[HN Gopher] Am I the Unethical One?
___________________________________________________________________
Am I the Unethical One?
Author : HR01
Score : 105 points
Date : 2023-05-26 11:17 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dailynous.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dailynous.com)
| karaterobot wrote:
| Why even go through the process of accusing them of cheating? If
| the fake answers were all wrong, just grade the test honestly and
| the cheaters will get what's coming to them without any ambiguity
| or additional overhead on his part.
|
| I would just ignore any problematizers who question the ethics of
| testing students' honesty. I think those people are silly and
| should rightly be ignored, except to mock them. But that's
| probably why I'm not a philosopher.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I would be tempted to do the same, and not say anything about
| it. It would be interesting and informative to see how the
| cheaters responded.
|
| It is not something one could do every time, however, as it
| will become known that the actual questions (though with
| incorrect answers) could be found on the web.
| balderdash wrote:
| Because the punishment for cheating is not a poor grade but
| severe discipline (typically suspension or expulsion), the bad
| grade was for not learning the material in class.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| At my previous university, this would constitute as blatant
| plagiarism.
|
| Plagiarism was punished by a "three strikes and you're out"
| principle. If you got caught more than twice over the three
| years bachelor course, you got kicked out and couldn't start
| the same program for a few years. You also had to explain (or
| defend, but rarely anyone ever got accused on false grounds)
| your transgression to the graduation board, with the
| possibility of worse punishment if you were particularly
| blatant about the whole thing. Obviously, you immediately
| failed the course you were caught on as well.
|
| This system worked well. Cheating was rare and students
| appropriately shot down team members that would suggest any
| type of plagiarism. So, why go through the process of accusing
| them? Because cheating deserves worse than just a bad grade, in
| my opinion.
| phs wrote:
| As an extension, after the exam publicly declare the poison-
| pill answers to deter the next semester's batch.
|
| Would that start an arms race causing the students to work
| harder to find the right answers? Mission accomplished.
| BeetleB wrote:
| There are two goals: Encourage learning, and discourage
| cheating. A low grade doesn't necessarily do the former.
|
| It also depends how the overall course grade is structured. In
| my undergrad, it was common that the final exam was _not_ an
| outsized portion of your grade. A number of courses pegged it
| at 10% - meaning if you did really well throughout the
| semester, you could just not study at all, get a 25% score on
| the final (i.e. fail the final), and still get an A.
|
| Aside: I loved those courses - work hard to get in a good
| position, and chill during the finals. The professors also
| wanted to encourage continual effort and learning, and making
| the overall grade be heavily dependent on the final would
| discourage that.
| tptacek wrote:
| One thing I want to say here is that "entrapment" isn't a moral
| principle; it's a legal one, and it isn't universal. We don't get
| it from English Common Law, where it wasn't widely known before
| the founding of the US, and was rejected when it did come up.
| Entrapment is a checks-and-balances balance of power mechanism,
| not a general rule of conduct.
|
| Furthermore, while we don't reach the question of whether this
| dummy test constituted entrapment (because it doesn't matter),
| it's also simply not entrapment under the US legal definition
| (arguably the most important such definition). In the US, an
| entrapment defense requires you to (1) admit that you did the bad
| thing, (2) prove that you were somehow coerced (at least
| psychologically) into doing that bad thing, and (3) prove that
| you had no predisposition to doing the bad thing. You're
| searching for exam questions and memorizing a bogus final exam.
| You know you're cheating, you know it's wrong, and you do it
| anyways. You're culpable.
| CPLX wrote:
| Indeed. Entrapment is such a narrow case and is designed to
| stop the government from taking advantage of vulnerable people.
|
| If you call someone who has just lost their job and is not able
| to feed their baby and say if you do this drug deal I'll get
| you enough to buy baby food that's entrapment, assuming they
| weren't already involved in the drugs trade and this "crime"
| would never have happened without the government willing it
| into existence.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| And to be clear on the other end (with requisite IANAL) - If
| the undercover officer says "You holding? I got cash", it is
| not entrapment. Simply making a request for a transaction
| isn't entrapment, even if you're being circumspect. Even if
| you're aggressive about it - "I know you're holding, give me
| the drugs, man" - That's not entrapment, especially if they
| are actually "holding". Entrapment is a narrow defense - The
| Government forced me to do something I would not otherwise
| have done. If someone other than the government (and it's
| agents) coerces you, that's not entrapment (but may be a
| defense).
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Sure, it's not entrapment. It's just stupid. People looking
| this up online aren't cheating, by definition they are
| _studying_. That is, they want to be able to answer the
| questions on the exam with the correct answers, and they want
| to make the highest score possible.
|
| The "previous exam online" doesn't let them cheat. It doesn't
| beam answers into their skulls during the test from 3000 miles
| away. They have to memorize these answers.
|
| At most, the example questions tell them what they should focus
| on. Think about it a moment. His classroom is so worthless a
| tool that they are forced to go elsewhere to learn to pass the
| test. By contaminating the online materials with wrong answers,
| he is sabotaging their learning because he is butt-hurt that
| his lectures are worthless.
|
| It's not just unethical in "I'm enabling cheaters", it's
| unethical in "I am paid to educate these people, and I am
| sabotaging their education so I can play games to make myself
| feel important and righteous".
|
| Cheating is, and always will be, attempting to provide correct
| answers without having learned those. Keeping a hidden crib
| sheet, using someone else's answers from the desk in front of
| you, having someone else take the test for you.
|
| I can even explain how he became so confused that he started
| engaging in unethical behavior. He has this half-formed idea of
| what university education should be. In his head, it's this
| elite institution where only the cleverest geniuses attend, and
| instead of rote learning they are encouraged to have brilliant
| original ideas of their own that amaze and impress the faculty.
|
| If there ever was such an age, it is over. No non-lunatic
| thinks that university can both be the goal of over half of the
| population, and that these same people should go into debt for
| hundreds of thousands of dollars (undischargeable-in-bankruptcy
| debt, no less) when only 1% _might_ be capable of such
| extraordinary feats of intellect. Even if they were capable of
| this in theory, once you have a population of tens and hundreds
| of millions of people going to university, all the original and
| impressive ideas have already been conceived. There 's nothing
| left to be original about (goes doubly so for undergraduates).
|
| All that's left is rote memorization. Learn this fact, remember
| this principle in that scenario.
|
| If he only wanted to produce (or graduate) students who could
| do the former, then maybe he is catching cheaters... their
| actions definitely interfere with his ability to correctly
| score those who can have original ideas and be excellent. But
| since reasonable people insist that it is no longer possible
| for university to be that, and that it should be about rote
| memorization, he's not catching cheaters. He's catching those
| who are trying to study efficiently.
|
| He should be fired. He does not belong in education. The
| liberal arts suffer from this syndrome the most, because their
| professors aren't doing any practical work like pimping
| themselves for grant money. With nothing better to do, he's got
| nothing left but aggrandize his profession in his own mind and
| catch non-existent cheaters.
| WalterBright wrote:
| A test can only test for a sampling of the material presented
| in class. Specifically looking up the test, and memorizing
| the answers, does not demonstrate any mastery of the
| material.
|
| For example, if I teach a course in "How To Multiply", and on
| the final have ten multiplication problems, if the student
| memorizes the answers to those ten problems, he did not learn
| to multiply.
|
| The professor said some of the planted answers were obviously
| wrong, if one knew the material at all. So no, memorizing the
| answers simply was not a substitute for learning the
| material.
|
| I disagree with your conclusions.
| prox wrote:
| I had a similar answer to another sibling comment, looks
| like a weird view on studying and legitimizing cheating (or
| shortcuts if you want to be lenient)
|
| You learn by getting the material, and that makes you pass
| the test. If you know a few items of the material in a
| checkbox kind of way, you haven't learned.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > A test can only test for a sampling of the material
| presented in class. Specifically looking up the test, and
| memorizing the answers, does not demonstrate any mastery
|
| None were in that class because they wanted mastery. They
| were in that class because if it wasn't a requirement for
| graduation, no one would take it.
|
| To demand mastery of worthless material so that the
| university can charge them another $5000 in credits, fees,
| and overpriced-by-the-academic-publishing-cartel books is
| not asinine, it's criminal.
|
| > For example, if I teach a course in "How To Multiply",
| and on the final have ten multiplication problems, if the
| student memorizes the answers to those ten problems, he did
| not learn to multiply.
|
| If that happens, it means you are a lazy fraudulent
| teacher. You insist that they learn more than what is on
| your exam, but you continue to use the same exam because
| you have no work ethic. Perhaps instead of multiplication
| you should go teach ethics in the philosophy department,
| where that sort of thing is considered high performance.
|
| > The professor said some of the planted answers were
| obviously wrong, if one knew the material at all.
|
| I think that "obvious" means something completely different
| than "if you master a university-level field of study, you
| will then know that it is wrong".
|
| Such a thing is, by definition, the very opposite of
| obvious. I don't know how to explain that to you so that
| you can understand. Your words make very little sense, it's
| as if you said "the snow was burning hot" or "that blue
| thing over there is red".
|
| > I disagree with your conclusions.
|
| This would be disappointing, but given that I'm no longer
| certain of what you even mean by "disagree" or
| "conclusions", it might be impolite of me to take that as
| something other than a compliment.
| balderdash wrote:
| You realize how comical it is to rationalize cheating on
| a test in an ethics class, because ethics is worthless!?
| WalterBright wrote:
| > They were in that class because if it wasn't a
| requirement for graduation, no one would take it.
|
| I've heard that one before - if you don't like the class,
| it's ok to cheat? If you want a certification, but don't
| want to do the work, it's ok to cheat? If you sign up to
| get a cert, that means you sign up to meet _all_ the
| requirements of the cert, not just the ones you feel
| like.
|
| > To demand mastery of worthless material so that the
| university can charge them another $5000 in credits,
| fees, and overpriced-by-the-academic-publishing-cartel
| books is not asinine, it's criminal.
|
| If it's worthless, the honorable thing is not to sign up
| for it. Nobody made you.
|
| > I don't know how to explain that to you so that you can
| understand.
|
| No need to be rude. The article made it clear - it would
| be obvious to someone who attended the lectures and paid
| attention.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >A test can only test for a sampling of the material
| presented in class. Specifically looking up the test, and
| memorizing the answers, does not demonstrate any mastery of
| the material.
|
| sure, but giving some data from a previous test is in
| various ways a hint on what to study, so the conclusion
| that he is deliberately misleading students as to what they
| should study does have some limited merit.
| WalterBright wrote:
| What's so hard about just learning the material rather
| than gaming the test?
| danbruc wrote:
| _People looking this up online aren 't cheating, by
| definition they are studying._
|
| Sure, you could look up previous exams for learning the
| topic, but you could as well just copy the answers. Given
| that the answers were [supposedly] obviously wrong and the
| cheating students still used them pretty clearly indicates
| that they were not using previous exams for studying,
| otherwise they would have noticed that the answers are wrong
| as they contradict what was taught in the lectures and what
| other sources say.
|
| _All that 's left is rote memorization. Learn this fact,
| remember this principle in that scenario._
|
| There is a vast gulf between memorizing stuff and
| understanding it. The basic goal of every education is
| understanding existing knowledge and being able to apply it,
| memorizing stuff is not enough and I guess you should not be
| able to pass exams without some level of understanding. Being
| able to go beyond the existing knowledge and having original
| ideas is not required unless you want to go into research.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| This cartoon is a great overview of the legal aspects of
| entrapment.
|
| https://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-w...
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| That _is_ great. Thanks for sharing.
| bawolff wrote:
| I would disagree about entrapment not being a moral principle
| (or its related to one at least). At its core it is basically
| just saying it is wrong to convince people who wouldn't
| otherwise be evil, to be evil.
|
| However this is case is clearly not entrapment.
| lwansbrough wrote:
| Agreed. I'm no moral authority nor expert in ethics but this is
| pretty cut and dry to me. I think the most important aspect of
| entrapment (although all are relevant in the legal sense) is
| the second clause: coercion.
|
| Without being explicitly coerced into doing something "illegal"
| (cheating in this case) I don't see how there could ever be a
| case to make that this is immoral. The students are cheating of
| their own free will. Case closed.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The coercion's implicit.
|
| Ever since these students were 9 years old, everyone around
| them including (and especially) those in public education
| have told them that they need to go to college and get a
| degree or they'd be destitute and living in a ghetto.
|
| Then they get there and college is even more absurd than
| public school ever was. They sit in a giant lecture hall
| listening to these people who don't live in the real world
| with the rest of us talk about things that do not matter (how
| many credits were for something other than electives or your
| major when you went?), threatening to flunk them if they
| can't jump through pointless hoops.
|
| So, they go back to the dorm after class, and do research the
| best way they know how, and they find _relevant study
| materials_. Did he catch them smuggling the answers into
| class on a phone, or written in microscopic print on the
| inside of the rims of their glasses? Were they copying
| someone else 's tests? Did they pay a lookalike ringer to sit
| in on the exam for them?
|
| Hell no. They did what they were supposed to do. They found
| what they thought were the correct answers, and went over
| them enough that they could remember them during the test.
|
| Why would anyone bother to go to this trouble? Because they
| were coerced. They've been coerced since they were children.
| He doesn't get a free pass because someone else volunteered
| to do the coercion for him.
|
| I _might_ be a little more forgiving if they were philosophy
| majors. If that were the case, then presumably they chose
| this field of study, and the class itself is relevant to that
| such that they should be putting in more effort... but even
| in that case, it is sufficient to fail them, because the low
| scores are their only real failing. Even then they haven 't
| cheated.
| prox wrote:
| I am sorry but you make a real tour-de-force out of how
| they are the victim of going to a site that is meant to
| facilitate cheating by looking up answers to exams, not
| learning.
|
| You learn by knowing the material, and if you know the
| material, _you don't have to cheat_
|
| Now you can come up with all kind circumstances that make
| it hard on the students, as you do in your comment, but
| that's another discussion entirely and imo outside the
| scope.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I think it's bizarre and irrational to tell someone "you
| must know the answers to pass this test, but you're not
| allowed to study by looking up answers to questions you
| might find on the test, if you do that it's cheating".
|
| I don't know how anyone who is sane and reasonable could
| ever come to such a conclusion. Perhaps you were
| brainwashed in college.
|
| If a person learns the answer to a question that ends up
| on a final exam years later in their future, but they
| learned the answer to that question "the wrong way", are
| they still cheating? If my 10 year old stumbles on that
| site, reads a question and remembers it for the next 9
| years... should he, on the first day of class confess to
| his professor that he learned the answer the wrong way so
| that he can be expelled for pre-emptive cheating?
|
| If he shouldn't be expelled, what if it's only 4 years in
| the future? What if it's only 8 months?
|
| Does your answer to my question actually depend on how
| far in the future someone learns the answer by "the
| cheating method"? Is it not about how long, but rather
| how many answers? Like is 1 answer or 3 ok, but 40 is
| absolutely cheating? Where is the line there?
|
| Yes, they're the victim. The professor has his head
| stuffed up his own ass so deeply he probably sees the
| glint off the backs of his molars.
|
| > You learn by knowing the material, and if you know the
| material, you don't have to cheat
|
| This is some nonsense statement spoken by an alien from
| Zepton VII. It has no appreciable semantic content. It
| can't, because what the professor describes in his whiny
| rant are a bunch of students who went to a website that
| had the material, and they learned it well enough to put
| that material into their answers on the exam. If they had
| not done so, then he wouldn't have been able to "catch"
| them.
