Asklemmy

43984 readers

780 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

How Would You Handle Students Cheating? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by wuphysics87@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

75 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I gave my students a take home exam over spring break. (This is normal where I teach) One of the questions was particulary difficult. It came down to a factor of three in the solution. That factor inexplicably appeared with no justification on many of their exams. I intend to have the students I suspect of cheating come to my office to solve the problem on the board. What would you do?

Edit: I gave them the Tuesday before spring break until the Thursday after. I didn't want it to be right before or right after.

When I say normal I mean giving take home exams.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] bayaz@kbin.social 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Whoa -- I assumed I would get a notification when you replied, but apparently not. Glad I checked the thread again!

But what’s the value in a take-home exam, if we assume that the intent is to be closed-book but with effectively unlimited time? Presumably that means it’s a problem roughly on the scale of an assignment, but they’re not meant to be able to look up their notes, review the lecture material, etc.?

Interesting point! I definitely see where you're coming from here... If I gave a take-home exam, I would want students to use their notes, some online resources, etc. I just wouldn't want them to copy an exact answer from online or other students. That may just be impractical today.

For what it’s worth, I’ve seen first hand that code copy-detection tools are honestly not actually all that great.

100% agree. I had small enough classes that I could check for plagiarism more directly. And, what you said later is spot on -- I think most students who cheated were not subtle enough to make hard-to-detect changes. Though, if they were, I wouldn't know they cheated, so... hard to say.

I’m actually not 100% sure on what “proctor” means, but based on how I’ve seen it used in this thread, I gather the two are the same?

Yep! Based on an online dictionary that said "proctor" was the US version of invigilator :)

Anyway, you make some great points, so thanks for the discussion!

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 points 7 months ago

I assumed I would get a notification when you replied, but apparently not

Yeah, that happens sometimes to me, too. It's incredibly frustrating.