I guess premeditated cheating pisses me off more than opportunistic cheating.

I'll be interested to see where this thread goes, but my general recollection of cheating threads here is that I find them a little uncomfortably sanctimonious. That is to say: I regard cheating in school to be ordinary and unremarkable, and the concept of it doesn't really bother me.

I liked learning, and was more often the supplier of answers on tests than the recipient, but I had basically nothing in the way of scruples about this, and don't look back on this fact with regret.

I understand the need for schools to impose penalties on cheaters. I even understand the need for performative anger regarding the practice. But the genuine moral outrage that people feel is lost on me. Am I Foucault in Tunisia?

I forget where you're from politicalfootball. I think part of the outrage is that the US historically has not had high-stakes tests and as a result has had less cheating, and in particular a lot less acceptance of cheating, than in a lot of other countries. I remember in grad school a Russian faculty member and an Indian graduate student talking about how little cheating there was in the US and how easy it was to stop students from cheating. This has been changing a lot in the past 10 years, mostly coming from increased competitiveness and unreasonable homework loads in high school training students to just cheat all the time. Once you get that phase transition where most students are going to cheat if you let them, it becomes a lot harder to be an honest student, and a lot harder to make it a moral issue.

I've only had online exams this year and weirdly I think they haven't really been cheating much. Partly this is that it's an honors class, but I've had big cheating problems in honors classes before. I had them take the same online final as the regular class, and the regular class grades were way up from a normal year (presumably due to rampant cheating) while my scores were down from a normal year (presumably due to online education sucking). One interesting experiment I did this year, which I may continue post-pandemic, is that I told students if they had questions during quizzes or exams they could *just ask the instructor*. The idea was this would make them less likely to ask Chegg if they could just ask me. I thought it was really nice, and I think it might help with student test anxiety (most of the questions were situations where the student seemed to basically know what was going on but needed reassurance). It just felt good.

1.last: No, you're worse.

Kidding, but I would say I don't share your opinion on this. At most I'd say Unfogged is probably even more anti-cheating than the general public just because there are so many academics here. And I'd say that cheating is less bad, or bad in a very different way, if you view academics as a path to a credential for the purpose of professional gatekeeping as opposed to pursuing knowledge mostly for its own sake. And the harm caused by it varies a lot depending on whether the class is graded on a curve, whether it's relevant to something with a strict cutoff, etc.

All that being said it's still pretty serious dishonesty.

I think homework as an assessment tool is essentially obsolete all the way up to and including intro level graduate classes. It's a big problem because I don't know how else you learn to do mathematics. The best thing I can do so far is to do more homework-style questions *during class*, but there's not enough class hours to do this for serious classes. What I'd like is for advanced math classes to have "labs" where you go to a room some afternoon for 4 hours and work on homework in a no-internet room with the TA and other students there to help.

I remember two guys I. High school who were complete assholes* who heated on Calculus tests. The thing that made me feel awful was that the teacher who was a wonderful teacher, partly because he had struggled with very advanced math, was away at a conference and gave us the exam unproctored. He came back and mentioned how how he had been able to share that he was able to do that. I felt intense guilt about not turn8ng the, in when he trusted us.

It was also really distracting because they were whispering during the whole test period.

*One later raped a drunk girl at a graduation party.

There's no way to design a conversation with any sort of movie-plot learning-of-lessons or show-of-remorse or re-establishing connection at the end, or anything.

An emotionally appropriate soundtrack would help with this. If the meetings are over zoom, you could probably arrange one.

I share pf's lack of affect, though I've never helped anyone cheat.
I've busted a few students for plagiarism, and felt no discomfort at all in confronting them. Heebie is Foucault in Tunisia.

I also think there's increasingly a cultural disconnect where us olds think that looking up answers on the internet is cheating, and the youngs think that looking up answers on the internet is just what learning is.

The other big thing is that there's now a half-a-billion dollar industry around monetizing cheating. That's very very new.

I believe that this thread is evidence of whether we're going to go Darmok, or more a Norse kennings route.