|
| Now, you might argue that they put down wrong answers.
| And this is true. That happened because he deliberately
| contaminated the study materials with wrong answers. Who
| can blame students who learn the wrong facts when the
| professor himself is deliberately teaching them the wrong
| facts as a gotcha?
|
| This is beyond absurd.
|
| If he wanted to encourage them to learn all the answers
| to all the questions (and not just those questions likely
| to be on a test), he could... just for instance... not do
| multiple choice. Or make sure he always has unique
| questions on his exams, every year (well, assuming there
| are ever more than 40 questions in a liberal arts class,
| imagine paying $1600/credit-hour for 4 months that only
| has 40 noteworthy questions).
|
| He didn't do that because he's lazy. He doesn't want to
| grade essay questions, and he doesn't want to spend time
| actually writing a new exam every year. You know, the
| stuff the university is (theoretically) paying him to do.
|
| If you don't understand anything in my comment, that's
| ok. I understand everything in yours, including most of
| the likely reasons that you can't understand anything in
| mine.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Show us on the doll where the bad academia hurt you.
|
| > If you don't understand anything in my comment, that's
| ok. I understand everything in yours, including most of
| the likely reasons that you can't understand anything in
| mine.
|
| Ironic that you consider the teacher to have his head up
| his ass, then write something as obnoxious and
| condescending as this.
| Zak wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to the idea that society treating people
| with university degrees better than those without is
| harmful in a sociological sense and likely to increase
| cheating in universities. I'm less sympathetic to
| individual students actually cheating in the manner
| described.
|
| The article says the test was take home, meaning in a
| practical sense, they could access any resources they
| wanted while taking the test. They did not need to memorize
| material as your comment suggests, and would have had the
| opportunity to copy answers.
|
| > _Were they copying someone else 's tests?_
|
| Yes. They were copying what they thought were a previous
| student's answers to the same test.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Entrapment and RICO!
| hartator wrote:
| > I decided to 'poison the well' by uploading [to Quizlet] a copy
| of my final with wrong answers. (The final is 70-80 questions,
| all multiple choice, 5 options each.) Most of these answers were
| not just wrong, but obviously wrong to anyone who had paid
| attention in class. My thinking was that anyone who gave a
| sufficient number of those same answers would be exposing
| themselves, not only as someone who cheated by looking up the
| final online, but who didn't even pay enough attention in class
| to notice how wrong the answers were.
|
| I think that's reasonable. I would even consider expelling
| students who did this; specially in college, specially in an
| ethics course.
| PopGreene wrote:
| I had a prof that did something like this. It was back in the
| 80s, so no internet. Instead, because it was a large class, he
| had to give the mid-terms to different parts of the class. He
| would make all the tests look similar, but with small
| differences. If the right wrong answers turned up, he would fail
| the student. (I hope that makes sense.)
|
| At the end of the semester, he explained what was going on. The
| course was required for the degree (EE), you had to have a C or
| above to pass, and it was a bear. He said right out, the course
| was designed to cull the heard.
|
| A few students were outraged. I'm not surprised by the reaction
| Merriam got. Speaking for myself, I was indifferent to what he
| had done, though I didn't speak up. I think he should ask the
| students that he determined hadn't cheated what they think.
| robochat wrote:
| This feels harsh because if the tests were similar but with
| small differences then getting the right wrong answers seems
| likely to happen anyway. Also, he went the extra step and
| outright failed the student but I'm not sure why that extra
| step was justified, surely the cheaters were automatically
| going to get very poor marks.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> He said right out, the course was designed to cull the
| heard.
|
| That seems unethical too. Students are paying to learn
| material. Professors are ostensibly there to teach it. Making
| it extra hard seems to go against that.
| catapart wrote:
| Are you trying to teach kids to not cheat? Or are you trying to
| teach them how to conceptualize, illustrate (if not demonstrate),
| and structure ethics such that they can make critical and
| thoughtful deductions or contributions to the field?
|
| Because, if it's the former: great job, Ranger Rick. You
| definitely used a method that will root out cheaters and give
| them some (small/limited) incentive not to cheat anymore.
|
| But, if it's the latter, you've failed your students in every
| respect. It's not even a clean example of the ethics of cheating,
| because you've tipped the scales in ways that affect multiple
| variables, instead of just one.
|
| Neither of which is ethical or unethical in the vacuums of
| consideration that any subject remains neutral in. But if the
| context is that it's a philosophy class, I would expect the
| teacher teach me philosophical ethics and let the chaff fall
| where it may, rather than try to "prove" some nebulous idea of
| what it means to "know" something, and why one method of being
| able to 'prove' it is inferior to some other method. Put simply:
| I'm in this class to learn. If you're giving me the information
| and then I pass the test, that's your entire responsibility.
| Whatever third parties are doing - so long as it's not infringing
| on you - is not relevant. Not to your class and my grades. Sorry
| you're one of THOSE teachers, but learning isn't a test. It's a
| lifelong pursuit and you can't force people to pursue what
| they're A) not interested in or B) deft enough to use digital
| memory for.
| elliotto wrote:
| Thank you for this comment. It's fascinating how everyone else
| in this thread seems to view education as a tool purely to
| acquire qualifications rather than for actually learning
| anything. I wonder if this is a US thing that has come about as
| the result of education becoming a financial instrument.
| catapart wrote:
| I honestly think it's more of a reactionary thing. Cheating
| is bad. That's a pretty uncontroversial statement. Whatever
| the criteria for "cheating", if we're all agreeing that you
| did it, that's bad and deserves 'correction'.
|
| Once you're there, there's not a lot of reason to go further.
| "Did he cheat? Yes? Then he bad." Easy peasy, next topic of
| consideration. Why spend more time on something that has a
| simple answer?
|
| In this scenario, the students did what would have
| unequivocally been a "cheat", in generations past. They
| looked up answers and used them to prove knowledge. That's
| what every person who ever failed a math test for cheating
| did.
|
| So, again, even going deeper, this is cheating, plain and
| simple. No need to wade in any further, when you've already
| given the benefit of the doubt.
|
| Of course, this not being math, and technology replacing the
| need for such conventions in math are both important
| considerations that change the context. But, you have to give
| it now a third thought before you even get to this point, and
| of course, here's where things are quite subjective. I bet
| people would still pretend that knowing math is important for
| whatever corner of life they inhabit ("I work construction
| and geometry makes you a pro", "gotta be able to calculate
| tips", "you'll get killed on contracts with tricky rates").
| Most would also quickly concede that if they were just taught
| how to get to interfaces (apps/websites/etc) that solve those
| problems, that would be effective as well (even if they
| couldn't help adding "but knowing is
| faster/better/convenient/etc"). And so, not only are we
| dealing with subjectivity and historical bias, but now also a
| confirmation bias. And all of that is on top of the authority
| bias that a lot of people START with ("the authority said
| don't do it; the students did it; they should fail."
|
| So, personally, I don't chalk up to
| indoctrination/conspiracy/malice anything that can be assumed
| to be myopia/selfishness/fear/distrust/etc. Humans are
| capable of the formers, but far more susceptible to the
| latters. That said, I'm never going to defend the US
| educational system, so I'm not disagree with you.
| gizmo wrote:
| Cheating is extremely common, so much so that students cheat
| during an _ethics exam_. People overwhelmingly find
| justifications for their actions, and cheaters are no
| exception.
|
| From the comments in this thread you can draw the obvious
| conclusion: many people here justify cheating because they
| are cheaters themselves and they don't want to acknowledge
| cheating is shameful.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| With all due respect, this is nonsense. This is a teacher and a
| human being that exists and works within a system. You seem to
| be one of those people who thinks that teachers are some kind
| of supernatural, super-powerful heroes of humanity who have the
| responsibility on their backs to be larger than life. This guy
| has to apply exams; it's not something he wants, it's what he
| needs to do in the system. And he has to grade 96 of them. And
| he is a human being. Do you know what it would take to assess
| 96 students in the way you are describing?
|
| Plus, cheating or not cheating is an _ethical_ matter, not a
| pedagogical one. He is not trying to teach anyone not to cheat.
| The expectation of not cheating comes as a pre-requisite of any
| formal education. He has the social duty to capture cheaters
| because if not he is failing the society and system who have
| given him the responsibility to not only educate, but to
| certify someone 's skills. If the cheaters get out there with a
| diploma in their hands, certified by him (and his institution),
| he has failed those who believe in that diploma's validity.
|
| Everything you said about learning being a lifelong pursuit
| that can't be forced, etc. are personal pursuits which are
| independent and orthogonal to this teacher's formal
| responsibilities in the educational system.
| overgard wrote:
| I think it amusing and I don't have a problem with what he
| did, but I guess I don't really understand why teachers get
| so fired up about the subject in the first place. If people
| are in the class to fill out a general education requirement
| or something and otherwise don't care about the topic or will
| never use it again, why get so vigilant about it? And the
| students that do want to continue in philosophy would just be
| punishing themselves by cheating.
| 6D794163636F756 wrote:
| I think you have to verify that cheating did not occur in order
| to verify if they have learned the ethics espoused by the
| course. Tests function to prevent those who have not understood
| the course material from claiming they have. In that situation
| verification of truthfulness is required before you can verify
| their skills
| catapart wrote:
| That assumes that a student is incapable of understanding the
| ethics without being able to practice the ethics. I think you
| would have a high bar in proving that to be the case. A lot
| of people do shit they, personally, find unethical, so long
| as they can square it with their own contexts of exceptions.
|
| The provided test tries to have it both ways, but that's
| invalid. If they are supposed to be learning the answers to
| the questions on the test, they can prove that even if they
| looked those answers up. But if the test is to not look up
| answers and then they get a score reflecting their ethics,
| then the class is meant to make more ethical students; not to
| have more people understand the answers to the questions on
| the test.
|
| At best, you could make the case for the ethical test being a
| component to the class. Give it a rigorous score, just like
| you do for any other answer on the test (pass/fail seems
| reductive, in this scenario, but it's reductive for a lot of
| tests answers, so whatever. bless the teachers who give
| partial points). But verifying what a student KNOWS does not,
| in any way, involve what ACTIONS they take.
| 6D794163636F756 wrote:
| You make a lot of good points and it's made me think that
| there is a fundamental assumption that tests are useful. I
| think that that is not the case. As you said this test
| attempt to both validate knowledge and ethics and ends up
| invalidating itself. It seems to be a flaw intrinsic to
| this style of test.
|
| I have taken some very well constructed tests. They were
| not takehome and only one was multiple choice (it was a
| systems class so it became sets of binary answers which
| became more than multiple choice). I think that ensuring
| the integrity of answers in necessary for gaging learnings
| from a test like this but that need, as you've implied,
| would indicate that the test is the wrong tool
| catapart wrote:
| I think you're right in that most test aren't useful for
| what they are trying to assess. And that you can't
| validate anything that you can't trust the integrity of.
|
| But I think the takeaway is that "critical application"
| is what constitutes a valuable test. In math, that just
| means "can you use the procedures of mathematics
| correctly, resulting in the correct answer?" But in, say,
| English, memorization has very little value. A valuable
| test would be in testing whether or not a student can
| match events in a dramatic story to, say, modern real
| world events and critically discuss the similarities and
| differences. And, unfortunately, writing that out
| clinically and expecting a student to both understand it
| and be able to do it on command while under pressure of
| failure is not exactly conducive to positive results. So
| English tests really shouldn't look anything like Math
| tests, once you get past the point of memorizing
| definitions.
|
| The same is true of all disciplines. Tests should be
| generated (and often updated) based on what is currently
| useful to the discipline in a real and practical sense,
| at a fundamental level, and then on a more philosophical
| or exploratory sense once you get into higher learning.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think both? At least, when I was in school, I thought one of
| the first-order lessons they were trying to teach us was to not
| cheat, while also teaching us other things.
| catapart wrote:
| Yeah, but WHY would they want to teach you not to cheat? It's
| not a virtue, in and of itself (cheating has to be defined
| for each context it's in so "don't cheat" is like saying
| "don't be bad"). They teach you not to cheat because if you
| cheat, you won't know the answer when you need it.
|
| If you're a doctor, and don't know the answer to a question
| when you need it, you might kill someone. A lawyer has
| problems there, too. There are great values in keeping people
| from relying on deferred knowledge, in a great many
| applications.
|
| I just don't see how philosophical ethics - especially not a
| mid-level course - benefits from those same
| lessons/limitations. If a software developer isn't expected
| to know every language pattern; only how to look up the
| patterns they need, when they need them, then why would then
| be disallowed from doing that on a test? A better test would
| target different metrics than "correct answer" or "incorrect
| answer". The same thing applies here. You can do software dev
| without being able to pass an "internal knowledge only" test.
| You can be productive with ethical philosophy without being
| able to pass an "internal knowledge only" test.
|
| So yes, both is the goal. What I'm getting at is that both
| SHOULDN'T be the goal. In a lot of cases. Most, I'd hazard to
| guess.
| sanderjd wrote:
| That's not why they teach you not to cheat. That's why they
| teach doctors (and other kinds of students) that they need
| to memorize some things in order to have fast recall
| without requiring a reference.
|
| But they teach you not to cheat because cheating is bad, on
| its own terms. The purpose of education is not just to
| teach facts, but also to teach young people how to be net-
| positive members of society. (This is why society
| subsidizes education.) Teaching not to cheat to get ahead
| falls within that part of the curriculum.
| catapart wrote:
| Nothing I said implies I think education only teaches
| fact. Obviously I believe the contrary, as evidenced by
| my comments. As far as education teaching people how to
| be net-positive members of society, I agree that's what
| the education we subsidize is intended for, but that
| doesn't apply to this situation. A mid-level psychology
| course at a higher learning institution. If you honestly
| think that the GOAL of that course is to teach children
| not to cheat, I think you're grossly mistaken. First and
| foremost by the fact that not all students are "young
| people". And then by the fact that we have other courses,
| even in higher learning institutions, that deal with
| teaching the students ethics. In the other classes, as
| with all other areas of life, you're just expected to
| employ the ethics of the society. It's a meta-
| reinforcement of those lessons, but the reinforcements
| are not the lessons of the other classes. If a student
| fails in their ethics classes due to their ethical
| decisions, that makes sense. If a student fails math with
| the right answers but the wrong "ethics", that doesn't
| make sense. Unethically sourced math answers can still
| provide the solutions to problems. Just ask NASA.
|
| So then, if a professor of an unrelated or tangentially
| related field takes it upon themselves to make a lesson
| out of what should be a meta-reinforcement, in a field
| that they readily admit that they are unprepared to work
| in or do data analysis for, that is not a reasonable
| source of ethical education. Especially not when done
| without prior social experiment approval and safeguards.
| sanderjd wrote:
| There are two different questions: 1. Are these the right
| rules? and 2. Should students be taught to follow well
| defined rules?
|
| You're almost entirely talking about #1, and I totally
| agree. The vast majority of classes should not forbid
| looking stuff up because it is an artificial constraint
| that doesn't reflect the reality outside school.
|
| But I think #2 is also important. I know it's passe,
| especially in the silicon valley milieu that we swim in
| here, but I think "not following rules you personally
| think are stupid is good" is a bad lesson for students to
| learn.
