Cheating 101
Posted at 2:20 PM on November 18, 2010
by Bob Collins
(8 Comments)
Filed under: Schools
A business professor in Florida has figured out that several hundred of his students have been cheating, so he gave them a lecture they may remember -- if we're lucky -- for the rest of their lives.
He told the students -- he used statistical analysis to identify them -- that if they admitted to the cheating, and if they took a four-hour ethics class, they wouldn't be kicked out of school.
Two-hundred have come forward so far.
It would have been great if the camera had caught the expressions on the kids' faces.
The other lesson for students: Kids, some adults are smarter than you are.
Comments (8)
I have two comments about this story.
One, using a test bank to develop a test is the lazy and seems to be a different form of "cheating". I know it is common, but my best professors wrote their own questions.
Two, how did the cheating occur? It sounds like the "cheating" students had to study hundreds of questions only to be tested on 50 of them If that's the case, I bet they learned a lot by their "cheating". Please let me know if there was more than that.
I love around the 7:30 mark.
I had a 8 and 9th grade math teacher that talked just like him.
Can we get this guy to do a statistical analysis correlating congressional votes to campaign contributions?
Kari, do you think it's OK for students to cheat if the prof uses the publisher's course bank? Just asking.
I think it is okay for a student to study from a publisher's test bank, assuming there are many more questions in the test bank than there are on the test. After all, the publisher's test bank should contain the same material as the text book, just in a different format. I don't think it is okay for a student to learn the 50 questions that will be on the test and learn just those answers. I also don't think it is okay for a student to somehow have all the questions and answers in front of him during the test. (That doesn't sound possible in this case since there were security cameras, etc in the room.)
Test bank is just the teachers being lazy...
Cheating is still wrong, but back when I was in school one of my prof's had a posting of all his old tests on the library servers to be used for the purposes of practice tests...
The concepts were the same, the problems were different.
But any text book publishers test bank is easily compromised with enough cash... and the information is available on the right sites on the internet... this is nothing new.
Also, I doubt that statistics could give a list of every one that cheated, unless there was a question that every one always got wrong, and they were looking for people that got it right... statistics can't be 100% accurate, otherwise it'd just be math not statistics.
What amazes me is the amount of time some students spend doing things like copying answers from an answer book or memorizing a bunch of answers from a key. Wouldn't it take less time to just do the assignment and/or study?
I tell my students that getting eventually caught isn't the reason they shouldn't cheat, it is the wasting of their time. Why bother spending four years of your life and thousands of dollars on something if you don't get anything out of it?
I'm not sure if it helps, but it makes me feel better.
This professor could have prevented cheating by writing original test questions rather than relying on pre-written questions from publishers. He seems to be more interested in catching kids cheating at his lazily written tests than testing students on what he supposedly taught them.
If he's going to rely solely on the publisher's questions, students can probably get all that they need for the tests by studying the text rather than attending this guy's lectures. Central Florida should raise the bar for their professors.
By the way, some students think that this was a pathetic reaction from a lazy professor and have made a rebuttal video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJG7aCQtI8E
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