And I will do so tomorrow as well.

    • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Yeah all my stuff has been take home since covid, and it's open/book/open note/open whatever. The one stipulation is that in needs to be you synthesizing these resources. Not someone else.

      People will still copy each others exam answers line for line though.

        • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
          ·
          edit-2
          4 years ago

          I mean to get really into it, all of these resources are fundamentally filtered through a variety of people synthesizing resources - unless you’re doing original research, the teacher and textbook author have the most sway over what is the correct answer.

          I don't see what your point is here; I write all my own questions and yes, I have some notion of what the right answer is when I write the question, but that doesn't mean a student that thoughtfully approaches the problem and comes up with a different solution methodology is incorrect or will be marked down. They might even get extra credit.

          This doesn't have anything to do with getting someone else to do the problem for them though, be it a classmate or Chegg.

          Certainly this is a quality of the test

          Nope.

          If two students’ answers can be exactly the same then it’s easy to cheat.

          If they're exactly the same, they get flagged for cheating. It's easy to catch. Additionally, some students will just pay other people to do the problem for them via services like Chegg, and that makes any test easy to cheat on.

          • LargeAdultSon [she/her]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Every time I've caught one of my students trying to buy a classmate's assignment, it's always been one of the undergrad 'entrepreneurs': rich douchebags who seem to have only bothered to get into engineering because they long to eventually tell people they dropped out of it when one of their many dad-funded startups becomes the next big thing.

            I'm pretty lenient with cheaters in general since most of the time it's just an act of desperation in response to busywork overload, but I have no tolerance for that pay-to-win fuckery.

            • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
              ·
              edit-2
              4 years ago

              Yeah I've seen something similar. I've also started including a syllabus statement and mentioning in class that if a student starts getting the urge to cheat on an assignment, that if they reach out to me about that I'll do whatever I can in terms of extra tutoring/extension to make sure they can earn they grade they hope to achieve legitimately instead of cheating. It's only been invoked a few times, but I was always happy with how those situations resolved.

              • LargeAdultSon [she/her]
                ·
                4 years ago

                This is brilliant, I really love this approach. I think the coldness of higher education (at least, relative to school) is a huge part of why students lose faith in the system and give up on trying to pass honestly. The class sizes mean there's inherently much more distance between teachers and students, and students are constantly being told that they're adults now and must handle their own problems, so I don't think anybody has a right to be shocked when they fall into difficulty and take matters into their own hands.

                Last semester, with online teaching, my tutors and I tried this weird new thing (at least, compared to my faculty's typical teaching culture) called "actually giving a shit". Like, if students didn't submit something or had a steep decline in their marks, we'd just ask them if they're ok. And wouldn't you know, it turns out that students dealing with depression/ family problems/financial stress/ all the other things they might have to cope with outside of their work are way more likely to open up and seek help if you come to them first in a compassionate way.