|
| (FWIW: I thought the opposite when I was a student, but I
| was a short-sighted idiot when I was a student.)
| overgard wrote:
| > The purpose of education is not just to teach facts,
| but also to teach young people how to be net-positive
| members of society. (This is why society subsidizes
| education.)
|
| If only this were true. If you read the history of
| education, it was generally invented to create compliant
| factory workers that were adjusted to rigid schedules and
| strict authorities. (Its not a coincidence that so many
| schools are named after robber barons. Rockefeller,
| Carnegie, Vanderbilt, etc) University used to be a bit
| different, but now that everyone is expected to go and
| its about vending credentials it's arguable that creating
| well rounded individuals is at best an occasional bonus.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > But they teach you not to cheat because cheating is
| bad, on its own terms. The purpose of education is not
| just to teach facts, but also to teach young people how
| to be net-positive members of society. (This is why
| society subsidizes education.) Teaching not to cheat to
| get ahead falls within that part of the curriculum.
|
| That is highly debatable. Cheating most often affects the
| cheater, if anything, because when they need a skill they
| pretended to have, they'll fail at real-life tasks. But
| nobody else is affected by cheating.
| meatmanek wrote:
| > Cheating most often affects the cheater, if anything,
| because when they need a skill they pretended to have,
| they'll fail at real-life tasks. But nobody else is
| affected by cheating.
|
| Except the people standing on the bridge designed by the
| civil engineer who cheated, or getting radiation therapy
| from a machine programmed by a cheating software
| engineer, or being treated by a doctor who cheated in med
| school.
|
| Cheaters getting degrees from an institution that's
| supposed to produce high-quality graduates is bad for the
| value of that degree, which is bad for the institution,
| anyone else who went there, and anyone who relies on that
| degree as a signal that the graduate has the skills
| they're supposed to have.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Also, the lesson is broader than this. In the real world,
| "cheating" is fraud. The lesson I'm saying educational
| institutions have a valuable social role in teaching is:
| follow the rules. I know that's naive and passe, but it's
| also important and a lesson most people actually learn
| well, to all our benefit. People who think they are
| entitled to cheat and get away with it are bad for
| society.
| colinsane wrote:
| back in my day -- which really wasn't very long ago -- profs used
| to google their exams before administering them. if they found
| results (like this), they would simply administer a different
| (new) exam.
|
| it's work: it might mean maintaining a pool of questions double
| the size of your exams ready to go at any moment, but it's a
| decent way to just not have to worry about this.
|
| the response, hopefully unsurprisingly, is that past students
| would circulate their exams under the table. every big frat
| maintained a dropbox (or megaupload, at the time) of scanned
| exams, with links shared only to the frat members.
|
| i actually did study for exams. i wasn't in a frat but one day a
| friend from a frat showed up to our study session with some
| "practice exams" for us. i learned about these scans and worked
| some grease to get access to these files for a good 4-5 different
| frats.
|
| if doing homework is prep for the exam, then working through past
| exams is even better prep for the exam. having access to
| realistic exams was a _huge_ leg up for me, even when the
| questions didn't overlap. the best profs were aware of this and
| just published their previous exams on their course webpage to
| level the field. yeah, it's extra work to write a new exam every
| year but that's just what you do: especially if doing so
| encourages your students to study!
| low_tech_love wrote:
| I work in a small university with local students that are
| aggressively average, if not a bit below that. Especially when it
| comes to writing a thesis, our expectations are extremely low,
| and the success rate is abysmal (something like 30% of the
| students in a year will actually defend their theses). If a
| student can reach something like, say, 10 people to do a
| usability test, we are extremely happy and will pass them with a
| smile on our faces.
|
| This year one of my students claimed to have done a user
| experience test with 30+ people, all of which came in person to
| his house during a period of 4 days. This is extremely unlikely,
| not to say absurdly unrealistic. If he had done it via Zoom I
| might maybe believe, but in person? Sorry, but no. I asked him
| what did his parents think of it, and magically they were both
| travelling that specific week. Then I asked him to scan and send
| me the signed consent forms for each participant; he promptly
| said "ok, coming!" then about 8h later I got a bunch of signed
| scans. Not sure what to do anymore, I guess he'll have his
| thesis.
| k0k0r0 wrote:
| This surprisingly remind me of the last to birthday parties I
| organized for myself. Unexpectedly I managed to get much more
| people together than I expected. Simply by actually trying to
| ask as many people as possible. I was really happy about this.
| Both times.
|
| Maybe that student was doing the same. Simply asking a lot of
| people. And other studends usually do not. I find it really
| hard to overcome my own shyness in this regard. And I wouldn't
| consider myself particularly shy. I assume a lot of people
| simply do not try asking enough people in order to get a decent
| amount of them to join.
|
| Of course that guy might be simply cheating, but I just wanted
| to share the story.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > Not sure what to do anymore,
|
| Scan the signatures and reverse image search them. Or look one
| or two of the people up on facebook and ask them whether they
| did the study.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| To add: If it turns on this is legit, ask him how he did it
| so that you can advise others on what to do for their theses.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > This year one of my students claimed to have done a user
| experience test with 30+ people, all of which came in person to
| his house during a period of 4 days. This is extremely
| unlikely, not to say absurdly unrealistic.
|
| I'm not familiar with conducting a user experience test. Why is
| this so unbelievable? (Also, the rest of the story is kinda
| hilarious; there will definitely need to be some standards and
| process changes in academia.)
| q845712 wrote:
| depends on the situation but generally most people aren't
| that enthusiastic to be your UX guinea pigs, and it isn't
| that much fun to administer the same test so many times in a
| single day (think of how bored your optometrist sounds as
| they ask you which lens is better). I worked at a shop that
| had a target of 3-5 users for any given UX testing because
| usually it starts to get repetitive after that - you tend to
| hit the diminishing returns portion of the curve.
|
| So if you assume that the UX tests were short (20-30 minutes)
| you're still talking ~15 total hours spent on UX testing, or
| two full work days. That would be a surprising amount of
| time.
|
| As someone else said, it's conceivable that they ran very
| short studies on a large number of people in the context of
| having a party or a couple of small gatherings, but it does
| seem unlikely overall.
| krisoft wrote:
| > This year one of my students claimed to have done a user
| experience test with 30+ people, all of which came in person to
| his house during a period of 4 days.
|
| Is it possible that maybe he thrown a big party (or a series of
| parties) and asked the folks there to try his stuff? Not sure
| what is the length and depth of the usability test in question,
| but if it is a short questionnaire that might work? But I see
| where your suspicion is coming from.
| bachmeier wrote:
| In middle school, I put a lot of time into a paper for a
| history class, at least three times what anyone else did
| (probably more). I got a B for the class. The teacher said it
| felt like the paper was copied, because the writing was "too
| professional" and that middle school students don't write like
| that. The teacher was wrong. I just happened to have worked
| really hard because the topic was interesting to me.
| reformedposter wrote:
| The argument for these ethics classes being mandatory in the CS
| curriculum is that they will prevent unethical behavior in
| industry. The article demonstrates the classes aren't even
| effective at preventing unethical behavior in the same classroom
| they're taught in. Waste of time.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Am I the only one here who thinks the prof's statistical
| reasoning, which is being waved at as proof, is really, really
| bad?
|
| And I mean, aside from the whole typical fallacy of treating a
| p-value as a statement on posterior probability.
| johntiger1 wrote:
| Nah you're valid
| codetrotter wrote:
| He did the right thing.
| contravariant wrote:
| To me looking up old exams is normal, it's not even remotely
| cheating, heck it may even be expected. Saying a website that
| lists old exams is 'ostensibly' a study aid seems disingenuous.
| Poisoning said site with wrong information is just making things
| harder for the students which is _the opposite_ from what a
| teacher is supposed to be doing.
|
| However what I don't understand is why that even mattered.
|
| Were the students just learning the questions and answers by
| heart to regurgitate them on the final exam? If they had any
| understanding at all they should have caught on, but even if they
| didn't they would simply demonstrate their lack of understanding,
| it is not dishonest.
|
| Or did they get to fill in the answers unsupervised somewhere?
| Because if they were left unsupervised with access the web then
| this is likely just the tip of the iceberg, they could more
| easily cheat by discussing the questions with each other.
|
| Edit: Reading more carefully it was a take-home exam apparently,
| which seems to have consisted of multiple-choice questions that
| are largely the same each year. I can vaguely see how looking up
| old exams would invalidate it as a test, but if your test is
| invalidated by normal exam preparation is it the exam's fault or
| the student's?
| Baeocystin wrote:
| >To me looking up old exams is normal, it's not even remotely
| cheating, heck it may even be expected.
|
| When I was at uni in the early 90's, several of my professors
| handed out older versions of their tests so that we could see
| the shape of the thing and prepare. We all appreciated it, too.
| robochat wrote:
| It was an online course and the exam was online too.
| nocoiner wrote:
| For all he knows, the students went to a site with study
| materials to prep for a test. His policy of disallowing
| students to refer to prior tests was not even explicit in the
| syllabus, but behind a link. If this policy were clear upfront
| - absolutely, reference to outside materials is inappropriate
| and there should be consequences. But I don't think it's
| reasonable to impose these consequences after the fact based on
| a reference to a reference.
|
| Based on his post, my assessment is that the prof is lazy and
| an asshole. Maybe there are other relevant factors that would
| change my analysis, but I have to think this is the version of
| the story that puts the prof in the most favorable possible
| light, so....
| danbruc wrote:
| _For all he knows, the students went to a site with study
| materials to prep for a test._
|
| Generally previous exams are good for checking that you
| understood a topic but you can not really study a topic only
| from past multiple choice tests. If they had studied the
| topic and gained some understanding, they would have noticed
| that the answers are wrong. Even just looking at two
| different past exams would probably reveal that something is
| off.
| none_to_remain wrote:
| I had a similar reaction. I was surprised that this school's
| policy forbids looking at old exams. I checked my alma mater's
| policies and they do not. Students openly sought out copies of
| old exams from upperclassmen or from repositories kept by a few
| cliques/clubs. Some professors themselves provided a collection
| of old tests so everyone had easy & equal access.
|
| I guess an important difference is going for engineering, it
| was trivial for professors to change numbers & details from
| year to year so old tests could aid study but not provide
| answers.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| On the case presented I have to say, the professor is being
| unethical. Looking up questions and answers to previous exams is
| practically studying. The point is to know the subject matter not
| to read it through a specific source or in a specific format.
|
| He should stop being lazy and vary the questions every year. If
| after a few years there is a body of previous exams covering the
| entire subject matter, then great the students "cheating" will be
| studying the entire course in Q/A format.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| It's not evident to me that knowing particular questions and
| answers in a multiple choice test is equivalent to knowing the
| subject matter. If these were essay or short-answer exams I
| might feel differently (though being able to copy-and-paste
| would make actually reading the correct answers, much less
| understanding them, optional).
| jpk2f2 wrote:
| At the universities I'm familiar with, looking up and using
| previous exams (not provided by the teacher) is explicitly
| considered cheating.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I (perhaps incorrectly) inferred that they copied from the site
| during the take-home exam, which is clearly cheating.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| Ah, I missed the take home aspect. Then yes that would be
| clearly cheating.
| nigamanth wrote:
| I think it's perfectly fair for the prof to catch students who
| are cheating this way.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| how would they have performed if they tried to cheat but didn't
| find the poisoned answers? would they have had to come up with
| answers on their own? suppose they cheated for 10% of the
| answers but had to give honest effort on the remaining 90% and
| just made the cut?
|
| i don't think it's very clear cut or obviously perfectly fair.
| mu00 wrote:
| > how would they have performed if they tried to cheat but
| didn't find the poisoned answers?
|
| I don't think this matters. Cheating was against the rules
| and a cheater demonstrates a failure to adhere to a social
| contract and voluntarily waives their right to be assessed
| the same with those who did follow the rules. At least there
| are avenues for a cheater to have another attempt, even if
| they have to move to another institution.
| jpk2f2 wrote:
| Their hypothetical score is irrelevant, as they will be
| receiving a zero due to cheating. In your hypothetical
| scenario they are still cheating, in which case their
| improved score would also become a zero.
| abeppu wrote:
| Given that this was an ethics course, I think it's
| interesting/surprising that the professor doesn't seem to be
| trying to engage with what I'm guessing was the course material
| in this discussion. "Am I the unethical one" the right question?
| How about "Under which formulations of normative ethics is my
| behavior wrong?"
|
| 1. Is it _good_ to catch cheating? If these are students who are
| just checking some distributional requirement box, does it matter
| if they actually understood the material? Potentially there is
| harm (delayed graduation, literal costs, etc) from failing
| students (or having them be subject to some other discipline).
| Perhaps under a consequentialist framing, catching cheaters isn't
| good. But does the professor have a deontological obligation to
| catch cheating, and to make a good-faith effort to have fair
| outcomes in which students who studied and understood the
| material receive better grades than cheaters?
|
| 2. Is the method of catching cheaters relevant? If catching
| cheaters is good for consequentialist reasons, isn't any
| effective means of catching cheaters (which does not cause other
| harms) also good? Certainly the objection that the professor was
| dishonest by uploading the bad test sounds like it's from a
| deontological / rules-oriented view.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > But does the professor have a deontological obligation to
| catch cheating, and to make a good-faith effort to have fair
| outcomes in which students who studied and understood the
| material receive better grades than cheaters?
|
| Most courses are either graded on a curve or the material is
| adjusted in difficulty to target a certain level of challenge.
|
| When cheaters come in and destroy that curve and inject false
| signal into the difficulty feedback loop, the non-cheaters
| suffer from increased difficulty.
|
| So yes, there is some obligation to keep the playing field fair
| and accurate.
|
| Given that grades can have an impact on real-world outcomes
| (e.g. admission to a desired graduate program) then it's
| possible that allowing cheating can have broad impacts beyond
| the students. Imagine if you took some 4.0GPA students under
| the assumption that they actually _learned_ what they claim,
| then discover that they have no idea what they're doing because
| they cheated the whole way.
|
| Also, the mind boggles at the suggestion that catching cheaters
| is bad because they might face some consequences for their
| dishonesty.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Most courses are either graded on a curve or the material
| is adjusted in difficulty to target a certain level of
| challenge.
|
| Thankfully not the case where I went to university. The bar
| was clearly set in the first lecture: If your overall score
| is 90+%, you get an A. 80-90%, a B, and so on. Doesn't matter
| what your peers do.
|
| University is (or should be) about learning, not about
| competition with peers.
|
| When I read the article, my mind was clear: He is not the
| unethical one. That's assuming no curve. If he is curving,
| I'm all for any method that messes up the curve, because
| curves are (generally) a bad idea.
| DavidWoof wrote:
| I feel like you're missing something basic. The professor
| classifies this as a "cheating site", and his entire article
| assumes this classification, but the site portrays itself as a
| study aid. If we skip the editorializing, what the professor
| actually did was seed misinformation on the Internet to see who
| would fall for it.
|
| Would you feel differently if he had edited the Wikipedia page
| for his subject to see which students used it as a study aid?
|
| The equation of "you found this info on the Internet instead of
| in the approved course material and therefore you're cheating"
| doesn't seem completely solid to me.
| prox wrote:
| The pirate bay might describe itself as a software sharing
| website, it's kind of a moot point what they describe
| themselves as in that sense.
