I like this. I also have heard (anecdotally), and witnessed a little bit, that universities in Germany and Switzerland have much more of a culture of cheating, even though those same countries have more of a culture of public integrity.
I'm dealing with some grad-level plagiarism at the moment. Depressing.
The reflections on classroom dynamics are interesting but given my limited time, I will only posit that it doesn't matter whether they _actually_ have different versions of the test as long as they _believe_ they have different versions.
3: Yes, think of how much of the cheaters' time you could waste by putting out Version A and Version B of identical material!
2 must be a really shitty situation all around.
To the broader point: I can't remember too many classes where it was even possible to cheat. Logic and Geology were about it, I think. Maybe Russian too, but that would have gotten really elaborate, and if I was going to spend that much time on it, I could have just studied harder & more often.
I personally despise the people who bring moron energy to the class much more than the negative ones.
And to 2: I'm so glad I'm not in grad school. That's the kind of thing that would give me excruciating anxiety dreams.
I will only posit that it doesn't matter whether they _actually_ have different versions of the test as long as they _believe_ they have different versions.
Actually, this was the plan. At least for the final exam - earlier in the semester I actually made different versions.
The differences were supposed to be prominent - a different graph on the front page and later on in the test, and otherwise identical. But xeroxed in different colors as well. (I ended up chatting while xeroxing and spaced on using different colors, so that didn't happen either.)
Anyway, I would easily presume that they'd flash each other their front pages so they could see if they happened to get the same version, so it was a shame that everyone's test was prominently labelled with the same version.
As a sociological experiment, maybe tell them that your respect for them manifests as trust.
Make half the students use Leibniz's notation and half use Newton's.
I genuinely don't think there was much of a culture of cheating at all when I was an undergraduate. But I was doing subjects where it wouldn't have been particularly easy to cheat -- essays, or translation, or whatever. I expect a lot of people did a fair bit of half-arsed semi-aware plagiarism for non-examined/continuously assessed work, though.
One of the other first years in my program kept asking me weird not-quite-cheating favors this year. Like, for that class with the insane tests she asked if she could have my notes for the lectures and reading because she hadn't done the reading herself. No?
It was really quite odd.
13. Either was she a close friend of yours or alternatively was she known to have been sick a lot or had other such issues? Because otherwise WTF?
because there's a natural consequence
This is why I was adamantly opposed to putting those protective outlet covers up when the kids were little.
grad-level plagiarism
Much better grounded than undergrad cheating, but sometimes a bit too clever for its own good.
14: WTF was my reaction. English isn't her native language, so I could imagine it would take her a hellaciously long time to get through the reading (between two and four hundred pages of dense review articles a week), but that seems like a good reason to get to it early, not a good reason to blow it off. Especially when, you know, the exams in this class count as your qualifying exams.
I told you all about the take-home final in one of the 2 classes I cared least about*, right? Three of us worked on it together, and I ended up having one response marked "Same wrong answer as L/sotta". Oops. I think the prof felt that giving me a C in the class was punishment enough.
* Rational Decisionmaking in Architecture. Direct quote from the text (written by the prof): "The difficulty in studying rational decisionmaking in architecture is that humans are not rational decisionmakers." After an entire semester, I still didn't understand what "heuristic" meant.
The culture at my undergrad institution was shockingly honest. Not that some people didn't cheat, but most didn't even when there was no monitoring and cheating was very much looked down on by students. Then I moved to Poland where I taught English at a private high school. There, students were shocked at the idea that anyone might see anything wrong with cheating, or administer any punishment beyond a mild rebuke. They also thought I had cheating detection superpowers - kids speak remarkably freely in front of teachers if they think the teachers don't understand a word they're saying. (Student A to B 'so, mind if I look at your cheat sheet' Me: 'No talking during the test', Student A: 'Just asking for a pencil sharpener Mr. Teraz.' Me: 'OK' [five minutes pass] Me: - 'what's this piece of paper?'
If you want to check out individually, no problem.
I'd like to thank my science and math profs for providing a nice soothing setting for getting my reading fix.
Heurstic just means a rule of thumb. I learned that from somebody sitting beside me during a test in graduate school.
Like, for that class with the insane tests she asked if she could have my notes for the lectures
I occasionally did that but that's cause I'm incapable of taking legible notes.
For most classes I'm not sure I'd think it was a big deal (especially if it's something like a math class where the bulk of the learning comes via actually doing things), but in this class paying close attention to the readings and lectures was the whole deal.
Also, she had to rewrite several (all?) of the questions on the midterm, and asked if she could see what I had written on my midterm. No!
You've told us about her before, right? And not too long ago (but can't think of what to search for).
If she asks for your herring, don't give it to her.
but in this class paying close attention to the readings and lectures was the whole deal.
That's the sort of class where I was likely to ask, but since my friends all knew I was physically incapable of taking legible notes, none of them had a problem with it.
Do people make much use of lecture notes? I never did. I took them, which I found useful to stay attentive and organise my thoughts while listening; and to quasi-memorise the stuff as I went along. But for studying later, I barely used them. Scanned over quickly for sekrit markup -- exclamation marks, circled quote marked verbatim bits and 'fuck off!'s -- but studying was always from texts, not class notes. Friends made a much bigger deal over their notes.
Friends made a much bigger deal over their notes.
It was an innovative show that way.
29: We've talked about this before, and I'm like you, except that I hardly even took notes. I'd usually have a notebook open and I'd write stuff, but it was unlikely to be any kind of usable precis of the lecture, and I almost never went back to them.
