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Education

Non-Technological Ways to Combat Cheating? 191

Posted by Cliff from the keeping-'em-honest dept.
blackcoot asks: "I'm currently T.A.ing for a required senior level class in algorithms. Having just graded the latest set of homework, I'm amused / sickened (can't make up my mind on that one) at the level of cheating. Slashdot has covered automated cheating detection in the past here and here, but I'm hoping to find some (necessarily nontech) ways of encouraging students to be a bit more honest (or at least a little less spectacularly stupid in how they cheat). I've been reporting the cheating as I've found it to the relevant profs, but it doesn't seem to be having much of an effect. Any suggestions?"
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Non-Technological Ways to Combat Cheating? More

Non-Technological Ways to Combat Cheating?

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  • Zeros (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:08AM (#7170215) Journal
    Give them zeros each and every time you find one of them cheating. They can appeal if they think it's unfair.
    • I agree. It is sickening the amount of cheating, even more disgusting in the more prestigious universities. But a SENIOR level course? These people are going on to become professional engineers and programmers?! That behavior is unnacceptable, and they should get a zero, end of story. They would be disbarred or their license revoked if they were lawyers or doctors. If this is not corrected American universities are just going to devolve (moreso) into degree mills.

    • Negatives (Score:2, Interesting)

      by philthedrill ( 690129 )
      I know a lot of people have suggested zeros. I had a prof who would dish out negative points on an assignment if you were caught cheating. So you could get -20 points on a 100 point assignment.

      But in the same class, we had a discussion board where people could talk about problems in the open. Maybe they won't be able to post specific pieces of code (from their homework), but at least people will have a forum to post questions where everyone can read them and help each other.
    • Isn't there a policy about academic misconduct?

      If some people cheat, you bring it to the Dean attention and they get kicked out of the school. I'm told this happenned in first year CS at my university in the year before I started. A whole third of the class handed in the same assignment (complete with the other person's name in the comments and everything.)

      Another way to deter cheating is to have a series of quizzes that are worth say 2% in the course each. Make the quiz content obviously directly re

      • The very last course in my CS program was "CS182 Compiler Construction". 10 weeks to learn how a compiler works AND implement one. I was one of the best CS studends at my school, and I got a C in the course and it was the hardest C I ever earned...

        Long story short, atleast half of the assignments were copied, someone had gotten source code to the *complete* compiler and we were worried about not graduating because a bunch of cheating assholes were going to turn in complete compilers whereas we worked ou

    • At my university, DTU [www.dtu.dk], the rules for cheating are very strict. If caught cheating, you will loose every ECTS point for that semester. I really can't see why cheaters shouldn't be punished severely. They reduce the value of my education that I'm taking the hard way!

  • Impossible Question (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:23AM (#7170259) Homepage
    Just put in an impossible question and see how many get the same answer ..

    Rus
  • In the CS course at my uni, most units have one or two major assignments and the exam. The assignments are usually "design an app to do blah, document, discuss design decisions etc". The exam then has a number of questions based upon the assignments.

    If you get less than half of the marks for those questions, you get zero for them. Seeing as they usually make up half of the exam (25% of the exam on each assignment), if you don't get 100% for everything else, you fail. This seems to have worked somewhat in s
    • I was a TA in college was very frustrated at the level of cheating. Your post made me think of an approach I wish I had used -- emulating the essay section of the Sun Certified Java Developer [sun.com] exam. After the students turned in their assignments, you could have a pop quiz with two questions: (1) How did you approach and implement ___ component in the last assignment? (2) Justify your design decision.

      Not only would that hose anyone who copied an assignment, that would be a really good exercise for everyon

  • Nano-Technological Ways to Combat Cheating? (Score:4, Funny)

    by IainHere ( 536270 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:37AM (#7170306)
    I misread the title, and thought we were talking about nano-tech.

    I'd come up with a couple of interesting ways to combat cheating with it before I realised my mistake:

    1) Have nano-robots floating around in your blood stream (and eyes) taking account of everything you see and write. If they witness you cheating, turn you into grey-goo.

    2) As above, but instead of mushing your entire body, just take control of your hands to write "I AM A CHEAT!" all over the paper.

    3) Since the above isn't actually possible yet, just *tell* the students that it is, and they've been injected with the "truth or die" serum.

  • Discourage them in classes (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dabuk ( 573028 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:40AM (#7170311)
    Tell them that you have sophisticated ways of determining if they're cheating. The main reason they cheat, is because they think they'll get away with it.

    One year, I marked all the coursework for a year and found some ridiculously blatant cheating. So the next year they were informed what happened before (including the 0 mark for all parties involved). I don't remember coming across any cheating when I marked that lot.