|
| The students are still responsible for what they take in
| outside of the materials provided. Wikipedia is even at the
| best of times not always correct. I see lot of people waving
| the responsibility of students away.
|
| The students took a chance, knowing _fully well_ what the
| site is and does, and they got burned. Own it and take the
| burn.
| paulsutter wrote:
| You're making it too abstract. The professor's actions are
| hilarious and fair game by any measure. Bravo, well played.
| It's such a good idea that I'm surprised its not already
| commonplace.
|
| As for consequences, thats up to university policy
|
| > I am in discussion with my Chair about exactly what response
| is appropriate for these students, but a zero on the final is
| the bare minimum, and an F in the class is likely for some, if
| not all of those who cheated.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| "Fair game" maybe? But we're talking about ethics.
|
| The professor intentionally taught students incorrect
| information when they were seeking out resources to help them
| learn the material.
|
| Maybe a student spent 2 days studying those incorrect
| answers. I don't know if there have been studies on this, but
| I suspect it's much more difficult to unlearn false
| information one has absorbed than it is to learn the correct
| information in the first place.
|
| In other words, the professor experimented on his students in
| a way that shows he's more interested in determining whether
| or not they were "cheating" (by his definition) than he is in
| helping them learn the material in a substantive way, and
| assessing whether he has adequately taught them.
|
| Any student failing the exam because they studied the
| poisoned material is just a testament to how much he failed
| as a teacher.
| abeppu wrote:
| > You're making it too abstract.
|
| A _philosophy professor_ asked a question about _ethics_.
| [deleted]
| AstralStorm wrote:
| 1. Absolute good is problematic even for philosophers. Under
| consequentialist framework, catching cheaters would allow
| others or yourself to reeducate them, causing a lot of social
| repercussions, especially if the test contained safety
| instruction. The consequences of cheating are very complex, and
| ones of fostering cheating behavior even more so.
|
| 2. It is, in as much as you believe AI should provide accurate
| answers to others or force them to think for themselves
| instead. The professor is honest in deontological point of view
| in that they're not lying to a person, but are lying in
| general. Depending on deontology in question this may or may
| not be allowed.
| chungy wrote:
| Nope, not unethical.
| throwerofstone wrote:
| While I've always had a negative outlook on the modern school
| system due to my own experiences, I fail to see how the answer to
| the title could be anything but "yes".
|
| I've seen this many times before, where a teacher seems to fail
| to realize that their students don't just have their own exam to
| prepare for; they have to prepare for many other exams at the
| same time, all the while struggling to balance their study time
| with their responsibilites at home, their social life and
| possibly their part-time job at the same time.
|
| So when an answer sheet is just readily available online, there
| aren't many students who wouldn't choose to spend a few hours
| memorizing the answers so they have a little more breathing room
| for other (possibly more difficult) exams.
|
| The statements about how this teacher apparently feels oh-so
| stressful about this situation that he purposefully created
| himself, all the while dismissing any and all critique from
| people because they aren't "teachers of any kind" feels very
| childish and leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.
| [deleted]
| bilvar wrote:
| Ok, let's not inconvenience the students anymore with studying
| then since they're so busy. We should just award them a degree
| after 4 years of being in the unversity's register.
| throwerofstone wrote:
| My point is that expecting time-pressed students to ignore
| freely available answer sheets is like expecting a hungry
| horse to ignore a carrot dangling in front of them.
|
| There is nothing wrong with removing their ability to cheat,
| but purposefully uploading answer sheets and then getting
| angry that students made use of them isn't. In fact, it's not
| just wrong: it's ethically wrong.
| mu00 wrote:
| I think the "anger" is merited since the students (1)
| cheated when they were clearly told not to and (2) marked
| answers that were "obviously wrong" which implies that not
| even a modicum of effort was invested in demonstrating
| knowledge.
|
| The "busy" argument is a poor one. We're all busy. Part of
| gaining an education is learning how to manage your time.
| As a professor myself, I know for a fact that most students
| manage their time poorly, yet many students will still pull
| the "busy" argument when it simply doesn't apply. Rather,
| just admit to procrastinating. Either way, the outcome is
| the same (poor performance).
|
| To sum up my sentiments to cheaters... "Play stupid games,
| win stupid prizes."
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| He's not unethical, just lazy. He should make better tests, and
| update them every term.
|
| He doesn't need to frame the questions the same way each year.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > I decided to 'poison the well' by uploading [to Quizlet] a copy
| of my final with wrong answers. ... My thinking was that anyone
| who gave a sufficient number of those same answers would be
| exposing themselves
|
| I kinda don't get this. Doesn't this also potentially catch
| students who used Quizlet to study and happened to find this
| teacher's "poisoned" exam? It seems like there's a pretty decent
| chance that at least some of the 1/3rd of the students who
| profess their innocence are telling the truth. Was anything done
| to account for that, or was it assumed that use of the site is
| cheating?
|
| > I'm neither a forensic mathematician, nor a cop, so this work
| took a lot of time that I would have preferred to have spent
| grading final essays.
|
| If one is willing to admit that they are not a forensic
| mathematician they can also be willing to admit that they made a
| mistake with their forensic mathematics. This person seems to
| have over-assumed a lack of mistakes in their understanding
| considering the certainty with which they choose to end these
| academic careers.
|
| Edit:
|
| > As far as Quizlet goes, all I did was go to the website that is
| _designed to facilitate cheating_ and set up a kind of camera to
| see who visited it. (emphasis mine)
|
| So they just assume that a person using the website is cheating.
| One might actually make flash cards based on previous exam
| questions/answers using said information to be certain that their
| flash cards are accurate. What if that person was thinking to
| themselves, "This doesn't sound right, but if that's what's on
| the test..."?
| iinnPP wrote:
| The answers were purposely wrong though and supposedly
| obviously so. Something I have seen in every multiple choice
| test I have ever taken.
|
| I don't think it's possible anyone legitimately studied using
| easily determined false information. If they did, failing the
| course seems appropriate anyway.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| They're on a website which is telling them that they're
| getting real exam questions and answers. It's reasonable to
| expect the questions and answers are not false and make,
| e.g., flash cards from them.
|
| I'm not so sure I'd agree that failing the course is really
| appropriate. These people are paying to learn and the teacher
| provided wrong answers to students who may have legitimately
| been looking to _study_. Of course, 2 /3 of the students
| admit it, so it's moot in those cases; at least some of those
| who claim innocence may have a reasonable claim.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Making flash cards from the exam's answer sheet is somewhat
| hard to defend on it's own. But when you're getting tested
| for your knowledge of a subject, and you make flash cards
| from an exam's answer sheet with blatantly incorrect
| answers that demonstrates a lack of knowledge, I have a
| hard time feeling sympathy.
|
| To oversimplify, it's hard to defend a CS exam where a
| student selects (D) here and their excuse was that a flash
| card told them to do it:
|
| How would you import a module in javascript?
|
| A) import * from 'foo'
|
| B) from 'foo' import *
|
| C) import { * } from 'foo'
|
| D) for i in `seq 1 10`; do echo "$i"; done
|
| Note, there are a tonne of questions upstream from this
| like the validity of requiring these students to be taking
| this class, and requiring them to take this exam, and this
| format of testing students, etc. But keeping the question
| of whether the student's outcome was reasonably impacted by
| the decision to replace the answer sheet with a fake answer
| sheet on Quizlet, I have a hard time believing it did.
| [deleted]
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I don't specifically disagree that the student should
| have failed the course when they clearly do not
| understand the material. I know that's contradictory to
| what I said above; from one perspective (the
| university's; rule-based) they should fail and from
| another (the one for which I am arguing) they should not.
|
| > whether the student's outcome was reasonably impacted
|
| Here's where I have a hard time. It's very easy for the
| outcome to change from a failed test to a failed academic
| career. The method by which the professor determined who
| was cheating is dubious enough that it may have caught
| non-cheaters (from an ethical perspective; assume that
| the person who found the test on the website is genuinely
| intending to study the material which they believe is
| correct). I guess it's moot from the university's
| perspective if it's against their cheating policy. But on
| this ethics topic, I'd have to argue for the professor to
| have more doubts about their decision.
| rprospero wrote:
| I see your point about a student attempting to pass the
| exam, studying the incorrect material, and failing the
| course. However, I see that situation as morally
| equivalent to the following scenario:
|
| Sam has been having trouble understanding their
| evolutionary biology coursework all semester. It's coming
| close to the final and they are frantic to find any help
| they can get. Finally, they encounter the Answers in
| Genesis website and use it to make a set of flash cards.
| They drill those flash cards relentlessly in their best
| effor to learn the material. Come the final, Sam answers
| every question with "God did it and evolution is a lie".
|
| I will agree with you that Sam has not behaved
| unethically and has not cheated on the exam, just as you
| believe that some students did not cheat on the ethics
| exam. That said, I do not believe that Sam should pass
| the final, as they have no understanding of the material.
| Even though Sam has put hard effort into studying, they
| have studied the wrong material and put zero effort into
| vetting their sources, so they deserve to fail the
| course.
|
| Do you believe that Sam deserves to pass the course or am
| I missing an important difference between my hypothetical
| and the actual events?
| genezeta wrote:
| These days I find it fairly risky to think that it's
| reasonable to believe just anything you read on the
| internet because a website says so.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| The academic integrity policy can forbid access or use of test
| solutions. A student who studied from that resource isn't
| innocent.
|
| You want to tune your policies so that students will bring that
| extra test that was lost in the printer tray back to you.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > A student who studied from that resource isn't innocent.
|
| I guess it's more understandable if that's the position being
| taken. However, that makes me want to ask a different
| question: why is that bad? A student who uses said resource
| to study for the test during usual study hours but walks into
| the test without any extra material is taking the test on
| their own merit.
| 1000100_1000101 wrote:
| Yeah, it entirely depends on the timeline of the poisoning.
|
| If the bad results were uploaded just prior to the exam, and
| the results were cloned, people likely cheated. I think this
| trap is fine. Hopefully he had his bad results pulled
| afterwards too, so the site only contained flawed data during
| the exam period.
|
| If the bad results were uploaded several days prior to the exam
| we run the risk of people studied, and couldn't fathom why
| their answers didn't match the "official results", but learned
| the wrong result was the correct answer. It may have stuck in
| their heads simply because it was an unexpected answer. Perhaps
| these people didn't even go back to the site during the exam at
| all, but the weird results from the studying phase were what
| they could recall.
|
| In this second case, the trap isn't good at all. It may have
| caused people to recall the incorrect answers learned from
| study, not from cheating during the exam. This is a horrible
| thing to do to your students. It may have caused some people to
| doubt themselves during study, and pushed them to cheat during
| the exam because they clearly didn't understand something. This
| is unfortunate. Prof and student share some blame here. How to
| classify this case is difficult. Without the poisoned study
| material, these students may have actually known the material,
| felt confident, and aced the exam. We'll never know.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Hopefully he had his bad results pulled afterwards too,
|
| Also remember anything you put on the internet is forever...
| Pretty much this guy may be doing the 'bullshit generation
| problem' we are starting to accuse AI of doing.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Thank you, this is what I was trying to describe. I don't
| intend to argue this necessarily happened (I'd expect it
| _probably_ did not), just point out the possibility. It doesn
| 't seem to me the professor really did enough to determine
| the actions of these students and there is potentially good
| reason for them to believe the 13 or so students who claim to
| have not cheated. Certainly the "one student who is right 'on
| the bubble'" could be given more benefit of the doubt.
|
| I guess it's moot given the actual policy against looking up
| tests without the professor's permission. I can see how it's
| a shortcut to find the correct answers without necessarily
| understanding the material. But I still see a reasonable
| perspective that the professor's decision potentially caught
| people who were genuinely intending to learn.
| LanceH wrote:
| Everything you say might be true. But it seems that the only
| "studying" that really stuck was when they went to quizlet.
| Read the rest of it where most of them admitted to cheating --
| which probably means pulling it up and copying the answer.
|
| Cheating is rampant in general and a lot of people bend over
| backwards to rationalize it.
|
| In short, they were given numerous valid resources and chose
| chose not to use them. Then they went completely outside the
| class and used unverified information in place of learning the
| material.
|
| Assuming it wasn't an "open internet" test, then there is
| nothing wrong with this.
|
| Out of all those people studying all those wrong answers author
| doesn't mention a single one of them bringing it up during
| office hours. I'm assuming they didn't. They all thought they
| were getting away with something and had an edge over actually
| studying. They were wrong.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > They all thought they were getting away with something and
| had an edge over actually studying.
|
| My point is that these people didn't (necessarily) do
| something wrong. The only reason they had to think they were
| doing something wrong is that the rules say they're doing
| something wrong.
|
| If a professor provided the questions and answers for flash
| cards to be made, is that functionally different from the
| students getting such information from a third-party? It's
| "cheating" from a rules-based definition but I don't see how
| a person is _necessarily_ not learning from that.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| >It's "cheating" from a rules-based definition
|
| Is there any other kind of cheating?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Assuming there's a reason for a rule, an action might not
| go against that reason even if it goes against a literal
| interpretation of the rule. In such a case, it should be
| determined that there's no reason to be against the
| action.
|
| The ostensible reason to be against cheating is that it
| devalues the degrees the university gives out if it can't
| be trusted that a person earned said degree through
| merit. I'm saying that a person who found the exam and
| learned from that material isn't going against this
| reason to be against cheating; they did, in fact, pass
| the exam on their own merit. At least, I don't see why I
| should consider it differently.
| mannykannot wrote:
| They did not, in fact, pass the exam on their own merit;
| they failed it miserably. Furthermore, in situations
| where they find the correct answers to the questions that
| will be asked, or even just the specific questions that
| will be asked, and then passed the exam, they would not
| have demonstrated that they could do so on their own
| merit, as an examination can only be a smallish sample of
| the knowledge they are expected to have in order to
| justify a passing grade.
|
| In this case, they cannot even appeal to that perennial
| cheater's excuse: "what matters is being able to get the
| right answer, not how I got it." Here, they demonstrated
| utter incompetence at that task! Their knowledge was so
| impoverished that they could not even identify blatant
| errors.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| It's clear from the story that no "learning" from the
| exam occurred. Students just copied the answers.
| Remember, this is a multiple choice exam, so this means
| question 42 - D, question 43 - A, etc -- nobody is
| looking up what this even means. According to the
| teacher, the answers should obviously wrong to anybody
| who knows the material.
|
| Although it's very funny that this happened on an ethics
| course, the "is it ethical to cheat on an exam if you
| learned the material" question doesn't even apply here
| imo
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > It's clear from the story that no "learning" from the
| exam occurred. Students just copied the answers.
|
| I don't see this so clearly. It seems to me that this is
| assumed. Why do you think it is so clear that this is
| what the students did?
| DanHulton wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| > My University has an academic honesty policy that explicitly
| says that looking at other tests without the instructor's
| permission counts as cheating (Although had I know it would be
| this much of an issue I would have been explicit about that in
| my syllabus as well, rather than just linking to the policy, an
| oversight I plan to correct going forward.)
|
| If they went to Quizlet and viewed previous tests, yes, they
| were cheating by definition. No assumption necessary.
| tombert wrote:
| Today I had to submit my final grades for my Java class, meaning
| I had to grade all the final exams for it last night.
