Sunday, June 17, 2012
WashPo on new immigration stance, job market
The Washington Post has a good article on the ramifications of amnesty after yesterday's announcement from the Rose Garden. Print link is here.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Online cheating? No way! From Chronicle of Higher Ed
Chronicle of Higher Ed had a piece the other day illustrating the huge risk of cheating in online courses. It talks about students rotating 5 through a sequence of testing over a semester, with a shallow test bank and with weekly tests. And using Google Docs to save the exams.
Isn't that an intellectual property issue? Shouldn't the university be protecting the professors' intellectual property better than that? That may be a good way to fight this kind of stuff with school administrators I guess.
We all know that there are a bunch of games attempted in online classes. The obvious one is to just have someone else take the class for you. [Search "The Shadow Scholar" on Google.] Many online programs have no way to verify the identity of the test taker, with or without some type of proctoring system in place. What is this doing to our overall reputation over time?
I get worked up over this because cheating hurts everyone. The stuff we have to do to attempt to control cheating makes it harder for those students who don't plan to cheat. Time spent on preventing cheating is time not spent on other more productive class items such as revising podcasts and notes, and working on current events with students. Cheating takes value away from the better students, and research has shown time and again that leaving courses open to cheating tempts even the best students into cheating behavior at times. Cheating makes a mockery of the whole system, and diminishes the hard work that 99% of our students are doing in order to better themselves.
I've never subscribed to the "bus" theory, or the idea that eventually a cheater's karmic reward will come in the form of getting hit by a bus. But I have plenty of colleagues for whom that serves as the ultimate justification of their inaction with respect to academic dishonesty (cheating, plagiarism, etc.). My other favorite is "the market will sort it out" - which suggests that employers have the ability to tell WHICH undergraduates cheated their way through online classes and which ones didn't - the market doesn't work that way. Instead, the market lumps all questionable programs together, and punishes everyone equally. It exists as a "pooling" equilibrium, in the econ lingo.
Isn't that an intellectual property issue? Shouldn't the university be protecting the professors' intellectual property better than that? That may be a good way to fight this kind of stuff with school administrators I guess.
We all know that there are a bunch of games attempted in online classes. The obvious one is to just have someone else take the class for you. [Search "The Shadow Scholar" on Google.] Many online programs have no way to verify the identity of the test taker, with or without some type of proctoring system in place. What is this doing to our overall reputation over time?
I get worked up over this because cheating hurts everyone. The stuff we have to do to attempt to control cheating makes it harder for those students who don't plan to cheat. Time spent on preventing cheating is time not spent on other more productive class items such as revising podcasts and notes, and working on current events with students. Cheating takes value away from the better students, and research has shown time and again that leaving courses open to cheating tempts even the best students into cheating behavior at times. Cheating makes a mockery of the whole system, and diminishes the hard work that 99% of our students are doing in order to better themselves.
I've never subscribed to the "bus" theory, or the idea that eventually a cheater's karmic reward will come in the form of getting hit by a bus. But I have plenty of colleagues for whom that serves as the ultimate justification of their inaction with respect to academic dishonesty (cheating, plagiarism, etc.). My other favorite is "the market will sort it out" - which suggests that employers have the ability to tell WHICH undergraduates cheated their way through online classes and which ones didn't - the market doesn't work that way. Instead, the market lumps all questionable programs together, and punishes everyone equally. It exists as a "pooling" equilibrium, in the econ lingo.
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