Do people make much use of lecture notes?
Yes! I took copious notes. In hard classes, to study, I'd go back through and re-write/organize my notes into a detailed outline of the material. Occasionally I needed to make a third pass writing/consolidating/organizing my notes.
On the other hand, I never made it through the assigned readings. I got an A in plenty of classes without doing any of the readings.
I found notes useful in classes where there were no secondary texts at all, so all the background information and analysis was presented in the lectures.
I kind of stopped taking notes at some point in grad school (and my note-taking from my last year as an undergrad was pretty sparse, IIRC)—something I now regret.
I took fairly good notes, I think, but I wish I'd taken them more seriously. Could have been better, could have been worse, depended on the class. I got them out and reviewed them when it was time to study for tests or projects, but I think just the act of writing them down in the first place did almost as much for my memory and understanding of the concepts as anything I did with the papers I wrote on later.
I'm miserable at taking notes. In engineering school so much of what passed for "lectures" was long strings of equations on the board. Often these were straight out of the text book, or closely related to it. So I sometimes would annotate the book in class. Many of the tests were based on problem sets, so that the best way for me to study was to do problems that hadn't been assigned, distasteful though this was.
Re 32
I am the complete opposite. I read (or did, I'm pathetic now) really fast, so I'd plough through readings -- which were big enough to give some of my science mates the fear* -- and take good notes from those. On the other hand I got top marks for classes where I literally slept through lectures. That -- read copiously but lax re lectures -- is common I think in undergrad humanities stuff.
Re 33
Yeah, that was common at graduate school level. At undergrad there was usually a key primary text or texts, or some decent secondaries.
* like hours of labs would have given me the fear.
For most classes I didn't write anything down, but there were a few where I took really voluminous, detailed notes, mixed in with doodles, abuse, smart-assery and so on. I think it was a function of whether the lecturer really was lecturing (as opposed to rambling or trying to spark discussion), and how well-structured their lectures were. Somewhere in my filing cabinets I think I have undergraduate lecture notes from one or two of the best-organized courses I took. If I looked I bet I'd be disturbed at how much they influence the courses I teach now.
I always took notes in humanities and social science courses, but generally only during lectures or lecturesque moments during discussions. Sometimes I referred to them. I rarely if ever took notes in math or science classes.
I did subscribe to instructor-approved*-but-third-party-produced notetaking services in two courses. In one case the prof recommended it because he thought it would make it easier to follow along if you weren't always trying to catch anything. In the other case, it occurred to me after a few weeks that I had not taken any notes yet, but kind of wanted to have them.
*That is, the instuctor approved having a paid notetaker. I don't think they oversaw the actual note taking.
I regret never cheating on homework because it left me underprepared for the legitimate group assignments I get now.
To the OP: I think supporting and maintaining a campus culture where cheating is looked down on by most students and not tolerated by faculty is an important part of a having successful institution. Maintaining standards in your course might seem like it is simply enforcing rules in an arbitrary game, but the game is a needed part of the overall work of the University, and I think you think that the Heebie U is a Good think.
42: Ah, for a minute I thought you had a Dr. Zeuss kind of thing going on there.
41: in practice, I do notify the dean and they get a zero on the test, and I try to make situations not tempting. I'm just not as naturally angry about it as I am other things.
I don't remember anyone ever asking for notes or being caught cheating. But then, the opinionated academic deals with plagiarists all the damn time, so perhaps my colleagues just thought I was either going to fail or else too snarky to ask.
The German thing is real, it's become an Internet sport there to search government ministers' dissertations for other people's work. They've already eliminated two and number three is on the ejection seat.
I took notes in the classes that I went to, but rarely referred to them. I didn't take notes in the many classes that I skipped.
32 In hard classes, to study, I'd go back through and re-write/organize my notes into a detailed outline of the material. Occasionally I needed to make a third pass writing/consolidating/organizing my notes.
You worked too hard.
In my class year at undergrad, there was one student whose note-taking was so renowned that the CS department eventually just bought her a scanner and paid for the host for all her notes' uploads. It is apparently still the most-used site by math and CS students in undergrad.
Most-used at my institution, of course, not in the world.
I can't remember too many classes where it was even possible to cheat. Logic and Geology were about it, I think.
I cheated in my Metaphysics final. I peeked into the soul of the student sitting next to me.
I had to think about this one, because cheating makes me irrationally angry. It's one of those "you're only hurting yourself" crimes, like taking drugs or gambling (wherein self-harm is assumed but not necessarily true, even), which I would normally not care a whit about.
I realized the main reason I got angry about it is because I was often the cheat-ee in school, not the cheater, and I felt that my intellectual property had been stolen. I studied hard, and the cheater didn't, but we both got the same grade. So my new feelings on cheating are: if you bring your own cheat sheet, fine by me. If you steal answers from someone else, it's still a moral code violation on par with theft of property, and I feel justified in my anger.
I'm sure I'd feel differently if I were a teacher.
I suspect what I'm teaching them doesn't really matter in any sense.
Funny, I think math matters a lot. I want my kids to learn it well, no matter what they go on to do. I love that my artist sister took college calculus. I love the calculus metaphors in Pynchon's books.
I always imagined math would have less of this "doesn't matter" feeling. I teach business students when companies make more money. Unfortunately, I wrestle with the rising feeling that this might just matter because it's making the world a worse place.