|
| During the exam (which I had to administer remotely this time) I
| made it abundantly clear that they _cannot_ use any kind of AI
| assistance for their work. No ChatGPT, no Copilot, no Bing AI, no
| Google Bard, and also no Googling, etc. I repeated this several
| times and also wrote it in bold font on the top of the test. I
| really didn 't have any way to enforce this, but I was hoping
| people would be honest.
|
| I'm pretty sure that most of the students _were_ honest on this;
| the answers I got generally fine, but had grammatical mistakes
| and were "basically correct but had light factual errors that
| are common with people new to programming but aren't bad enough
| to count as 'wrong'". One student, however, who has submitted
| broken sentences and broken code the entire semester, managed to
| suddenly have decent writing skills, decent explanations of
| everything, and his code was clean and concise.
|
| I'm about 95% sure he used ChatGPT to generate answers to the
| questions. I tried getting ChatGPT (and Bard and Bing AI) to give
| me a word-for-word copy of what he submitted, but I couldn't. It
| got somewhat close, but never an exact match.
|
| _Technically_ , it's possible that he just studied very very
| hard and his code and grammar improved. It's also technically
| possible that he used Grammarly to make sure his writing was ok
| (which was technically against the rules but I wouldn't really
| consider cheating in a Java class), and so I just had to swallow
| my pride and grade the test assuming he was being honest.
|
| It's kind of upset me all day; I have worked pretty hard trying
| my best to be available to students if they have questions, and I
| worked pretty hard to try and make sure that the final exam was a
| reasonable level of difficulty. I think most of my students were
| fine, but one bad apple is enough to really ruin my day.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Universities are going to have to adjust. That's really all
| there is to it. It's not that hard for an exam, since you can
| put them in a properly designed classroom with human monitors.
| Homework? Projects? Much more difficult.
|
| The current system worked in 1960. Not in 2023, and probably
| not since the late 1990s, when technology started to make our
| evaluation processes obsolete.
| nickff wrote:
| Exams used to be a larger part of school grades. In my area,
| they were devalued and the reason that was given was that
| exams favored males over females.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I wonder if it would be worth it to give some sort of in person
| feedback to convey (a) you noticed the dramatic improvement (b)
| you were even worried they might be cheating (c) you decided to
| give them the benefit of the doubt (d) congratulations on their
| hard work paying off (e) but if they did cheat they got lucky
| and if they keep it up it's going to backfire on them one day.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, I've drafted a few emails that I have not sent stating
| more or less what you listed, in "decreasingly-pissy" tones.
|
| I think by tonight I'll have cooled off enough to write an
| appropriate email.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I really don't think this is a good idea.
|
| If I got an email half accusing me of cheating I would
| complain to anyone who would listen.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Basic arithmetic and calculators.
|
| I'm old: when I went to school we weren't allowed calculators
| "because there'll be a situation where you need to do basic
| arithmetic and don't have a calculator". I occasionally laugh
| at this while firing up the calculator app on my phone. We'd
| have been better off if they'd taught us sign language rather
| than arithmetic.
|
| Our education system is going to have to adjust to the new
| reality. Setting an essay task is now the equivalent of
| learning the times table - utterly redundant (unless you plan
| on a career writing essays or doing maths).
| to11mtm wrote:
| The most 'fair' math classes (specifically, I'm thinking of
| algebra and calculus type courses) I have been in, allowed a
| good in-between. Basically, you were totally allowed to use a
| Calculator, even one with a built-in CAS, but you -had- to
| show the in-between steps if you did so on a test.
|
| This was pretty useful in it's own right, as you at least had
| a way to check your work, and frankly it was extremely useful
| for helping me solidify knowledge in those fields. [0]
|
| Of course, AI muddles this, since it can explain the steps
| for you.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| That may be the strawman, but that's not the _real_ reason
| why people ban calculators when you learn arithmetic. The
| reason is because learning to manipulate numbers in your head
| abstracts to other things, like learning to estimate and
| learning to manipulate equations.
|
| Higher-level math classes usually encourage calculators, and
| graduate-level math classes will often allow Matlab or
| Mathematica, as long as you can write a short sentence
| explaining what the computer algebra system is doing. Where I
| went to school, this was colloquially called "proof by Steven
| (Wolfram)."
| Spivak wrote:
| Honestly, unless the grade for that class translates into
| taking something directly tangible from other students, and a
| "java" class sounds pretty intro, I wouldn't give any thought
| to it. Cramming for exams and then immediately forgetting
| everything you hastily memorized is a-okay even though you
| didn't learn anything either.
|
| A random college class, to me, isn't the kind of thing where
| cheating really matters. The stakes are low, it's expected that
| most students will do well, and everyone gets the same degree
| at the end. If someone wants to sabotage their own education
| then fine, and if it doesn't bite them later good for them.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, I'll admit that the problem is somewhat on my end, but
| I find it very hard not to take these kinds of things
| personally. I agree that I _shouldn 't_ take them personally,
| but that's easier said than done.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| Some students cheat. As an adjunct instructor at the university
| level, I had similar experiences.
|
| You have to both adjust your expectations and make a
| significant part of your grading use an in-person one-on-one
| oral exam or project walkthrough.
|
| It is a huge commitment of time - most professors I know seem
| to have quietly accepted cheating will be be rewarded because
| they don't have enough time to verify student performance.
| pixl97 wrote:
| It seems we want to turn universities into McDonalds where we
| push high numbers, but also pretend they are elite
| institutions that we can charge premium prices for. This is
| not going to work well in an age of ever increasing automated
| intelligence...
|
| Well, lest of course the students sit under the watchful eye
| of AI in the near future
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| I would suggest you ask him. Offer him immunity and ask him.
| For your peace of mind and so that in the future you can be
| better prepared.
| shinryuu wrote:
| So the purpose of academia is teach pupils a subject, that they
| can the use in real life.
|
| When you're solving the same problems in real life you do have
| access to all those tools that you banned. Because in real
| life, if you manage to solve a problem it doesn't matter that
| much how you solved it.
|
| Sure, if you just Google things and always solve your problems
| by copy pasting. Your solutions will lack depth, and at some
| point this will catch up to you.
|
| My point is, cheating is primarily cheating on yourself, and it
| will catch up to you.
|
| I think this is the framing you should have with regards to
| cheating.
| elliotto wrote:
| Whilst it's unfortunate this kid might be cheating the system,
| I don't think it's worth being upset if they got through. The
| point of these exams is to allow students to study and learn
| these topics, which it sounds like they did. It sounds like
| while maybe you failed in gatekeeping the cheaters (an
| impossible post gpt task) you have succeeded in the real goal
| which was to help these kids learn and improve.
| yowzadave wrote:
| A good and reasonable sentiment. It's a very human thing for
| people who are largely successful at something to fixate
| unproductively on failures--and in this case you can't even
| conclusively say that it was a "failure".
| tombert wrote:
| Oh I largely agree; I'm kind of learning that you have to
| view teaching as somewhat more of a "statistical success"
| than anything else.
|
| It's just one of those things that while you're totally
| right, the one or two bits of failure kind of nag at me. It's
| extremely easy to take these things personally (especially
| for a nascent teacher like me) when in reality I should
| likely view things as transactional.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I'm starting to see this come up in coding interviews.
|
| I had one candidate that struggled MIGHTILY on a coding problem
| that was easy (kept running into syntax errors) but then pulled
| out an esoteric solution for the second problem in no time
| flat.
|
| I can't prove that he was cheating but it very highly
| suggestive that he is.
|
| I hate it, but I'm starting to think I have to do an AI
| detection question now. It's not hard, just ask someone to do
| something impossible. However, I don't like the fact that now I
| need to be "tricky". I've never believed in making coding
| challenges hard, I just want to see if you can write code.
| cgearhart wrote:
| I saw something similar in a recent interview. I brought in a
| candidate who did not meet all of the typical resume check
| boxes, but who had a long history of success on highly
| technical problems. These type of candidates can bring very
| new perspectives to our team, but they're often a long shot
| in interviews.
|
| In this case the candidate chose to use a language that I
| don't know well and they said they weren't especially
| familiar with either. Then they struggled a lot to even talk
| through the question and it was a grind to work through each
| line of code. I couldn't offer much help, and they were very
| clearly unsure at each step.
|
| But when we clicked "run" on the code, we were _both_
| surprised to see that it ran on the first try. Not only that,
| but it already worked for all of the "but what about..."
| follow up edge cases. And the candidate didn't know _why_ ...
| "oh, I guess the language just works that way."
|
| I don't know if they were cheating, but the entire thing was
| far outside any other interview experience I've ever had --
| and fits the pattern of what I'd expect an LLM to produce.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| this is me using ocaml
| littlekey wrote:
| Seems like there's a silver lining here. It reinforces the
| idea that the answer to the problem is not necessarily the
| important part. When you can trivially provide a correct
| answer, it places more emphasis on the skill of being able
| to actually explain and work through the logic as a way to
| distinguish yourself from other candidates.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I'm a pretty good practical programmer, good at noticing
| potential edge cases, writing code that's changeable without
| being overcomplicated. This based on feedback across years of
| professional work.
|
| I also have adhd and literally brain damage and have worked
| professionally in about a dozen different programming
| languages. I can't write a for loop or declare a static
| method or w/e in _any_ of them without googling the syntax or
| using my editor 's hints & autocomplete.
| cogman10 wrote:
| That's fine and all, but not what was happening.
|
| They had google access and editor hints. Further, I start
| every interview with "please, ask any questions, we aren't
| trying to trick you we just want to see if you can code."
| And I mean it. If someone has a minor problem with
| remembering syntax or how to declare it I don't really care
| and will happily let them know how to do that.
|
| Heck, I've even had interactions where a candidate was like
| "I think there's a method that does x for this" in a
| language I was unfamiliar with, so I googled up what x was
| and shared it with them mid interview. "Oh yeah, looks like
| this is what does x for your language".
|
| There was also some pretty weird behaviors with the
| camera/screen that caused them to need to touch it fairly
| frequently (I'm guessing to take over keyboard control from
| the AI software they were using).
|
| What they were doing, repeatedly, though the interview was
| writing
|
| `a[i]` then having to change it to `a.get(i)` because they
| were working with a `List` in java. I get maybe doing that
| once or twice, but in the course of the interview they did
| it every single time they needed to pull something out of
| the list. (and each time needed to touch their screen and
| take a few minutes to correct it). This is why I strongly
| suspected cheating. It extended a question that normally
| takes 15 minutes to 35 minutes. Then the question I ask
| that usually takes ~45 minutes they completed in 15 with an
| optimal solution that relies on a data structure I
| literally only learned about because the interview hints
| for the question are like "Hey, java has this data
| structure that makes everything easier".
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Yeah I get it. This is one of those things that's really
| hard to convincingly describe online because each
| individual thing is explainable eg I will write a[i]
| every time and my format-on-save will change it to
| List.get(a, i) every newline or whatever.
|
| But you were there and I wasn't and if the overall
| situation seemed suspicious to you that's evidence at
| least as strong as any specific thing. Intuition can
| certainly pick up on weird behavior even if it's hard to
| explain how after the fact.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| This may be an unpopular point of view, but I think in
| situations like this, you should just pass on them. They are
| applying to tens of jobs and your company is interviewing
| tens of candidates, so there's no real reason for either of
| you to continue this process if they struggled on the easy
| problem and had questionable reasoning on the hard problem.
| However, if the candidate could very clearly explain the
| esoteric solution, there is a good chance that it's just
| similar to something she has done before and you should not
| be suspicious.
|
| I am assuming that you had a compiler or IDE in this
| situation providing a useful error message. If you were
| whiteboard coding and you were telling the candidate "you
| have a syntax error but I won't tell you where" (like several
| folks at a former employer of mine were fond of), you may be
| the problem, not the candidate.
| cogman10 wrote:
| We ultimately did pass.
|
| > I am assuming that you had a compiler or IDE in this
| situation providing a useful error message.
|
| Yup. I prefer to give candidates compilers/IDEs and even
| access to google if they ask about it. Like I said, I'm not
| trying to trick them or anything, I just want to know if
| they can code.
|
| > If you were whiteboard coding and you were telling the
| candidate "you have a syntax error but I won't tell you
| where"
|
| I'd hate being on the receiving end of that and would never
| pull that sort of stunt. The software we use allows both
| sides to edit the code and I pretty regularly will go in
| and silently fix syntax errors for a candidate so as not to
| let a compile/refresh loop get in the way of actually
| solving the problem.
|
| Like, what does "You have a syntax error" even prove? I'd
| let you write pure pseudo code so long as it makes sense.
|
| I just don't like "mind games" in interviews.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I still make syntax errors all the time.
| joefourier wrote:
| Can I ask what's the point of testing students in a scenario
| where they don't have access to AI tools? As a software
| developer I use these tools daily, and if I or my colleagues
| stopped our productivity would suffer - it sounds like the same
| genre of thinking that leads to having students write out code
| by hand because using an IDE is "cheating".
|
| If it would be possible to take a bottom-tier CS student and
| turn them into a decent programmer using AI tools, the hiring
| landscape would be /very/ different. These tools aren't magic,
| and to me it sounds like the tests are failing at measuring the
| students competence if they can so easily be gamed by using an
| AI/old fashioned googling.
|
| Maybe the solution should be to move towards a style of
| exam/grading that actually measures the competence of the
| student in a situation closer to what a professional developer
| will be in, rather than an old fashioned artificial exam
| setting?
