How do you feel about cheating in school?

[shemer77]

Just curious to find what others think about cheating in school. Whether it is ethical or just totally wrong or somewhere in between? For instance if your struggling to catch up in school and you know you don't have time to finish a homework assignment do you think it would ok to cheat in that circumstance? As for me personally I've used sites like School Solver andhttp://chegg.com to help me out when I'm really up against the wall but overall I feel that cheating will hurt you in the long run. Maybe some of the older members can say how valuable their time in school really was.

 

[strangerep]

[...] if your struggling to catch up in school and you know you don't have time to finish a homework assignment do you think it would ok to cheat in that circumstance? [...]

Get thee to the headmaster's office right now, and bend over to receive your caning.

 

[nuuskur]

I was retarded when I went to school. So no, didn't care. Average C student. I am in uni now, so I have to care. In fact, I don't have to care, I simply do care. It's a matter of attitude.

 

[jz92wjaz]

Cheating is doing something against the rules that gives you a competitive advantage. It's never ok. It hurts the person doing it, and it can hurt that person's classmates too. Asking for help is just fine, as long as you put the effort in before you ask, and as long as you don't turn an assignment in without understanding how you solved the problem.

 

[jmeps]

Cheating is never acceptable. In the short run, you have taken a shortcut that leads someone else to believe that you understand the material covered when in fact you do not. In the long run, when you finally become responsible for said material, you do not have a clue and further, by then you have forgotten that you never knew it. Bottom line, if you have to resort to cheating weather in school or in life you cut yourself short. Do the work or don't do the work but take responsibility for what you have or have not done. Cheating is never acceptable

 

[nuuskur]

Anything but uni, cheating is fine. No one really cares about it. In uni, though, one probably should realize that cheating will only make them fall behind even more.

 

[Bandersnatch]

It's not about morality, but about compromising your own education, and your own integrity. It's getting used to autodestructive behaviour.
Sure, it's easy to fool oneself into thinking you'll catch on with the material later on, but it never really happens.

Also, this:

 

[BobG]

Just curious to find what others think about cheating in school. Whether it is ethical or just totally wrong or somewhere in between? For instance if your struggling to catch up in school and you know you don't have time to finish a homework assignment do you think it would ok to cheat in that circumstance? As for me personally I've used sites like School Solver andhttp://chegg.com to help me out when I'm really up against the wall but overall I feel that cheating will hurt you in the long run. Maybe some of the older members can say how valuable their time in school really was.

Cheating in school: You're cheating yourself. You may as well not have even attended the class.

Cheating in life: Like Bandersnatch said. You have a good chance of actually killing people.

Unless you're an English major. Given your future prospects for financial stability, you're probably cheating yourself by becoming an English major in the first place. And I'd have a hard time imagining a scenario where something an English teacher could do professionally that would actually kill someone.

And unless you're an engineer in weapons development. In that case, it's probably the students that don't cheat that will kill people later.

If you have teachers that grade on a curve (a very bad idea, by the way - so bad that I'd consider it "cheating" by the teacher), then cheating actually hurts other students' grades.

There's actually a point to the first point. I admit I once completed every single one of my sister-in-laws geology labs in one arduous week. I didn't want to, but wound up being convinced to do it because:
a) She wasn't a geology major. She needed one more elective in her very last semester and, given that one of her core courses were very difficult, her adviser recommended she take a very easy course for her elective. Somehow she misinterpreted "interesting" and "easy" as being synonyms.
b) She was a mother of five kids living on welfare and her attending college on student loans was part of the revisions to the welfare program instituted in the late 90's. Helping get her off welfare was good for the country!
c) I never took a geology class. Is asking a person with less knowledge about geology than you to do your labs really cheating?
d) And the main reason I did this is because she fed-exed me a box of rocks. No one had ever done that to me before (or since). Once I opened the box (and the lab book), I couldn't quite stop myself. I would have done it no matter what and found a reason to justify it later (in fact, not just "would have" - I actually did it).

 

[Doug Huffman]

I directed nuclear power plant testing based on fundamentals I learned in Navy Nuclear Power School, now accused of pervasive cheating. To be sure, it's the Goose Creek unit and forty years later, but now characterized as a mud-pump that will pass a bag-of-rocks that gets to the intake. 1970 NPS Vallejo was likened to a filter passing only the finest. ZERO TOLERANCE

One of my very best bosses had worked in weapons aerodynamics and aerospace weapons. His aerodynamics story was of the empirical design of a 40 mm grenade nose ogive, of sending the sketches to a machinist and an hour later shooting it out the back door. In aerospace he worked on a throttling solid fuel motor controlled by a reactive screen/mesh driven against the reacting surface of the fuel.

