Showing 28 posts tagged cheating
“Students allegedly passed answers back and forth and confirmed responses on their phones during regular reading quizzes, which consisted of basic poem identifications. Without a TA to help her grade the work of such a large class, Senior Lecturer Peggy Ellsberg, who is teaching the course this spring and has been at Barnard for over 20 years, allowed her students to self-grade. Ellsberg became suspicious of cheating after the majority of the class was consistently receiving 90 percent on their quizzes. All quizzes, many with nearly identically-marked answers, are now being held by Barnard as ‘evidence.’”
“Ms. Parks admitted to Mr. Hyde that she was one of seven teachers — nicknamed “the chosen” — who sat in a locked windowless room every afternoon during the week of state testing, raising students’ scores by erasing wrong answers and making them right. She then agreed to wear a hidden electronic wire to school, and for weeks she secretly recorded the conversations of her fellow teachers for Mr. Hyde. In the two and a half years since, the state’s investigation reached from Ms. Parks’s third-grade classroom all the way to the district superintendent at the time, Beverly L. Hall, who was one of 35 Atlanta educators indicted Friday by a Fulton County grand jury.”
Harvard Has Sullied the Integrity of Quiz Bowl
Quiz bowls aren’t really known for attracting cheaters — the 2006 British hit Starter for 10 excluded — but, as recent history suggests, if there’s a way to cheat, a Harvard student will find it. According to a “security update” posted earlier this week by the National Academic Quiz Tournaments, LLC (which holds and judges quiz bowl tournaments), a star member of Harvard’s quiz bowl team, Andy Watkins, will be stripped of four quiz bowl championship titles after the company caught him illicitly accessing official quiz questions before the tournaments were held.
The company discovered the breach while reviewing a batch of server logs, which showed that Watkins and three other students — who, because they were so good at the quiz bowl competitions, was hired to draft quiz materials — used their employee login credentials to view official quiz questions in advance of championship bowls.
» via The Atlantic
New Technologies Aim to Foil Online Course Cheating
MILLIONS of students worldwide have signed up in the last year for MOOCs, short for massive open online courses — those free, Web-based classes available to one and all and taught by professors at Harvard, Duke, M.I.T. and other universities.
But when those students take the final exam in calculus or genetics, how will their professors know that the test-takers on their distant laptops are doing their own work, and not asking Mr. Google for help?
The issue of online cheating concerns many educators, particularly as more students take MOOCs for college credit, and not just for personal enrichment. Already, five classes from Coursera, a major MOOC provider, offer the possibility of credit, and many more are expected.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
Harvard Forced Dozens to Leave in Cheating Scandal
Harvard has forced dozens of students to leave in its largest cheating scandal in memory, the university made clear in summing up the affair on Friday, but it would not address assertions that the blame rested partly with a professor and his teaching assistants.
Harvard would not say how many students had been disciplined for cheating on a take-home final exam given last May in a government class, but the university’s statements indicated that the number forced out was around 70. The class had 279 students, and Harvard administrators said last summer that “nearly half” were suspected of cheating and would have their cases reviewed by the Administrative Board. On Friday, a Harvard dean, Michael D. Smith, wrote in a letter to faculty members and students that, of those cases, “somewhat more than half” had resulted in a student’s being required to withdraw.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
Cheating scandal: Feds say teachers hired stand-in to take their certification tests
It was a brazen and surprisingly long-lived scheme, authorities said, to help aspiring public school teachers cheat on the tests they must pass to prove they are qualified to lead their classrooms.
For 15 years, teachers in three Southern states paid Clarence Mumford Sr. — himself a longtime educator — to send someone else to take the tests in their place, authorities said. Each time, Mumford received a fee of between $1,500 and $3,000 to send one of his test ringers with fake identification to the Praxis exam. In return, his customers got a passing grade and began their careers as cheaters, according to federal prosecutors in Memphis.
Authorities say the scheme affected hundreds — if not thousands — of public school students who ended up being taught by unqualified instructors.
» via NBC News
“Experts say the reasons are relatively simple: Cheating has become easier and more widely tolerated, and both schools and parents have failed to give students strong, repetitive messages about what is allowed and what is prohibited. “I don’t think there’s any question that students have become more competitive, under more pressure, and, as a result, tend to excuse more from themselves and other students, and that’s abetted by the adults around them,” said Donald L. McCabe, a professor at the Rutgers University Business School, and a leading researcher on cheating. “There have always been struggling students who cheat to survive,” he said. “But more and more, there are students at the top who cheat to thrive.”
Can an honor code prevent cheating at Harvard?
Harvard University, whose motto “Veritas” means “truth,” has never had a student honor code in its nearly 400-year history — as far as it knows. But allegations against 125 students for improperly collaborating on a take-home final in the spring are leading to renewed consideration of the idea.
Though widely associated with college life, formal honor codes are hard to implement and fairly rare on American campuses. But some would argue they’re especially important at places like Harvard that are wellsprings of so many future leaders in government and business.
» via Associated Press
“The enabling role of technology is a big part of this picture,” Mr. Harris said. “It’s the ease of sharing. With that has come, I believe, a certain cavalier attitude.”
Amid plagiarism reports, Coursera adds honor code reminders
On the heels of reports that some students on online course platform Coursera have copied content from other sources, the education startup this week started rolling out what co-founder Daphne Koller called their ‘first line of defense’ against plagiarism: honor code reminders that students must acknowledge reading before submitting some assignments.
The new addition comes after a story last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education about dozens of plagiarism incidents reported by students and professors on the platform. According to the story, students in at least three humanities courses on the site, which use peer grading, have complained about other students who have lifted content from Wikipedia and potentially elsewhere.
» via GigaOM
