When undergraduate education goes well, the students will be interested in the material and motivated to learn it, both on their own and through working on collaborative projects with other students. Then testing and grading, while not necessarily eliminated, become less important in the students’ minds and cheating becomes only a minor problem.
Creating an environment conducive to that kind of learning, though, can be very difficult, especially with large classes, heavy teaching loads, and subjects and curricula that are perceived as requiring passive knowledge acquisition rather than active engagement and exploration.
I will retire next year after teaching for seventeen years at a large university in Japan. Cheating has sometimes occurred, both in my own classes and in the classes of a large first-year writing program I used to manage. But because the classes were mostly project-based, with students writing and revising in stages over the course of the semester and sharing their drafts with each other in class, and because the average class size has been only about fifteen, the amount of cheating has been small and manageable. I’ve been lucky.
When undergraduate education goes well, the students will be interested in the material and motivated to learn it, both on their own and through working on collaborative projects with other students. Then testing and grading, while not necessarily eliminated, become less important in the students’ minds and cheating becomes only a minor problem.
Creating an environment conducive to that kind of learning, though, can be very difficult, especially with large classes, heavy teaching loads, and subjects and curricula that are perceived as requiring passive knowledge acquisition rather than active engagement and exploration.
I will retire next year after teaching for seventeen years at a large university in Japan. Cheating has sometimes occurred, both in my own classes and in the classes of a large first-year writing program I used to manage. But because the classes were mostly project-based, with students writing and revising in stages over the course of the semester and sharing their drafts with each other in class, and because the average class size has been only about fifteen, the amount of cheating has been small and manageable. I’ve been lucky.