Cheaters-the long view

Parent Cafe
41

@garland No, I think what I said was lost in translation. So - if when I was a kid, I couldn’t figure out how to do a math or science problem on my homework, I’d have to turn the assignment in incomplete (or cheat and copy the answers from my smarter friends - but in all honesty my high school experience was a joke - I grew up in a very rural and backwards area of the country and the electives for girls were typing, office practice, home ec and shorthand in order to prepare us for our careers as secretaries or housewives - for boys they were wood shop, drafting, auto mechanics and FFA). It definitely was not a college prep oriented high school experience, we didn’t even have guidance counselors to give us information on how to prepare for college. And I don’t remember a high school teacher ever telling me “Hey, class, if any of you don’t understand the assignment, you can come and talk to me outside of class and I’ll help you.” That just was not a service that was provided. These days, kids have all the resources on the internet available to them to help them figure things out (learn). I mean, what’s Khan Academy for? If a kid is learning a specific math or science concept, there are tons of examples of how to do similar problems on that site and others that explain step by step how to do math or science problems that can help when a kid just doesn’t get it from the instructions in the text book. My daughter was taking physics and was having problems understanding some concept related to acceleration and the formula involved. The textbook was horrible (I tried to help), so we looked it up online and she was able to work out the problem. I don’t see this as cheating. It’s using a resource to learn. The comment I made about the difference in looking up informational type science material like how an el Nino develops and the effect on water temperature and currents is that, in that example, my daughter was able to absorb and understand the material from searching and finding the answers online (it was an animated video), even though it was obviously a website designed specifically for her AP class curriculum (because the questions were so similar). But it was a learning experience - she wasn’t just copying answers. As opposed to pure math, since it’s so formula driven, where you just plug in numbers, I’m not so certain that my kids are really absorbing what they are finding online in that subject. Maybe they are and I’m just projecting my difficulties with math on them (because like I said - I got a crappy education and the only math class I was required to take was Algebra I in 8th grade - and the only math elective was geometry in high school - which I didn’t take because no one told me that I should). What I’m saying is that at least they are making the attempt to find out how to do their assignments with the resources they have instead of not doing the assignment and waiting till the next day to copy the answers from a friend (which according to my daughter, is the choice some of her classmates still make) - and I’m calling that cheating and laziness because they could have spent time online and used available resources to do the work themselves.

But now that I’ve taken the time to explain my line of thinking - I guess maybe your statement “there are so much better ways to cheat now” is true (even though that wasn’t what I was saying and I could have worded my statement better), because with today’s technology, is certainly IS so much easier to cheat if a kid has that inclination (what I was trying to say is they shouldn’t have to with all the resources they have**): But anyway…written assignments - all a kid has to do is learn how to cut and paste effectively and paraphrase to outsmart plagiarism programs…having trouble with your homework - ask your buddy to take a pic of his/her work and send it to you, etc. It is definitely a different world and a challenge to maintain academic honesty in today’s environment.

**Case in point - we old folks know how difficult is was to write a research paper in the old days. Go to the library, look thru the card files, try to find something in the vast library pertaining to your subject, and then stand in line to make copies of your sources. Go write your paper on real paper and find someone who has a typewriter that you can pay to type it for you. The process took weeks. Once while In college, I couldn’t find many sources in the library for my paper topic so I actually wrote to a federal gov’t research station and asked them to send me any pertinent papers they might have on file. I was very surprised that one of the researchers sent me an unpublished working copy of a paper she was writing. So was my professor - when he handed back our graded papers, he asked how I was able to get a copy of of it. When I explained, he was really impressed - I think I probably got a few bonus points for taking the time to go the extra mile. Compare that experience to how easy it is now for a student to find sources for a paper and then prepare said paper using a computer. Something that tooks weeks can literally be accomplished in a day. So - I’ll stand by my statement - why should a student make the choice to cheat when things are so much easier these days?

Sorry for the book - I can’t sleep and don’t have much else to do :slight_smile: .

42

Unfortunately, this is one seriously negative effect of treating college as a consumable product like a car or a service like being waited on at a sit-down restaurant where no effort on the part of the consumer is expected.

However, a college education is much more like purchasing a gym membership which is really purchasing an opportunity and means to better oneself.

However, the actual benefit can only be derived if the gym subscriber puts forth the requisite effort If s/he refuses to put in sufficient effort at the gym or worse, never show up, the fault lays solely with the subscriber…not the gym or its staff.

Likewise, a student(and his/her parents if they join in) who cheats and then complains when called on it is the equivalent of a gym subscriber who never shows up or puts in the requisite effort and then blames the staff for his/her failure to improve his/her physical conditioning.

43

@romanigypsyeyes --That’s a shame–where I teach, that would be reported and the student would fail my class.

44

@leastcomplicated, Using an online tool to understand how to do math isn’t cheating. If they’re allowed to use their book to understand the concept, then using an online resource that explains it better is just using a different tool to accomplish the same thing. I think the key is making sure they learn it to automaticity. In order to own the concept they should work several problems until they feel comfortable doing the homework set.