    So either they got very good at Prolog or very good at hiding their cheating. Either way I don't care as had fewer meetings to attend...

    • So either they got very good at Prolog or very good at hiding their cheating.

      In my first year of undergrad, there were some people who were terrible cheats. This was at a university that's consistently ranked among the top 5 in the UK, so you would think the students would be a little smarter. These people would literally photocopy someone else's report, stick blank white self-adhesive labels over the original name, handwrite their own name on the label, then bind the photocopied pages and hand it in. I
      • ...there were some people who were terrible cheats. This was at a university that's consistently ranked among the top 5 in the UK...

        It's funny, I TA'd a course at a top 5 US school (think Cambridge, MA, not MIT) and I had two students cheat. Talk about terrible. One marked out all of his answers, then blatantly copied the other one's WORK AND ANSWERS, including the mistakes that were scratched out. to top it all off, they turned them in at the same time (ie right next to each other's in the stack of pa

    • Re:Discourage them in classes (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Glonoinha ( 587375 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @09:39AM (#7171332) Journal
      You may be on to something here - social engineering to a positive effect being more powerful than the technical applications of cheat detection.

      Perhaps the first day dedicate a 15 minute sermon asking the students to be completely honest as to why they are there. Some are going to be there because they have to be there (and thus more likely tempted to cheat simply to get out of the class) and some are there because they genuinely want to know / learn the material (and thus the only ones they would be cheating would be themselves) ... and some are there from a foreign country with severe penalties for not passing and doing well (and thus very motivated to exceed at any cost - I have seen some of the (insert nationality here) syndicates in action : entire sets of class material including exams in advance.) And some are just lazy.

      Also differentiate between cheating on homework and cheating on exams / projects.

      At the collegiate level homework is simply a formality, the professor's way of indicating which material in the book he finds important and which can be ignored, and sort of a form of extended classroom instruction. It gives the student an opportunity to apply the theories and formulas in a controlled environment and determine which he has a solid grasp of, and which not (hopefully so he can get it explained during the next class or during office hours 1 on 1.) It is to get him ready for the exams ... so copying someone else's homework totally defeats the purpose of the homework in the first place ... the prof doesn't care if you get it right or wrong or even do it - it is his way to help you help yourself for the upcoming exams (and thus cheating on homework really is only cheating yourself and shouldn't be monitored.)

      At the exam / report / computer program level, let the students know that first sermon that you are looking for someone to make an example of, that you look forward to catching someone cheating so you can document it very well, assure a 100% no questions asked case of cheating, let the student float along the entire semester and regardless of the marks in class / exams / programs / papers that student will fail the class horribly, only not realize it until he gets his report card. You will not acknowledge that he has failed, but you will know and because he cheated he will know. And you are willing to do it for more than one. Perhaps after the first major exam or paper or program take a minute at the beginning of class to announce that one student was determined with 100% certainty to have cheated and will be failing the class regardless of their marks over the course of the semester, but don't tell them which one it was. Any one of them that was even borderline considering cheating even a little is going to fly totally straight the rest of the semester.

      When the penalty is too extreme, most people will pass on the crime. As a child the penalty for stealing a banana from a fruit stand is pretty wimpy, so it happens. As an adult in Saudi Arabia the penalty for stealing a banana from a fruit stand is what(?) the loss of a finger or a hand? I don't envision too many cases of that. When the penalty for DWI in the USA was pretty wimpy it happened all the time, but now the penalty is total financial and employable destruction - and I for one don't do it.
      • social engineering to a positive effect being more powerful than the technical applications of cheat detection.

        I couldn't agree more with that point. I have taken many a class where I am certain of exactly who is cheating -- and when.

        Basically, I find that there is a small quantity of severe cheating when the professor takes a completely lax attitude (example: 3-7 out of 400 students sitting next to each other copying answers back and forth for 10 minutes after the exam ended)

        However, I find that

  • don't depend only on homework.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:43AM (#7170320) Homepage Journal
    as you wont EVER know if it is them or their roommate who the other bought a sixpack for(well, maybe from the beer stains)..

    the whole point of homework is to LEARN things so you can pass the exam(ok, not just for passing the exam but you get the point), if you make it possible to finish the course without exam you will end up with people who are totally clueless about the subject getting passed. one year on the c++ course over here no exam was necessary at all, all you had to do was a very bitchy, for most people for various reasons, practice assigment and be at every lecture and write down basically everything the prof said and then return those notes. so you got through by just copying everything the prof said(no understanding necessary as long as you were willing to go there twice a week and copy whatever slides he showed) and by knowing some poor soul who was willing to code it for food(the prof really sucked too, and wasn't here for another year).

    anyways, have sufficiently bitchy exams and you may catch the cheaters. of course if you just except them to report in lots of written work weekly you might just be screwed if you don't have enough time.

