> I was suffering technical difficulties while giving online lectures.
> It was extremely demoralizing to teach to a class that was blatantly cheating the entire time.
How demoralizing do you think it is to be paying a fair bit of money (or more likely taking on a fair bit of debt) to be just 1 of 100+ students in a poorly functioning online class?
To be clear, I'm not blaming the teacher here but the system has continually failed students. It's become a stupid game that you pay a lot to play because you have to. When I was younger I used to very anti-cheating, but I realized with time that was a foolish principle to hold on to. The game is rigged and there is no shame it taking short cuts. The university is trying to exploit you the student so why would you not return the favor and seek to exploit the system whenever you can?
Consider the counter position: what would an incredibly passionate, engaged and hardworking student get from this situation? This experience for that type of student is scarcely better than just teaching yourself from a text book and free online lectures (in fact, all of the material for this class is free online)... only you don't get a degree doing that.
My only critique of the teacher here is not having a enough empathy for these students and spending far more energy trying to catch cheaters than address the fact that these students have gotten a raw deal. Ignore the cheaters and spend those extra hours chatting one-on-one with the students that actually give a shit (if there are any left).
I went to a top ten ranked cs school for what it's worth. I graduated pre-covid. Every single cs class has minimum 100 students. The department recorded classes so that they could increase attendance without getting bigger rooms. By the time I was an upperclassmen less than half the students showed up to lectures. Having 25/200 students present was common. It really was demoralizing to realize that the department didn't see a problem with many if not most students graduating without having actually spoken to a professor once, since you had to show up a couple hours early for office hours if you wanted to be seen. It's clear that the undergrads were nothing more than moneybags to my institution, so naturally students saw their education as the transaction it was. Most students were there because they figured graduating from a top school is what is required to get a FAANG job as a 21 year old.
> When I was younger I used to very anti-cheating, but I realized with time that was a foolish principle to hold on to. The game is rigged and there is no shame it taking short cuts. The university is trying to exploit you the student so why would you not return the favor and seek to exploit the system whenever you can?
Two wrongs don't make a right. Yes the university system has its issues, especially through the COVID pandemic. But that does not justify this behavior.
> Ignore the cheaters and spend those extra hours chatting one-on-one with the students that actually give a shit
Actions have consequences. You can't just ignore them.
You can definitely ignore them if you think that ignoring them and putting work elsewhere is a net benefit to everyone. Not every action merits a response.
I agree, I'm not against cheating but high risk high reward. If you're dumb enough to include the lecturer in the very group chat you cheat in then you deserve to fail. The class was stupid to even think they could cheat as a whole class, its like robbing a liquor store with 80 accomplices. What you do is you find a small group of individuals you trust and you cheat together secretly and given how small that group is likely to be you're all forced to learn something.
For the amount of money most universities cost, it would be stupid and irresponsible not to cheat and risk failing a class. Struggling and failing legitimately has no upsides and only downsides, big financial downsides, along with possibly a delayed or no graduation if it cuts their funding.
I would agree with your position if college was either extremely cheap or free. But as a money making endeavor it serves more as a roadblock to prosperity or in numerous other cases a potential pit of debt.
Ah but there's still a huge inefficiency here! Why bother with the offer? Just let them include their four years of tuition to $65 application fee and make the rest of the application optional. You wouldn't want them to waste all that time writing bullshit essays about their passion for their major if they're not going to study it anyways :)
Supporting a "benign neglect" model of cheating is how you get a very expensive degree mill. The perception of others that your institution is a degree mill both degrades the value of those who already graduated with a degree from there and it devalues the research put out by the staff ("oh, look at this paper that came out of that sham university down the road").
It's clear to me from the writing that empathy was abundant.
Even if you find it demoralizing, the cheating behavior was to basically half-ass the entire course and not try at all. We already have an intellectually lay and pervasive culture of "just tell me the answer."
Are you fucking kidding me? After the absurd lengths he went to to give them chance after chance after they kept cheating, lied to his face about it, possibly threatened each other with violence, and repeatedly plagiarized their apologies for plagiarizing? After all this, you have the gall to claim he doesn't have enough empathy? What does it take, in your view?
What a terrible piece of advice. If you ignore a problem like this it only gets worse for everyone. The cheaters included, who go through life with that mindset.
