Another professor devised an exam that used your student ID as a variable of the first question, and subsequent questions used the previous answers as inputs. Impossible to cheat.
We're discussing this in relation in relation to COVID, so no large gathering. This means no open book in person exams, I'm specifically talking about take home exams.
> Another professor devised an exam that used your student ID as a variable of the first question, and subsequent questions used the previous answers as inputs. Impossible to cheat.
Really easy to do so in a take home exam.
I think the larger point is that it is fairly easy in any subject to design a test that is very hard to cheat on. It is much harder to find the resources in modern education to grade that test since each submission is likely unique.
Tests that are easy to grade (like multiple choice), tend to be tests that are easy to cheat....
It's true that you usually can't cheat your way through such an exam provided you actually write the answer yourself, but in a take-home situation you can always ask someone else to solve it for you.
For things such as proofs, it might give you a problem for which the theorem is needed, then ask you to solve the problem, indicate which theorem you used, and then prove the theorem.
Please tell me how you would structure such an exam without a proctoring system as described.
Of course if you have 50 students per instructor this is not going to work...
Computer science: Solve a complex problem in code. Include a git history. Be ready to defend your program design if I get suspicious.
Econ: Long answer question: Pick 5 concepts that we learned about that you think are most important. Explain them as you would to a ten year old.
You can always just pay someone to do it for you.
I mean, we're obviously upset about false positives, and we should be. But I'm presuming that some people are caught who were cheating, and without the software they would have cheated and not been caught.
We can suggest that with an honor code in place, maybe some of those cheating students would have not cheated, because... I mean, if they were willing to cheat with software in place, I'm not sure why would have been deterred by an honor code.
I think in about 98-99% of cases, people who claim an honor code prevents cheating are deluding themselves. Yeah, if you don't have any way of catching cheaters, then you can pretend you have a 0% cheating rate. But it's pretend.
P.S. I'm not speaking for my employer at all.
Where would they get reliable training data?
There's a pile of money to be spent on this stuff, and virtually zero accountability. What's that a recipe for?
The flipside is that when you do catch a cheating case, you completely throw the book at them. It's legitimately easier to cheat under an honor system, if that's what you're wanting to do... so my assumption is that if we catch you at it, it's likely part of a pattern, and if we catch you multiple times the pattern is irreformable. It is not uncommon at honor-code institutions to expel students on the second offence (sometimes even on the first).
I do think that cheating is less prevalent at my institution (and my previous institution) than it is in the larger university population.
We may hate the software on ethical grounds, or because it degrades the exam-experience on many levels, or because its use can be considered abusive, but obviously it has an effect in the intended direction.
As someone who taught a college, that's a flawed statement. Let me propose this to you. You teach Calculus 1000 and there is an end of term exam. Your normal end of term exam is one where everyone sits in the same room, proctors are looking for cheats, things checked, etc. Instead this year you tell your students that this year it will be a take home exam with the following rules: 1) they have 2 hours to do it during the team home peroid; 2) no cheating by the honor system.
Do you think the rate of cheating will be the same? I mean by your logic, it should be.