1: I got x=2 if we were solving for x, but we aren't.
I didn't remember what it meant to even simplify an equation, so I Googled. It took me here, and that web site seems more useful than whatever your students used. It takes me through the "perfect square formula", which vaguely tickles my memory. It gives the final result of x^2-12x+20, is that what you were looking for?
It makes me think the problem is not cheating, but incompetent cheating.
I just googled "what is x?" and took the first answer that was a number.
It's not even set equal to zero, you nerds. It's just an expression. "Simplify" just means "clean it up". In this case they were taking a limit.
3: It was part of a larger expression - this is just the numerator. My expectation was that they'd multiply out (6-x)^2, combine like terms, and then factor it. One of the factors then cancels with the denominator, which I didn't put on the OP here. Then they can take the limit.
In graduate school while grading an exam we had an interesting discussion where everyone educated abroad was of the opinion that there's was surprisingly little cheating in the US and the reason was that the tests were so low stakes. That was pre smart phone though, which I think have changed everything.
For lower level classes in person I just make homework ungraded and have quizzes and exams. For intro graduate courses I am more careful about making homework less googleable (and most importantly, not assigning questions directly from their textbook by number). I'm at a loss about what to do for honors linear algebra: they really need to do the homework to learn but it's really hard to find genuinely different problems.
This year I'm doing longer-form writing assignments only.
Did it ever occur to you academics in your ivory towers that learning to cheat effectively is an important part of preparation for life in the real world? Where would Donald Trump be without cheating?
Here our business school installed cameras in all of the exam rooms and caught loads of cheating. Over in the college of arts and sciences we're not rich enough for that.
Sorry that was me.
You left out the 3rd step in the (1) grades are super important, (2) cheating is rife structure. (3) is that if you report this cheating and seek to do something about it in terms of student discipline, each successive step up in the administrative hierarchy -- starting with your department head and finishing with the provost -- will be less supportive of you and more accusatory in re your culpability (negligence, bad teaching, whatever) as the cause of the cheating.
Academia is definitely a shoot the messenger type of place for bad news
That said, this is definitely your fault for teaching limits, which was absolutely the worst part of Calc 1 the three times I took
11. This was one of my kid's big gripes as he was finishing high school. Kids caught cheating were met by the school principal intervening to change their grades back up. Possibly this was just in response to complaining parents, but the school system's response to grade disparities between kids of different ethnic origin is as many A grades as possible, and as many AP/Baccalaureate enrollments as possible. Oh the classes are now dumbed down and the kids cheat constantly? hmmm. Good teachers leaving? A mystery.
Also, to finish a thought there, at least at my kid's school, it was the kids from the rich neighborhood, overwhelmingly white, whose cheating and loafing pissed him off. The brown and black kids didn't cause academic problems according to him.
That said, this is definitely your fault for teaching limits
Right. You should be teaching them that they are only limited by their imaginations.
Does anyone use oral exams anymore?
If you made them take the oral on a hoverboard, it would make it much harder to cheat... Good idea!
Seriously though, if you identified those students who had a discordance between oral and written exams, you could pull them for more intensely proctored testing.
For a big intro to calc section, that sounds difficult.
I am sure it would be - very time consuming to say the least. But there is nothing like a conversation about a topic to identify if someone actually understands it. My pedagogical experience has been almost solely OTJ training of residents, and I would never consider it a replacement for more formal written exams, but I also knew the difference between a resident who could pass a test and one that actually knew how to use the information.
20: Did you used to be Dr. Oops? Or are you another doctor and mistake? Or am I confused?
This is going to be like Sherlock where there's a third, one that's really murderous instead of just a little.
Gradulatite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
Obv Domina is the case of the good Dr.
Maybe if enough people cheat grades won't be super important anymore.
26: There will always be some honest people than ruin everything for everybody.
If you made them take the oral on a hoverboard, it would make it much harder to cheat... Good idea!
I don't know, there seems to be a strong correlation between hoverboard dentistry and Medicaid fraud.
29.2: I'm surprised at you, teo! Confusing a single anecdote with data!
