I decided to ‘poison the well’ by uploading [to Quizlet] a copy of my final with wrong answers....
I was accused of ‘entrapment’ and ‘honey-potting.’ More than a few seemed to think that my transgression was as bad or even worse than my students’.... Maybe (as the saying goes) I am the asshole here....
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53 comments:
"Maybe (as the saying goes) I am the asshole here"
And sometimes, as it turns out, that's a good thing.
Students! Consider that your teacher is onto you and may be an a##hole.
I teach high school history and government, and my tests show up on quizlet regularly. But I find what usually happens is a smart kid takes the test, and then airdrops it to all of his friends.
Starting next year, all of my tests will be hand-written five paragraph essays with no phones or laptops out.
Young students--as biologically dependent first on mother's milk and then on parental handouts--routinely share information/cheat in school. This is as old as time, and was previously tackled with Honor Codes, pop quizzes, assignments that avoided predictability, and visible ways to block cheating. One of my undergraduate teachers handed out alternate color exams to every other seat (e.g., yellow vs. blue) to show the students they couldn't look at the next paper. This war has now shifted to the Internet.
How did you succeed in life:
1. Freely sharing information and working as a team, or
2. Building independent skills and error-checking methods?
Many have succeeded with each strategy, but #1 is bound to eventually fail without at least one accurate error checker. Success often demands a mix of #1 and #2.
he IS an asshole! all ranking (ALL Ranking!) is RACIST!!!
OF this RACIST insists on assigning grades.. he MUST assign "A"s to ALL students; else RACISM!!!
Racist Pukes like him, are WHY BLack students receive bad grades..
ALL Students (at Least, ALL BLACK Students), MUST receive "A"s EVERY TIME
RACISM!!! RACISM!!!! RACISM!!!!!!
So...is the argument that the students have the right to cheat without the professor attempting to catch them? Otherwise, I'm not seeing the problem.
I'm surprised, watching videos of professors explaining my favorite philosophers, how little they understand them. So the right answer may be something other than the guy thinks.
Adaptation is a wonderful thing...until it is unhelpful to the Left, then it is wrongthink.
"set up a kind of camera"
I can't imagine what he trying to say. This professor has "cameras-in-the-ladies-room" issues.
Quite the lively discussion in the comments over there.
Solution: final exam is administered in the classroom with pen and paper.
I was accused of abuse for doing this 15 years ago.
I presume the honor code would say someone who cheats should fail. In that case, this is just an efficient way to achieve the result and in a highly accurate manner. Play stupid games win stupid prizes. Good lesson to learn.
Ha, ha, ha. Our modern age: "How dare you catch me cheating! That's cheating!" Outraged delivery with absolutely no sense of ironic self-awareness.
The penalty is not for cheating, the penalty is for not thinking. Not thinking = not trying = Fail.
No, he is not the asshole.
Reminds me of an old quote by Abraham Lincoln- "Don't believe everything you read on the internet!"
A website to facilitate cheating- and he uploaded wrong answers. Brilliant. The only thing I see wrong with it isn't actually wrong. It would have been so much better if it were a class in ethics...
As can be seen in many comments on many things in the comment section of this very blog- determining the truth takes some serious digging. Probably the last place I'd go is a website designed for cheating- way to easy to, as one commenter there put it, to poison the well.
What can you find by searching even "trusted" sources on the internet? Well, Hunter's laptop was Russian misinformation, nothing real at all. Verified by 50, count them, 50 former intelligence professionals (unstated- current DemoncRATs...). Fact checkers all agreed, and free discussion to determine the truth was stifled...
He's not the bad guy. I'm surprised it took him this long to find out- some, as in a lot, of people do the bare minimum to get by. In the easiest way possible, which includes cheating. Similar behaviors abound in real life. False charges, sleeping your way to the top, denying reality, et cetera and so and so forth.
So many things can be tied to his little rant. It's philosophy- so we'll ask one question-
What is the difference between Quizlet and Ashley Madison websites?
Oh, Lord. "Entrapment"? Balderdash. If the students are using your own wrong answers, they're busted, tout court. And if they didn't even check to see whether any answers were right before submitting this stolen material as their own work, they are mental as well as moral idiots.