45

@romanigypsyeyes wrote

Wise words, and ones I’ll share with my kids.

46

At one of the churches I served an elder was separated from his wife and dating someone. He had the girlfriend convinced he was done with the wife but kept stringing the wife along because she threatened to take his family estate in any divorce settlement (she was catholic and did not want a divorce). He came up with a scheme to have a friend she did not know purchase the property and keep it in some kind of trust for him. The other elders thought this was ingenious.

He was this ingenious in other nasty ways as well. I left the church.

47

Regarding the shift in student attitudes mentioned earlier, I have noticed this over my 25+ years of teaching, from the NYT story linked below.

“The erosion of etiquette encourages students to view faculty members as a bunch of overeducated customer service agents. “More and more, students view the process of going to college as a business transaction,” Dr. Tomforde, the math professor, told me. “They see themselves as a customer, and they view knowledge as a physical thing where they pay money and I hand them the knowledge — so if they don’t do well on a test, they think I haven’t kept up my side of the business agreement.” He added, “They view professors in a way similar to the person behind the counter getting their coffee.””

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/opinion/sunday/u-cant-talk-to-ur-professor-like-this.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0

48

@garland that’s supposed to be the protocol here, too. It was even spelled out in the syllabus.

And yet…

49

That’s just wrong, @romanigypsyeyes . Wonder if that professor some other issue that made him choose to violate the honor code policy.

50

One of the top students at our high school was caught looking through a teacher’s desk, finding a test, taking a photo of it, and posting it on Snapchat!! I believe she was suspended for a few days. Is that the kind of thing that ends up on a high school record that colleges will see? Secretly, I hope so…

51

This is a really good thread and I think it touches on a lot of things. For example, given the nature of elite college admissions that seems to be based upon students getting hyper stats, you could argue the entire process is cheating since so many kids look to game the system. If you write an admissions essay about social justice and your passion for it, but you could care less about those less fortunate, isn’t that cheating? Or doing EC’s because they look good on a resume. The kids whose parents force them into music, who force them to practice (in some cases sadly literally beat them), not because the kid or the parent loves music but because they hear it helps with admissions, isn’t that cheating? A lot of the kids who do this can end up in elite schools and end up doing well, so what does that say about the impact of cheating?

The standard line on cheating is that the kid doesn’t learn how to learn, but is that really true? If a kid in my day read the old cliff notes version of “Crime and Punishment” to not have the endure the agony of reading the book and used that to get through the class, does that mean they didn’t know how to learn? Would that really impact anything? Is school these days really about learning to learn, or is it learning to game the system? And if so, couldn’t you argue then that school has increasingly come to mean learning to game the system to get ahead, and isn’t that in effect encouraging cheating? (I know, this sounds like the student trial sequence in “Animal House” lol).

I think the real problem is when you set up a system where everything is a sea of numbers, you create the problem, people mention international students, and for the kids from Asia especially it is because in those country the whole education process and your future is based on numbers, you don’t get high numbers on the standardized tests, you don’t track to the high level university, you don’t get into the high level university, your future is much diminished expectations. While that still isn’t true in this country (thankfully, though I see us heading that way because of some notion that high international test scores=success), a lot of parents and kids think this is true, and we have thus created a culture where cheating is becoming rampant IMO.

It isn’t necessarily deadly, I have asked several doctors I recently saw for various things, all of them graduates of prestigious medical schools, specialists of some note, and I asked them about Organic chemistry, and they all to a person said that as a doctor, they never found it useful to working as a doctor, so if a kid somehow cheats through organic chem in college to get a good grade, doesn’t sound like it impacts whether they can be a good doctor shrug.

Gonna go radical here, and say that cheating is deadly only when someone refuses to acknowledge they cheated, whatever it was, and really thinks that when they cheated the accomplished something, ‘beat the system’, whatever. The kid who hates organic chemistry and cheats through it can end up a great doctor if their cheating was limited to that one class (organic from everything I can tell if you aren’t planning to study the subject as a degree, was designed to weed out pre med kids:), as long as the kid doesn’t think ‘hey,I cheated in that, so what the heck’ with other classes, acknowledging that you cheated your way through something and knowing it isn’t a pattern you want to repeat, makes a difference.

Working in the financial industry for so many years, I see this all the time. Not everyone in the financial industry is crooked or a cheat, a lot of people working in it realize why there are the regulations there are and realize the danger of greed (talk to any fund manager at a big institutional firm, like Creff or the like, or managers of pension funds about that one), but there are also a lot of people who spend their careers trying to game the rules, find space that is unregulated, and those kind of people are those who generally in my experience who don’t acknowledge to themselves they are cheating, they basically say “hey, it technically isn’t illegal, so what is the problem?” while knowing what they are doing is designed to subvert regulations and in turn exposing their company and the financial markets to risk…so in that kind of situation, a long experience with cheating and rationalizing it works out great shrug

52

There is, however, a difference between cheating and gaming. Gaming means staying (sometimes barely) within what is allowed by the rules, but perhaps scoring higher than one should in the system’s evaluation. Cheating means breaking the rules of what is allowed and hoping not to get caught.