  • Make them care about the assignment (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gori ( 526248 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:48AM (#7170332) Homepage
    In my experience, one thing that works is to make sure students care about the work they produce.
    When they think that the quality and honesty of the work is is important to them, and to others they tend not to cheat.
    One way is that we give them problems that we ourselves not fully understand, and we clearly tell them so. You present them with a challenge saying "Ok, here is this tough problem. We (the reseach group) dont quite get it yet. Maybe you will see the light and can help us get it further. If your solution/idea it is particullarly good, we will make you a coauthor on the paper on the toppic"
    Obviously, this requires that you do have such a toppic. But inventing a tough or next to impossible problem is usually not a problem.
    Anohter way we use is to introduce a element of competition into assignments. Make them make competing designs/solution and invite an industry/scientific expert to evaluate and judge the solutions during a workshop/panel discussion. Works wonders for us.

    Caveat: this experience comes from teaching Environmental Science and Sustainability, not computer related stufff, but is should port finely to CS as well.
    If you want more info/literature on the topic of chalenging education, just mention it.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:58AM (#7170362)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Forcing them to admit cheating (Score:5, Interesting)

      by shachart ( 471014 ) <shachar-slashdot ... ac.il minus city> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @07:50AM (#7170568)
      Two comments:

      1. Being a student of the former poster (Hey Tal, enjoyed your physics exercises :), while currently not having mod points, I can vouch that it was the case. I know more than a single set of a cheater and a cheatee who approached him and told the truth.

      2. Being a TA myself (CS, though), I tried the following approach - every student writes the names of the students around him, in all 8 directions, in a specially drawn 3x3 box. Now, this killed 99% of cheating, as we TAs could get a quick verification of cheating suspects. It also helped us recognize cheating, since we could check the tests in the order of seating. This, coupled with Tal's method, could probably locate almost all cheaters.

    • Re:Forcing them to admit cheating (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Stalemate ( 105992 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:54AM (#7172176)
      In one of my composition classes during my freshman year a student copied a paper verbatim from Cliff's Notes. The teacher and everyone else in the class had read the Cliff's Notes for the material, so this was a really dumb move.

      The teacher's solution: give her a really high grade and have her read her paper aloud in class as an example of an outstanding paper.

      As she read the paper it became obvious to everyone in the class what she had done and she immediately approached the teacher and apologized, rewrote the paper, and explained the whole thing to the class at the next meeting. That class never had a problem with cheating again as far as I know.

      This could be applied to CS classes if there are student's with identical programs. Give them high grades and have them each present their solutions to the class separately and they will be forced to admit what they have done as it will become obvious to everyone present.
    • What happens when another students steals my take-home test out of the drop box, copies it almost verbatin, and turns it back in right next to mine?

      This happened to me, then the arrogant T.A. sent me a note similar to yours saying I would be failing the class and probably reported to the dean for allowing someone to copy. It was all I could do not to beat him into a bloody mass.

      Luckily the prof gave him a smackdown.
    • Only one problem with that. Way back when, someone grabbed a non working copy of my then GFs program out of the trash, and just did enough to make it work. My GF was accused of cheating, and was given a zero on that assignement, and was threatened with bing tossed from the school - in fact, disiplinary hearings were started. My GF (Now wife) was able to convince folks to LOOK at the patterns in the class, and the computer time used. The department head believed her, but the TA never did. She ended up w
    • I'm sorry but I think this is a foolish way to do it. It's just as bad for a person to give an assignment to someone to copy and the person who actually cheats. If it were my call both would be given zeros. THey are supposed to both be professionals, can't they say no?

      I know it sounds like an after school special but if you can't say no to one of your friends then you will just get walked over in the work place. Personally I spend the time helping them with there issues and make sure they understand wh
  • As someone who teached for 3-4 years, I faced the same difficulty. So, my options were, basically:
    1. grade the students based on practical, speed tests (not essays or homeworks). What is concept? How would you use it in case? What is the error hidden in lot of code here?
    2. grade the students based on my subjective perception of how much each one absorbed. pop quiz everyday, 3 or 4 students a day, noting my remarks on their answers. keep them interested.
    3. to smooth 2, throw in some auto-evaluation.
    Hope I ha

  • YOU CANT WIN YOU CANT EVEN BREAK EVEN AND (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cathouse ( 602815 ) * on Thursday October 09, 2003 @07:12AM (#7170411)
    And you can't get out of the game.