It is pretty well established by now that increasing the fraction of the population subjected to the higher education process from 2% to 60% has not resulted in a corresponding increase in the educable fraction of the population. Perhaps we need a three-tier system, where we have institutes for higher education, institutes for Commie indoctrination, and adult baby-sitting institutions. Instead of trying to combine all three functions in a single country club setting.
In fact, I seem to recall running into the same problem in high school. It was a real relief to me, when I dropped out of high school and started attending college, to discover that there were places where they held classes for people who wanted to learn.
The idea that this is entrapment is fascinating. Would any of the students not have cheated if this "opportunity" was not available? The thing is any student caught in this trap would almost certainly be failing the course anyway given the "exam" answers were obviously wrong, though there is a significant difference between failing and cheating. The latter is far more serious. I have no sympathy for the cheating students, mind you, but there are edge cases.
I am confused with the "honey pot" accusation. Was anyone getting sexually turned on by the exam? That's a kink that had escaped my attention previously. I've never had the urge to take a pop quiz out to a fancy dinner and slow dancing. I mean, if you are going to simp, then you should at least have the illusion that something more interesting would happen than a paper cut.
Laziness and cheating is endemic in most schools, bordering on epidemic at some schools (high school and college). I give credit to Gerritt Merriam for the ingenuity of uploading a very obviously fake test to Quizlet. I love the irony that his class was an Ethics class! I fear, though, that some students who got caught red-handed, will complain rather loudly to the school administrators that Prof. Merriam “tricked” them. If they are a racial minority, they could play the race card, and that Prof. Merriam will end up being the person punished and the students who cheated will get a passing grade.
Sounds like as good a lesson as any about not trusting things to-good-to-be-true on the internet. I approve. I'm sure it was real chore for him. Assuming the semi-standard four (4) answer choices for each question then for each he has to see if the question was answered right or wrong. If wrong, he then has to determine if it was cheat wrong or dumb wrong. If cheat wrong, it could still be guessing, so he has to some form of pareto analysis of the wrong answers.
This may be a side issue, but the idea of making a take-home exam multiple choice strikes me as very odd.
Students should be flunked if not expelled. And every Professor should start doing this.
I wonder if it is the same philosophy professor that just admitted to this or someone posting the story as if the person. My own opinion is no [the professor is not unethical], but with the caveat that you are certain the evidence proves the cheating. Cheating doesn’t seem a big deal as I recall it when I was studying, As I’ve gained experience, my opinion on cheating has changed. The more it happens and universities don’t care to punish it, then it just hurts the reputation of universities and the value of degrees. As my degree is nearly useless compared to my work history and resume, then why do I care about the university’s reputation? To employers, caveat emptor. To cheaters, manga est veritas et pravevalebit.
Not an asshole. Students may not enjoy getting caught, but it’s the risk one runs when violating rules of any sort.
Back when I was an adjunct professor I ran my tests as open book, open notes, and open laptops, which made developing test questions pretty challenging. Sometimes I had clear evidence of collaboration on an answer, but usually that was because the resulting answer was spectacularly wrong.
Ridicule the students who cheated, fail them. Admit no wrong. Let them learn a lesson in life.
I wonder whether he was legitimately surprised at how many of his students were (likely) cheaters, or whether he kind of suspected it, and just wanted to verify. That said, if you get 19 of 45 questions wrong on your take-home multiple-choice final exam (i.e. only 58% correct), you can't really be complaining when you get an F in the class.
That said, it's been a very long time since I have done combinatorics, but is his math correct? Each question has five answers and his cutoff is 19 of 45 matches against his specific set of deliberately wrong answers. So it's [(1/5)^19 * (4/5)^(45-19)] * [45 choose 19], right? That gives me about 0.04% chance of a random outcome, way lower than the 1% he says he is using. If my math is right (and it probably isn't -- it's been a long time) 16 matches is probably the threshold he should use.
The problem is that he really has no way of differentiating what the student legitimately knew and what they garnered from the website.