The hoverboard has but one wheel. Which is technically one more than you should have if hovering.
People ride them in the streets here. I assume it's only a matter of time until one dies. Them or the ones skateboarding in traffic. Or the ones riding dirt bikes at night on city streets with no lights.
The bikes have no lights, not the streets.
I've forgotten calc 1. I did have to retract my boss order of operations for calculating percentages.
Sorry, I had to leave the conversation for a while. Yes I guess I was Dr. Oops... I comment infrequently enough that I can't remember my own pseudonym.
I mean, I did stick you with it without asking you. You could call yourself anything you liked.
Well, I guess the appropriate thing would be to go back to the old name. If one of the supreme leaders wants to change my pseud on the other entries, that would be fine, although I am sure the vast readership can figure it out. Sorry for the confusion.
You could do 'DO' if you went to osteopathy school.
Dr. Wry Cooter is still available.
Because the trademark office is full of assholes, you can still call your landscaping business "Sod 'o Me." Or at least, I can't sue if you do.
My next lecture will be "How to Derail a Perfectly Interesting Thread." There will be a quiz at some yet to be determined time in the past.
As a Calculus 1 student I would have instantly and reflexively simplified the expression accordingly. Granted, I was a math contest geek in high school and that's just among the arsenal of tricks you amass when tackling artificial exam problems.
At Last Chance Community College, cheating is a problem in the nursing program and similar courses, because people really can make a lot more money if they go through the programs, and it really is important that graduates actually know things
Can't you steer the ones that cheat toward the paralegal program?
And the ones that send "Pee is stored in the balls" memes.
I agree with heebie that the number of students who'd do it that way is trivial. If you don't know what to do at all, just rotely turning (a+b)^2 into (a+b)(a+b) and then using FOIL or whatever number-sense based trick they teach now is easy. If you're a B+ student like me, you've probably memorized the second degree binomial expansion (a+b)^2 -> a^2+2ab+b^2; doing that and subtracting the constant is less work than applying the difference of squares and then having to do arithmetic twice.
Then again, common core does encourage students to do things in idiosyncratic ways, so maybe things like this pop up more now than when we all were younger.
I wonder if generally this could be a way, at least for math classes, to check for cheaters: include N questions, actually about the material but not that difficult, each with k equally plausible solution paths (although some will be more likely than others). The set of choices serves as a fingerprint, and the probability that any two students would be the same would be quite low with high enough N and k.
One of these days I need to write a longread piece about the secular crisis of faith I've been having over the last several years. For years, I told people that the most valuable lesson I learned at Brown wasn't anything specifically academic - it was the way the curriculum there emphasized keeping grades in perspective. Not that they were unimportant, but that you should focus on what you are learning and let the grades fall more or less where they may. That the person who cheats to get a higher grade is really cheating themselves of the learning experience they could have had instead. That you should accept whatever grade you get as the teacher's honest assessment of your performance, barring mechanical errors or obvious failures of equity.
Those were the values which I tried to instill in my son, successfully I believe. And I think that I may have inadvertently screwed him out of educational and employment opportunities that other parents who were more focused on grades uber alles, working the system, and not so much on making sure he did all his own work may have gotten for their kids.
I'm not sure how much I really believe those things any more. Or rather, I do still believe them in the ideal, but I'm no longer so sure how well they can work outside the context of elite educational institutions where the reputation of the institutions will carry over to the way people view their graduates.
I look at things like the Varsity Blues scandal, and while I don't condone the cheating and criming, I wonder if at some level those parents may have had a certain point - that the real point of education in this country today is just getting the credential that will give your kid a golden ticket to a UMC lifestyle in a contracting gig economy. I don't want to believe that - it seems excessively cynical. But I do wonder how much my earlier beliefs about grades were rooted in a failure to recognize my own privilege and luck, that got me into a position where I could afford not to worry quite so much about them.
49: We're not a common core state!
