<p>I guess you have to determine if the objective is to learn the material or to be 100% independent of others.</p>
<p>The problem I see with the situational response is the likelihood of it continuing. The student cheats on one homework assignment, being done by 200 students - what’s to say the student isn’t going to cheat on all homework assignments? And then, does getting away with it embolden the student to cheat on other items? Or does the student end up cheating more because he doesn’t fully understand the material because he cheated on the homework?</p>
<p>I would encourage the students to give the cheater the opportunity to turn himself in, and then turn him in if he chooses not to use that opportunity. Cheating impacts all of the other students, and turning him in maintains the integrity of their grades. But it also helps the cheater, who may otherwise learn to rely on cheating, rather than learning the necessary material.</p>
<p>emeralkity4 - I think in this particular case, the prof wanted both. Both can certainly be achieved. The students I’m talking about are all doing well and learning the subject matter.</p>
<p>The bummer is that they were more EXCITED about it before, and were having fun. Now they pretty much want to just be done with the class.</p>
<p>I have a problem with profs like that.
I also have extreme executive functioning disorder.
My long term memory is amazing, but my short term memory is about as long as a puppy.
I need all the ways that are available to retain the material, to master it.
We need more respect for learning differences.</p>
<p>Perhaps the middle ground would be to go to the professor & tell him/her that, without naming names, you are aware that cheating is going on, and that he/she needs to do something to address proctoring in the future.</p>
<p>When I was a teaching assistant, I suspected cheating going on. So I made up an “A” & an “B” version of a test. It was easy to spot the cheaters who copied their neighbor’s answer that bore not relevance to their own test. Afterwards, no messy confrontations nor time-draining disciplinary committees. </p>
<p>One of the cheaters even had the chuztpah to come to my office hours to complain. Lol at her expression when I explained that she wrote in the “A” answer to the “B” test.</p>
<p>I have a suggestion to reduce cheating.
If the ultimate goal is for students to learn the material and to show that they understand it, we need a way for them to do so.
Many people have trouble in the artificial atmosphere of a classroom regurgitating their work.
While many courses at my daughters college had open book- unproctored tests, that places the burden on the prof to write a test that isnt multiple choice and requires more time to review.
I have been immensely frustrated by tests that basically consisted of a blank piece of paper & instructions written on the board. It doesnt matter how much time I am given, my brain quits after a few hours & much of that time is often spent trying to remember one or two details that are connected to everything else.</p>
<p>My suggestion. allow students to bring in one 3x5 card with notes hand written on it.
Require the students to either bring in their card before hand to be approved or have it turned in afterward with the exam.
If they don’t understand the class/ haven’t been keeping up, the notes on a card will not be enough for them to pass the exam. But it may be enough to reduce test anxiety and allow them to perform better & for the prof to get a better idea of the success of the curriculum.</p>
<p>Ages ago when I attended RPI, that’s exactly what we had for many tests, though we often didn’t turn our sheets in. Just creating the sheet was often good practice to learn the material - and it simulated to some degree the ability to look up a less-used formula. In the real world, you would do just that - look up the formula, rather than relying completely on memory, unless it’s something you use on a day-to-day basis. If you organized your sheet well, it was far easier than trying to look something up in the book, but it was only useful if the relevant information had been transferred to the sheet.</p>
<p>Of course it could be taken to the next step as well - turn the sheet in either as a separate grade, or as possible extra credit, allowing another way for the professor to know what student understand, and whether review is in order, if the misunderstood material is foundational to the rest of the class.</p>
<p>I teach in high school and unfortunately, cheating is rampant. One of our AP History teachers now supplements his grades with oral quizzes which are taped and graded by a panel of 3 teachers. Students are given 4 topics to prepare and then are asked in-depth about 1. Since implementation, there has been a drop in enrollment and some grades dropped drastically. In my senior calculus class I often make up 8 different versions of a short answer quiz. Our school is very competitive with most students attending highly selective schools, including the ivies. We feel we have an obligation to the higher institutions to share honest results. Just this spring, two seniors in a neighboring school, admitted through ED, had their admissions rescinded when it was determined they stole copies of the Economics midterm. Another friend, who is an admission officer at BC, says that he “catches” plagiarized applications more than he should.</p>
<p>cromette, that professor is just so off base.</p>
<p>I could never understand why kids won’t snitch on the exam cheating. </p>
<p>I have to admit that way back in high school I often had a friend look over my French homework before I handed it in. I was a dunce at French. I did spend a year in France before I went to college. I still have nightmares about the French exam where I had to write a comparison of the first and second love affair in *Le Rouge et le Noir *- which I hadn’t finished and hadn’t had the sense to read in English. It was an open book exam and I did figure out one was a brunette and the other was a blond and a couple of other differences before my hour was up!</p>
<p>My kids’ high school had strict policies regarding cheating and an honor code. I remember very clearly that the ASB President was asked to step down by the administration because he had used the internet to help him with his Spanish homework. There was some plagiarism involved. Another year, a few AP students in one of my kid’s classes had access to the AP exam in advance through an outside consultant. The tutoring company had received the test from abroad , where their company was located, and they were coaching students on the actual exam.
