200 Admit Cheating After Lecture

Academic cheating is an industry.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

Gauldar, you might find the discussion after this post interesting:

http://www.neatorama.com/2010/11/15/the-shadow-scholar/

Ahh, Thanks. I thought I noticed this article on here, but I assumed I had saw the link from Geekosystem. There's so much overlap I have trouble remembering where I read what, and what I read where.

Lazy professors who teach by rote, who never change up their lessons, who fail to use technology properly, deserve to have cheaters. Sadly, one has to question the value of any test where someone can cheat. If the test can be complete by a list of answers, it may not be a complete test of knowledge. That is why essays are better for actually testing the ability of a student. But no one wants to put in the time to read them, and most people would fail that kind of test. And so the multiple choice test lives on.

Hmm, if it was plagiarism or something where you were caught on camera (having a cheat sheet), take the deal, if it was simply a pattern that emerged (e.g. everyone getting the same wrong answers) then I'd stick and tell them to prove it.

R2K: Yes, blame the professors. Smart.

Just where did you go to college?

You get kicked out for cheating on a test?

I read about this somewhere also and I guess he used his statistics skills to calculate that 200 students had cheated. Guess the error margin was a little higher than that.

The hardcore cheaters will call their bluff - if they had actual proof, they'd have to expel them since almost all Uni's have a pretty clearly defined code of conduct rule about cheating and the penalty for getting caught.

The only one cheating was the professor who is too lazy to write the exam for his own class. Using a standardized test for a college course is pathetic.

Cheating is worthless if you value learning.

Teaching a class with 600 students makes the teacher no more effective than a video.

MC can be done, it just has to be done well. And the problem is not that it's a list. The problem is that students are *cheating* off each other.

I remember studying operational research and we had to give back our work to the teacher on floppy disks. One day I realized the teacher was using my floppy disk for his own use, so I asked "innocently" if i could have my disk back for I needed it. He erased what was on it and gave it back to me. Yep, all I had to do was to restore the data, and I got the next week exam right there...
Some call it cheating, some social engineering, some intelligence gathering. What I learned later on is that in business the lines can be blurred, and ethics are much more challenged by the potential benefits of a piece of information : money, of course, or market shares but also survival of your company, keeping your team's jobs safe, etc.
I wish I could see in black and white.

This is for a class for business majors? Since business majors usually end up as managers or corporate people, taking credit for work they didn't do is kinda second nature, eh?

Christophe! Bro! Semper Fi! You rock!

200 people fell for a bluff

Sounds like a test of how naive students were. If they had positive proof of cheating, they would have done something about it. Since they didn't, they pretended.

We've done this at my work with students. If they suspect someone's misbehaving (using their cell phone, going on the internet during class time), but have no proof, we bluff the class.

I wonder how many people were not listening and in a panic raised their hand.

Bluffing or not, the cheaters' ultimate plans were foiled. Big fail. Blaming the school and/or professors for the cheating is a red herring. Your criticisms might be accurate (and I agree with all of them) but have nothing to do with the students' actions themselves. It was a systemic problem and the school and professor chose to handle it as such rather than singling out students. Now they might take a look at being lazy and rote with test banks and multiple choice tests. But to blame them for it happening is like blaming a woman for getting attacked because she dressed provocatively.

Dagonet, I hope to god you are being sarcastic.

What the test was, how it was done, etc., has nothing to do with that fact that the students still cheated. My school has a no tolerance policy that everyone knows about and I cannot believe that this professor got away with making a "deal" with the dean.

Wow Christophe... that's pretty ingenious.

This professor is bluffing. Like he said, he can estimate who cheated but he can never be certain. Calling it "forensic analysis" sounds scary enough. I don't even bother to cheat on exams because having a high GPA means little to me.

For those of you who are against blaming professors/schools, a lot of them really don't put in effort to actually teach well. It's the always the same thing around exam time: binge and purge. A hundred multiple choice questions that tests your memorization skills, not how well you know the material.

@Lea: No sarcasm. I really do find it too harsh a measure to expel someone for cheating on a test. At my university people getting caught cheating will get a negative grade on that test, end of story.