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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

There is (and always has been) a fairly effective way of detecting cheating. Have a conversation with a student. Ask them about some of their recent work. This can be in the form of something more formal like a viva, or it can be a casual chat.

These conversations should not be graded, just flag for problems (of which cheating is just one).

Combining this with verifying the student's ID is about as good as it gets. I think a mandatory 1-on-1 meeting with a member of staff at least once per term is essential, and serves many purposes.

EDIT: I think oftentimes it's known which students are cheating, but it's not easy to do anything about it.

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I've had teachers try this method with me and determined I was cheating when I was not. I don't believe in it.

This happened to me in secondary school, and I'm still mad about it.

It's not the method you shouldn't believe in, it's the teachers that are malicious. But yours is still an important point to make. The reason that all tests are standardized now, is in large part because of this reduction in bias. plenty of teachers are biased against students and will abuse said power, it's not a defect shared with multiple choice tests.

It seems insane to me to return to something we know is bad just because a new calculator was invented. At least before we figure out how to fix it's known issues first.

> It's not the method you shouldn't believe in, it's the teachers that are malicious.

That seems like leaping to a conclusion. Could it also be that this is not exactly an exact science and it's very easy to get it wrong?

I'm not sure it's honest* to say it's known, which students are cheating. you shouldn't say you know someone is guilty of a malicious offense without clear evidence. Where, if you had clear evidence it wouldn't be hard to do something about. Or if you don't have clear evidence the most you should charitably consider is suspect. IMO, in a hypothetical like that, it's unethical to accuse someone at all. It's impossible for me to prove I didn't cheat.

*: honest meaning in this specific context I think otherwise, without any accusation or assumption of maliciousness, you're probably right

How do you stop charismatic in-group students from getting reduced scrutiny?

Biases are hard, and you have to be careful to avoid perpetuating them.

When the student is ESL in the first place (and doing coursework via text), it's pretty hard to determine whether they are cheating or just struggling to communicate verbally.

As a teacher, I 100% agree with this. It's easy to have false positives and negatives though, so should never be used as more than in evidence building. Students can get nervous when put on the spot and some are smooth talkers. But it is a good start.

> but it's not easy to do anything about it.

This is actually prolific and a problem. I caught two students cheating once and their excuse was "I didn't know GitHub was on the internet." This was a junior level course... and the professor's focus was on networking... (he put in the syllabus that you can't use the internet for help. Let's put personal opinions aside (I wasn't checking them against SO fwiw)). The other student couldn't speak a lick on English. Yet, our department didn't want us to do anything about it. Despite being about as clear cut of a case as you can get, they even admitted it. In my other post I mention Goodhart's Hell. The reason the department didn't want to do anything is because the university evaluates a department's level of cheating by the number of reports that they make. So obviously, no one fucking reports it.

But besides this, I think we have to ask why students cheat in the first place. It's because despite GPA not having meaningful outcome [0], they are critical for students so get into grad school or get their first job. No one knows that you took the hard professor, learned twice as much, but barely got a C which would easily be an A in the other course. So of course they cheat. I design my class around this actually. I make it easy to get a good grade on purpose, but get students to work. To do projects, explore, and be creative. If I don't, they just cheat and that undoes any benefit from a hard and challenging homework. I let them know too. But I also am purposefully late to return grades, which makes them sweat. It might sound dumb, but you got to adapt to the environment. My goal is to make students learn. I can't make someone choose to learn, and I don't bother with students that are checked out. But I do make my class engaging and highly encourage creativity, and I've found that a lot of students that previously were checked out end up checking in (I give often give them opportunities to make up their slack, but require more from them). And the students that do work hard, they have good projects in their portfolios which I've seen them use to get hired. Its dumb, but it is the only way I've found to re-align the a class with the intended goals: to teach students.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230107050342/https://www.nytim...

Personal attention costs money.

... but university students (and especially international students) are paying a lot of money.

We're all (understandably) upset if we pay for something much more modest and when it has an issue we're unable to talk to a real human to try to resolve the issue. Imagine paying _many thousands per year_, working on projects and papers, being taught increasingly by adjuncts, struggling to register for all your required classes as administrators admit more students every year (without hiring more faculty), and then when you're accused by a bot of cheating, the response to a suggestion that you should talk with a staff person at least once per term is "oh that's too expensive".

Do you think your reasoning also holds up in the rest of western society where university is mostly tax-funded and needs to optimize for efficient use of funds?

I won't pretend to know anything real about higher education in other countries. But if staff cannot meet once per term with students, then I wonder how effective they can be overall? If a student's interaction with staff is limited to sitting in lecture ... That sounds like a MOOC.

I have studied in the US (big state college), a small Austrian private college / university of applied science and the University of Vienna (big public university) so maybe my take counts for something:

Lecture sizes between European public universities and American universities are very different. While in the US few lectures were "MOOC-style" with most class sizes allowing for 1:1 interaction, in Austria you really generally are "just a number". (There is even some funny German comedy based around students abusing that the professor does not know the name or face to each student ID, many such lectures happen in one of our many so-called Audimax halls)

This might be confusing to an American audience but works due to most classes in Europe having no required attendance and the grade being almost wholly determined by one exam at the end.

One exception is the small Austrian / German private college (University of Applied Sciences) which limits access much more to allow for small class sizes. These usually have much stricter entrance criteria by necessity but once you're in you generally get a much more personalized experience like I had in the USA.

As with everything, ymmv.

Most of my exams at my publicly funded university were individual in person meetings, where the Professor asked questions.

Cheating was basically unthinkable.

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