    This is an area where you would be well advised to be VERY careful, and
    I suspect that the LESS automatic [ergo: more personal] your methods of
    detecting and dealing with cheating, the greater the risk to you.

    Two situations, both of which astonished me at the time:

    In High School, I always thought of tests about the same way that a Jock
    thinks of a Track Meet--Fun and Games with the chance of winning a worthless trophy.
    When this one bad-attitude twit with a two-digit I.Q. started whispered requests for answers
    during a mid-term, I thought that giving her 100% WRONG answers was a perfect
    way of dealing with an insult. Want to guess who got more than TWO HOURS of
    major [as in YELLING and ARM-WAVING]from both the Dean of Students and the Vice-Principal?
    Not the cheating twit-bitch.

    A few years later, Proctoring an Exam as part of my T-A duties, I spotted one of the test-takers
    repeatedly peering into a book-bag. A few minutes later, having seen the suspected Crib-sheet,
    I confiscated both it and blue book, then quietly ejected the cheater.

    Want to guess who very nearly got fired?


    • That sucks, and I am sorry. I don't agree with you on the first, but on the second instance, you really did do the right thing. You shouldn't let that sort of crap discourage you.

      Of course, life isn't fair, and sometimes you just need to make a judgment call, and maybe keep your head down. However, if that's the case, there's little you can do about it unless you're willing to put up a fight (bad management sucks, yes.) Ejecting the cheater from the test is the correct thing to do.
  • One thing you should do is make sure that they know you've been where they are now - and that means you know all the tricks. Even better if you can give them some examples of what you'd expect them to do, and tell them that you will check. Don't rely on the "we have this magical software that can detect cheating" trick - students don't believe it until you prove thta it can do it (I didn't believe the CS department work for had one when I was an undergrad, until I graduated and saw it from the other side)

    I
  • I'm assuming we're talking about cheating on take home assignments, right? Why bother grading them? I always like the approach taken by most of my electronics professors...homework really meant nothing, grade wise. Some of them would collect it, mark it, and hand it back with a grade, but it only counted for something like 10% of your final grade. Any test was worth more than every homework assignment, and it was much, much harder to cheat on a test.

    I've never quite understood homework grading...in HS,
    • Amen!!! I avoided certain teachers when I was getting my Computer Science degree because they graded homework. They weren't better teachers because they did or didn't grade homework, I just didn't agree with it in advanced classes.

      People in college are paying a great deal of money to be there in most cases (or their parents are paying it). If they don't want to learn, it should not be the teachers responsibility to drag them along kicking a screaming by grading homework. If the student doesn't know h
    • I agree. In college I've failed 2 seperate courses (digital systems and linear programming) with 90+ averages on the exams and final projects. I didn't do a single homework assignment. Even though the first class, homework was worth 20% of the final and the second class it was only worth 10%. I didn't need to do the homework to understand the material.

      The first teacher accused me of cheating. I went to see her and she refused to budget even after offering to take an oral quiz in front of her. I filed

  • Cheating how? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by theCoder ( 23772 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @07:44AM (#7170543) Homepage Journal
    If you mean turning in the same copy of the homework, then report it to the prof/dept/university and let them deal with it. Most places take a very dim view of cheating and the consequences can be very harsh.

    If you mean turning in homework that has similar answers, then that's, IMO, different. Especially at that high level, you can't honestly expect all the students to work completely alone on all the homework. I know I sure worked with my friends trying to figure out the solutions to harder problems. Now, I always wrote it all up in my own words after I understood the solution. If working with peers to determine and understand the solution to a *homework* problem is cheating, then I guess I was a cheater. Considering that most places encourage students to form study groups, I think it's hypocritical of them to not expect the members of those same groups to help each other. That doesn't mean writing the solution for each other, but to help them understand. Of course, this is highly variable for the type of work for each class, but the senior level algorithms class in this case probably has a lot of thinking and writing/explaining as part of the homework.

    As a TA, it's part of your job to distinguish between the two. Yes, it's hard and subjective, but that's part of the job. Fortunately, back in my TA days, I didn't have to worry about that (grading Freshman labs wasn't that hard, though I did have to grade the homework for one sememster)

    As for detecting the cheating, the only low tech thing you have is that great pattern matching device sitting on top of your neck. If you think you've seen the same answer before, chances are you probably have. Go back and find the similar paper. Compare the answers -- quality, correctness, writing style, grammar, spelling, etc. Keep in mind that the students may just have been working together, and not copying one another. Use your best judgement. Maybe you just need to talk to the students yourself first. Let them know what you find unacceptable.

    Always remember, however, that the point is to get the students to learn. If they can accomplish that through working through the problems together, then why stop that? All you want to stop is one person doing the work and the rest copying (because there's very little learning going on on the copiers' parts).

