Because if you can sufficiently obfuscate your job, nobody can figure out if you’re good or bad at it.
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I also don’t grade on a curve, instead grading on demonstrated proficiency and understanding. the school translates those into letter grades, which is why 50% is the C threshold, since Partially Proficient is 2 of 4.
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Professor at Chapman University sues students for copyright infringement. Meanwhile Chapman University requires students to submit their work through TurnItIn, which copies student work into their database for commercial purposes without compensation.
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I take a pretty different stance with my students: I was teaching engineers, who are ethically expected to be agents of the public’s safety. If they don’t do their jobs well and make mistakes because they cut corners, people can and will be hurt. If I knowingly let them through the program it not only puts the public at greater harm, I damage the value of the degree we award them. Every cheat we remove from the system is a quality improvement of the caliber of student that represents us in the wild.
I’ve explained this to every class I teach and stick to it pretty aggressively. If I find that you’ve cheated, I will be addressing it in a transparent manner, and you will serve as an example to prevent it from occurring with other students.
It’s also worth noting that I’m very flexible with students up front regarding scheduling and accommodations. I’ve even shifted around deadlines and schedules to let someone go on a big skiing trip with their parents, because they asked two weeks ahead of time.
I can appreciate the goal of not being adversarial with students, and try to structure grading and assessment as a chance for students to demonstrate their understanding, rather than as a series of ‘gotchas’ to punish them with. However, sometimes people just do not want to put in their own work and I don’t think we’re at all worse off for cracking down on it, because it also solidifies in the heads of their classmates how serious we are when we expect them to take Engineering Ethics.
Edit: Addendum: not all faculty fit to this standard, especially at a graduate level, and one of the ongoing jokes from students who really resented this lack of commitment was “Well, my grades aren’t always the best, but they’re mine”
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And of course medicine, law and sciences.
I would also hold the same degree of rigor when it comes to the more so called ‘woolly’ humanities subjects. A friend who is a senior Barrister suggested that a working understanding of cultural theory and philosophies is more important than a law degrees (practical knowledge) as it is more valued in court to be a well versed person in humanity. To be able to demonstrate critical thinking in a testing system is also an important area to weed out the cheats.
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Operationally it is the same stance, in that I do not tolerate cheating and have had to learn how to navigate the process for prosecuting cheaters at 4 different universities. FWIW, most of the students I’ve pursued this with have been engineering majors.
On my current campus I had a dean tell me I couldn’t follow up on one student because I did not have “cheating is not permitted” on my syllabus. Well, it is there now, but I went around that dean to the appropriate student committee anyway. My take away from that experience is that students hate cheaters even more than deans do.
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Come to Boing Boing for the jokes, and stay for the enlightening discussion on cheating, public safety, and ethics. Kudos to you folks.
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I teach high school English, and we are for sure concerned about plagiarism and copying the work of others, but the idea of guarding against students sharing exam question seems antithetical to learning. I don’t care if students know what I’m going to ask them in an essay exam (I usually tell them), if they can produce a cogent, well-organized essay that has a well-developed argument, that’s showing mastery. Success! Who cares if they knew the prompt in advance.
To be fair, I don’t give a lot of multiple choice exams, but even when I do, students knowing the questions ahead is not a big cheat. A student from first period telling a student from second, “There’s a question about Meursault’s reaction to Marie’s marriage proposal; there’s a question about the definition of existentialism…” isn’t going to help a lot if the student doesn’t know the answers. If she learns them from leaked exam questions: success! That’s mastery. It’s the same things that I’d have on a study guide.
Of course, I have to take some precautions against cheating: I shuffle the answers, so students can’t memorize a string of letters (ACCBDA), and get 100%, and I do keep a secure environment to make sure they are not using sheets. But even then, cheating prep on the part of students is often just good test prep taken one step too far. That’s good advice for deviant students (like I used to be): prep a really good sheet, read it over once or twice, then forget to bring it with you into the exam. It’s just studying, but it makes it sound edgier 
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He may not have the option. In some professional schools (such as nearly all law schools), the curve is mandatory for all courses.
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Schools need to stop using multiple choice questions.
If you have more than 24 students in a class, you are being ripped off.
