I had a prof during university that had a really good method to get people to engage. You would be assigned a reading, and then complete the quiz as an individual for a small portion of your grade, and then do the exact quiz again in a team of about 5-6 people worth a much greater amount of your grade. Lectures would then have particular focus on topics that students had trouble with on the quiz.
Assignments were designed to require iteration until you met the specifications of the problem. If you got the same or similar answer as anyone else, then it was almost certainly cheated.
Exams were open book, but quite difficult and long. You pretty much had to make sure you knew where to find all the information required in the course materials and were often similarly open ended as the assignments in the course were.
>It seems that my uni solution is to give assignment so hard it will require understanding even when cheating (unless someone solves it for you of course). There are assignments taking north of 40 hours for top students (from scratch).
Using this as a method to reduce cheating disturbs me. The goal shouldn't be that students have to make their homework a full time job, imagine is someone was taking 7 courses all with assignments like that.
> Using this as a method to reduce cheating disturbs me. The goal shouldn't be that students have to make their homework a full time job, imagine is someone was taking 7 courses all with assignments like that.
To be fair it's the largest assignment of the semester for that course (compilation theory). The assignment structure per course is more or less fixed, so people know what awaits them in the semester and try not to take courses with large overlapping assignments. Then again, I think almost nobody does it from scratch (and it still takes people tons of time), but rather use "references".
And you know, studying is kinda your fulltime job when you're a student.
Assignments were designed to require iteration until you met the specifications of the problem. If you got the same or similar answer as anyone else, then it was almost certainly cheated.
Exams were open book, but quite difficult and long. You pretty much had to make sure you knew where to find all the information required in the course materials and were often similarly open ended as the assignments in the course were.
>It seems that my uni solution is to give assignment so hard it will require understanding even when cheating (unless someone solves it for you of course). There are assignments taking north of 40 hours for top students (from scratch).
Using this as a method to reduce cheating disturbs me. The goal shouldn't be that students have to make their homework a full time job, imagine is someone was taking 7 courses all with assignments like that.