As to the effects of cheating in the trivium, it is just as deadly only slower and broader, illiteracy is killing society and culture.

 

[BobG]

It's not about morality, but about compromising your own education, and your own integrity. It's getting used to autodestructive behaviour.
Sure, it's easy to fool oneself into thinking you'll catch on with the material later on, but it never really happens.

Also, this:

One other comment about this picture:

In one of my EE courses, intended to be one of the "weeding out" classes, we started with 24 students. Towards the end of the class, I suddenly realized the entire back of the room had disappeared! It was as if a sniper had been steadily picking off students one by one, and without anyone at the front of the room realizing it! Seven students finished the class, with six of us passing the class.

This was the third time taking the class for one of the students that passed. Having finally overcome this seemingly insurmountable hurdle, he immediately went and changed his major. There was no way he was going to get through two more years of this!

I felt that was a very mature decision. Sometimes, you're pursuing something that just wasn't meant for you. Accepting that and finding something you actually can accomplish makes life better both for you and for anyone else that might someday depend on you.

 

[wukunlin]

When I worked as a tutor I really didn't care and I still don't. The act of cheating itself is quite insignificant to me, but it is a sign of poor resource management and/or attitude. If those problems aren't fixed, they will come bite you harder than getting caught cheating ever will.

 

[Dembadon]

It's not about morality, but about compromising your own education, and your own integrity. It's getting used to autodestructive behaviour.
Sure, it's easy to fool oneself into thinking you'll catch on with the material later on, but it never really happens.

Also, this:

I honestly don't see how the situation described on that piece of paper could even happen. A well-designed technical interview should quickly reveal the cheater and their lack of knowledge. If it doesn't, whose fault is that? Shouldn't a company be held responsible for hiring decisions and any subsequent responsibilities given to said cheater?

Also, I don't understand how someone could even pass exams if they don't do the homework. In all the courses I've taken, failing exams meant failing the course. If you fail your courses, you don't get a degree. If you don't get a degree, you don't get to work in a position that would enable you to endanger people's lives as a result of cheating.

I believe cheating is wrong, but I don't think cheaters will ever get to a place where they'll be designing bridges/elevators/etc. Even if we assume they somehow make it there without anyone noticing, we then have to assume that all of the work this cheater produces goes un-checked, which is another scenario I find highly unlikely.

 

[symbolipoint]

I honestly don't see how the situation described on that piece of paper could even happen. A well-designed technical interview should quickly reveal the cheater and their lack of knowledge. If it doesn't, whose fault is that? Shouldn't a company be held responsible for hiring decisions and any subsequent responsibilities given to said cheater?

Also, I don't understand how someone could even pass exams if they don't do the homework. In all the courses I've taken, failing exams meant failing the course. If you fail your courses, you don't get a degree. If you don't get a degree, you don't get to work in a position that would enable you to endanger people's lives as a result of cheating.

I believe cheating is wrong, but I don't think cheaters will ever get to a place where they'll be designing bridges/elevators/etc. Even if we assume they somehow make it there without anyone noticing, we then have to assume that all of the work this cheater produces goes un-checked, which is another scenario I find highly unlikely.

I was going to say something like you said. The smarter employers will test the applicant through a spoken/oral quiz. This will show the candidate's competence related to the questions. The testing conditions are excellent and the candidate will have no opportunity to cheat. Sometimes the employer will also test the candidates in a written form of testing. This also is a situation in which cheating is extremely unlikely.

In a classroom, best practice should be that nobody other than the teacher knows what are the questions ahead of time.