Education has become a scam, students are scamming back.
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If youre talking about public education, it’s a mess because it’s underfunded, not because it’s some kind of scam.
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Yeah, that seems like the obvious answer. The only conceivable way for a letter grade to have comparable meanings on different exercises is by normalising the distribution of scores for each exercise.
Although “grading on a curve” is a particular talking point in the US, something similar is happening in any system that assigns grades (including when the grades are “pass” and “fail”). How else could grades be comparable between math, history and gym class? It might be done using historical data, e.g. if you’ve administered 500 spelling tests, you know what score boundaries are required to give the right number of As, Bs, etc. Or it could be left to the teacher’s judgment, but then what are they judging you on if not where you rank among other students?
The problem with grading a single test on a curve is not that it’s an essentially different practice, just that the sample size is small. But on the other hand, if the test isn’t directly comparable to past examples, the only fair way to set grade boundaries is to base them on how students end up doing.
I’m all for education without grades, but that means not having tests at all (in the current sense). It also means a lot more teachers, since half the point of grades is to enable industrialised education by efficiently targeting a very limited supply of teachers’ attention. Without that targeting, you need enough teachers to give full attention to every student, all the time.
wooops missed that part, thanks
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The thing about writing tests is that when every test question gets instantly published for cheaters, after a few tests you run out of meaningful questions to ask that don’t already have polished answers on the cheat sites. You feel like you’re reduced to asking questions about essentially meaningless trivia they could only answer if they’d read the material. Which is a really awful way to test, as it proves nothing about their knowledge or abilities.
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In my senior year of college, I was in a curve-graded course that everyone was really struggling with. I think the high score on the first exam was below 70%. In retrospect, I can’t remember what was so difficult about that material.
Anyway, preparing for another exam, my study group noticed a pattern to how the professor created the exams. It turns out the questions were straight out of the book, and always one question after an assigned homework question. Now, the exams were shorter than the assignments, so there were lots of false positives. But we reasoned that if we just worked through all the candidate questions, we’d be well-prepared.
We spent two hours before each exam in the student lounge on the same floor as the class going over the material. When we went to take the exam, sure enough - we had just worked through every problem. In our group, I want to say that the low score was 94%.
We felt bad about wrecking the curve. We tried to quietly share what we knew, but we didn’t know everyone. The prof definitely knew what was up, as he’d always come into the lounge just before class to buy a soda. He’d scan the room, nod, “Hello, class,” kind of smirk and leave.
We were terrified that he’d change the pattern, so we always put in some extra effort to cover other, non-homework material. But he kept the pattern straight through to the final.
Nowadays, I wonder if we’d run afoul of some cheat detection system. However, at the end of the day, we studied better, harder, and more thoroughly for the class that we knew what the questions were going to be than for most other classes. I’ve occasionally wondered what to take away from that and whether my experience could be generalized.
Returning to school sometime later for an advanced degree, a few professors would share the topics that the exams would cover or even “accidentally” share the exact questions in the review session. With some more experience and (I hope) maturity under my belt, I took that as them saying “this is the really important stuff. If you take nothing else out of the course, remember these things.” Even through that program, it held for me that the courses that previewed the exam questions, sometimes in great detail, are the ones that I feel I understand most thoroughly and intuitively.
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Which leads to the need for qualitative and formative assessments instead of pretending like the classic exam routine of college courses is testing anything other than performative memorization in the moment. The ability of a student to cheat by knowing questions in advance is a failure of the instructor and their approach to andragogy.
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As it’s a business school, should they not get extra credit for cheating and getting away with it?
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That’s one way that instructors can actually sort of cajole students into studying – by getting them to think you’re allowing them to cheat.
Reminds me of the recommendation to allow students to bring notes to the exam, as long as it’s just one page. Many will put a lot of time and effort into cramming as much info onto it as they can. And so, voila, in the process, many have reviewed that material more than they would have otherwise.
Edit: I think it was also supposed to be handwritten, which makes sense to me. I think that requires fuller engagement with what you’re writing down.
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There are now easy statistical tools to compensate for that, where it shifts the grading scale in order to compensate for easier/harder tests (or better/worse teaching). It’s still not a curve, it’s scaled.
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