A friend and I were once accused of cheating on an open-book, open-note, Intro to Business Law midterm, because we finished first and were the only two people in the class to get perfect scores. The reality was our notes consisted of an index of all the headings, sub-headings, and names of cases cited in the textbook for the period being tested, making the exam a snap.
Exonerated, but under Heavy Manners, once we explained.
First, his exam for a philosophy class is entirely multiple choice?
Second, he discovered upon searching Google that some of his "previous" exam questions were available - this could only lead to cheating if he was too lazy to create a new exam every year (and bear in mind, he taught only three classes this spring).
Third, his response was not to create new questions that would not be so easily found on the site, nor to convert to an all essay exam, it was instead to knowingly plant questions with wrong answers onto a study aid website that is accessible to the world, not just his particular students, so he is knowingly dis-educating the rest of the people who go to the site.
Fourth, he libels the Quizlet site as being "designed to facilitate cheating" - I checked it out just now and it seems to comprise flash cards and practice exercises and the like, did not appear to have been set up to cheat.
Of course, he won't listen to any of these arguments, because he made clear that he will not consider any arguments from someone not up to his personal idea of being his "peer" - "philosophers at least, if not specifically ethicists."
The comments there were..., interesting.
The way I see it, is as an analog to counterfeit money. The professor has a valuable commodity, knowledge, and his job is to share that knowledge with students, to "educate" them. A relevant part of this "educational" process is to measure the degree to which his students assimilate that knowledge, and the method of measurement is a grade.
But it doesn't stop there. The student's grade is a component of his GPA, which is a measurement of the student's satisfaction of requirements for award of an academic degree. An academic degree, or the absence of one, is typically noticed by a prospective employer and incorporated into his evaluation of a potential hire.
Thus, one class grade may have ramifications unknown and/or unanticipated at the time it is earned.
Ah, back to counterfeit money: just as Gresham's Law* suggests that "bad money drives out good," a grade given, an academic award granted, a job obtained, under false pretenses, ...as a result of "false" or "counterfeit" grades, will negatively reflect upon the hire, the school, the academic department, and all the way back to the class educator. For sure, not immediately, and likely not soon, but given some number of similar occurrences, a "tipping point" of counterfeit graduates (or, graduates who are willing to lie & cheat) will be recognized at some point in time, and a reputation degraded (pardon the pun!)
* one might also recall the old poem/saw that describes ascending causal relationships: "For want of a nail, a shoe was lost....."
Last point: how ironic is it that the guy's class was "Introduction to Ethics"?
If it had been "African-American Studies" it would have been OK. Everybody knows that's bullshit anyway.
Virtue: doing the right thing, even though no one is watching.
Subliminal messaging: asshole... back... black hole... whore h/t NAACP.
Yeah, he's a dyed in the wool diversitist, probably rabid.
I had an engineering class, freshman or sophomore, one of those huge classes with 90 or 100 people in it. An overview of materials science as I recall. This was in the late 70s, so long before the internet. Anyway, the professor passed out a handout with all the questions from the final on it. 400 and some odd questions. Only 50 were on the actual test, but all 50 came from that list of 400 questions. He had them on the mainframe, and just went in and selected teh 50 to print off the night before. He figured if you knew the answer to all 400, you would get an A, and both of us would be happy.
"Quite the lively discussion in the comments over there."
A lot of overthinking the issue, too, if you ask me.
The instructor did nothing unethical. The only people affected by his posting of the wrong answers online are those who are looking for someone else to do their work for them. What sort of reward do they deserve (aside from the expectation of an offer of a government job, of course)?
"It is pretty well established by now that increasing the fraction of the population subjected to the higher education process from 2% to 60% has not resulted in a corresponding increase in the educable fraction of the population."
There's your problem, right there.
I suppose we could investigate the moral implications of "cheating". Who is harmed? The teacher? The student who cheats? The students who do not cheat? The future employers who base their decisions on GPA? The institution whose grades are no longer trusted? The government that loaned the tuition, and will eventually convert it to a gift? Maybe no one?
I was accused of ‘entrapment’ and ‘honey-potting.’