“Opportunities” such as this, if you could call them that, were used as teachable moments in our household. In the second instance, the boyfriend of one of the students who was using the dishonest tutor told the teacher of the situation, and he willingly took the fallout from his actions- which was mixed, as you might imagine.<br>
How one responds to encountering cheating is going to depend on each person’s view of the harm it is creating. Personally, had I been a student and known someone was using the net to do their Spanish homework, I wouldn’t have
reported it. But the AP test situation is one that begs to be reported, imo.</p>
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<p>In this case, I would say that the professor is cheating. There is no realistic way to avoid leakage of information about the old tests, so it is a better policy to make all old tests publicly available to equalize access to them as use for study tools. (Old tests are also useful for frosh with AP credit trying to decide whether to skip intro courses using their AP credit.)</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I know a case where the answer book to a freshman STEM class was in the possession of the students and passed on from year to year. Not uncommon situation I suspect.</p></li>
<li><p>Used to be that frats would have a stash of old tests/lab write ups etc for members to use as needed.</p></li>
<li><p>I adjuncted for a month for a college class. On the test, there were 3 clear cases of cheating (copying answers) involving 8 students (37 total in class). I passed on the evidence to the main prof. I doubt he did anything with it other than tell the students not to do it in the future.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Here’s my experience, FWIW. A quarter-century ago in grad school, I was proctoring an intoductory sociology final for my faculty adviser. I saw a girl who kept putting her head down on her desk and I remember thinking “She does the same thing I do when she’s trying to think.” Then I noticed there was a folded-up paper with writing on it beneath the under-desk bookrack. I picked it up and it was full of intro sociology info. I immediately took her test. We went out in the hall and I told her I had reason to believe she was cheating (I was very careful not to actually accuse her of it.) I told her she was not getting the test back and she would have to speak with the professor the next day. She did and said her dad was threatening to sue the school, etc. He ended up giving her a totally different test in his office. I was kind of ticked off because everyone told me I did the right thing, but she suffered no consequences. I did learn that it still pays to do the right thing, if only so you can live with yourself. I can only hope she learned something from the experience, but I doubt it.</p>
<p>I don’t know if OP is still monitoring this thread, but my response to cheating is situational based on the expected response of the professor.</p>
<p>During my freshman calculus class final exam (graded on curve), there were three students in the back row behind me who held conferences every time the professor left the room. After the third occurence (Why did the professor leave the room three times during a two-hour exam anyway?), my frustration became unbearable. I went to the front of the room to turn them in. The professor simply asked me to finish my exam and meet with him when everyone was finished. During this post-exam conference, he told me that he knew the students were cheating and his response was to grade their exams more rigorously, allowing less room for partial credit.</p>
<p>The injustice of this response still makes me upset. First of all, I am sure that my grade was lower simply because I had difficulty concentrating due to their collaboration. Secondly, the punishment did not fit the crime - what if their collaboration produced exactly the right answer and partial credit was not a factor at all? Finally, and most imporantly, since the professor never confronted the students, there was no due process. It made me wonder what would happen if the professor believed incorrectly that an innocent student was cheating. The student would have a lower grade based on improper assumptions.</p>
<p>The penalty for cheating in calculus 1 will come to the cheaters in calculus 2.</p>
<p>For me, just having to take calculus would be a penalty.</p>
<p>I’m not clear what you are trying to teach them? Would it matter if you (the teacher) were the parent v. an instructor v. school personnel? Perhaps you wouldn’t all teach the same thing, and perhaps you shouldn’t. </p>
<p>I think cheaters usually win in the end. It is so common - in school, and in life - that most folks don’t even think of it as cheating. </p>
<p>There are other options, like turning yourself in for refusing to report cheating. That meets virtually all ethical requirements.</p>
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<p>This is ridiculous, especially if the Professor in question didn’t specify that this form of collaboration…which isn’t cheating by any reasonable definition…isn’t allowed on the syllabus. </p>
<p>If this had happened in a class I took, I’d be bringing a complaint to the Prof and the chair of the academic department concerned. </p>
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<p>In many college classes/majors…especially highly competitive ones like pre-med, the goal of the classes is not only to facilitate learning the material, but also to rank students by how quickly/self-sufficiently they learn the material to separate out the “quick studies” from the rest. </p>
<p>Employers who hire college graduates…especially ones who are in highly competitive fields/industries also prefer this method as it facilitates their ability to hire fresh graduates who they feel can hit the ground running from the first day without much/any handholding. </p>
<p>Just as importantly, they want to minimize the chances they hire fresh graduates like a couple of younger colleagues who were considered “slow learners” and/or lacked a semblance of work-ethic in the eyes of my supervisors and thus, fired early in their probationary period.</p>