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Can I ask what's the point of testing students in a
| scenario where they don't have access to AI tools?
|
| It's a question of: Are you testing for understanding or
| ability? Both have their merits, but often the goal is the
| former. If it were a project, it is generally the latter.
| yuliyp wrote:
| An evaluation for a course should measure how much of the
| subjects of the course the students learned. It's not a job
| success simulator, nor a measure of unrelated skills.
| hxugufjfjf wrote:
| So the students are disallowed or discouraged from learning
| how to use tools like AI in the courses they take?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| This follows the same logic as banning calculators when
| teaching people basic arithmetic. When something is a
| replacement for your learning, it should be banned, and
| when it is an augmentation, it should be encouraged.
|
| You may think it's ridiculous, but many people today
| can't calculate a 20% tip or add two prices together
| without a calculator because the constant use of
| calculators has caused their arithmetic skills to
| atrophy. This seems like a silly gripe, except a lot of
| other skills are built around these basic ones: for
| arithmetic, the ability to estimate the cost or time
| taken to do something is all based on tricks you learn
| when you are trying to learn mental math. Society is not
| worse off for this (enough of us still know how to do
| these things), but many people are poorer, both
| intellectually and monetarily, due to a lack of
| arithmetic skills. And no, this lost knowledge of
| arithmetic is not replaced by a knowledge of higher math
| - it tends to come with a fear of it.
|
| The same applies with text-generating AI. In terms of
| writing, if you don't learn to write dumb essays about
| books, skills like learning to construct an argument are
| much harder to pick up. For people writing code, learning
| to slog through writing and debugging a doubly linked
| list (something ChatGPT can reliably generate for you
| today) leads you to later being able to slog through
| debugging B-trees or lock-free queues (which ChatGPT
| _definitely cannot_ write for you).
|
| I think there is a _very compelling_ argument along these
| lines for low-level courses to ban AI tools. However,
| higher-level courses probably should allow students to
| add them to their repertoire, where they are an aid and
| not a crutch. This follows how mathematicians and
| engineers learn to use calculators and computer algebra
| tools, which seems to work well.
| hxugufjfjf wrote:
| I don't think it ridiculous at all. I'm not sure if your
| comment was an argument, a counter-argument or just a
| comment.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| >people today can't calculate a 20% tip
|
| Earlier this week, I spent several minutes talking one of
| my co-workers through how I 'did math in my head' to
| figure out my half of the 20% tip we were leaving for
| lunch. Even something as rudimentary as moving the
| decimal place over one and doubling the result seemed
| like wizardry to them.
|
| They aren't dumb. They've literally just never thought
| one second past reaching for a calculator. Which is kind
| of scary, because it means they have no way of sanity
| checking any numbers they come up with.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I know a person who does interviews for programming
| positions who asks "what is 20% of 20,000?" The ones who
| are flummoxed by it are no hires. So are the ones who
| pull up a calculator app on their phone.
| vasco wrote:
| Most people today can't make fire by hand either because
| we have tools for it.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It's a good thing that the skills involved in making fire
| by hand don't transfer to disciplines that matter. The
| same cannot be said for arithmetic and writing.
| watwut wrote:
| Student are neither disallowed or discouraged from
| learning them. The are not allowed to use them during
| unrelated test.
| hxugufjfjf wrote:
| Why is the test unrelated to learning methods?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Think of it this way. I use a calculator to do less trivial
| arithmetic. However, knowing how to multiply means I
| understand what multiplication _is_ rather than just a number
| that inexplicably appears on the calculator screen.
|
| I've known engineers who did not understand the analytical
| tools they were using. They misused them constantly.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Maybe the solution should be to move towards a style
| of exam/grading that actually measures the
| competence of the student in a situation closer to
| what a professional developer will be in, rather than
| an old fashioned artificial exam setting?
|
| Most "real world" software development work involves
| understanding existing code and/or choosing solutions.
|
| AI can help you write a linked list, but can it help you
| _know that you need_ a linked list vs. a queue or a binary
| tree? Can it help you to make more architecture-y decisions
| like deciding whether you need a document database, a
| traditional SQL RDBMS, or maybe something else?
|
| I'm not in a teaching role but those are the kinds of things
| I'd like to see examinations cover -- what tool or data
| structure are you choosing, and _why_ is it the appropriate
| tool for this specific case?
|
| Or, similarly, can the student understand existing code and
| fix bugs or make performance improvements?
|
| Bottom line, though: professors should just absolutely accept
| the reality of AI. Assume all students are using AI tools.
| Actively mandate or at least encourage their use in order to
| ensure a level playing field.
| suid wrote:
| > Can I ask what's the point of testing students in a
| scenario where they don't have access to AI tools?
|
| It's not just the issue of "what if they didn't have access
| to ChatGPT?"
|
| Just as an example: ChatGPT is literally the world's biggest
| bullshitter. It vacuums up vast stores of "data" (note: NOT
| "knowledge"), and just pulls out words that it thinks could
| likely follow from previous words given a context.
|
| Quite often is produces silly, or even dangerously wrong,
| answers. You need to be pretty well skilled in the art to
| catch it at its bullshit.
|
| It's just like when you hire assistants to do something
| critical for you. You have to be able to verify their work,
| or you have to be able to trust them blindly.
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| I at least partially share this sentiment for hiring
| interviews. In that setting, the goal of any kind of coding
| exercise is to evaluate a persons coding skills in a real-
| world environment. For something like that, it does not make
| much sense to hobble the developer by artificially limiting
| their access to coding resources that are normally employed
| while on the job.
|
| However, I feel like an academic exam is a bit different. The
| goal of these exams is to evaluate what students have
| _learned_. Unless the class was about how to find helpful
| code examples on SO, it does not make much sense to allow
| AI/internet-searching during the exam.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| This is like asking "what's the point of not allowing
| students to use Google during their Maths exams" or "why
| bother with English exams when Grammarly exists".
|
| The point is to gain some knowledge yourself. Obviously
| you'll use new tools and methods later when you eventually
| get a job, but the point of most courses is to teach you the
| concepts, not how to command the IDE. Whether you decide to
| hand-craft assembly code or become professional a Copilot
| suggestion approver doesn't really matter.
| codegladiator wrote:
| A person who knows how to code without access to AI tools
| means when they have access to AI tools their productivity
| would increase but they will also be able to point out
| mistakes, if any, in the generated code.
|
| A person who does not know how to code without access to AI
| tools means they will consistently push bugs generated by AI,
| affecting the teams productivity, if any.
| mdorazio wrote:
| If this is the case, wouldn't you expect their grades to
| reflect this as well due to the generated code answering
| exam questions having errors?
| i2cmaster wrote:
| I think it's good. This sort of thing will move Universities
| back to being about teaching and research instead of vending
| credentials.
| tombert wrote:
| I've gone back and forth about how I feel about grades as a
| whole.
|
| I do feel that by having these tests and grades that it does,
| indeed, sort of become just a transactional way to "vend
| credentials" instead of focusing on learning. I also think
| that often homework and tests aren't great measurements; I
| was bad about doing homework in college the first time
| around, and it was frustrating to the professors because I
| was doing horrible grade-wise, but was extremely active
| _during_ class and generally did fine on the tests. I _was_
| mostly learning the material (at least well enough to get an
| A on the exams), but because I wasn 't submitting my
| assignments, they would be forced to give me a C or a D.
|
| At the same time, I really haven't figured out a better
| system. I would be open alternative systems, but I think
| grades and grading and tests do the best job for the "average
| case".
|
| Maybe I should email some of my old professors and apologize
| for the headaches I probably gave them...
| the_only_law wrote:
| > This sort of thing will move Universities back to being
| about teaching and research instead of vending credentials.
|
| I don't see this happening unless jobs stop caring about
| credentials or become more willing accept other forms of
| credentials.
|
| Of course I'm assuming you aren't specifically talking about
| software, which doesn't have nearly the amount of
| credentialism as many other fields.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _I made it abundantly clear that they cannot use any kind of
| AI assistance for their work_
|
| You're swimming against the riptide. If I were teaching coding
| today, I'd allow, even encourage, use of AI, with some ground
| rules. Students using AI would have to show their work (i.e.
| the conversation with the machine).
|
| The content of the prompts and in particular follow-up
| questions, can demonstrate competence. E.g. situations in which
| the student spotted that something was wrong in the generated
| code and made an intelligent hint to the machine to fix it.
|
| Students should be prepared for tomorrow's world, not
| yesterday's.
| balderdash wrote:
| By that logic wouldn't it be ok for grade schoolers to use
| calculators when they are learning basic math? Sure you can
| teach someone how to get an answer, but have you actually
| given them an understanding of the material to be built upon?
| kazinator wrote:
| Kids should be using calculators in kindergarten. You can
| discover a lot of curious things about the numbers with
| calculators. Like when you multiply by 5 and keep doing it,
| the last two digits are always 25, and the hundreds digit
| bounces between 1 and 6. You can discover that without a
| calculator, but it's more time consuming.
|
| If we want to ensure kids can do arithmetic without
| calculators, we can have exams in which there are no
| calculators.
|
| You can give them homework problems in which they have to
| fill in all the work steps of multiplication and long
| division, e.g.: ______ 17 |
| 2091 -__ __ -__
| __ __
|
| If you want to ensure that the students know and follow a
| certain process in obtaining an answer, you can't just test
| the production of an answer. You have to white box it.
|
| Kids should know time tables to about 12. Beyond that, you
| can test whether they know the structure of long
| multiplication and division and such.
| rmellow wrote:
| > Technically, it's possible that he just studied very very
| hard and his code and grammar improved.
|
| As an early procrastinator (rehabilitated perhaps?) I've had a
| history of doing very well on finals through cramming.
|
| In your student's case it might very well be more likely they
| are cheating, but those unlikely but possible students who
| study extra hard to recover their grades for a final deserve
| the benefit of the doubt.
|
| How unlikely can academic recovery get? I spent an entire
| semester completely lost in a second level Macroeconomics
| course...
|
| ... I was able to read and write chapter summaries of a
| semester and a half of content (about 15 chapters,
| corresponding to the first level and the second level courses)
| in a single weekend and aced the exam, with the highest marks
| in the class.
|
| That was the hardest I've ever crammed in my life and I had
| trouble speaking in the hours that followed the study session.
|
| I later got a recommendation letter from that prof, totally
| worth it.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Today you learned a lesson. You will need to add to your course
| work how GPT can get things wildly wrong. Just a simple example
| should not be too terribly hard to find. Then plant the seed
| 'if it has that wrong what else is it getting wrong? It is a
| good tool of getting the general idea but one you need to
| audit. This class is where you are going to learn the basics
| and know when this thing is wrong when you use it' That thing
| is not going away any time soon.
| tombert wrote:
| I actually did say something more or less exactly like that
| pretty early into the course.
|
| Something to the effect of "ChatGPT is pretty cool, I like
| it, but it will just make stuff up sometimes in extremely
| convincing way. It's a tool that's dangerous to newbies and
| powerful to professionals, and I'm hoping this class will
| help you get closer to the latter".
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Ah good. A very small demonstration probably would drive
| the point home. It is one thing to hear that but another to
| see it yourself.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| But clearly it gets things right often enough to be worth
| using to cheat on a test or assignment.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Also, how GPT can get things right, and that if students use
| GPT (because it's the early days of the graphing calculator
| all over again but now for code) then the exercise is not
| "write the code" but "explain the conditions under which this
| code doesn't work, and why" because if you're taking a
| programming class it doesn't matter what writes the code,
| what matters is whether you understand that code. So if
| you're turning the exercise into a code audit by using GPT,
| you better damn well be able to explain what problems are
| left in the code it generated.
| scythe wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36087175
|
| 'nocoiner mentioned in a sublevel comment that the syllabus was
| not very clear about not referencing old course materials:
|
| >His policy of disallowing students to refer to prior tests was
| not even explicit in the syllabus, but behind a link. If this
| policy were clear upfront - absolutely, reference to outside
| materials is inappropriate and there should be consequences.
|
| If you want to catch students cheating, you should be clear with
| them beforehand what constitutes cheating.
| overgard wrote:
| To a certain extent, I wonder if the real problem is the focus on
| tests and memorization. In the real world, "knowing" something
| means you can apply it to a project. I "know" guitar if I can
| play multiple songs well, not if I can easily tell you how to
| form the first inversion of c major 7 in a specific tuning or
| something. I could be a savant on tests and not be able to play
| Wonderwall. I know programming if I can write good working code,
| not if I can answer trivia about C++ virtual tables.
|
| My point being in the real world people look things up all the
| time, IE, cheat. Ability to memorize for an arbitrary test is a
| bad measure of the ability to apply learning.
|
| Also admittedly its been a while since i've been in school, but
| in my day (like 10 years ago), a take home final was not
| considered a serious thing. I think that happened maybe once or
| twice and it was because the final barely mattered.
| phkahler wrote:
| Yes, he is unethical. He didn't just catch students cheating. He
| actively sabotaged the cheaters. He says he placed a
| (metaphorical) camera to catch the cheaters, but if he didn't pay
| attention to it they would have failed anyway because he planted
| wrong answers for them to find. Thinking about it now, he could
| have just graded them with the wrong answers and left it at that
| (a different ethical question), but it seems he was determined to
| "get" them, call them out, and punish.
|
| To be clear, I'm not supporting the cheaters. There are two
| wrongs here. "Am I the unethical one?" should instead read "am I
| unethical?" to avoid any discussion about which is worse. Suppose
| I went on the site and uploaded wrong answers, thereby clearly
| sabotaging cheaters. Clearly that would have negative
| consequences for those students and one might ask why would I do
| that.
| catapart wrote:
| Exactly. Whether he intended to or not, he - HIMSELF - put two
| different, equally authorially-dominant, sets of answers into
| the wild and expected students to pick the best one in what can
| only be described as an unauthorized (afaik?) social
| experiment.
|
| Fuck the students who thought "wait, this seems like...way
| wrong. I feel like he said the exact opposite in class...? But,
| I mean, this IS the test that I'm looking at, so I guess I'm
| just misremembering...", is the apparent sentiment. At least he
| caught the _obvious_ cheaters, right?
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Those latter students would have been taught in high school
| not to trust sources without some sort of verification.
| Trusting that a non-verified, random upload to a cheat/study
| site is accurate shows lack of critical thinking skills, at
| best.
| tombert wrote:
| I'm inclined to agree. If you're actively putting out
| misinformation, that's always bad. It feels a bit
| "entrapment"-ey.
|
| Sort of tangential, but I have always thought
| teachers/professors who put "trick" questions on tests to be
| sort of assholes. It's fine if it's an extra credit thing and
| isn't going to take away from the final grade, but when you
| write a question that literally everyone in the class gets
| wrong, I think that says a lot more about your communication or
| teaching ability than the students.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Why is it unethical to be determined to call out and punish
| cheaters? When I was in college, we had like an academic
| honesty pledge that made it clear we would get kicked out of
| school if they caught us cheating. It's not uncommon (or, I
| think, unethical) to punish cheating in academic programs.
| phkahler wrote:
| He sabotaged the cheaters. It's a bit different than just
| catching them and issuing the usual punishment. I think there
| is room for debate around the distinction, but from an
| ethical point of view one should avoid gray areas, and this
| guy actually teaches ethics - to this class.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah I agree that's the interesting question, but I think
| "it's bad to want to punish people who cheat" is the wrong
| take, in general.
| jpk2f2 wrote:
| He did not sabotage them - the usual punishment is at
| minimum a zero on the relevant assignment/test/etc., and
| frequently extends to outright failing out of the class.
| Scoring worse on the test due to their cheating is
| irrelevant as it'll be reduced to a zero.
|
| From an ethical point of view, he has done these students,
| the university, and the world at large a huge favor.
| derfnugget wrote:
| Where's your head aaaaat. Where's your head at? You are unethical
| because at some point you decided it's not about teaching them,
| it's about catching them. I think you should take a minute to
| think about what your role actually is. Time is limited. Spend it
| on what matters.
| taylorius wrote:
| I was interviewing a candidate a couple of months ago, and as
| part of the assessment they were required to write a bat and ball
| game in Javascript, in advance of the interview.We would go
| through the code during the interview and I would ask them how it
| might be modified / extended in various ways.
|
| This candidate produced a reasonable, functional bat and ball
| game in a couple of pages of Javascript code, and I had high
| hopes for the interview. But as soon as I tried to delve into the
| code with the candidate, it became clear they had no idea what
| half of it was doing. I suppose they got chatGPT to write it for
| them, or something. Was disappointed and vaguely annoyed to have
| wasted my time.
| sevensor wrote:
| This is unethical, but not for the reasons given. It's unethical
| because it favors the pre-internet status quo of cheating within
| one's social circle. It was well known at my university that
| fraternities and sororities kept libraries of old exams. A policy
| that catches only internet cheaters is a policy that advantages
| socially connected cheaters over individual cheaters.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > It's unethical because it favors the pre-internet status quo
|
| Don't agree. You're saying that if I can't catch _all_ the
| cheaters, then I can never call anyone out for cheating. That
| 's a licence to cheat.
|
| Cheating is bad, for the same reason corruption is bad; once
| it's accepted that it's allowed, then anyone who doesn't
| cheat/take and give bribes, then everyone who plays by the
| rules is at a disadvantage. Corruption is a disease that
| spreads if you don't stamp it out.