Honeypots are a legitimate tactic in the cybersecurity field. Tell those students to STFU.
"I teach high school history and government, and my tests show up on quizlet regularly. But I find what usually happens is a smart kid takes the test, and then airdrops it to all of his friends."
Why would smart kids be stupid/foolish enough to share the fruits of their intelligence and diligent work with their friends who lack one or both of those traits to do well on tests by their own ken?
"If it had been 'African-American Studies' it would have been OK. Everybody knows that's bullshit anyway."
I don't know that, and neither do you. Any course can be bullshit or can be valid, illuminating and challenging...depending on who creates any particular course, selects the readings, devises the tests and requirements for papers, etc.
You just can't help showing who you really are.
I like Merriam's methods.
To cheat is to cheat is to cheat. I don't care how you catch them, but do catch them. They are no better than thieves.
Cheaters beware!
"What can you find by searching even "trusted" sources on the internet?
It's all perverted now.
I watched a guy cook up a batch of crack on a stove some years back. He started with a large pile of pure coke, looked to be at a minimum four ounces, which he dumped into a pan of water and if memory serves backing soda. My immediate reaction was, Are you fucking mad?
When cooking up crack, you know when it's done because it solidifies and while doing so, makes crackling sounds (no snaps or pops though). Sometime later I saw the film "New Jack City" in which one character says, "It looks like little cracks." From that we are supposed to assume that's how crack got it's name. But apparently, whoever wrote the script never cooked up a batch of crack.
Anyway, I decide to find out for certain, so I asked Google, "Why is rock cocaine called crack? That's a straight forward question with little room for interpretation. If you ask Google how the robins got their name, the first answer it provides is about how English settlers in America named it that due to it's red breast. There are countless questions like that one can ask Google that will also produce simple, straight forward answers.
But if you ask Google, "Why is rock cocaine called crack?", instead of providing a simple, straight forward answer it gives you pages and pages of links to sites about the evils of addiction and places that can helped the addicted. And no matter how you rephrase the question, that's what comes up. Every time.
On the Internet, there are no trusted choices. None whatsoever. It's devolved into a tool used by our masters to control information in order to manipulate and influence thought. In other words, thought control.
If you think you can conduct an online class (as this was) and administer multiple choice tests un-proctored at home without major cheating issues then you're probably going to be disappointed.
Maybe, if this is important to you, you make the effort that teachers have always made to insure, as best you can, that you don't make cheating so easy that a typical student will find it irresistible.
Or you could put your effort into setting up a trap that, when sprung, will only prove that you, the teacher, are sort of an idiot.
Barely half the kids at Sac State graduate. It's a waste of time and money for those kids, the parents and society. And many of the ones who make out...
Why would smart kids be stupid/foolish enough to share the fruits of their intelligence and diligent work with their friends who lack one or both of those traits to do well on tests by their own ken?
I don't know, and they won't answer when I ask them.
He's an asshole for giving a take-home final that is 70-80 multiple choice questions for an Intro to Ethics class. I would expect short answer/essay to an ethics class. Teachers choose multiple choice test because it is easier to grade by themselves or by someone else.
Also, he never described any ground rules. Was this considered an open book or open notes test? In the day of computer reference material, what is considered out of bounds? Was it an online, time limited test that would discourage use of reference material vs what they could answer from what they already knew. I had an engineering professor who let you bring in any reference you wanted, notes, books and/or cheat sheets. However, if you didn't know the material well enough you were going to flunk because you would never finish enough problems correctly to get passing score if you were spending all your time looking things up.
Cheating is endemic everywhere. (I trust only me and thee, and I'm beginning to wonder about thee . . .)
It's the main reason the system is Doomed. Reality is never cheated.