  • every time you teach the course, invent a completely new and original set of problems, and assign them individually to students. Use a non standard language (such as Fortran 95 - yes - ) hard to install on home computers, and watch the students as they work in your computer lab, so they cannot get outside help from people who code C++ for food (or wannabe boyfriends of cute students).
    Only problem with this approach : one has to be extremely creative...you can get away with, say, three set of twelve assign
  • Try this: The new policy is, when you catch a cheater, the person who cheats will not be allowed to have any work graded (getting all zeros on every assignment and test) until the cheated work is re-completed by the student.
  • Like you suggest, go as low tech as possible. No computers.

    Ideally, you'd keep everything in your head and then just verbalize in front of your students. Failing that, find a typewriter and a mimeograph machine. (Do they still make mimeographs? Dunno, but there's always the office copier).

  • Just let the cheaters go on their merry way. Your prof doesn't want to deal with it.. Your school doesn't want to deal with it.. And if it ever went to a judicial review thingy, you won't want to deal with it.

    Besides, people who cheat in these classes will just go on to be your managers and bosses eventually (assuming you leave academia)... Move along people, nothing more to see here.

  • Two ways (Score:3, Insightful)

    by More Trouble ( 211162 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @09:01AM (#7171025)
    One: give each student a different assignment. This is really great if, for instance, you know the students well enough to assign each the project they need to round out their education.

    Two: assign the whole class one project, something that a smaller number can't complete. This method reflects what I like to call "the real world".

    :w
    • -Two: assign the whole class one project, something that a smaller number can't complete. This method reflects what I like to call "the real world".

      What happens is the 2 or 3 uberStudents will do the project while the other 27 will either simply stand around, get in the way, arrange accomodations to insure the 2 or 3 have access to whatever they need to succeed, bring food so the 2 or 3 can concentrate on the task, possibly even manage some of the real world issues on the behalf of those 2 or 3 in order to
  • Depending on the school's policy, it might not even be your place to do anything about it.

    Some slashdotters have gone to extremes and mentioned giving both parties big fat 0's. But is this really the right thing to do? What if they happened to reach a spectacularly similar solution by coincidence? Do you wish to defend and testify in a review committee session?

    The reason that it may appear as if your prof isn't doing anything could be that it's not his place to decide anything about it either!

    Surprisi
  • Not entirely non-technical...and a little more work for you.

    For exercises that involve a bunch of questions being answered, you need to ensure that each person only has to answer a subset of the questions. The plan is that they can't simply copy one person's answers, they have to find enough people to 'collect the whole set', which is a little harder.

    Generating a list of variations on which person should answer is easy (think binary). Assign each person a variation number along with an assignment (write t
  • make them use GPL or sommat on their code, that way they need to document what portions they copied. Then grade them on the portions they actually did them selves.
    Ie copied the core algo, but wrote the rest 25% or less

    copied the algo, but rewoked it to be more efficient
    75 or what ever

    -- tim
  • Easy -- flunk them, suspend them, expel them.

    After they've been through 2 or 3 schools, maybe they'll start to get the picture.
  • The EE department at my Uni (I was a Science student) used "personalised" assignments in many subjects... The questions were all set up so that one of the inputs to the problem was your student number, last name, initials, or some other personally linked detail.

    Therefore, while students could still work together to some extent, each assignment had to be "solved" individually.


  • Working together is great, as long as everyone comes away understanding the answers.

    In the undergrad algorithms class at CMU some of the assignments are "presentations," where a group of students solves problems together, then presents the answers in front of a professor or TA. At the time of the presentation, the TA picks the question that a student will answer randomly, so that it's in his interest (and his group's interest) to understand the answer to each question.

    This is actually *easier* than gradin
  • Do the powers that be in CS departments frown on the GPL, too? I don't get it. As a computer scientist, you're supposed to solve problems, and solve them in the most efficient manner possible. I think sharing code counts as efficient. That terminator was just being systematic.

    When you think there's a need for a program, what's the first thing you do? I always look to see if someone's done it first. Even if you do have to start from square one, examining other peoples' work can make your first implementatio
    • As a computer scientist, you're supposed to solve problems, and solve them in the most efficient manner possible. I think sharing code counts as

      As a software developer you are expected to solve problems in the most efficient manner possible, including the reuse of existing code. As a computer scientist you are expected to demonstrate an ability to derive solutions from basic principles and operate in areas where there is no precedent, i.e. in research. Upon graduation, you should be equally qualified to g
  • Having experienced university in the US and UK, I can vouch that there's a simple answer that will be popular with the students too: eliminate the incentive to cheat by grading the entire course properly invigilated exams. This is the standard approach in UK universities: yes, you have tutorials and problem sets, but no-one cares about attendance and marks count for nothing. Everything hinges on the exams.