Gaming examples include SAT or ACT preparation for skills specific to the SAT or ACT, even though such skills are of limited or no value outside of these tests. High school course selection to game the high school’s class rank system is also sometimes mentioned in these forums (often from Texas). These examples are distinguished from actual cheating (e.g. stealing the SAT or ACT before the test is given, or cheating in high school courses to raise class rank through higher grades).

Of course, sometimes what is gaming becomes redefined as cheating when the rules are changed after the gaming is seen by the rule makers as undesirable. If you wonder why rules can be so voluminous, think of all of the ways that people have tried to game the system in ways that were considered undesirable by the rule makers.

53

I remember students like this who cheated their way through our HS. I always assumed they would get their comeuppance in college. They all became really successful trial attorneys.

54

@ucbalumnus:

my thought on cheating versus gaming is that it is a matter of degree. With cheating as you point out it is about breaking absolute rules (like getting answers to a test, getting a pre written term paper, etc) while with gaming it is technically legal but is in a gray area.

But think about it this way, people will tell you that the problem with cheating is you aren’t doing the work, you aren’t gaining the ability to think (which quite frankly when it comes to a lot of school work, I question whether it is thinking…but that is another thread), you aren’t getting the purpose of taking the class and getting a grade for it, rathe r you are perverting the reason for the class into being about getting a high grade.

But think about, for example, elite admissions. If the point of the whole admissions process is to match the right kid with the right school, if it is about assessing who the kid is, then gaming is cheating that purpose, even if it is ‘within the rules’. The kid who does EC’s because they look good on an admissions form is not pursuing a passion of his/hers and is not demonstrating that they care for others, care about what they do, but rather is doing something to look good personally.The kid who takes AP US history or AP Chemistry or Physics is not showing he/she cares about those subjects but rather is using it to demonstrate a check off on an admissions application. The kid who plays violin or piano because they think it looks good to HYP, for example, not because they care about music but it is an ‘strong EC’ to have, is violating the meaning of what EC’s are, if not violating rules shrug. So yes, it is cheating, you can cheat yourself and others doing perfectly legal things,in other words.

In the financial world this is rife, with sub milisecond trading there is so called latency arbitrage, where people try and hit a quote as quickly as possible knowing that market data updates are a lot slower than executions, and this is perfectly legal, firms send out orders electronically with a cancel a millisecond behind it, and if that order hits an executing venue before their public quote has changed, they by rules get the execution even if the order they were trying to hit is already executed (in the bad old days when NASD had 1 second execution times and even slower update times on their SOES small order service, there were firms called SOES bandits who took advantage of that slowness to get executions after the market had moved away from a price, then could turn around and sell/buy at the new advantageous price and make money that way, cheated the firm whose quote they hit, though. )

55

There is cheating and there is bending the rules just far enough to push the limits while staying within the legal boundaries. If the honor code does not spell out that researching a topic online while getting ready for finals is not OK, then it should be fair game. That said, few people would disagree that buying old tests from shady online sources and sharing illegally gained questions and answers online is NOT online research.

56

Sometimes, it may not be gray in a legal sense, but appears gray because the line of legality is not the same as the ethical line for many people. Of course, lawyers are often paid to determine the difference between what is legal and what is ethical. People expect that the laws should align with their ethics, but they often do not (and different people have different ethical lines).

57

My former doc H maintains that organic chem is a thinking exercise; it shows something about the student’s critical thinking. Well, unless they cheat. That just shows something about their cynical willingness to get what they want, and the heck with ethics.

Not a good look for a doctor.

58

I’ve seen a little karma with respect to kids’ cheating classmates. Some of the worst cheaters are hitting the wall in college.

But one of the worst ended up at Stanford. sigh

The role of the internet and cheating is interesting to me. Some of my kids’ teachers were lazy and lifted tests and homework from the web—sometimes without checking to be sure it matched with the assignment/text. If kids weren’t told to stay off the web when studying, I have no problem with kids discovering the source of the tests/homework. (I do have a problem with teachers being too lazy to match the work with what is presented in class.)

59

I knew a pilot who was rumored to cheat a little on the regs. Nice guy. Fun to hang out with.

We miss him and still tell his stories on occasion.

60

Long ago I worked with a man in the financial industry who testified against some of his big bosses. They were all found “not guilty” (they were guilty as hell, they were my bosses for about a year). Wall Street bigs kept their gains and their careers, customers were still out their life savings, the world went on as it was.

The testifier was later destroyed as payback and served years in jail, now known more for being a convicted con man than the one honest person in the room. I wish Karma took care of cheaters but Karma has mostly been a disappointing concept.