Come to think of it- I was investigated for cheating once. Won’t mention the class or where. Lockstep class- everyone had to take it. Different professors, same book. Same homework problems assigned, same tests given. Only difference- the professors. I went into the final with a high “D”. Night before the final a classmate with a different prof held a study/tutor session where in several hours we went through every homework problem that had been assigned. And he explained how to do them. And each step of the way I was thinking, “Wow! That’s easy!” Final exam in a big lecture hall, everyone taking the course present. Multiple choice. Final exam grading was simple and on a curve. High score and everyone within one standard deviation- A. Two standard deviations B, and so on. My test grade was not used- the next highest grade would have been a C. One person. (I was told all this afterwards) As time ran out I finished the last question- the only one to answer all of them. Just that changes everything since the total number correct is the score, not the percentage. The exam had been videotaped. In the days of actual videotape. The tapes were reviewed by multiple people to find how I cheated. Obviously- I didn’t copy off anyone. The students sitting around me were questioned. (They weren’t supposed to tell me they were questioned…) The test proctors were all questioned. Their assessment to the end was I cheated, but they couldn’t find any evidence so they had to let it go.
I didn’t cheat. It was a multiple choice test. Multiple choice tests tell you two things. One- does the test taker know the material? Two- is the test taker good at talking multiple choice tests? I am. Especially if I know the material. Two days before the test I didn’t. One evening of explanation from a fellow student- I did. My professor routinely had the highest failure rate in the school. But, he was brilliant! IMHO, a lousy teacher, but was young, what did I know?
Cook's wisdom.
You just can't help showing who you really are.
Likewise. Reality is tough for lefties like you. I spent 50 years with reality. I've held someone's heart while they died.
I think he's pretty smart to do that, but I also think the students are doing what the system encourages. Who needs to memorize anything these days. Not only do we have a calculator everywhere we go, we have access to the entire collected knowledge of the world everywhere we go.
If cheating is this easy, this is actually just the new reality of information gathering they will use in real life. Assess learning a different way that can't be so easily replicated. But that takes realteaching and no longer using scantrons
I think entrapping students is morally wrong, but what this professor did is not entrapment. You should never deliberately set up a situation that lowers the practical or emotional barriers to cheating, but uploading distinctively wrong answers to a cheat site doesn't do that. However, he IS the asshole for giving a multiple-choice exam as a take-home. Actually, he's an asshole for giving multiple-choice exams in college. The laziness around teaching in my profession is killing us as much as the ideological conformity. Exams in humanities classes should be short answers and essays. If you can't take the time to teach your classes properly--and that includes grading your papers in a timely manner--stop collecting your paycheck.
Often fun to look up what comes after Althouse’s ellipses. Here she left out the proof that the professor is a pompous asshole:
“Maybe (as the saying goes) I am the asshole here. But I would take that possibility a lot more seriously if that were the judgment of my immediate peers (philosophers at least, if not specifically ethicists), and even more so still if those peers could articulate an argument beyond simplistic accusations of dishonesty or ‘entrapment.’”
When did philosophy professors start thinking they were philosophers? Some are, but the vast majority are not. Why isn’t calling yourself a philosopher when you are only a philosophy professor academic dishonesty?
In my inner city high school classes I have extra credit for cheating as it showed initiative.
Re: Paddy O:
If cheating is this easy, this is actually just the new reality of information gathering they will use in real life. Assess learning a different way that can't be so easily replicated. But that takes realteaching and no longer using scantrons
I actually think his exercise has been an excellent demonstration of how to assess learning in the new environment. His students just failed the test, perhaps because the real lesson wasn't something covered in class, viz. don't blindly trust your sources! Students needed to learn that not every source is realiable, so you need to be able to use your own knowledge and understanding to assess the credibility and reliability of information you gather, whether on the internet, a library, a human source, the newspaper, ChatGPT, etc. This becomes even more critical when everything you need you look up. And his students didn't acquire that knowledge or understanding, so they couldn't recognise what apparently were obviously incorrect answers.
That said, I rather doubt most of his students learned that lesson. Doesn't sound like the ones he caught particularly cared about school after all.
I taught survey history as an adjunct for three semesters over a number of years. I realized how much work it was to prepare and grade some matching, some short answer, and a choice of essay questions (no multiple guess), and was thankful indeed that I went the librarian route.
After my first bout, I made sure that the students understood that if they didn't know any
geography they should transfer to another section.
Besides, when is it news that philosophy profs are often pompous, assholes, or both?
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