@IsomerMashups
Oh wow. A dehumanizing, high-stress, high-stakes, low-empathy setting where the letter grade you receive can determine your entire financial future encourages people to do whatever they have to in order to get that letter grade. Who would have guessed?
@George12String
The real enemies here are the grading system and the cost of college tuition. Students aren't afraid of failing per se -- student are afraid of the consequences of failing. Students don't want a permanent negative mark on their record; students don't want to delay graduation if it means paying an extra semester of tuition down the line. It seems universities facilitate an incentive structure that leads to cheating. This doesn't justify the cheating any more than poor material conditions justify committing a crime, but it does explain why cheating occurs. Let's try and reform education so that the only real motivation a student has while taking a course is indeed learning the material.
@AlexBesogonov
To professors everywhere: PLEASE stop doing closed-book exams. In actual engineering nobody cares if you remember all formulas or integration methods, you can always look them up. I still remember spending weeks practicing integration techniques that were then never used in practice. Mostly because practical diff. equations are either trivial or can't be solved anyway.
@edfrederick3630
My prof allowed us to bring in the cheat sheet for computer architecture subject, 2 side of A4. And I think it’s hella good way to “force” students learn everything because they need to know what’s important and what’s not. Fyi it’s around 2000 pages of presentation, and you’re only allowed to have 2 side of A4. Beside writing things again is also a method of studying, you basically have to reconstruct everything you learnt (this is also basic knowledge for reading researching paper I believe)
@i.ninetales
Professors catching students on cheating are like the police looking for couriers instead of investigating the whole drug cartel
@yichen8884
I received an email from those cheating contractors asking if I need any "help". I asked them if they could prove the P=NP problem for me. Surprisingly, they said that they can do that for $100. Maybe I should have taken the deal and gotten my 1 million dollars.
@wesleysmith2199
After my final exam, I discovered a calculator left by a student. This was in the mid 70's when even the simplest calculator cost $400. Taped to the back of it was a cheat sheet. Imagine the dilemma of this student: (1) claim the calculator and admit cheating, or (2) forget the calculator and lose $400. It turned out it was his brother's, and he had to take option (1).
@philippg6023
In Germany, in pure Mathematics, you are usually allowed to bring a handwritten piece of paper into the exam and i think that ist awesome. I am the oppinion that the Goal of a lecture is Not to know some formulas by heart but to understand the matter and to be able to proof things. Therefore i have never seen anyone cheating in an exam at the University.
@antman7673
In my physics exam we are allowed to write a DinA4 paper with “cheats” or notes. It is generous and helps not to feel pressured to remember everything. Good notes aren’t enough to complete the exam. The tasks are technical. Some stories came about of people using the old 3d glasses to write in red and blue to have double the information on the paper. Another story was someone writing on a extremely large piece of paper till the loophole was fixed and the size limited to DinA4.
@logank
The only problem with this is professors need to actually be 100% certain when they accuse of cheating. I had a professor, who thankfully reasoned with us later, but he wanted to give myself and a friend an F on a coding homework assignment for "cheating". We were honest that we discussed the assignment together (which was allowed by policy), and we both talked about a global variable being a potentially good idea (typically global variables are frowned upon). We both had a global variable, which is why he thought we cheated on each other. However, preparing to defend ourselves against the university, we sat down together and went through our code to find that almost none of the rest of it was all that similar. Luckily he agreed with us and reinstated our homework grades.
@jainabraina
What I've noticed here (UC Berkeley computer science) is that the common refrain of "If you just cheat and don't learn the material, you won't do well later!" just doesn't really hold up. Students will study the material, learn it, and then cheat anyway because the classes are just that competitive and difficult. Granted, that's not the worst thing in the world - the primary objective of learning is still fulfilled - but it screws over students like me who don't cheat because the classes are curved.
