalds... somehow employers don't value that, though. ;-)
If the statement was only given as a reason why cheating is prevalent nowadays it would be an explanation.
To take the next step and use that explanation to rationalize one's own cheating makes it is a justification (or rationalization, whichever you prefer).
GP certainly used it as his justification.
> Because, I agree: if there wasn't such a societal emphasis on material goods (ie the Benz), there would be less embezzlement.
Noting that that relationship might exist is entirely different from saying "this relationship exists therefore I shall embezzle."
Wouldn't that only harm you? Wouldn't you only be cheating yourself?
I don't understand why your professors' interest in your personal learning would impact your own desire to learn.
(Thinking about it a bit more, I can vaguely understand this if it's a required class that you have no actual interest in - an elective you had to take because all others were taken, or if you were retaking a class that you were already very familiar with - but at that point, cheating would be redundant.)
I understand the difference between our thoughts. Where we differ is that I think college is not a place of learning. In general, it is a sequence of hoops to sort out the labor force.
I learned a lot of interesting and useful things at college, and so did many of the other students. If your opinion is based on actual attendance at a college, it seems you had an unfortunate experience. If that experience was at a place focused on teaching to multiple-choice examinations, that could explain it.
For exams, it's nearly unheard of in small classes (ie <= 30 or so people), but in large lecture halls with hundreds of students, it's not uncommon (especially for general education large lecture courses).
Right, for service courses with lots of sections, the marking load can be pretty high (e.g 1000+ students taking the same course) and the difficulty in maintaining even marking policies both tempt towards scantron and the like.
It is limiting, but if you put a lot of work into it you can even design pretty decent multi-part questions that reward partial understanding/success. Mostly people don't put that time in, though, and I've never been a fan of the practice.
I wonder if the front-back case is the top-most red dot. This would be explained if the front person was innocent and the person behind them copied. Not having the benefit of collusion, they have more shared wrong answers. Also, they have less answers in common overall, which supports the non-collusion theory.
Multiple choice tests simply are a horrible way of assessing knowledge in any non-trivial domain. Instead of wasting time with writing R scripts the author really should grab himself a book about education.
Edit: On second thought that's probably worded too harsh, but multiple choice testing for a final exam in biology? There's not the slightest chance the results will correlate with the capabilities of his students at all.
I'm surprised he didn't break it down to probabilities according to answer distributions instead of right vs wrong. For instance, given 2 questions with their answers and the percent of the class that answered for each choice:
1. A is the answer
A - 60%
B - 20%
C - 5%
D - 15%
2. C is the answer
A - 10%
B - 5%
C - 70%
D - 15%
The probability of randomly selecting 2 students that both chose:
- A and C (both correct) is 0.1764
- D and B (both wrong) is 0.000056
That doesn't necessarily work because wrong answers can have natural correlations. Let's say you have two questions about finding a slope on an exam. Anyone who thinks that slope is change in x over change in y is going to get both of those questions wrong in the same way, even if those wrong answers are both individually rare. It would be really hard to distinguish between when these correlations are expected and when they're unexpected.
61 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadAlso if cheating is really such a concern, why not just handle it in a similar way to the american GRE's or SAT's ?
I think if academic integrity is huge issue, perhaps we should adopt some formal rules for all tests, rather than being at the whims of different professors, or universities.
Essentially we need some kind of check and balance before we try to discredit students on a metric like the one being described this article.
The GRE's as a specific example have a high degree of trust and a fairly proven track record for being secure and preventing cheating. It might not be that much of stretch to apply whatever they seem to be doing to combat academic integrity issues.
I think I rambled a bit, but I hope that made sense
The big problem is that it only works for people who share a fairly unique answer set. In other words, they need to all have a decent number of wrong answers which correlate. What about people at the bottom-right of the graph who had a high correlation simply because they answered nearly all of the questions correctly? Certainly most of them are innocent, but how would we know? It seems this technique can only finger people who cheat and still end up with a mediocre grade, not those who cheat and end up acing the exam.
The only foolproof way to "convict" someone of cheating is to have (several) people witness/record the incident. If a student accused of cheating categorically denies everything, they're usually in the clear (although faculty will say nasty things in private).
Student aren't cheating on multiple choice tests. Professors too lazy to do their jobs are.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/invigilate
If I had to sit through a lecture room with 200 students (TWO HUNDRED!) and I was absolutely confident that the professor cannot possibly give a shit about my learning in this crowd, I too would cheat.
You could use this justification to rationalize any sort of unethical behavior you like. Embezzlement is a natural consequence of society putting a huge value on owning a Benz and other dullard measures of achievement!
That is to say, I disagree wholeheartedly.
Low GPA means no good job straight out of college (because apparently you need a 3.5+ from an ivy league school to model in excel) means in a lot of cases lesser income for the rest of your life.
No Benz means you can drive a Toyota. Big whoop.