 

[Medicol]

The first time I was caught red-handed while copying the text I had hand-written in my flashcard so as to fill in the blank in a chemistry test really shamed me. Later I couldn't resist the tempt to wide-open my eyes into the answer of a classmate sitting right next to me in the final math test and even though I failed the exam and had to take it again next semester, I felt indifferent. You see, from the second time on, I've become like a worn-out tire which is still useable . Years later I luckily got into a local college and had to learn the same stuff again at an advanced level. I almost lost the basics while most of my friends did so well, heck if only I had learned them harder. Even when I went to work I also felt ashamed of what I couldn't do. But I was accepting of the fact that all things come and go naturally and I was ready for any bad news to come.
I used to correct my years of experience in my CV and was caught by HRers (they said the guy who would interview me knew I was lying). I was blushed and accepted I was wrong, I said I did it for job to live and they said they'd consider. But you know I didn't hear anything from them again.
You know, shaming people for whatever reason is a childish behavior.
You know, mixing truths and lies is also an art. The higher social position you possess, the more artistic your everything (speeches, behaviors) must become.

 

[Masceritoy]

The ethics of cheating are based on context. Is it ok to go grab the smartest kid in the class, who happens to be smaller than you, and threatening him with violence to write you paper for you? No. Is it ok, if you are a single mom with three kids and a job, and you have a hard time finding time to study, and so you sneak a peek at your neighbors paper to reassure yourself that you got the right answer? Yes. But both fall under the category of cheating. and there are infinite variations that fall inside those two margins. But I do know that schools see no difference, and will kick you out for either.

 

[Evo]

The ethics of cheating are based on context. Is it ok to go grab the smartest kid in the class, who happens to be smaller than you, and threatening him with violence to write you paper for you? No. Is it ok, if you are a single mom with three kids and a job, and you have a hard time finding time to study, and so you sneak a peek at your neighbors paper to reassure yourself that you got the right answer? Yes. But both fall under the category of cheating. and there are infinite variations that fall inside those two margins. But I do know that schools see no difference, and will kick you out for either.

So, if this woman with kids saw her answer was wrong, she would not correct it? Well, that's ok, she didn't cheat if she made no corrections. Otherwise, she's cheating. If she cheats her way to a degree, it's wrong. Is she going to continue to cheat if she manages to get a job? When is the cheating no longer ok? I have to disagree with an "ethics of cheating"

 

[SELFMADE]

I believe its a HUGE no-no. If you are serious about your profession, the first thing you should do is master the basics. Sometimes I encounter these old ladies trying to type on the keyboard with a single finger of each hand. All they do is type, typing is their job, and they are terrible at it. Only because they have failed to master the basics of proficient typing. It probably would have taken them less than 2 months to learn it and faster typing skill would have saved them hours and hours each day, not to mention pain of seeking each letter every single time. What really hit home for me about the importance of fundamentals and constant practice to master them is what Michael Jordan did. He never failed to practice the fundamentals, even when he had reached the apex of the sport. That is what set him apart. Cheating in irrelevant tasks is fine, even necessary and productive sometimes. But cheating in subjects that are fundamental to your profession is recipe for total ineptitude.

 

[D H]

I honestly don't see how the situation described on that piece of paper could even happen.

I beg to differ. There are a number of ways that engineers can and do kill people. Sometimes it's just ignorance, incompetence, or ineptness, but other times it's misconduct, misbehavior, or malfeasance. Reviews and such might be able to detect problems caused by ignorance, incompetence, or ineptness. Catching misconduct, misbehavior, or malfeasance is a much, much harder task. This is why honesty and integrity have to be central parts of the work ethic, from the very bottom of the workforce to the very top.

 

[Dembadon]

I beg to differ. There are a number of ways that engineers can and do kill people. Sometimes it's just ignorance, incompetence, or ineptness, but other times it's misconduct, misbehavior, or malfeasance. Reviews and such might be able to detect problems caused by ignorance, incompetence, or ineptness. Catching misconduct, misbehavior, or malfeasance is a much, much harder task. This is why honesty and integrity have to be central parts of the work ethic, from the very bottom of the workforce to the very top.

I certainly agree with everything you've said and don't think our positions really differ. I do believe engineers have the opportunity to kill people. However, the OP was referring to cheating in school, and the paper sign refers to engineers killing people because they cheated in school, not due to misconduct, misbehavior, or malfeasance on the job. I think they are two different cases, but also realize that someone who cheats in their classes is likely to cheat at their job.

In other words:

Will cheating in school cause you to kill people? Probably not, since you probably won't pass enough classes to even get a degree.

Will cheating/misconduct/malfeasance on the job cause you to kill people? If the person isn't caught (as you mentioned), then eventually, yes.

 

[D H]

Will cheating in school cause you to kill people? Probably not, since you probably won't pass enough classes to even get a degree.