|
| Also: cheating on tests is an insult to the intelligence of the
| examiner. The cheaters are laughing at him. If you don't call
| out cheaters, then the whole idea of getting a graded result
| becomes meaningless; you might as well simply give every
| student that actually paid their fees an 'A', and do without
| exams.
|
| BTW, I think it's irrelevant that it's an ethics exam. You
| don't study Ethics to become more ethical. You study it to
| learn about the philosophy of ethics.
| kuroguro wrote:
| Our uni's CS students kept an online catalogue of past
| exams/answers/cheat-sheets so it was somewhat democratic for
| it's time :) Tho I guess you had to know it exists to find it
| first.
| neilv wrote:
| I once wanted to be a university professor. Stories of rampant
| cheating at some schools make me think it would've had to have
| been somewhere with a more honorable culture.
|
| I've heard of some schools where supposedly the students take the
| honor code very seriously.
| tombert wrote:
| If you have at least a masters degree (bachelors in some
| states), it's not terribly difficult to get an adjunct lecturer
| job. You're generally committed for a whole semester, but
| that's basically it.
| robochat wrote:
| Can anyone explain the maths that he did because my calculation
| give different results. Isn't there only a 1 in 2588 chance of a
| student 'guessing' 19 'answers' out of 45 where there are 5
| options for each answer? Whereas the article states that it is 1
| in 100 ? (actually he writes 1:100 which is odds, so it is 1 in
| 101?) Don't we just use the Binomial distribution, so: Prob =
| 45!/(19!26!) * (1/5)*19 * (1 - 1/5)*26 It's really bugging me
| that I can't get the maths to work.
| Aulig wrote:
| I guess it depends on how obviously wrong the given answers were.
| At my university it was allowed and encouraged to practice for
| exams using old exams. I could see someone having studied that
| way and assuming the fake answers must be correct.
| batch12 wrote:
| Nah, the professor isn't in the wrong. A study guide was
| provided, the school disallows looking at other tests, and he
| told the students not to cheat-- and the consequences. I don't
| agree that there is nuance here.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I love the irony that the students were cheating in an Ethics
| class.
|
| As for entrapment, it's no different from leaving your front door
| unlocked being entrapment for thieves (it isn't). The cheaters
| are adults, know what cheating is, know they cheated, and know
| what the consequences are. No sympathy. Give them all an F for
| the course.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| > When he confronted those students about this, most of them
| admitted they had cheated; the consequences for their grades are
| still being determined
|
| > I tell all my students what will happen if I catch them
| cheating
|
| How do those two statements go together?
| jpk2f2 wrote:
| Typically the university itself handles consequences for
| cheating, plagiarism, etc. Repeated issues often leads to the
| student being expelled.
| gapan wrote:
| "If you get caught cheating, there will be serious
| consequences, ranging from X to Y. The decision will be made by
| the board together with the ethics committee."
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It's been two decades since I took an ethics class, but here's my
| stab:
|
| Kant would call this unethical because he argued against any
| philanthropic impetus towards lying. Of course he would also call
| the misrepresentation by the students to be unethical.
|
| Utilitarianism has trouble dealing with cheating because any
| single act of cheating seems to cause benefits for the cheater
| greater than the damage a single cheater does. Rule-based
| utilitarianism attempts to resolve this by considering that if
| too many people cheat, the negative outcomes to the school then
| outweigh the sum of the individual advantages of those cheating
| (particularly since any performative aspects of getting a high
| grade go away when it becomes well known that many people cheated
| to get those grades). Many people argue that rule-based
| utilitarianism just devolves to utilitarianism since no two
| situations are ever identical.
|
| I never really quite grokked virtue ethics, but it seems to me
| that if the professor is upright and is acting with the intent of
| helping the students who didn't cheat (by raising their grade
| relative to cheaters) then this would probably get a stamp of
| approval.
|
| Moral relativism would acknowledge that his actions will be
| deemed immoral by his students (who just want to pass the class,
| and feel attacked and deceived by this), but moral from the point
| of view of a teacher who is required by their position to come up
| with some form of practical assessment for a class of nearly 100
| students.
| mquander wrote:
| > Utilitarianism has trouble dealing with cheating because any
| single act of cheating seems to cause benefits for the cheater
| greater than the damage a single cheater does.
|
| It clearly doesn't? There's no sensible mechanism by which
| someone cheating to get a higher grade will help them, except
| by hurting someone else. The main dream of the cheater is to
| get some kind of rewarding job later based on the strength of
| their transcript, instead of some other guy who would otherwise
| have been doing that job, and who (if you think the grades
| prior to cheating had any usefulness at all) would most likely
| have been better at the job.
|
| It's hard to be able to predict in advance exactly who will be
| harmed by any given act of cheating, but that isn't a problem
| for utilitarianism.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Unless the outcomes to all students involved are zero-sum,
| it's not hard to have a model in which a single student
| getting an artificially higher grade through some unfair
| mechanism is a net utility gain. It was one of the arguments
| specifically presented in my intro-to-ethics class (though it
| was not cheating, it was a student asking their professor
| (who was a utilitarian) to give them a slightly higher grade;
| for pure utilitarianism the mechanism that results in
| inflating the grade is irrelevant).
| SilverBirch wrote:
| > I ran a binomial analysis and found the likelihood that someone
| whose answers matched on 19 out of the 45 planted questions had
| about a 1:100 chance of doing so
|
| This is just bad math. Take a question (A), there are 5 possible
| answers, using his analysis the probability of a student picking
| the same answer as the cheating answer is 1 in 5. But let's say
| the question is hard, and of the 5 possible answers, 2 are highly
| plausible, so plausible in fact that the students always go for 1
| of the 2. Now, if the cheating answer is one of the plausible
| answers the probability is low, but if it's one of the plausible
| answers, then it's high. And more specifically, if the cheat
| answer is correct - what's the probability the student got it
| right? Well what you should be doing is take the other 55 non-
| cheating answers, calculate the probaility of correctness and
| then use _that_ as the probability. The "1/100" threshold is
| overwhelmingly determine by how he selected the answers on the
| leaked answer sheet, and you can't say it just average out with
| such a small sample.
|
| Modelling the whole thing as random choosing is just sloppy
| maths.
| luma wrote:
| > Most of these answers were not just wrong, but obviously
| wrong to anyone who had paid attention in class.
|
| Already accounted for per the article.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| No it's not, he says some of the answers were obviously
| wrong, but he did the binomial analysis on 45 questions. If
| you plant 45 answers in a 80 answer test and they're mostly
| obviously wrong then the students who cheat are going to fail
| either way, so it can't really be true that they were wrong.
| And if the answers _were_ very obviously wrong then the
| probability of choosing the wrong answer for each would be
| much higher than assuming a 20% chance of matching the fake
| answer. So the whole 1in 100 is highly questionable.
|
| To put it another way, let's say he planted only wrong
| answers, and we have an idiot student that always gets the
| questions wrong. Now the probability of matching the planted
| answer has clearly jumped, right?
|
| On the flip side, if the planted answers are right, and in
| general you expect your class to pick correct answers (ie,
| they're going to pass) then the probability they pick the
| same as the cheat answer could be as high as 90%
| tgv wrote:
| It isn't. "Most of these answers were not just wrong, but
| obviously wrong", according to the teacher. The chances of
| picking the worst possible answer is lower than 0.2. If the .01
| threshold is fair? It isn't if you assume that someone tried to
| pass the test by filling out the whole thing at random. If the
| students tried to pass by choosing the correct answer, >= 19
| obviously wrong answers out of 45 seems fair enough.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Is it cheating to study off of past exams? I really don't
| understand the professor's perspective here.
| ziml77 wrote:
| To some extent yes. By studying the exams, you're learning how
| to answer the test questions instead of actually understanding
| the material.
|
| And what is definitely cheating is to search for past exams
| while you have the current exam in hand and start copying down
| answers.
| robochat wrote:
| For all of my major exams in the UK, we were encouraged to
| study by practising on old papers and my score would have been
| abysmal if I hadn't. So not being allowed to look at past exams
| feels strange to me too.
| jjice wrote:
| Unrelated to the details of this case, but my school had an
| official, department associated organization/club called the
| Society of Software Engineers that would run study sessions for
| CS, SE, and related courses that the students would have to
| take. They also took in old exams from students to create a
| knowledge base that you could study against. The rule was that
| you weren't allowed to leave the room.
|
| It was an interesting grey spot since most professors were all
| for using old exams to study, but some weren't (I don't think
| they liked writing new exams every semester, but I wouldn't
| either). Some would give threats for giving your exams to this
| university recognized academic club, but they'd black out names
| upon receiving them so there wouldn't be any proof that it was
| you (at least easy proof).
|
| It was an interesting case there but most staff were all for
| it. Making that old data available to future students, but in a
| more restricted way seemed fine to me, and it absolutely helped
| me study, but I wonder what others would think of that
| situation.
| docdeek wrote:
| I think there's a difference between looking at an old exam and
| its answers, figuring out why each was right and wrong, and
| learning from it, and just finding an exam online and using the
| answer key as your answer in a test because you couldn't be
| bothered learning.
| strken wrote:
| The interesting part here is that at least some of the
| students might have _thought_ it was an old exam from the
| same course, used it for studying, learned totally
| nonsensical answers, and then gotten confused in the actual
| final. Evidently not all of them straight-up copied the
| answers, or they would have gotten much higher scores. This
| is apparently still a violation of his institution 's
| academic honesty policy, but there are interesting questions
| about what happens if he e.g. poisoned one member of a study
| group who went on to teach bullshit to the other members,
| giving them a higher chance of picking the wrong answers and
| putting them over the threshold without ever knowingly
| cheating.
|
| Of course this is irrelevant, as the p<0.01 test gives an up
| to 62%[0] chance that someone in his class of 96 students
| could be falsely accused of cheating, and is unethical in
| itself. Apparently one student managed to be right on the
| threshold, which the professor has chosen to interpret as
| "the student possibly cheating" rather than "me possibly
| ruining my student's academic life for no reason by choosing
| a test with lots of false positives and applying it to a
| class of 96 students".
|
| [0] 1-(0.99^96), and though the real chance is probably a lot
| lower if the questions are obviously wrong, it's still a
| stupid threshold to choose
| jpk2f2 wrote:
| It is at the universities whose policies I'm familiar with,
| yes. At both universities I have attended it was included in
| the policy alongside all the typical cheating and plagiarism
| rules.
| cafard wrote:
| I took a number of philosophy courses in college, and do not
| remember ever seeing one with multiple-choice questions on an
| exam. Although I deeply sympathize with those who do not wish to
| read undergraduates' prose, still I think that this comes with
| the instructor's job.
|
| I think the instructor was wrong, as a matter of manners at
| least, perhaps as a matter of responsibility. Suppose one of his
| students suspected someone employed by a cleaning service, on no
| particularly good grounds. What would he think of that student
| leaving a $20 on a table under some papers, in the expectation
| that it might be stolen?
| Silhouette wrote:
| Add me to the list of people who see nothing wrong with this. If
| he didn't encourage or incentivise his students to cheat in any
| way (and in fact actively warned them against it) then the idea
| that this was some sort of entrapment is laughable.
|
| The only room for ambiguity I can see is the arbitrary 1%
| threshold. If there was a student just over the line then it's
| plausible that they were honest but unlucky here. Given the
| consequences of being tagged as a cheater both for this exam and
| beyond I would want _much_ lower odds of a false positive and I
| 'd certainly feel obliged to give a borderline case the benefit
| of the doubt.
|
| But if it was clearly understood that this kind of behaviour
| constituted cheating and innocence is a billion to one shot?
| Throw the book at them. Anything less is unfair to every student
| who didn't cheat.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Right. He's made this harder for himself than he needs it to
| be.
|
| The honeypot is fine. If it were me I'd warn the class that
| I've seeded the internet with bullshit answer keys, and while
| I'll never be able to prove you used one of them, you'll
| probably fail if you do. And leave it at that.
|
| Instead he's guessing a threshold, and can't _really_ be sure
| if someone that insists they didn 't cheat is lying or not,
| with high stakes. It's a bad situation for all involved.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| A teacher at my university was fired for failing students who
| were caught cheating in an introductory CS class. The ones in
| charge didn't like that he was causing a disturbance. They would
| rather have had the cheaters get away with it. The system is
| broken.
| asoneth wrote:
| > The system is broken.
|
| That may be university-by-university thing. I briefly managed
| an academic department at an old, highly-ranked university.
| Professors regularly caught cheaters and there was never any
| question that they would fail the course. The only question was
| whether the incident was mild enough that they would be
| permitted to try again next semester or severe enough to leave
| the university.
|
| The administration supported us 100% as this was seen as
| essential to defending the value of the degree conferred on the
| other students. Without some kind of standards we'd eventually
| become just another degree mill.
|
| What surprised me most was how many students who never finished
| the degree (not just cheating -- some just got job offers and
| decided not to stick around) still listed the degree on their
| resume/CV. The problem is that many companies now call the
| school to check as part of their hiring process, and the school
| would inform them that they had enrolled but had not been
| granted the degree. In retrospect I wish I had instituted a
| policy of letting the ex-student know in those cases, because
| I'm not sure if hiring companies tell them and I wonder how
| many people think they're just unlucky or something.
| beambot wrote:
| Faked degrees happen all the time, sometimes in very
| prominent circumstances. E.g.
|
| > MIT Admissions Dean Resigns After Fake Degrees Come to
| Light
|
| https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/4/26/mit-
| admissions-...
| butterNaN wrote:
| That is indeed some disproportionate reaction to just failing
| some students in introductory CS class. (So much that I feel
| there must be more to the story.)
|
| > The system is broken
|
| This is truer than it sounds. The very design of Examinations
| itself is broken in most places. It shouldn't be _possible by
| design_ to cheat in my opinion.
|
| "Open-book" exams are harder to set, but I think the whole
| cheating-prevention infrastructure is harder, costlier, and
| pointless.
| zvolsky wrote:
| Our best computer networks teacher from secondary school
| decided to leave following complaints from parents, who
| believed that the tests were too difficult. As I remember,
| about 3/4 of our class had a tough time. Honestly, the tests
| weren't all that hard. I suspect there was some crowd effect
| taking place, which resulted in people collectively giving
| up. This turned out to be a significant blow to the standard
| of our education. The subsequent teachers were neither as
| knowledgeable, nor as effective in teaching the subjects.
| okennedy wrote:
| Even open book exams can be gamed. There are whole industries
| set up around enabling in-exam communication (e.g. concealed
| subvocal mics/headphones) and outsourcing schoolwork.
|
| It is definitely possible to design assessments on which
| cheating is difficult. For example, oral examinations or
| personalized per-student projects or exams. The problem is
| that this style of personalized assessment fundamentally does
| not scale past a few dozen students in a classroom.
|
| You want a classroom that small, it's going to cost you. Just
| instructor salaries for would run each student 10-30k per
| year, and that's before paying for infrastructure
| (classrooms, tech, offices) and (admittedly not always
| useful) administration.
| butterNaN wrote:
| > Even open book exams can be gamed
|
| Of course, yes, nothing's perfect. But Open book exams are
| far better bargain than what the most popular method of
| exams is as of today.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Would "open book" include access to Google search and to
| ChatGPT?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Smaller class sizes is definitely a huge boon for everybody
| involved. I went to a mid-sized private uni, where a large
| class size was maybe in the low 30 students range, and many
| were closer to 10-15, and the experience was dramatically
| better than my friends at other universities got.