The best teachers I had in university were very tough and very strict. They taught me to study harder. They taught me how to learn difficult material. They taught me to understand things at a deep level. They would give 10 minute pop quizzes designed to fail you if you did not know the material (no time to even look up an answer or pass to a friend) ahead of time.
Fail the cheaters. It's for everyone's own good. No one grows up if you never make them.
My only critique of the teacher here is not having a enough empathy for these students and spending far more energy trying to catch cheaters than address the fact that these students have gotten a raw deal.
I agree, except that this teacher did have tons of empathy for the students. That's pretty clear from the lengths they went to individualize the repercussions, offer second chances, and so on.
I suspect this teacher has perhaps a bit of fun catching cheaters? I'm not sure. They've written code to detect plagiarism in the past. They use a quiz/exam structure that's ripe for cheating: multiple chances for quiz retakes, long windows for exams, and question re-use between quizzes and exams. They wrote code to archive the chat log daily, identify students, and determine instances of cheating. They gave second chances, creating a new syllabus, after which cheating still occurred. Then they wrote this article.
So I agree - the teacher spent a disproportionate amount of time on the cheaters, which is unfair to the honest students.
Why not use cheat-resistant course material? They were able to restructure the second midterm exam this way - one question at a time, no backtracking, randomized order, and no question re-use. I suppose this is also time sink to combat cheating, but it seems more efficient than spending additional time filing reports and writing chat analysis code and so on.
I’m went to school at a time where everything was curved.
In that environment, you had to fight for every GPA point and were at a disadvantage of you were a stickler for academic integrity. In a 500 person lecture, ~25 were getting a 4. It’s easy to be on a high horse at an Ivy school, where people who don’t show get gentleman’s Cs and the average GPA is like a 3.6.
Obviously this situation in the article wasn’t that. But I think the professor did a good job of empathizing with the students and accepting that there are varying types of motivations.
Indeed. But that’s not how it’s presented to high schoolers. Parents, secondary school administrators, and post-secondary school employees are all complicit.
I'm curious what you call it when, say a car company programs their vehicles to notice when they are on an emission test stand and will operate differently to get the best test result possible. Because regulators call it cheating and society as a whole suffers from it.
Except society as a whole has deemed it necessary for lots of reasons. Even strict libertarians tend to think one of the better roles of government is to regulate negative externalities.
Depends. If the hiring group has said, for example, you need an ABET degree to be qualified and ABET has said an anthropology course was part of the required curriculum, then yes.
In other words, groups (society and otherwise) have created standardized curriculums for a reason. You may not agree with their decision, but the reasonable response is to remove yourself from consideration, not to lie in order to get the outcome you want.
This has nothing to do with fairness. It has everything to do with integrity. You justifying these actions is part of the problem. This is the attitude that these businesses you are accusing take themselves. "Others are doing it so why shouldn't I?" It is a direct lead to societal decay.
The justification here, is that focusing on individuals does not solve the problem, and instead only helps you feel better about yourself by how evil you think other people are.
Instead of focusing on why you think other people are more evil than you are, instead people should focus on ways to actually solve the problem, instead of satisfying their internal need for moralization.
> I was suffering technical difficulties while giving online lectures.
> It was extremely demoralizing to teach to a class that was blatantly cheating the entire time.
How demoralizing do you think it is to be paying a fair bit of money (or more likely taking on a fair bit of debt) to be just 1 of 100+ students in a poorly functioning online class?
To be clear, I'm not blaming the teacher here but the system has continually failed students. It's become a stupid game that you pay a lot to play because you have to. When I was younger I used to very anti-cheating, but I realized with time that was a foolish principle to hold on to. The game is rigged and there is no shame it taking short cuts. The university is trying to exploit you the student so why would you not return the favor and seek to exploit the system whenever you can?
Consider the counter position: what would an incredibly passionate, engaged and hardworking student get from this situation? This experience for that type of student is scarcely better than just teaching yourself from a text book and free online lectures (in fact, all of the material for this class is free online)... only you don't get a degree doing that.
My only critique of the teacher here is not having a enough empathy for these students and spending far more energy trying to catch cheaters than address the fact that these students have gotten a raw deal. Ignore the cheaters and spend those extra hours chatting one-on-one with the students that actually give a shit (if there are any left).