    As a result, the lazy students who would otherwise have cheated simply to pass the class, simply don'
    • Ah, now the question makes sense. I did wonder what the problem was about cheating on 'homeworks' was - surely they'd just fail the exam at the end. The only coursework (UK uni) I had that was worth any marks was either a group project, or individual reports where everyone in the year got different report titles. People would sometimes get copies of reports from the previous year, but that wasn't much help really.

  • Something I've seen in the workplace (Score:3, Funny)

    by MarkusQ ( 450076 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:14AM (#7171693) Journal

    Here's a trick I've seen in the real world that gets the results you want in short order:
    • Tell them teamwork is required (this cuts communication down right off the bat).

    • Implement some form of zero-sum grading; e.g., you are going to award N points for each problem / assignment, distributed among the correct solvers as you see fit. Make sure they understand the system.

    • If you suspect cheating, give half the points to the cheater (the one who you think copied, not the source) and divide the reduced remander among the rest of the students.

    • Act like you don't notice when the cheaters fail to show up for the next few classes, or limp, etc.
    It works best if their livelyhood is on the line, but the effect should be sufficent even with grades.

    -- MarkusQ

  • Questions that encourage/discourage cheating (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PepperedApple ( 645980 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:18AM (#7171742) Homepage
    As a TA for a computer science class I saw many instances of cheating, but they could be split into two types.
    1. People who cheated on most assignments
    2. Questions that many people cheated on
    For the people who cheat on many assignments, often turning in identical, alpha-renamed problem sets, I think the best solution is to give them a Zero and send them to whichever judicial administration your school has in place for academic integrity violations. Those people probably don't want to be in a CS course in the first place, or they have other priorities (Sports, Social life, etc.), or maybe they just have no faith in their ability to pass on their own and just need more tutoring. If you can make it less worth their time to cheat than to just not take the class at all, hopefully those people will take another class that they might be more interested in.

    But I've seen questions that honest/smart students cheat on. I've heard of people in the labs shouting answers across the room. The questions that caused this kind of cheating tended to be trial-and-error questions with one line solutions. In any class students are going to work together, and I think it's wonderful if they can help each other understand what's going on.

    So to avoid cheating, the best way is to create problems where the understanding is separated from the answer. This way students that just get the answer really miss out on something that the students who solved it honestly get.

  • UCRs technique (Score:2, Interesting)

    by yarbo ( 626329 )
    UCR [ucr.edu] makes us paranoid about cheating. When they catch someone cheating, the person gets an F in the course and the choice of going to a seminar, or getting suspended for a quarter. If the person chooses to fight it, I believe he/she will be suspended for a year if the person can't prove that there wasn't cheating.
    To catch cheating, they use MOSS [berkeley.edu], and an anonymous cheating report form [ucr.edu]

    If you cheat twice, you're likely to get suspended for a year or get expelled.

    The policy on academic dishonesty [ucr.edu]
  • Another aspect of cheating is the answers to exercises in popular books (e.g., Cormen et.al.) can be found on the internet.

    So don't rely on exercises from the book, or perhaps modify them enough so that the answer changes substantially. Even rewording them slightly will fool clueless students.

    • Another thing I should add is that instructors should avoid putting their answers on the internet. Once you do that, the answers will be googled and available to everyone in the world.

  • Yeild to the inevitable (Score:3, Funny)

    by aminorex ( 141494 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:37AM (#7171956) Homepage Journal
    "Cheating" is a *good* thing. Why would you
    deprive future software engineers of what might
    be their *only* opportunity to work as a team
    in a realistic simulation of a workplace environment
    before their graduation?

    If you wanted to make things more realistic, you
    would let everyone google for their test answers,
    give 'A's to your friends, and randomly pick
    fat people to fail.

  • It's Late, Minimize Fascism (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:46AM (#7172040) Homepage Journal

    I'm hoping to find some (necessarily nontech) ways of encouraging students to be a bit more honest

    By this time of their lives, it's a bit late.

    Morals and ethics are best instilled at an earlier age and society has relies fundamentally on parents to do this (even if parents don't do it, leave it to others, etc.) People can argue for eternity whether society ought to or is obligated to pick up or replace what incompetent parents leave as a legacy.

    But this is an institution of higher learning. These people ought to have a clue and be able to put two and two together.

    That is , a word to the wise suffices.