Will cheating/misconduct/malfeasance on the job cause you to kill people? If the person isn't caught (as you mentioned), then eventually, yes.

Look to the sad history of scientific discoveries that were only discoveries thanks to completely invented data, the sad history of engineering and industrial failures that resulted from malfeasance from bottom to top, the sad history of economic scandals based solely on cheating, and the sad history of political leaders who rose to power solely based on lies.

The sad fact is that cheating can be extremely gainful, at least until you're caught. I suspect the people who prosper by cheating didn't learn these skills in college. They learned those skills much earlier than that.

 

[Ben Niehoff]

I am always shocked, whenever someone posts this thread, how many PF members are comfortable with cheating.

 

[Doug Huffman]

Please be slightly comforted then by we few who do not tolerate cheating. I suspect that we are a dying breed.

 

[ZapperZ]

I'm surprised no one cited this paper that had a careful study of cheating and the correlation with performance in exams:

http://journals.aps.org/prstper/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.6.010104

In particular pay attention to this:

Briefly, we found that students commit about 50% more copying than they self-reported on the self-reported survey. We showed that actual copying from both 2003 and 2005 data correlated with demographic factors: being male and being a business major as found in previous self-reported dishonesty surveys. Since our freshmen had not declared a major when they took the survey, we showed that copying is a leading indicator of becoming a business major.

Zz.

 

[Medicol]

Cheating is a good sign of smartness. And that you can detect cheating doesn't mean you're smarter and calmer than the cheater. Cheating is bad in general but it can be understood its cause and consequences. It'll be funny to learn in a test that 49/50 students cheat to earn a better grade while there is only one who refuses to do the same.

 

[ZapperZ]

Cheating is a good sign of smartness.

Really? What evidence to do you have to support such a statement?

On the contrary, the paper I cited indicated that repetitive copiers have 3 times the chance of failing that class! This is a sign of "smartness" to you?

Zz.

 

[DataGG]

I don't cheat and I never did (other than once, in 6th grade). I felt really bad while doing though, the fear of being caught.. I hate people who cheat and get better grades than I do, it's tremendously unfair. Having said that, I think I would cheat if it meant to pass a class that I was else-way going to fail..

I have one question though:

Would you say that posting a question in PF's HW section that we're supposed to solve and turn in is cheating?

 

[Bandersnatch]

Would you say that posting a question in PF's HW section that we're supposed to solve and turn in is cheating?

If between posting the question and getting the answer the poster succeedes in gaining understanding of the thing the problem was supposed to teach, then it isn't. If all they do is get an answer, without following through with the learning process, then they've cheated - they've claimed to know something they don't know by submitting the answer they don't understand.

That's why it's so important for posters to follow the template and guidelines of the HW section, and why it's so important for members to guide them through the process and not just feed them the answers.

 

[SteamKing]

This is what should happen if you get caught cheating in school:

You get nailed to the wall.

(Source: Ripping Yarns, 'Tompkinson's Schooldays' episode)

 

[Medicol]

Really? What evidence to do you have to support such a statement?

On the contrary, the paper I cited indicated that repetitive copiers have 3 times the chance of failing that class! This is a sign of "smartness" to you?

Zz.

Smartness to me is a social interactive skill. It can also be defined as intelligence in academics, strategic planning, problem solving etc.
I don't have any evidence like your link. Everyone is actually smart to me; I don't know how smart they are and I will never know. But 49/50 gang-like students in a class say the Earth is square, the only one student who says it is not is then not qualified as smart in this particular case though he may be very good at maths and can even solve advanced complex maths problems.
I can't imagine if humans don't have an expression for the intolerance they have towards cheating; their emotion would not grow diversely; it is only a small add-on to the full blown psychological activities but somewhat tries to complete the current whole picture of what one's emotion is composed of.

 

[symbolipoint]

Smartness to me is a social interactive skill. It can also be defined as intelligence in academics, strategic planning, problem solving etc.
I don't have any evidence like your link. Everyone is actually smart to me; I don't know how smart they are and I will never know. But 49/50 gang-like students in a class say the Earth is square, the only one student who says it is not is then not qualified as smart in this particular case though he may be very good at maths and can even solve advanced complex maths problems.
If we allow kids to have more freedom to learn the way they want, we also allow cheating to grow.
I can't imagine if humans don't have an expression for the intolerance they have towards cheating; their emotion would not grow diversely; it is only a small add-on to the full blown psychological activities but somewhat tries to complete the current whole picture of what one's emotion is composed of.