| Professors knew the vast majority of us by name, and had at
| least an approximate idea of your grasp on the course
| material.
|
| Cheating was solved with a pretty straightforward approach:
| don't make it trivial to cheat (re-using test questions,
| question-bank multiple choice tests, etc) to keep the
| honest students honest, then trust the students. If
| someone's caught violating that trust, send them to the
| business school. (I don't know what they did with cheaters
| in the business school. I assume promote them)
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I once worked as a part-time visiting lecturer in CS.
|
| I routinely got assignments handed-in that students had
| evidently copied from one-another. More than half of the
| students were handing in copied work. In at least one case,
| they hadn't even botherd to change the name at the top. Usually
| they had the sense to change variable- and function-names, but
| not always.
|
| As a newbie lecturer, I asked my colleagues what to do. They
| said: "You can fail them. You'll be accused of racism (most of
| the students were brown-skinned). They will appeal; you'll then
| have to sit on exam boards through the summer, which is unpaid
| for a visting P/T lecturer. There's a good chance the school
| will overrule you, because these are paying overseas students."
|
| "Or you can tell them that you've noticed the 'sharing' that's
| been going on; that collaboration and sharing is encouraged,
| but that they must never do it in marked assignments."
|
| I adopted the latter course of action.
|
| Being a part-time visiting lecturer is a crap job.
| johnny99k wrote:
| I remember when I was taking software development classes in
| 2003/4, when I was finishing my computer science degree.
|
| I helped a buddy of mine out on one of the projects by
| basically writing it for him. I re-wrote my project in a
| completely different style.
|
| We both got 100%.
|
| If you are going to cheat, do it right and actually show some
| imagination and creativity.
| ourmandave wrote:
| Once AI starts grading papers you'll have to be more clever
| than that.
|
| Like re-code your project in another language and then back
| again.
| g_sch wrote:
| The linked article and this entire discussion is
| addressing the ethical issues that surround grading,
| originality, and plagiarism. How is AI going to be able
| to apply the "correct" ethical code when all of us can't
| seem to agree?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Honestly if people are working together to do assignments
| that's not the end of the world. IMO you probably learn more
| doing it that way.
|
| If people are selling answers that's a different story, but
| that's what in person exams are for.
| Aunche wrote:
| I don't think the honeypot is necessarily unethical, but giving a
| take-home multiple choice final exam for a philosophy course
| seems like several levels of bad pedagogy.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Agree. I don't know what a multiple-choice philosophy exam even
| looks like. I did a Philosophy BA, and _all_ the exams and
| assignments were essays. The non-exam assignments were all
| discussed in seminars.
| skizm wrote:
| If things today are similar to they were ~10-15 years ago when I
| was in college, deciding not to cheat was actually pretty tough.
| So many people were cheating in every class I was in I felt like
| I was handicapping myself by not also doing it. I had to actively
| ignore obvious cheaters in a lot of situations since our honor
| code indicated that if you saw it, and did not report it, you
| could be in similar trouble, so I had to give myself plausible
| deniability. Very stressful. I guess I could have tried just
| burning it all down and reporting every instance I saw, but that
| felt like inviting trouble and way more hassle than it was worth
| to just keep my head down.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Kinda reminds me how Genius proved Google was scraping lyrics
| from them.
|
| Cannot find for the life of me what could be possibly unethical
| about this. If anything, it's very, very educational.
| contravariant wrote:
| It's a decent exercise in ethics to point out what could be
| unethical about it. If you only consider the goal (catching
| cheaters) it's easy to convince yourself it can't possibly be
| unethical, but you shouldn't disregard the methods.
|
| - Publishing wrong answers to a previous exam could confuse
| students who were simply looking up old exams to study.
|
| - Identifying 'cheaters' as anyone who had a less than 1%
| chance of arriving at the answers randomly. This is wrong for 2
| reasons, one is that they aren't answering randomly the other
| is that even assuming they are answering randomly you'd falsely
| accuse at least 1 student of wrongdoing on average.
|
| - Not sure if a teacher has a moral duty to make good tests,
| but if they do then reusing multiple choice questions on a
| complex topic like ethics isn't ideal.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| > - Publishing wrong answers to a previous exam could confuse
| students who were simply looking up old exams to study.
|
| In any decent institution which does exams, an example exam
| sheet with questions similar to what you're going to get, or
| even one of actual old exams, is usually published for just
| this purpose.
|
| Sniffing around the sites the express (or commonly agreed
| upon) purpose of which is enablement of cheating, on the
| other hand, reveals the intent.
|
| So, nope.
| contravariant wrote:
| The claim that Quizlet is solely designed for the purposes
| of cheating is unfounded in my opinion. It doesn't look
| like it at first glance anyway.
|
| I'm not even sure what a website designed to enable
| cheating would look like to be honest, but that's because I
| have no expectation that I'd be able to access the internet
| during an exam, and because I consider _any_ study of
| related materials fair game before the exam begins. You 'd
| have to get an answer sheet of the _actual_ exam up front
| before I start to consider it iffy.
| segh wrote:
| Reminiscent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
| ziml77 wrote:
| Also seems fine to me. I'm not even sure why anyone would be
| defending the cheaters by making this out to be unethical.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| From my experience working at a university (in the foreign
| language department), I found a number of students who put a
| large effort into "getting out of work". I was astonished at the
| number who put more effort into avoiding work than it would have
| taken to get an A.
|
| If I were in this professor's case, I'd just mark the answers
| wrong, and in the future upload more wrong answers. The students
| who use these sorts of online dumps aren't the ones who study and
| will beg at the end of the semester for some sort of extra-
| credit. If it were necessary, perhaps have a second gradebook
| where the number of "exactly the same wrong answer as the bait"
| were kept.
| frantathefranta wrote:
| > From my experience working at a university (in the foreign
| language department), I found a number of students who put a
| large effort into "getting out of work". I was astonished at
| the number who put more effort into avoiding work than it would
| have taken to get an A.
|
| It's funny when that happens, I used to do this in 7th or 8th
| grade when we were doing home exercises in touch typing. All
| the typing tasks were given from a textbook that was the same
| for everyone in the country, for a few years at least. Over 2
| years of classes, I had probably spent more time scouring the
| internet for the solution rather than type it myself. The
| search was however always more entertaining than the exercise
| and taught me how to use the web. And I still learned how to
| touch type.
| tiberious726 wrote:
| I was about the same age when I discovered my school's touch
| typing program saved your results as a raw text file on a
| shared drive---I didn't actually learn to type well until a
| few years later
| polytely wrote:
| Honestly, it's kinda wild to me that the final(!) is just
| multiple choice questions, and that it's similar enough to the
| one last year that you can cheat by looking at previous exams?
| That's just a badly designed course, feels like the students are
| the ones getting scammed here...
|
| I have done 2 ethics courses during my education at a Dutch
| 'Hogeschool' (honestly not sure how this maps to US education
| wikipedia says 'Vocational university'). I did a specific design
| ethics course and a broader ethics course as part of a philosophy
| minor, and in both of them you had to write papers or apply the
| things you learned to a case study. There were some little tests
| with multiple choice, but they often had additional questions
| where you had to explain your reasoning.
|
| Maybe there is a language difference here, but I would expect
| something more involved from a course given by a professor at a
| university, or is this a course for people who are in high school
| or something.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh, and the professor is polluting the info space too... That
| is if other parties are taking this fake test out of it's
| multiple choice format and using the answers as data for other
| sources. You know, in the same ways bots steal information from
| recipes and mix them on pages to try to get ad hits. You start
| building chains of misinformation based on unethical behavior.
| neilv wrote:
| > _who recently caught 40 of the 96 students [...] cheating_
|
| That 40 is reported _suspected_ , by one individual. The same
| individual claims that only 2/3 of those were admitted at time of
| writing.
|
| Also, suspicion was by only a 1:100 coincidence probability
| standard of evidence, and by some imperfect metric. IMHO, that
| threshold would be too low to "prove" guilt in such a potentially
| serious matter (negative mark on student record, reputational
| damage among college social and professional networking peers,
| and potentially including suspension or expulsion).
| [deleted]
| masfuerte wrote:
| He says that only one student was at roughly the hundred to one
| level, so he thought that one might be honest. The rest were at
| the billion to one level.
| 6D794163636F756 wrote:
| He also said that he is talking to others about what he
| should do. It seems like he very sensibly is using this as a
| starting point rather than accepting his work as the final
| verdict
| ajross wrote:
| > Also, suspicion was by only a 1:100 coincidence probability
| standard of evidence, and by some imperfect metric.
|
| ...only? In a sample size of 96, what's the value in analysis
| beyond that level?
|
| No, this seems pretty solid to me. The math to do this is
| routine freshman statistics stuff, something every practicing
| scientist knows. The assumptions just require that wrong
| answers be roughly evenly distributed across the choices (e.g.
| you could construct a test where everyone who was wrong would
| be led to choice C and rarely B or D, but that's a little
| pathological; and regardless it's something that would be
| evident in the data set and seems not to have been).
|
| I mean, standards vary but I'll bet in most jurisdictions 100:1
| odds count as "beyond a reasonable doubt" for jury instructions
| in criminal trials. At the very least you'd bring the trial,
| which is what happened here. If I know there's only a 1% chance
| I'm wrong, it's absolutely valid for me to _accuse_ you of
| cheating.
| kmod wrote:
| "1% false positive rate => 99% confidence about a positive
| signal" is a really intuitive step to take, but you should be
| careful because it turns out to be horribly wrong in general:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
|
| (Perhaps not in this case but in general this can get you
| into trouble)
|
| Though personally I'd say that it's quite likely that the
| p=0.01 threshold falsely flagged a non-cheater, which to me
| says it is too lax.
| robochat wrote:
| Actually, I can't seem to get the maths to work. Isn't it
| just the Binomial distribution? Each question has 5 options
| so the probability of 'success' is 1/5 and so to get 19
| questions 'specifically wrong' out of the 45 planted
| questions by chance is just (1/5)*19 * (1-1/5)*26 *
| 45!/(19!26!) = 1 in 2588 but in the article it is 1:100. What
| am I doing wrong ?
| sokoloff wrote:
| > I'll bet in most jurisdictions 100:1 odds count as "beyond
| a reasonable doubt" for jury instructions in criminal trials.
|
| IANAL, but I sure hope that 100:1 chance, standing alone,
| doesn't meet the bar for "beyond a reasonable doubt".
|
| To me, a 1% chance of an accusation being false is
| _definitionally_ "reasonable doubt".
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| ...I have no idea where I heard this, but for some reason I
| was under the impression "beyond a reasonable doubt" meant
| ~95% confident. (Whereas "preponderance of evidence" meant
| >50% confident.)
| ajross wrote:
| Per Wikipedia, the original framing is Blackstone's ratio
| from the enlightenment, where he used 10:1. Real courts
| don't put numbers on this, of course, but that's the
| thinking that produced the philosophy. Basically: no, given
| the level of innaccuracy we already know to be present, I
| think it's very clear that a sincerely-believed 99%
| confidence will send someone to jail pretty much anywhere
| in the US.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_doubt
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
| neilv wrote:
| The quoted sentence I objected to was the sloppy writing,
| conflating of "suspected" with "caught". I think "caught"
| would be read by most readers as implying guilt.
|
| Suspected at 1:100, certainly. Quietly confronted and
| questioned at 1:100, sure. Convicted at 1:100, absolutely
| not.
|
| I'm not sure this is the best analogy, but imagine that, for
| every 100 people in society, 1 of them is wrongly convicted,
| at random. Further imagine that this lottery happens
| repeatedly, so that even more than 1 in 100 end up getting
| hit. That sounds like a miserable society in which to live.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Headline: "80 million people worldwide caught cheating"
| just in the first round.
| Aunche wrote:
| The 1/100 chance is assuming that students choose all answers
| with equal likelihood, but supposedly these answers were
| obviously wrong. If the probability of accidentally choosing
| the obvious wrong answer drops even by a few percent, that
| would significantly decrease the likelihood of innocence.
| rcfox wrote:
| I'd argue that the unethical bit is knowingly publishing
| incorrect information, especially in an educational setting. If
| there's a chance that someone learned deliberately false
| information that they will then attempt to apply in a practical
| setting, then you're effectively sabotaging them. He did say that
| it was obviously wrong if you had been paying attention, but what
| if you missed a class or two?
| wilg wrote:
| In my opinion, teaching should not involve taking tests at all.
| Students should be offered optional tests for self-assessment and
| for professional certification. Otherwise, focus on teaching. I
| see no real educational merit to it, and a lot of heartache for
| teachers and students.
| tgv wrote:
| I'd rather avoid the question about ethics in this case. Is it
| ethical to accept payment for teaching? Is it ethical to charge
| as much for as (some of) US univerities do? Is it ethical to
| devise a test in such a way that a number of students will
| certainly fail? Is it ethical to prevent students from cheating?
| You can bend the word just as long until it means something like
| "might it cause any harm at all?"
|
| But if you ask yourself: why do the students take this course,
| you can think the reason is to learn something. If they want a
| piece of paper that proves that, they can't cheat. If you
| --cynically-- assume that students only take the course to get
| their diploma with as little effort as possible, then cheating is
| allowed.
|
| As long as schools want to teach something, they should stay away
| from online or take-home exams and essays. If they want something
| else (and usually the motivator here is money), the value of
| their education will drop.
| neilv wrote:
| > _in his online Introduction to Ethics course cheating on a
| take-home final exam._
|
| Sounds funny that an ethics class gets heavy cheating. But it
| might be a required or elective course that students don't take
| seriously, or it might be disproportionately Philosophy majors
| (which major might get more than their share of frosh starting to
| wield off-the-wall ethical rationalizations).
| batch12 wrote:
| > Sounds funny that an ethics class gets heavy cheating.
|
| Good observation - got me thinking. I see lots of suggestions
| here about requiring ethics training/classes for developers, so
| it made me wonder-- can ethics be effectively trained into a
| person predisposed to behave unethically if consequences for
| the behavior don't exist?
|
| Edited for clarity and moved under the right comment
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > can ethics be effectively trained into a person
|
| Maybe. But that's not what an ethics class is for; it's for
| learning _about_ ethics, it 's not for learning how to be
| ethical.
| neilv wrote:
| One problem doing this for tech is that we've _normalized_ so
| much bad behavior.
|
| For example, go back 30 years, and make ordinary software
| _spy on_ its users, or otherwise act against users '
| interests, and I think you'd be seen as evil and possibly
| criminal.
|
| One promising thing, though, is that college students might
| still be be more open to confronting issues of ethics and
| morality. (Though often it's only "Revolutionaries till
| graduation", because of sheltered circumstances or social
| fashion.) But college is a bit late, and students are already
| being driven to mercenary behavior by e.g., competition for
| FAANG jobs (like I used to mainly hear about
| desperate/ruthless behavior by some pre-meds). Ideally, we
| teach better values from early age, including by example.
| bawolff wrote:
| So if they accessed the quizlet during the test it certainly
| seems like cheating.
|
| However if students were studying by rote memorization of
| basically any resource they can get their hands on, then i could
| see this happening without the students realizing that the
| website had answers from the test (yes rote memorization is a bad
| way to learn, but that never stopped undergrads). Like to what
| level is a student expected to investigate the source of study
| material?
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