I gave my students a take home exam over spring break. (This is normal where I teach) One of the questions was particulary difficult. It came down to a factor of three in the solution. That factor inexplicably appeared with no justification on many of their exams. I intend to have the students I suspect of cheating come to my office to solve the problem on the board. What would you do?
Edit: I gave them the Tuesday before spring break until the Thursday after. I didn’t want it to be right before or right after.
When I say normal I mean giving take home exams.
The schools in my area have a partner system for almost all homework assignments. This system was made so that all homework had a co-op style and so that anyone who was cheating risked being told on by one of the other students in a co-op. The penalty would be a zero for all participants in that co-op except the snitch. It was like that one episode of Naruto.
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Seems like people are missing the part where you said “this is normal where I teach” and just judging you for a take home exam. Anywhere I’ve been to school has an office for handling academic dishonesty. I’d consult with them, even if only to protect yourself.
Not the same thing, but when I was proctoring an exam I saw someone very un-sneakily using their phone, so I quietly sat down next to them for the rest of the exam as a quiet threat (then of course let the prof know when they turned in their exam too).
Throw the question out, but offer extra credit to anyone who can show their work.
Of course they cheated on a take home exam. If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.
Proctor your exams if you don’t want them to be able to utilize any of the resources at their disposal. Making them do it again in front of you sounds like bullshit imo, but I am certainly not an academic.
If you ain’t
cheatingstudying & mastering the material, you ain’t trying.
There has to be evidence of their process for me to accept it as evidence of understanding/ability. I have made it clear to them that this is necessary. Their job is to convince me that they know what they’re doing. (But… I’m teaching HS Mathematics). So … I’d mark it wrong/incomplete. I’m also working on student understanding of consequences of their actions, so wouldn’t give them another opportunity on that exam. They would need to improve things on the next exam.
How do you deal with students who say “my gut says it works this way. This is an easy problem, the answer is obvious. I don’t know how to explain it to you any more simply”?
I mean, it takes 162 pages to formally prove that 1+1=2, but we got by just fine before we wrote down that proof. We just knew the answer, we couldn’t explain how. If a student is gifted, a high school level problem could be as simple to them as 1+1 is to most people. They might know and not be able to explain how. Now, in a university environment I’d expect them to learn the proof, but that’s not the point of high school maths, is it? The point of high school maths is to know how to solve the problem, not to know why the solution works.
I found the equivalent of high school maths in my country to be similarly intuitive and trivial. The kids who think that the maths they’re being taught is obvious will just memorise what the examiners want to see and regurgitate it even if they feel like it’s teaching shapes to a baby. If you are “gifted” and truly do understand it then it shouldn’t be hard to just overexplain (which is what most exam boards are looking for)
Yeah, I figured that out in high school too. I think it just irks me that different students are being graded on a different standard, subjectively speaking. The neurotypicals are being judged on their ability to learn, while the gifted kids are being judged on their ability to explain. Maybe the gifted kids wanna learn too. They’re all told their whole lives the point of school is to learn, and then they’re met with disappointing reality. We expect gifted kids to grow up so fast, and having to explain the material back to the teacher to prove they know it doesn’t help. I wish they got to spend a little longer just being kids.
it takes 162 pages to formally prove that 1+1=2
This is ridiculously backwards, Whitehead and Russell’s motivation for writing the PM was to come up with a set of axioms and deductive rules that the entirety of mathematics could be derived from. When they worked out their proof that 1 + 1 = 2, it didn’t tell the world that now 1 + 1 = 2 is now officially a fact, it told the world that the logic and axioms they built were enough to be capable of deducing some very simple facts that we’ve already been confident are true. The hope was that maybe if we keep working at this and modifying our rules when need be, we’ll be able to get a set of axioms and inference rules that are sufficient to determine the truth of any mathematical question. Calling that a proof that 1 + 1 = 2 would be saying their brand new theory was somehow more valid and more fundamental than addition of natural numbers.
A few years later Gödel came along and completely obliterated any hope of a project like that succeeding, and today literally no one thinks of the PM as more than a historical curiosity. (If you actually wanted to prove 1 + 1 = 2 from first principles today, you’d use the Peano axioms for the naturals: S0 + S0 = S(S0 + 0) = SS0, done.)