Several different kinds of "smart" exist in people. The social-interactive skill is one of them. Logical-analytic skill is another; and then there are still others. Students do what they want or what they can when in school, and some of them may cheat. Later, when an employer representative is interviewing a candidate, the representative can and in many cases does, test or quiz the candidate in spoken form, on some necessary technical skills and topics. The kind of SMART that is important in this situation is the mathematical, programming, technical materials parts of the analytic-logic kind of smart; the candidate being interviewed will not have the opportunity nor benefit of cheating. Such test-taker conditions do not seem to happen in school classrooms.

 

[ZapperZ]

Smartness to me is a social interactive skill. It can also be defined as intelligence in academics, strategic planning, problem solving etc.
I don't have any evidence like your link. Everyone is actually smart to me; I don't know how smart they are and I will never know. But 49/50 gang-like students in a class say the Earth is square, the only one student who says it is not is then not qualified as smart in this particular case though he may be very good at maths and can even solve advanced complex maths problems.
I can't imagine if humans don't have an expression for the intolerance they have towards cheating; their emotion would not grow diversely; it is only a small add-on to the full blown psychological activities but somewhat tries to complete the current whole picture of what one's emotion is composed of.

You're just making things up as you go along, without even considering any evidence to support all this. I can easily do the same as well, and this will be (if it isn't already) a colossal waste of time.

Our lives are filled with politicians and talking heads in the media who simply make statements without bothering to justify and validate those statements. Being "smart" is also knowing when one is being shoved unjustified claims as if they are facts.

Zz.

 

[Medicol]

What I say is almost the common sense or common knowledge. Why don't you consider some people's idea as a product of smartness ?
Even your request to ask me to provide evidence about smartness is actually your smartness to me. Your statements are logical. Those without some smartness would not be able to conclude such a time waste of debate without evidence.

 

[ZapperZ]

What I say is almost the common sense or common knowledge. Why don't you consider some people's idea as a product of smartness ?

And this is why we often have morons elected to office, because the public simply buy something that they say that seems to make "common sense". A lot of people seem to think that simply uttering the phrase "gay marriage undermines traditional marriage" makes it true, because, hey, to them, it makes sense! This, despite the fact that the evidence of {A=gay marriage} causes {B=traditional marriage to be undermined} as not been established beyond simply just making such a statement. You are repeating the SAME practice.

You are dealing with social issues here. There is no "common sense", because what makes sense to you, doesn't makes sense to me. Your sense isn't "common"! So unless there are studies and statistics that back your claim, you are simply blowing smoke into the air, yet thinking that you have something that has been validated. That is the worst kind of self-delusion.

Zz.

 

[Doug Huffman]

The first shots in a rehash of The Science Wars are being fired; truth and knowledge as a social construct. The conspiracy of ignorance masquerades as common sense.

 

[Simon Bridge]

I usually assume some students will cheat and set up the assessments accordingly.
When we work hard to stamp out cheating, we are just training more effective cheaters.

For example - I had to teach yr1 eng lit shakespear.
I relied on prev work - but I noticed that there was a lot of effort to detect plagiarism yet also a lot of plagiarism.
A typical concern was the amount of essays online.

The final assignment was to be an essay - I couldn't get out of that - but the reason people could copy so much was that the essay questions had not changed much in 70 years. Cracking down on copying just made students think up strategies to beat the plagiarism detectors.

I set them the task of finding two essays on the topic online from any source they liked which disagreed with each other, they had to explain each position and the disagreement and how the authors supported their positions, then decide what the best position is and defend it using the text as a reference.

This was difficult to cheat on because the usual method of cheating was part of the assignment - they hated it.

In future years the same question could be reused - except that now people can copy the earlier ones ... they'd only get away with it, though, if the cited essays were still available online. If the marker cannot access the citation, that's a fail.

There is still copying off someone else - or is that collaboration?
But there was only 20 people in the course.

So the answer kinda depends: what kind of cheating are we talking about?

If the class was on how to cheat - would it be cheating to complete the class honestly?

 

[ZapperZ]

The first shots in a rehash of The Science Wars are being fired; truth and knowledge as a social construct. The conspiracy of ignorance masquerades as common sense.

