Cheating

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Permalink Reply by george mayer on July 8, 2009 at 4:56pm

I'm gunna have to go ahead and disagree with your final point there: "I'm not sure if a training session would help because students will find new ways to cheat once their old ways have been done away with." I think students are only so innovative and if even just a couple of simple and fair precautions are put in place it becomes far easier to study than to cheat.

The one I really liked was just having the teacher stand in back. I wouldn't cheat if I couldn't see the teacher.

There are two ways to cheat: 1) with information you bring in, and 2) off of someone else's test.

I think if a teacher prints two copies of the test changing question placement and alternates them, it makes it virtually impossible to cheat off someone else.

And If i were a teacher I would just have bookbags against the wall during my tests. Sit in the back an I would defy students to cheat on my test. The more we have been talking about this and the more I have been reading about it, I think the real problem is NOT students, its lazy teachers.

Everyone will cheat--adults and students alike--if given the opportunity and teachers give students that opportunity.

Homework is a whole different story and a much harder problem to solve, but testing, i believe, is a quick fix.

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Permalink Reply by Nora on July 14, 2009 at 6:07pm

Sitting in the back of the class would for sure reduce the number of kids that were cheating. Having multiple test forms works sometimes and doesn't other times. When people are at desks it can cut back on cheating but when sitting at tables, it doesn't do much good.
I agree that homework cheating is more difficult to prevent because it happens outside of the classroom.

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Permalink Reply by george mayer on July 20, 2009 at 3:25pm

OK, here is the beginning of my solution to stop cheating on homework, it will need a couple of revisions, but here goes the rough draft:

It started with me reading this:

"Type-A personalities are "competitive, achievement-oriented, easily aroused and sometimes aggressive and hostile." (This type of personality is more prone to heart attacks.) Type-B students are "more relaxed, less goal-oriented and less likely to believe they control their own destiny." Type-A students are typically more learning-oriented and less likely to cheat. In contrast, Type-B students are more grade-oriented, less likely to study, and more likely to cheat.

"Davis and Yandell believed that the Type-A students, with high standards of performance, would be more likely to cheat if they were unprepared for the testing situation - if they lose their sense of control over the situation. The researchers devised such a situation. Type-A, Type-B and control students were asked to form as many words as they could from a set of letters within 30 seconds. The Type-A and Type-B students were told that college students average 26.5 words in that period, but the control students were not given any information. (In reality, the average for college students was 13 words. It is impossible to form 26.5 words in that time.) After the 30 seconds, students reported the number of words they had formed.

"With their actual performance, Type-A students were under stress. They wanted to achieve the false standard that they had been given, but they could not. In this study, 84% of the stressed-out, Type-A students cheated. The Type-A group said they had completed an average of 20 words, while both the Type-B and control students reported about 13 words." Here's where it came from.

Ok, so here is my parallel. The deal with homework (it seems to me) is that if you try, you score highly, but if you dont, then you might as well copy someone else's. So, I have two ideas. The first is to make it a curve.

This would do two things:
1) if you dont get 100% then its still ok, because all grades would be curved to a high grade, so if the high score was 70%, than 70% is an A. There would be less pressure to share answers.

2) It makes students less likely to let someone copy their answers because they wouldn't just be helping someone, they'd be hurting everyone else. (if you're confused about how a curve works, i'll explain).

Also, each student could drop X number of their worst scores at the end of the quarter (or tri, or semester, whatever). It would then be ok if you forgot to do an assignment. You wouldnt have to cheat, you could just drop it.

Problems with this? Do you think it would work?

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Permalink Reply by Nora on July 29, 2009 at 9:54pm

I like the idea of always grading on a curve. In each class there is at least on test, assignment, quiz, whatever that almost everyone does really bad on. Some teachers drop the assignment altogether, some teachers say, "I guess you should have studied harder," and still count it and them some curve it. I believe that grading on a curve would reduce the amount of cheating because there would not necessarily be a certain amount of points that each student needed to get in order to pass the assignment.
Dropping assignments at the end of the quarter also seems to work well. In my biology class, two assignments and one quiz were dropped every quarter and it seemed to reduce the amount of cheating going on, at least cheating on assignments.

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