To me, thankfully completely uninvolved in this, the moral problem depends on how grading is done. If it's just you get what you get, then a cheater is only cheating themselves (and the very few people who rely on the transcript) because they are pretending to learn that which they have paid to be taught, and won't know it later. If there's a curve, then they are cheating other students, and that's indefensible.

The only grading I've been involved with in the last 30 years (or ever?) is the bar exam. If I could somehow tell that someone had cheated, I would definitely report it, because (a) the exam is supposed to be testing a minimal level of knowledge (and it is pretty minimal, expect for the nuances of the rule against perpetuities) and (b) there's an element of honesty and integrity in what we are supposed to be doing. Fortunately, I wouldn't have to tell the student that his legal career is over before it's started, I'd just have to tell the board, and show them the evidence (whatever it was). The good news for cheaters is that I'm not particularly sophisticated, and if they don't write 'well I'm not really sure but the woman next to me seems to know what she's talking about, and she thinks this case falls into the unborn widow exception' I'm not actually going to catch them.

Of course cheating should be penalized. When students get away with cheating, it reinforces the idea that there are lots of other stated norms in society, e.g. around consent, that are only superficially honored.

I think they're cheating other students regardless, by causing future competitions for admissions/jobs/opportunities to be falsely swamped with higher GPAs. It cheapens what another student's 4.0 means.

If this was just for the joy of learning, I wouldn't give exams at all.

12 was me.

I don't exactly care whether my students learn calculus, but I do think that practicing your reasoning skills and broadening the scope of situations that you can apply reasoning and logic to is an actual meaningful skill that is measured by your grade in a math class.

The one point that I'll grant PF is that some instructors seem to get personally butthurt, which is super dumb. It's not about you. The student's life is easier with a better grade and they don't want to do the work.

The real evil people here are the Chegg executives. Makes me wish hell were real.

There's just something so utterly dystopian about setting up a society where to good jobs require an expensive credential which you get by paying some poor smart kid in India to take your exams for you.

I am super dumb and do fall prey to the "how dare you?!" emotional response to cheaters. Not often, but I can sometimes tell it's in there somewhere. What I see is mostly low stakes, and cheaters don't generally prosper, and I have learned that prevention >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> dealing with actual cheating in real time. But also, I am so ready to be back to in-person exams and remove so much of the opportunity.

I'm in a relatively small town and I teach college biology. If I warn my students about cheating I often say "because I don't want to be in the hospital, look over, and see that the person getting ready to stick a needle in me cheated to get the job they're in now." Which is a pretty plausible scenario.

If they cheat well and often, they might accidentally kill people in a bigger city.

16 is correct. Fuck those guys.

I never heard of them.

I guess you haven't googled a calculus problem lately?

No. My son borrowed my computer and googled an addition problem. I guess the calculator is extra clicks.

Calculators are a scam. These days I send students to Desmos more than Wolfram Alpha.

It's truly shocking that graphing calculators still cost the same amount that they did 30 years ago. Like you're not even trying to hide that it's just a scam.

What I'd like is for advanced math classes to have "labs" where you go to a room some afternoon for 4 hours

This is basically how I learned statics and dynamics. The teacher was so good and held office hours and eventually most of the class completed the problem sets while sitting on the floor in the hallway outside his office and ducking in when stuck on something. A "lab" session with chairs would have been more comfy.

I respect the role of colleges in producing functional human units for capitalist employment. But I don't think grades in aggregate correlate all that well with capitalist fitness, and the grades themselves are not all that affected by cheating -- though, of course, this is in part true because colleges enforce rules against cheating, and that's fine with me.

In any event, the sin against capitalism is the incompetence, not the method by which you got the job. You see those stories every now and then about the people who totally fake their credentials for a career, and on occasions when this happens with someone who is good at their job, I'm always a little sad for them, and feel as though the result for the world would have been improved had they never been caught.

So I think chill and I are broadly in agreement as regards 18, but my question for chill in 19 is: Are you granting an exemption for doctors who cheat in their art history classes? For museum curators who are obliged to take intro to biology?

You don't think the sin is that someone else deserved the opportunity that the cheater was offered after graduation?

I'm at the fairly extreme end of "fuck them all". Basically for the reasons already given by CharleyCarp re: grading on a curve, and by Heebie in 11. I might not be on board with institutions setting really draconian punishments for cheating, especially when it's so widespread, but I'm not going to think it's OK.