Actually, we're not even there yet. This is not about those issues, but rather the methodology in how one arrives at a conclusion or accept something to be valid. Some social scientists may argue that truth and knowledge are social constructs, but they certainly didn't just say that and then walked away without making arguments on why they concluded that. They may say "The Sky Is Falling", but they don't just stop there. They may argue, incorrectly or not, that the reason they say that is because they keep seeing water coming down from the sky, and that they've seen debris falling from the sky, etc. One may then start arguing on the validity of those supporting evidence, but at least, there are attempts at justifying the statement "The Sky Is Falling".

Here, it is not even to that stage! I see statements upon statements being made, and yet, there have been very scant attempts at supporting such statements. I see this being done in political debate all the time ("I will cut taxes and create jobs!"). Forget about trying to debate about the validity of these evidence, because none are usually offered. As Peter Woit would say, these statements are Not Even Wrong!

Many years ago, there were arguments being made that violent video games causes violent children. A lot of people seem to accept that because to them, that statement "makes sense". Yet, at that time, there were hardly any studies being done on this issue, and so, that statement was made without any valid evidence to support it. Yet, there was a groundswell of support for legislation against such type of video games.

It turned out that subsequent studies started to question whether "A = violent video games" is the cause of "B = violent children", or were they simply nothing more than correlations that are consequences of a common cause. Could it be that children who spent the most time playing video games were also tend to be neglected the most by their parents, and that this neglect is the cause of them to be violent? A law to prevent children from access to such games would not solve anything, because the cause of these two have been neglected and is still present.

This is just an example of what would happen if we lower our standards and simply accept something without demanding any evidence to support such a statement. This is not a Science Wars.

Zz.

 

[Medicol]

...because the public simply buy something that they say that seems to make "common sense". A lot of people seem to think that simply uttering the phrase "gay marriage undermines traditional marriage" makes it true, because, hey, to them, it makes sense! This, despite the fact that the evidence of {A=gay marriage} causes {B=traditional marriage to be undermined} as not been established beyond simply just making such a statement. You are repeating the SAME practice.
You are dealing with social issues here. There is no "common sense", because what makes sense to you, doesn't makes sense to me. Your sense isn't "common"! So unless there are studies and statistics that back your claim, you are simply blowing smoke into the air, yet thinking that you have something that has been validated. That is the worst kind of self-delusion.

I used to be kind of a day-dreamer always thinking that what I said or wrote up was worthiest being listened to by others. So I felt ashamed when some ignored or even joked back with (un)constructive remarks which I thought was to mainly shame me or doubt my skills. I was afraid to lose my credits, my voice, my significant self especially when I had to make a speech. I was so serious and strict that I ignored relativism to polish absolutism. I fought hard with people around to be on the top list. Every time I tried to rise up, I soon had to take care of the fact that some had been ready to shoot me down. Insulting words were my daily food I had to chew or offer others. Years later while jogging up a local hill (50ft high), it suddenly started to rain and I slipped on the cliff edge and fell (rolled) downhill hitting my head against a big rock. I then was taken to a nearby hospital and got my forehead sutured and was diagnosed with a minor head injury but I lost my vision temporarily. During the time I lived in the dark, I realized I needed to forgive me to understand me and others, I needed to help myself to help people around. So I learned to walk around without any help from others. 3 weeks later after the last change of my eye bandage, I finally could view the world again. Even up to now I still haven't known what drugs or medication I took during my sick days but I don't even bother to look them up not because I am not curious about truth or physicians' skills but because I believe in the medical protocol they have applied to medicate my injury.

 

[BobG]

I usually assume some students will cheat and set up the assessments accordingly.
When we work hard to stamp out cheating, we are just training more effective cheaters.

For example - I had to teach yr1 eng lit shakespear.
I relied on prev work - but I noticed that there was a lot of effort to detect plagiarism yet also a lot of plagiarism.
A typical concern was the amount of essays online.

The final assignment was to be an essay - I couldn't get out of that - but the reason people could copy so much was that the essay questions had not changed much in 70 years. Cracking down on copying just made students think up strategies to beat the plagiarism detectors.

I set them the task of finding two essays on the topic online from any source they liked which disagreed with each other, they had to explain each position and the disagreement and how the authors supported their positions, then decide what the best position is and defend it using the text as a reference.