Your reply vis-a-vis a Mercedes vs lifetime earnings seems to imply that you are willing to sell your integrity for some value x: $(Benz - Toyota) < x <= ~$2,000,000 (spread out over a lifetime). I'm a bit incredulous that your reply was basically that the only reason you would act ethically in my hypothetical situation was because you required a higher bribe.
This is a classic mentality of victimization. By focusing on the theoretical harm that been done to the extent of all other considerations, you can justify anything. It's a dangerous mentality that has resulted in many evils throughout history. Hell, this is the same justification ISIS originally used when recruiting Sunnis who were tired of corruption and discrimination at the hands of the Shia Iraqi government, only with the economic context replaced by a political one.
A more mature ethical position would recognize that in some environments, while evil has been done which harms or disadvantages you, the strategy of employing "any and all effort necessary to further one's interests" is likely what gave the advantage to those who have allegedly disadvantaged you. If you successfully follow through with this attitude you'll likely perpetuate a cycle.
If you are going to cheat, break rules, or whatever you should do so because those rules or prohibitions have little or no moral and social value in the context in which they exist. If GPA is just a meaningless filter enabling incompetent HR departments at BigCo to trim down their resume pile, then sure, game the system to your advantage. But don't draw the conclusion that you are morally entitled to do whatever it takes to promote your own interests. That path leads to psychopathy.
It can be much easier to get a job, and achieve other things, if you have the proper toys to signal your social status with.
It's not that you need those credentials to model in Excel. Rather, you're signaling that you have a proven capability to work long hours, deal with bullshit, work "within the system", etc. It's not about intelligence.
> Rather, you're signaling that you have a proven capability to work long hours, deal with bullshit, work "within the system", etc. It's not about intelligence.
I'm going to argue the opposing part for a bit here: So OP's response should be (something along these lines):
HA, there you admit it's putting up with bullshit! But if it's bullshit what's wrong with cheating on it as long as I get to where I want (within the system)!
Rather I would suggest the premise that there is an ethical guideline to behaviour should rest, on our ability to validate the consequences of this behaviour. So in the embezzlement behaviour clearly there is a deceived party and someone suffers. In the student cheating behaviour perhaps there is a deceived party (the future employer) - but it's not clear whether someone suffers or not, are biology 101 grades a good indicator of anything (i.e. future performance), should students caught copying biology 101 exams be exorcised from their academic institution with prejudice?
My take on it is that least in the US there is an overtly-strong caveat for this kind of thing (i.e. even copying assignments), while we are generally accepting of various other forms of deceit (i.e. sociopathy).
That said in my personal experience standardized tests are a good deal better than attendance grades, participation grades, national honor society, club activities or whatever other bs people have to put up with in highschool.
The future employer might be deceived, but the other students who did not cheat are the real injured parties. They will have a lower GPA either in relative to the cheaters (no curve); or possibly absolutely if the class is graded on a curve.
I'm not promoting cheating on tests - but.., I do think the value of a class is primarily in the education and not the grade; therefore in my opinion students aren't being cheated, because they all learn as much as they want to learn. Where as if the grade were the value - people should not have been forced into such a course in the first place! Although, obviously the system (or mostly employers) need some objective metrics for assessment and they have made them (perhaps poorly in some aspects but what systems aren't?)
To use the biology 101 example - if you can't spend 10 hours/week studying/learning material that you don't really care about and that is irrelevant to your life, how are you going to spend 60-80 hours a week doing that in your excel-modeling job?
It isn't a justification; it's an explanation.
Because, I agree: if there wasn't such a societal emphasis on material goods (ie the Benz), there would be less embezzlement.
To take the next step and use that explanation to rationalize one's own cheating makes it is a justification (or rationalization, whichever you prefer).
GP certainly used it as his justification.
> Because, I agree: if there wasn't such a societal emphasis on material goods (ie the Benz), there would be less embezzlement.
Noting that that relationship might exist is entirely different from saying "this relationship exists therefore I shall embezzle."
I don't understand why your professors' interest in your personal learning would impact your own desire to learn.
(Thinking about it a bit more, I can vaguely understand this if it's a required class that you have no actual interest in - an elective you had to take because all others were taken, or if you were retaking a class that you were already very familiar with - but at that point, cheating would be redundant.)
The author sounds like a really nasty piece of work.
It is limiting, but if you put a lot of work into it you can even design pretty decent multi-part questions that reward partial understanding/success. Mostly people don't put that time in, though, and I've never been a fan of the practice.
Edit: On second thought that's probably worded too harsh, but multiple choice testing for a final exam in biology? There's not the slightest chance the results will correlate with the capabilities of his students at all.
1. A is the answer A - 60% B - 20% C - 5% D - 15%
2. C is the answer A - 10% B - 5% C - 70% D - 15%
The probability of randomly selecting 2 students that both chose:
- A and C (both correct) is 0.1764 - D and B (both wrong) is 0.000056
* Appreciate corrections