@gg-xp9wc
I've cheated in the sense that I have looked up solutions as a reference to homework problems that I either got stuck on or that I felt were a waste of time. In both of these scenarios, my "cheating" was genuinely the most effective (and time efficient) way for me to learn while still getting a good grade. I'm a "learn by example" kind of person so if I got stuck on a problem type that the professor/book didn't explain well, I used the solution to generalize a way to approach those kinds of problems, and used that to drill for exams. And if I came across a problem that I knew wouldn't be useful for me to do, I didn't have to waste too much time on it. Since homework is for a student's own benefit, I don't really find this kind of cheating to be particularly problematic. I was practicing in the way that was most effective for me, without wasting time. That being said, I have seen a lot of students starting out like this who then fall down the "cheat code" analogy rabbithole where they start looking up solutions more and more, so it definitely takes discipline not to over-use.
@Chris-pt6hh
When we (Columbia) went online, some of the historical curves were moved by a full letter grade. People suddenly getting 80+ on exams that typically have averages around 60. When we went back in person, the grades were magically back to normal.
@rufioh
In my first year at uni, one lecturer said “revision societies are cheating” and tried to get them banned. These are societies where 2nd+ year students help 1st years by teaching, and making mock papers and stuff
@eliontheinternet3298
Do professors realize how much of a problem it is to not just fail a class, but to drop below a certain GPA? I wasn't able to get my bachelor's degree because I got one too many C's, lost my scholarship, couldn't apply for other, less selective scholarships because I was already in college and most require you to be an incoming freshmen. Couldn't pay for school, had to stop. I am lucky enough to be going back now but that is only with the support of my partner. It is 100% understandable that students feel pressure to cut corners when the margin for error is small or nonexistent.
@Michallote
I love how my university deals with this. Firstly all exams must be submitted by professors every semester so they are practically always new. Secondly all previous exams are available on the university web page and actually encourages students to use them to study. Thirdly and most impressive is that most exams allow you to take your notes into the exam. And correspondingly it has problems that require connecting 3 or more topics in order to solve them, information is almost always dependent and conceptual understanding almost defines your grade. If you have fundamental physical understanding of the topics the exams are surprisingly easy, and when not by the end of the exam it forced you to think creatively to reach a solution. They are very long exams as well and most of the time have very very lenient time limits (say 5-6 hours for finals). Some might argue that is a bad think but on the contrary many students realise how important it is to take notes and have them correctly organised. The extension of the courses makes it very hard to locate what's useful if you didn't make your notes yourself or at least studied them well and catalogued them. One of my professors told me that in practice you won't have single day time limits to make all the calculations, you usually carry them out in matters of weeks. So putting time pressure on top of the underlying difficulty hinders the actual learning of topics. I know this will receive some criticism, so for those interested my university is top 100 in the QSRankings (if that is of any value, it is considered after all the best uni in my country) and I have enjoyed so much more my education because of this philosophy of teaching.
@kruksog
I'm not proud of it, but I did cheat on some homework (never a test) in the final two years of my undergrad. A big part of the problem (as a math/comp sci double major) was the tremendous amount of work that was expected of me. I was doing homework like a full time job and I know that's part of the deal, but never having a moment to myself, a moment to breathe, just became crushing. Like, it got to the point where, if I struggled with a problem, I couldn't justify spending 3 hours on this one problem, banging my head against it when there was a mountain of other work I had to do. I wasn't getting enough sleep, I never got to see friends, I never got to enjoy myself. It was untenable. This problem is only made worse by the fact that I, and a lot of students, also had to work while going to school to survive. I don't know what the solution to this is, other than to get kids free/cheap school so they don't need a job while going to school. The workloads in some classes does need to be addressed though. I'm fine with the 3 hours outside class for every hour in class "rule," but I feel like I was doing more like 6 or 7 just to keep my head above water. It was too much.
@PvblivsAelivs
I was a little surprised at the characterization of having notes of the most common formulas as cheating. I am more accustomed to exams being open-note and no-calculator. Presumably, this is a test of your ability to apply the math rather than rote memorization.
@DavidCourtney
Not being able to have a formula sheet in math exams was such a terrific and valuable lesson that totally applies to real life. In my day-to-day engineering job, myself and everyone I work with are locked in a room, and we are never allowed to look anything up. 🙄
@DrTrefor