That’s a tangent from the actual topic but I feel compelled to call it out.
Getting back on track, probably 90% of the points I give on exams are for partial credit, because there need to be distinctions between having no clue, knowing where to start and getting stuck, understanding essentially every meaningful step but then writing 1 + 1 = 3 to wrap up, etc. I’m grading on both their ability to solve problems and their ability to communicate their ideas. Both are equally important.
This is very controversial, but I don’t go out of my way at all to worry about cheating. I don’t want to play policeman and teach with the mindset that my students are potential criminals. Even if I’m 99% sure a student is cheating, if I’m in the profession long enough I’ll eventually hit that 1% where I’m giving a decent student an undeservedly hard time. I’m not paid anywhere near enough for it to be worth having a more adversarial relationship with my students.
I had a student earlier this month where it looked like he probably snuck out his phone for an exam. I just wrote a note on those problems that I couldn’t follow his work and wasn’t comfortable giving points for work I don’t understand, please walk me through your solutions for the points back. I told him this verbally as well when I handed it back to him as well. He never took me up on that, but it feels more humanizing than just calling him a cheater. I think OP is getting at something similar, but I think there’s value in not phrasing it in an accusatory way.
Being somewhat sympathetic to OP though, there is a sense of feeling insulted when a student puts very little effort into pretending they’re not cheating. I try not to take it as an affront to me personally and imagine that they do the same for all their instructors, but I do feel kind of peeved sometimes.
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I’d ask them to come in and redo the problem on paper at the same time, if many have the answer without any calculations, the moment you got the first one in your office, the others would be aware of what’s going on.
Nothing.
Having any homework for the holidays is already enough. Of course most of them would just want to have that gone ASAP.Leave it. Life’s hard enough, just let em have the W before the real world bursts their bubbles more.
Wait, you gave them work over their spring break? What the fuck?? Let them have a damn break!
What does cheating mean in this context? What did they have access to that you wish they hadn’t? And if that’s the case, then why did you make this a take home exam?
This. It’s a case of poor assessment design on the part of @wuphysics87.
In creating assessment you need to know what you are asking them to do, how you want them to do it, what you are measuring and how. The format you choose needs to accurately reflect those things.
Yeah you have a take home test over the holidays, fuck that
Did they cheat? You were lazy & let them take an exam at home. Sounds like you should’ve expected them to use any resources available. Just because something is normal, doesn’t mean it’s right.
I’m sure your students love you…
I don’t think that the best way to convince someone their way is wrong involves personally insulting them and sarcastically implying that they’re hated by their students
Hold an in class quiz with essentially the same problem but with different values. The students that actually worked through the problem should be able to do it again with the changes. Those who didn’t understand and just put down what their peers got will struggle with a quiz. Bonus points if you can restructure the problem in a way to elucidate which specific aspects you think the students were skipping over with help from their peers. Feel free to have specific requirements assigned point values in the problem statement.
Don’t call them into your office and put them on the spot. That will make this adversarial. Your job is to teach them how to solve problems and communicate their methods in a clear fashion. You should reevaluate your problem writing and grading policies if just looking up answers can earn a passing grade. If you give a quiz, be up front with them that you have concerns about some students skipping the work and copying answers. Reiterate that the point of the exam was to make sure they can solve problems, the correct answer is merely a byproduct.
I will add speculation that there is a difference between what your students think you expect from an answer and what your expectations actually are. Mismatches in expectations are immensely frustrating for both parties. So don’t leave your students guessing. Give them specific examples of work of different quality and what aspects earn full points and what things might lead to point deductions. Some of the best professors I had would publish all the prior year exams with their solutions. That gave everyone the opportunity to mimic the workflow and match the level of detail expected. That also elliminates the concern of students finding the answers online or from prior year students for exams as the teacher will have had to avoid reused questions entirely.
This is pretty much what I’ve done previously. I’d say the best way to go about it. Bonus points if it’s on a final haha.
A bigger picture may be; why is sending kids home for break with homework. It is my opinion, that people learn better when they actually have a break during their break. in my opinion, this is a tactic to prepare kids to think its normal to work all the time. That breaks are never actually breaks.
See edit please
