200 students admit cheating after professor’s online rant
“I don’t want to have to explain to your parents why you didn’t graduate, so I went to the Dean and I made a deal. The deal is you can either wait it out and hope that we don’t identify you, or you can identify yourself to your lab instructor and you can complete the rest of the course and the grade you get in the course is the grade you earned in the course.”
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So far more than 200 students have admitted to cheating.
UCF cheating scandal makes national news, on ‘Good Morning America’
It’s a 15-minute video, so the short version: the professor noticed a bimodal score distribution (rather than the expected normal distribution), with the average a grade and a half higher than usual. And then an anonymous student dropped off a copy of the entire exam bank, saying that it was in wide distribution.
I think the professor bluffed a bit when he told the students that he could hand in a list with 95% probability that all the cheaters were on it, which is probably true, and would shortly be able to hand in a list that only contained the cheaters, which is probably false. The list with all the cheaters would just be a list with all the high grades, which deviated from a normal distribution — the high-end part of the bimodal distribution. (You might not incorporate a few at the low end, but I’m guessing there isn’t much of a worry about a student who couldn’t pull better than a “C” while having the test questions ahead of time.) The problem is in identifying the cheaters with no false positives. That means not including anyone who legitimately got a high grade, and I don’t see how you can conclusively do that. But tossing the test makes a lot of that moot, since nobody gains an advantage from the cheating.
An interesting and scary scenario is what happens if the university decides someone who didn’t come forward is a cheater. What do you do if you’re that student, and you didn’t cheat?
The part about the incident not appearing on the transcript might have been a smokescreen as well. Would you hire a business grad from UCF who took this class in Fall 2010 and also had the four-hour ethics class on their transcript?
However, some information is missing, and I’m not entirely convinced this is cheating. It’s an advantage to know what questions might be asked, but whether that’s an unfair advantage (i.e cheating) depends on how you came across that information. The course had been given for several years and presumably at other institutions, so it’s possible questions were re-used. How many of them were “in the wild?”. Gathering up old exams to be used as a study guide is perfectly legitimate as far as I’m concerned; professors have to be profoundly naive to think that wouldn’t happen (and is why exams were treated as restricted material when I was teaching in the navy). The real issue here is how the students came to have the bank of exam questions and where you draw the line of coming by that information legitimately.
What do you do if you’re that student, and you didn’t cheat? Get a revolver loaded with hollow points. It’s the only way they learn. Management is inert to inputs orthogonal to its performance metrics.
I teach at a large public institution, and I no longer assign problems from the book on homeworks. Thanks to various web sites, the students have access to the solution manual. I don’t always craft as good problems as some of the book problems, but I think the students appreciate the effort. It’s unfortunate that the cheating is rampant, but at this point it’s just irresponsible/lazy to assign problems — on a homework or a test — from a “test bank” of questions.
The question about whether it’s cheating is an interesting one. I certainly don’t want students to have access to the actual test questions before the exam, but I’d love it if I could get them to go and work through a large bank of questions, since it seems like a decent learning process. Ferinstance, I think one of the major learning elements of graduate students preparing for a comprehensive exam is solving problems from previous years.
For my regular classes, I just need to figure out how to trick the students into thinking the questions will be coming from some giant test bank as a way of motivating them to do some extra work.