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Alicorn comments on Eight Short Studies On Excuses - Less Wrong
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You know, most of these problems can be avoided if you accept assignments late and have most of the course grade depend on one or more large individual projects that must be turned in "sometime before the end of the semester". The simplifying assumption is that a student who doesn't try to learn anything deserves to remain ignorant -- it's nice how neatly this works out.
I give my students a recommended due date, but allow them to turn in any assignment at any time before Finals Week without penalty, for any reason. It works better than you might think.
(I wish that I was allowed to insist that everybody do an individual project. There is so much cheating it's a bit ridiculous, and the worst part is that the students who cheat are just good enough at covering their tracks that I can't find absolutely definitive evidence. This is especially common among Chinese students, for some reason. Again, I figure that if people harm their own learning by cheating on assignments, then their actions are self-punishing.)
If you can't find definitive evidence of cheating, what makes you think that a) there is so much of it, and b) especially among Chinese students?
I should be more clear about what I'm saying. There's a certain level of evidence needed to prove cheating to The Authorities so that it can be dealt with through the official academic honesty processes of the university. That's a hard standard to meet, since in this sort of thing you really don't want false positives. However, I can be almost certain about most instances of cheating, and that's enough to get a solid idea of how much is going on and who's doing it most.
I have plenty of evidence, of course, just not enough to convict anybody of academic dishonesty. Except the guy whose idea of "writing a report" was to copy and paste from Wikipedia and hope I didn't notice. That was weird.
I need to share this anecdote now... a friend of mine who shall remain nameless was teaching a history class and asked for papers on the War of 1812. One student copied the entry from Uncyclopedia. And showed no signs of it having been a joke. And didn't understand what she did wrong after it was explained.
The paper explained how one of the major powers in the war was Antarctica, and dolphins carrying bombs helped the United States defend against killer penguins. So yeah.
One day the classified files will be released, and you'll be really sorry for having trivialized this theater of the war >:-(
I'm idly interested (by which I mean I have no use for it, I'm just curious) what some other heuristics are for "obvious cheating." Mismatch with the student's apparent understanding of the topic? Or their writing style?
I was accused of copying a paper for, of all things, an economics class, in high school. I think what got me out of it was the completely genuine look of astonishment on my face--I had not, in fact, copied it, and had never gotten the accusation before about anything. To this day I wonder why my teacher thought I had.
Let's see if I can list a few heuristics for cheating:
Mismatch between the writing style in different parts of the paper. If some paragraphs are poorly-punctuated and ungrammatical, and other parts are written in very formal academic language, that's a sign that the paper may have been made by copying and pasting from other people's writings, then filling in the cracks with their own writing.
Formal academic language is a very weak warning sign. It means you should try typing some statistically unlikely phrases into Google, just in case.
Sometimes people who are asked to summarize some assigned reading will do so by copying and pasting directly from it, and changing a bit of the wording around. This is pretty easy to detect if you've read it recently as well.
If a completely incompetent student suddenly turns in top quality answers, it's unlikely that this is due to him just getting his act together.
I have no idea why your teacher thought you copied a paper for your economics class, but those are some heuristics that I've learned.
Don't forget to add plagiarism heuristics:
and in CompSci
Thanks! I don't remember much about how I was doing in the class otherwise, so I'm not sure either. Likely possibilities are formal language (I had turned my brain into "paper mode") or the last one about incompetence (I was not so big on doing homework in high school, so whether I appeared competent would depend on how much I'd been participating in class).