    The prof should mention once in class that there have been cases where homeworks bore a striking similarity and that he hopes everyone will try to get the maximum learning benefit from doing their homework as independently as possible and that he and the T.A.'s have office hours if anyone is having particular problems. Competent students that simply let others crib without learning are not doing the cheater any favors, any more than buying an alcoholic a drink does that person any favors.

    If someone wants to hang themselves and their career by cheating, they've already got enough rope to do it.

    When I was an undergrad there was an honor system that included exams which were:

    • take-home,
    • finite-time,
    • closed-book.
    and was a much more pleasant environment than the kind of proctored exams that are more common. I'm sure that some cheating occurred, but I still managed to graduate with a tolerable GPA without cheating.

    By comparison, some early coursework in grad school was really ugly. I had to roll out of bed early to go take some stupid scheduled final exam with 40 other sweating, anxious students at the same time. Until you've experienced how good things can be you don't realize just how palpable the environment of no-trust and no-respect really is. It sucks, and it's not worth sacrificing to punish a few cheaters that will hurt themselves in the long run.

  • OK, so setting 20 sets of questions for 20 people is a bit over the top but set four sets of questions that test the same knowledge.

    If there are two or more people who you suspect of cheating/copying, give them both a zero (of course, it helps if you've previously warned the students that copying will be rewarded with a zero mark) and have them complete different sets of questions the next time around.

    If there's still copying going on with the second homework assignment then it should be easier to detect
  • Oral tests. No one dares cheat if they know there's an oral test coming up.

  • Collaboration vs. Cheating (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Vadim Grinshpun ( 31 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @11:29AM (#7172639) Homepage

    I've always found that I was much more motivated to do the work, and learned more from the process, if I had the ability to work with someone else--whether the policy allowed it or not.

    Working alone is prone to getting stuck at one place and not being able to move on, whereas when you work with a partner (or partners), there's a potential for a different perspective, which almost always helps. I found that I learned a lot simply from hearing a different take on the problem (usually, after getting stuck in solving it :) as opposed to spending hours agonyzing over a stumbling point and possibly not really advancing from it, thus learning very little from the assignment. Furthermore, many people learn a lot by just discussing the problem, as it forces them to think along paths their brains would not take if they were left to themselves; many things fall into their place and sink in much better in this fashion (for example, how many of you have come up with an answer to a tough question while explaining your question to a friend?). And let's be realistic, in the real world, many things are done collaboratively and are beyond any single person.

    A number of my CS classes at Cornell had a very simple policy, which has worked remarkably well (and I've seen this both as a student and a TA). The policy was, roughly:

    1. You are allowed to discuss the problem with others
    2. You have to give credit to the people you discussed the problem with (write down their names on your assignment)
    3. Everyone has to do their own writeup

    This policy had the benefits of letting people bounce ideas off of each other, to learn from others, to pick up things they wouldn't otherwise pick up. At the same time, requiring everyone to do their own writeup ensured that the people understood the solutions well enough to be able to formulate them well on paper--not an easy task if you're just trying to blindly copy parts of a solution without understanding it.

    What I saw with that policy in place was that people tended to form stable study groups, the overall results were pretty good (yet sometimes people in the same study group might have rather different explanations of the same things!), and also, in the rare cases of cheating, the cheating was relatively obvious and easy to spot.

  • Here's a radical notion: legalize it.

    I'm serious: in the spirit of "pair programming" and "egoless programming", make "cheating" or collaboration permissible. Just point out that the submissions had better not look identical, and make them disclose who they're collaborating with. If you think there are one or two students who are supplying the whole group, cut them out and give then different assignments.

    I've worked with this kind of notion both as a student and as a professor, and I'm convinced that it
  • "I hereby declare on my word of honor, that I have neither given nor received help with this work." Antiquated, I know. Maybe a stern lecture on the university's cheating policy, complete with knowing and humiliating smirks at the suspects, would do a better job.

    I've wondered for years, though, what good it does once you're past fractions, to assign graded homework that just consists of a series of written examples or problems to be solved. Life doesn't work that way, and the people who're up to their nec

  • The professors know and do nothing? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by whorfin ( 686885 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @11:45AM (#7172890)
    Then report the professors to the university's academic standards board. If the people with the authority to punish wrongdoing tolerate this dishonesty, then *they* are a large part of the problem.

    Although I generally agree that at college level, the students are old enough to know right from wrong, they are learning important life lessons while at University, and one of those needs to be "Cheat, and you lose". The others are the answers to the questions "How much can I drink before I fall down?", and "Is that it?"

    • There are universities out there where the academic offenses committee treats the professor as the guilty party while giving every available opportunity to the student to weasle out of the punishment. One can hardly blame a professor who choses not to report under those circumstances.

      Just something to keep in mind.

  • Kick them out for cheating, and go very easy on the ones you can't detect any cheating from.