Until recently I used to basically think of paying for private tuition as cheating, because of the ways in which it advantages people with invested/supportive families and money over people who work hard as shit--poorer kids, kids from difficult home circumstances, people with less social capital, etc--but can't bring those resources to bear. I'm not quite as hardcore over it any more, but the feeling still persists.

29: I think this is a routine feature of capitalist life and cheating on tests doesn't materially contribute to it -- though my underlying assumption is that it's pretty much impossible to modify your grade-point-average by, I dunno, more than a tenth of a point or so. Again: I'm not arguing against enforcement or even performative outrage. I just don't quite get the actual outrage.

When I was a TA we had to deal with a few cheaters, and I don't recall being very worked up about it, but happy that they were drummed out of the course.

However, in the working world, I once had a situation where my manager had me conduct a formal review of another person's work over a phone conference - we were all working remote, as that was the way that company was set up, even in the days before video chat - because she believed that my co-worker hadn't really been doing anything. She was correct, as I had also suspected, so I had an excruciating hour of asking "so what did you do about X? how did you solve Y? Where is the code for Z?" and getting dissembling and increasingly implausible answers in return. He was fired as a result of this. I hated being the hatchet-man that way, even more so because the co-worker was fun when you weren't trying to get work out of him, and this clearly destroyed any social relationship. But his attempt to get paid without doing any work made life harder for the rest of us who were used to having a pretty long leash.

You know where cheating bugs me? Games! Even as a child, I don't think I ever cheated at a game. I respect games. Grades, not so much.

I've never caught a student cheating, which I think is mostly because I don't really care very much. I did once find that someone posted a take-home exam problem I wrote on StackExchange, but I didn't try to figure out who did it. I can't really imagine being invested enough in this to try to track things down on Chegg or whatever, like some of my colleagues do. I'm sure some of my old problem sets and exam problems are there, and students can cheat with them. I just don't see any incentive for me to spend time learning about this; it would take a lot of time and make me disappointed and probably not solve the problem.

What bothers me more than cheating is the way the university administration suddenly wakes up and starts to interfere when I have a student who should be failing. They really, really, really do not want a student to be given a failing grade, even when the student hasn't turned in a single thing all semester.

We don't have that, the administration can't be bothered about individual students, instead what we have is the administration taking away a third of our postdocs and implying they'll keep coming up with other punishments until will lower our grading standards and stop failing so many students.

34 is Jammies' experience at the high school.

And not specific to this year, based on other accounts.

On topic, a new work from the Thesis Defense Snake universe.

That's really long.

Most of it's email headers and signatures. And it's under 3,000 words even including those.

38: That was almost too real to be funny. I think I've played every single possible role in those emails.

They really, really, really do not want a student to be given a failing grade, even when the student hasn't turned in a single thing all semester.

I wish I had realized this when I was a student.

Reading the link in 38 was stressful.

38: I stopped having nightmares about my defense a few years ago, but that made my shoulders rise and heart race. Yikes.

I have this fantasy of getting rid of graduate division entirely, salting the wart where it lies, and replacing them with therapists for graduate students. Why do there need to be some many rules around graduation? Who the fuck cares about margins? Why can't all of this be dealt with at the department level?

What if an economist wants to read a dissertation from a historian and can't because of the historian used Arial?

Who the fuck cares about margins?

Fermat?

I think I'm with CC's 9. Maybe I'm just grumpy this morning (for reasons only barely relevant to the topic) but there's some sort of race to the bottom thing going on here at a couple of levels. If people cheat and get away with it either due to "hating to fail anyone" or the graders just not caring, then it just reinforces the idea that you can lie your way through life. Eventually the liar is going to be found out, but at the cost of a job, or a relationship, or their own realization that cheating is bad.

I know people who have noticed obviously faked results by subordinates and had to work to get it fixed, or redo it themselves, after several layers of people have skated past the problem. It's not fair to anyone to let cheaters "prosper."

Or they can just become a Republican and then just lie and cheat the whole way through life and if you get caught Fox News will cover for you.