This was difficult to cheat on because the usual method of cheating was part of the assignment - they hated it.

In future years the same question could be reused - except that now people can copy the earlier ones ... they'd only get away with it, though, if the cited essays were still available online. If the marker cannot access the citation, that's a fail.

There is still copying off someone else - or is that collaboration?
But there was only 20 people in the course.

So the answer kinda depends: what kind of cheating are we talking about?

If the class was on how to cheat - would it be cheating to complete the class honestly?

By time I was in high school, I realized that the best way to take tests was just to skip the questions I didn't know and move on to the next question. Then, having read the entire test, I'd go back to the questions I hadn't answered yet. The answers to many of those questions tended to be in other questions later in the test - or subsequent questions at least eliminated some of the choices on multiple choice questions to the point where at least I had a 50/50 chance of getting the question right.

Is it cheating to use the test as your source of answers? Or is that just lousy test writing?

It's also a very common flaw in multiple choice tests. Many teachers couldn't have done a better job of handing the test answers to you if they tried. I'm thinking it would be very hard for a teacher to consider that method of test taking to be cheating since, in a way, they'd be complicit in it.

And, all in all, it's not a technique that would get you through with no knowledge at all. But if you did learn a lot of the material, it's not hard to turn what you do know into an 'A' even when you didn't learn all of the material.

I do think the number of people participating in something would also have to be considered when deciding whether it's cheating or not. Professional cycling would be the perfect example. Riders nearly went on strike when cycling imposed rules about performance enhancing drugs. It initially wasn't perceived as a situation where a rider using drugs would gain an unfair advantage. It was perceived as a decision about risking being the first rider to actually comply with new rules. And, obviously, that reluctance to be the first to give up using performance enhancing drugs resulted in drugs still being a huge problem decades later. Although, the puny time penalties imposed in the early days of having rules against drugs probably contributed. The penalties weren't nearly as severe as the disadvantage of being the only drug free rider in races.

It's a lot harder to eradicate an established behavior than to prevent the behavior from becoming established in the first place.

 

[johnqwertyful]

Yes we need to deal with cheating, but honestly stressing over it is a waste of time. Spend at most 5 minutes of your life on a cheater, don't waste your time with cheaters when you could spend it on the students who actually deserve it. Everything will catch up to them someday.

 

[ZapperZ]

Yes we need to deal with cheating, but honestly stressing over it is a waste of time. Spend at most 5 minutes of your life on a cheater, don't waste your time with cheaters when you could spend it on the students who actually deserve it. Everything will catch up to them someday.

I would love to just ignore them. However, as a physics instructor, the problem with this is that it often penalize those students who do work really hard. Think about it. Students who tend to cheat, especially on HW and Lab reports, will score higher because they are copying the correct solutions. So already they are skewing the scores. Secondly, once the honest students sees this, what is the incentive to not copy or cheat? They work their rear ends off, and yet, they do not attain the high scores. The temptation will be just too great for many.

It takes a lot more work, as a physics instructor, to ensure that (i) no one is cheating and (ii) those who do cheat do not get rewarded ahead of those who don't! Many of the things I do isn't to stop people from cheating, but rather, to make sure those who did an honest work do not get penalized or be at a disadvantaged.

So no, ignoring it won't make it go away or won't make it "harmless".

Zz.

 

[johnqwertyful]

Never said it was harmless, and I did say to deal with them. I'm just saying that some people tend to obsess and spend a lot of time/effort on it. It's just time gone. Yes, you need to deal with cheaters. Absolutely. But don't spend any more time than necessary.

 

[BobG]

... Many of the things I do isn't to stop people from cheating, but rather, to make sure those who did an honest work do not get penalized or be at a disadvantaged...Zz.

The "identify the element" part brought back memories of Chemistry class where we had to identify the mystery chemical... and from our tests and calculations the mystery chemical must be liquid hydrogen! Even being us, we could recognize a problem with that and all we could do is look at each other and go, "Oh maaan. How the heck did that happen?"

At least we got enough credit for the things we did right that coming up with a totally outrageous answer didn't kill us. Plus, we at least tried to identify where we went wrong, since there was really no way to just start over in the lab time available.

It's still humiliating when you're turning in a paper that any sane person would have to laugh at.

 

[symbolipoint]

A Basic Mathematics student once turned in a class exercise assignment in which some of the student's answer responses were nothing more than, "Answers may vary."