    The problem here is that there is no reward for honest behaviour. Yea, yea, a degree is the reward. But if you're good at cheating, you get that *plus* you have a chance to get top marks in your class and graduate with "honours" *plus* you get to concentrate on the stuff you're actually interested in learning. Once you learn that many people don't actually want to be in the class you're teaching, you'll realize that
  • It is the professor's problem. If the instructor doesn't have a zero tolerance policy, then you're screwed.

    I just started taking classes again, and one of my profs stated that any cheating would result in an immediate F for the course. He claimed that at least once a year he has a student in his office crying after being caught. He always states this policy on day 1 so that there is no surprise. I respect that, and wish that more faculty weren't such candy asses about enforcing academic accountability.
  • True story:

    My wife was student-teaching a biology in a senior high school some years back. Students were supposed to work independently and write up their lab notes individually.

    To cut to the chase, here's what my wife said to a student:

    "OK, so you copied your lab notes. That was bad enough. But a carbon copy? What were you thinking?

    And then to put them in my in-basket with the original directly on top of the carbon?"
  • I did both my BS and MS at UNC-Chapel Hill, where there is a fairly strict honor code. Basically, if you're caught cheating, you flunk the course and are suspended for at least one semester.

    The basic message, at least in the Computer Science Department was to give credit to others. Most professors didn't care if you worked in groups on assignments; in fact, it was strongly encouraged in many classes. You generally had to turn in your own work, and it had to be your own work.

    For example, the group would wo
  • As a successful student I NEVER did homework alone. What is the point - it is one of the worst ways of learning. My professors encouraged us to get together, work through problems and potential solutions in a group.

    Well what happens with people who copy ?... Well homework was worth 10-20% of the grade, tests 50-60% (labs the rest) so if you weren't doing/understanding the homework - you flunked the test

    Is the purpose of the homework to really show that I know how to type in some silly answer - or is i

  • Most cheaters, when caught, either (1) claim they didn't think they were doing anything wrong, or (2) really didn't know they were doing anything wrong. I make them turn in a multiple-choice quiz on my academic honesty policies in the first week of class. That eliminates the excuse in case #1, and eliminates the cheating in case #2.

    You can also get rid of some of the easy opportunities for cheating, without making your class into a prison camp. For instance, I just handed out a take-home test in my physics

  • I remember back to first year CS at University of Waterloo (long time ago). We had been instructed to talk to others, to share information, but to leave the pencils down when you do it.

    Anyways, it was the last assignment. I get back my assignment, -100%! It was a direct copy of so-and-so. Now, I'd never heard of the other guy, so I went to the TA, toting the text book I had scarfed the answer from.

    When I got there, the TA said that the other student had already been in (with a different book/same

  • This is a people issue. Make and use a process that is described clearly [uq.edu.au] and mentioned often. Inform everyone of misconduct cases.

    Our numbers are going down.

    Ralf

  • I suppose this depends on the subject material, but implemented correctly, this may actually make the students learn something. Give out homework assignments that require studying some obscure part of the course's subject matter. Soon after the assignments are turned in, throw a pop quiz at some unpredictable interval on the same obscure material. The students who did the work honestly will be more prepared for the quiz than the ones who just copied. This won't catch cheaters in the act, but it'll help
  • Over the past few years I've seen two principal strategies to deal with cheating prevail in my Comp.Eng program

    1. Accept it. In most classes where there were paper-based assignments (think Math, Physics, etc.) our profs would basically say on the first day of class "I know you're all going to work together on these assignments. Fine. But remember that exams arn't done in groups." and would then point out the fact that assignments were only worth ~10%. Thus, we all learned the best way to work as a team, go
  • The honor code system at Caltech worked
    well at minimizing cheating ... it had a
    lot of structural support, though.
  • Nope, not cheating - dropping out...

    Back when I was taking Bio II in college, it was the "weeding" course - the hard one to pass. The grading for the class was quite simple. 50% for the final, 50% for everything else - NO CURVES

    All exams were given in the lecture hall. I don't want to say there was a LOT of cheating going on, but it was blatant. I was running a C, and seriously bummed, because the only people I knew getting B+ or greater were cheating. I decided to drop out, and put in my paperwork t
  • ...by exhibiting the rotting corpses of last semester's cheaters at the front of the room.
  • In many of my courses during university, regular homework averaged about 10% of the final mark for the course. Homework was really a small kick to encourage us to keep up with the course material, more than anything else. Big projects, exams, and class participation (where cheating is easier to catch or not applicable) took the lions share of the course mark. We were often encouraged to work together on the assignments - though verbatim copying was not accepted (if caught)!

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