50: It's collateral damage to rising economic insecurity and precariousness, and how the economically secure have responded by clenching up the opportunities twice as tightly. I bet if we implemented all the best reforms and addressed economic inequality, and eradicated poverty and ultrawealth, people could return to a more relaxed stance towards learning, and grades as a measurement.
And to be fair, students at Heebie U are really not grade-grubbers. I don't think any of the students who cheated are gunning for an A as hard as they can. Quite possibly they worked on the problem for a little bit themselves, decided they'd gotten as far as they were going to to, and looked it up to get the rest or check their answer, and then felt safer turning in the online answer.
I think 52.last is exactly right. I think most students think looking up answers online is just what learning is. They don't know any other ways to approach solving problems.
I understand somewhat the Catholic viewpoint, provided that they also vehemently opposed the Iraq war and take seriously arguments like the one in 1. What I don't get is how a bunch of Sola Scriptura fundamentalist protestants have made the be-all and end-all of Christianity something that is manifestly not in the Bible.
Wrong thread.
52.1: I just don't believe that Lori Loughlin was feeling economic insecurity in regards to her daughter who was already earning 6 maybe 7 figures as an influencer. That was a case of rich people that just can't accept the idea that there is anything their money can't buy.
They need to justify their economic privilege by using allegedly merit-based credentials.
Not knowing anyone involved, I'm still going to disagree with 57. A. Insecurity isn't rational. B. Even a shallow Hollywood parent is going to think that influencer money is a ridiculous short term, easily lost windfall, especially in the hands of a dumb and incurious kiddo.
Also, I don't think actual people think like 58.
It's like laundering social status. If you just give it to your kids in the form of an inheritance, it doesn't reflect well in your kids' character. If you give them things in such a way that it looks earned, the kids get more status.
It's like how Trump likes to lie about how much he inherited.
I was surprised by how many students we caught cheating every semester, even if it was objectively very few. I assume we did not catch most cheaters. I've probably told this before, but the lecturer I worked with most often had a pretty clever solution to spontaneous cheaters. We figured that most cheaters (and the hardest to prove) were ones who just kind of panicked and looked at the exams of students next to them. At the beginning of class, he'd announce that exams would have assigned seating and we'd be checking IDs to take attendance/make sure everyone in the exam was supposed to be there. (With 300 students, this is not a given.) The first exam had a simple alphabetical arrangement. The second was by grade but obviously wasn't announced as such. Students with top grades on the first exam sat in the back of the auditorium, and the students with the lowest sat in the front. Cheating became a lot more uncomfortable since they were close to where the proctors convened (we'd walk around the room, but there was pretty much always someone at the front), and if they did cheat, their neighbors had basically the same grade, hence no real benefit to their cheating if they weren't caught.
I only taught one class and never caught anybody cheating.
I've worried less about cheating after an experience a few years ago. We found out, when it was too late to do anything (the exam was half way finished) that a copy of the exam had somehow been swiped by a student and had been circulating for several days.
The grade distribution ended up looking about the same as any other year.
Feeling very old that the Buzzfeed interviewer described Allie Brosh (PBUH) as part of "early blogging cylture". She started her blog in 2009!
|| I've been listening to the arguments in Trump v. Bullock today -- anyone can call in -- and boy does our side have the better of this. There's probably another hour to go, but the logistics of making counties changing in late September from all mail to 75% mail are truly daunting. |>
68. Not just an interview, but a book. Best news I've heard in weeks.
(it's over, having run 2.5 hours. Nothing left unsaid. I don't like the President's chances in this one, but who can ever be sure.)
t the real point of education in this country today is just getting the credential that will give your kid a golden ticket to a UMC lifestyle in a contracting gig economy
There's got to be only so much credentialled deadweight an economy can carry, though, right? (Right?) At some point actually knowing stuff, and being able to figure it out, and being able to tell whether your solution is working, is going to be so necessary it's valued. Maybe not to wealth and fame, but at least to security and local respect.
Getting rid of credentialled deadweight is one of the traditional benefits of war. One of my least printable opinions is that the post-Thatcher collapse of the British state is in part due to the long peace after 1945, and thus the death of the last UMC generation who actually had to get shit done right or die. National Service is usually thought of as a way to civilise/discipline the lower classes, but quite possibly it taught the officers a whole lot more.