 

[johnqwertyful]

A Basic Mathematics student once turned in a class exercise assignment in which some of the student's answer responses were nothing more than, "Answers may vary."

I was grading for integral calculus. Two students turned in an integral, as well as a taylor expansion, as it does on wolfram alpha. The problem did not call for that, obviously.

 

[gfd43tg]

The problem with not cheating is that it puts you at a serious disadvantage to those who do cheat.

As much as some people in this thread who are professors think they prevent cheating, students are very tricky in the way they cheat and probably the professor would never be able to find.

And what if you have a professor that doesn't crack down on cheaters? It's definitely a big problem.

When I see professors who make extremely difficult exams, it encourages students to cheat in response, and the professor responds by making the exam even harder, it's a vicious cycle.

I think the issue is nowadays all these companies want superstar students with high GPAs that wasn't needed back in the days. Students with lower GPAs back in the decades past are as good as students with higher GPAs now.

Probably too much emphasis on having a high GPA

 

[ZapperZ]

The problem with not cheating is that it puts you at a serious disadvantage to those who do cheat.

As much as some people in this thread who are professors think they prevent cheating, students are very tricky in the way they cheat and probably the professor would never be able to find.

Nope. You are forgetting that we were once students as well. As much as technology has changed, many of the ways that students do cheat are not that new. There are always simple ways to penalize those who do cheat. The question is does an instructor want to spend his/her time preventing it. It does take a lot of effort and time.

When I see professors who make extremely difficult exams, it encourages students to cheat in response, and the professor responds by making the exam even harder, it's a vicious cycle.

I think the issue is nowadays all these companies want superstar students with high GPAs that wasn't needed back in the days. Students with lower GPAs back in the decades past are as good as students with higher GPAs now.

Probably too much emphasis on having a high GPA

I never make my exams harder just to catch cheaters, or people who never did their HW. I simply change the way the question is asked and what parameters are given. There is almost an infinite variety to ask the same type of question. And look at what I did when I ran the labs. It took almost no effort to change the spectroscope lab and already they simply can't copy off some "database" of lab reports.

Zz.

 

[Mark44]

Would you say that posting a question in PF's HW section that we're supposed to solve and turn in is cheating?

Is the assumption here that the work is supposed to be done with no outside help?

If between posting the question and getting the answer the poster succeedes in gaining understanding of the thing the problem was supposed to teach, then it isn't. If all they do is get an answer, without following through with the learning process, then they've cheated - they've claimed to know something they don't know by submitting the answer they don't understand.

I disagree, Bandersnatch, and whether the poster gets something out of it is irrelevant. If a take-home test is supposed to be done with no outside help, then posting the problem here on PF or elsewhere is cheating, plain and simple.

And that's not just me - it's written into the Homework Guidelines (https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/physics-forums-global-guidelines.414380/) for this forum:

Cheating
We do not support cheating in any form: Do not ask for solution manuals, answers to exams, or instructor's manuals. Every school and instructor has their own policies or honor codes on what constitutes cheating, and it is up to the individual student to adhere to those policies when seeking help here. If you are in doubt as to whether you are permitted to seek help, consider erring on the side of caution and not asking for help.[/quote]

 

[Bandersnatch]

Is the assumption here that the work is supposed to be done with no outside help?
I disagree, Bandersnatch, and whether the poster gets something out of it is irrelevant. If a take-home test is supposed to be done with no outside help, then posting the problem here on PF or elsewhere is cheating, plain and simple.

And that's not just me - it's written into the Homework Guidelines (https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/physics-forums-global-guidelines.414380/) for this forum:

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, or misunderstood DataGG's question. I never meant exam questions - these are meant to test the previously-acquired knowledge. However, seeking help with any other kind of question that is supposed to teach the student cannot be considered a breach of the guidelines, as that would be such a broad application of the rules as to include any and all HW questions.

 

[Mark44]

I interpreted DataGG's question as "Would you say that posting a question in PF's HW section that we're supposed to solve on our own and turn in is cheating?"
My comments apply to that interpretation.

 

[Bandersnatch]

Hmm. I think my understanding was that all HW tasks are meant to be "solved on our own". As in, not just copying a ready-made aswer.
But I can appreciate how it could be interpreted differently, so let me repeat that I don't condone seeking help with exam questions. The time for learning is long past by then.