If Johnson, Cameron, and Osborne had all spent three years being shot at or shelled in conditions of considerable discomfort instead of smashing up restaurants in Oxford they'd have been better people and better politicians. And if not all had survived, well, them's the breaks.
The timing works, kind of. If you were born in 1925, you would have been a very junior officer at the tail end of the war in 1945, and you would retire after a successful career in the Civil Service (or wherever) in 1990.
It is difficult to overemphasise the degree to which the central government has, without anyone really noticing, deliberately shed huge amounts of power over the last ten years. I bet most people still think that the Department of Health and Social Care runs hospitals, for example, or that the Department for Transport is in charge of the roads. They are not. Colleagues of mine were aghast when they turned up to help plan for stuff and asked "well, where's the ops room? The control room? The big room with a big map or screen or something on the wall showing what's going on?" and were told "we haven't got one of those, we've no idea what's going on". Without anything to do, their main preoccupation is now apparently "not making the minister look bad". If running stuff isn't your job, then when stuff goes wrong it isn't your fault, you see.
76. The other thing they have to do a lot is identify "announceables", which means stuff the minister can announce in speeches to make it look as if they're doing something. There is an art to making these superficially plausible. Frex, there doesn't have to be a budget for them, but it has to look as if there might be; it doesn't matter if they've been announced before, as long as it was in a sufficiently different context; etc.
The main task of the policy side of the civil service is now to make the minister look good, or at least as if they have a pulse.
re: 75
It's really noticeable that when you look at the politicians who were coming to the end of their careers in the late 80s/early 90s, they were just much more substantive people than their successors. Dennis Healey, Edward Heath, and Wille Whitelaw, to randomly pick some contemporaries, had done much more with their lives and shown much more personal accomplishment and bravery than any of the current lot of pricks.
78: well, Keir Starmer. But for a lot of them, yes, agreed.
PEOPLE WHO FIGHT AND DIE IN WARS ARE SUCKERS. AVOIDING STDs WAS MY PERSONAL VIETNAM.
I just realized: why haven't we heard anything about what Biden did during Vietnam? I have no idea.
Let's see... he was in law school until 1968, then was deemed ineligible because of asthma. Also he was a father by 1969 - that put you in a lower priority classification. And some consider the asthma to be a bone spurs-esque classification, given all the football and lifeguarding he did in school.
Makes sense why no one would bring it up.
Keir Starmer reminds me so much of John Kerry. The pitch was "Look at this guy! He's on the left but he's patriotic, eloquent, handsome, great hair, with real accomplishments OUTSIDE POLITICS, can you believe it? The perfect man" and the general response from the press, and therefore non-political people was "Get a load of this rich snob".
Keir, though, is not rich, certainly not in the way that Kerry was/is. Nor does he have hair as good as Kerry's.
that's Major Healey, Lt-Col Heath and, I think, Major Whitelaw (who fought in the same tank regiment as Robert Runcie, later Archbishop of Canterbury and all round Good Egg). I think that Healey first ran for parliament as Major Healey.
83. I'm going to take some convincing that a successful silk isn't rich enough to impress the average voter, however much pro bono he's done.
Fortunately he's in a position to point and laugh if they try it, as Kerry should have done.
re: 83
re: Whiltelaw, wikipedia says:
"He commanded Churchill tanks in Normandy during the Second World War and during Operation Bluecoat in late July 1944. His was the first Allied unit to encounter German Jagdpanther tank destroyers, being attacked by three out of the twelve Jagdpanthers which were in Normandy.[6]
The battalion's second-in-command was killed when his tank was hit in front of Whitelaw's eyes; Whitelaw succeeded to this position, holding it, with the rank of major, throughout the advance through the Netherlands into Germany and until the end of the war. He was awarded the Military Cross for his actions at Caumont"
Just think what Healey might have accomplished if Nelson hadn't been so stingy with the supernatural assistance.