But that's cheating!
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@Mason_Wheeler if I may ask, what's the text's license?
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@Gąska Feel free to share it around, with attribution.
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@Mason_Wheeler well then, for the benefit of all people who hate Medium as much as I do...
What does “cheating” mean when you know everything?
by Mason Wheeler
Everything there is to know, I know it.
No, that’s not the hubris of a stereotypical teenager talking. My teens are long past for me, and I never really went through that particular phase back when I was that age. It is, rather, a simple statement of fact. A fact perhaps exaggerated slightly for the sake of presentation, but honestly not by all that much. I know everything… and so do you.
What does it mean to know something? Dictionary.com defines knowledge as:
- acquaintance with facts, truths, or principles, as from study or investigation; general erudition: knowledge of many things.
- familiarity or conversance, as with a particular subject or branch of learning: A knowledge of accounting was necessary for the job.
- acquaintance or familiarity gained by sight, experience, or report: a knowledge of human nature.
- the fact or state of knowing; the perception of fact or truth; clear and certain mental apprehension.
- awareness, as of a fact or circumstance: He had knowledge of her good fortune.
- something that is or may be known; information: He sought knowledge of her activities.
- the body of truths or facts accumulated in the course of time.
- the sum of what is known: Knowledge of the true situation is limited.
These definitions are all variations on the same theme: available information and the possession thereof. However, I suspect that, if you were to ask the typical person on the street what it means to know something, the answer they had in mind would contain an element that’s not specifically mentioned anywhere in that list: having the information in question personally stored inside of your brain.
This is the sense of knowledge that is taught to us in school. We’re taught about knowledge and reasoning as distinct things: knowledge is a noun, a set of facts that you have sitting on a shelf somewhere inside your head, while reasoning is a verb. It’s a skill, a process by which you apply knowledge and rules in order to work out further knowledge.
A lot of us grew up in times when that distinction was quite strictly enforced. My high school chemistry teacher was a terrible teacher — he clearly understood the material quite well, but didn’t have the slightest clue as to how to effectively communicate it to a class full of teenagers — but one thing he taught us has always stuck in my mind, just because of how novel and unprecedented it was: when solving an equation, the important part is to make sure to write out the equation correctly in such a way that all the terms line up and cancel out as expected. Once you’ve done that, in his words, “the rest is just calculator work.”
This was kind of a huge difference, because up until that point in my academic career, teachers would have looked aghast at the very thought of using calculators to solve equations. That’s cheating! You have to know the math for yourself, and do the math for yourself! But this chemistry teacher had a very different take on it: knowing how to set up the math correctly requires actual knowledge and understanding of the problem at hand, but computing the answer to the already-set-up problem is a simple mechanical task, so there’s no moral objection to handing it off to a machine that can do that task faster and more efficiently than you can. (And it was a good thing too, because the equations we had to solve in there were significantly larger and more complicated than the ones we dealt with in math class. Having to work them all out by hand would have made an already-dull class significantly more tedious!) This was the first time I’d ever seen a teacher even begin to embrace the validity of the concept of external knowledge.
In college, math courses were a lot more calculator-friendly, and I was introduced to the concept of “open-book tests” for the first time, but only for low-stakes quizzes. “Real” exams still were all about retention: about how much of the material you could hold in your brain and recall on demand. Taking a calculator in was no longer considered “cheating,” but bringing your textbook along certainly was!
I can’t help but wonder what the point of that distinction is, though. If you’ve ever visited a lawyer, or seen one discussing law on TV or YouTube, you’ve almost certainly seen a massive bookshelf full of law books in their office. Doctors have medical texts. Many software developers are surprisingly fond of their collection of thick programming books, even in an industry where the state of the art moves so quickly that half the knowledge in them is obsolete the day after you buy the book!
If, as many assert, the purpose of formal education is to prepare you for a good career, they aren’t doing a particularly good job in this regard! There’s so much stuff to know that all of the top professionals must, by necessity, rely on “cheating” just to do their jobs properly. There’s just too much stuff to fit inside one skull, so to them, their professional knowledge is much more of a verb than a noun. Instead of knowing what the answer is, they know where to find the answer. The end result is the same, though: they are able to produce the answer when it’s needed. (And if, as many others assert, the purpose of formal education is not to prepare you for a career, but to form you into a well-rounded human being, might I humbly suggest that under that philosophy, dissuading well-rounded-human candidates from embracing one of the most generally applicable skills in the modern world is doing them even more of a disservice than under the career-prep philosophy?)
A friend of mine likes to joke about how he carries the sum total of all human knowledge in his pocket. He’s referring to his smartphone, of course. But the more I think about it, the more it seems not to be a joke at all, but merely a simple statement of fact. If it’s on Google, if it’s on Wikipedia, if it’s on the news, or any of dozens of more specialized sites, I am able to produce it on demand, because I know how to look it up. In many cases, when it’s not something stored on the frontmost shelves in my brain, I can produce it more quickly via my Internet connection than I can by remembering it.
Everything there is to know, I know it, because I know where to look it up. I’m one of those software developers who doesn’t have a big stack of programming books, because I can look it up more quickly with a Google search than by thumbing through reams of paper. If it weren’t for my ability to do so, I would be severely hampered in my ability to do my job, and employers understand that. More than once I’ve gotten looks of approval in a job interview for answering “well, I don’t know how to do that, but here’s how I’d figure it out…”
This has been on my mind because my wife recently decided to take some classes online. She mentioned to me how they’re going to some rather extreme measures to protect their quizzes from “cheating,” including requiring students to run special browsers that restrict their ability to visit other sites, and also forcing them enable their webcams and running eye-tracking algorithms that will flag students looking away from the screen (such as at their phones) to ensure they’re not making use of external knowledge.
But this class deals with a subject where the bulk of knowledge is going to be external anyway. (Don’t they all these days, when you think about it? But this is one of the more obvious ones.) So how can doing precisely what you’d be required to do as part of a job in the field possibly be considered “cheating” in a class meant to prepare you for a job in that field?
I’m not going to claim that the term is entirely meaningless. There are plenty of other ways that an unqualified student can fake competence in an academic setting. But in the modern world, including the reliance on knowledge external to one’s own brain in the definition of cheating is just bizarrely wrong and completely out of touch with reality.
What room is there for the concept of making use of information you don’t actually know, when you actually know everything?
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Google can't help you if you don't know what questions to ask. Or how to interpret the answers.
If you're struggling with basic arithmetic, you won't see the patterns that let you simplify things. Because your brain space is being used decoding and handling the basic symbols.
Even worse, it's really really really easy to go astray and pick up bad information if you don't have a firm basis in yourself as to what's correct. Generally, unlearning is harder than learning, the first thing you learn tends to stick, even if wrong.
Without content mastery, you can't master concepts. That's why we start at the basics. And mastery requires effortless recall of those core things. Not just recall, but internalization of the principles involved. Like playing a sport, if you have to think about it, you've lost. You have to train until you just react. That same level of internalization is required for any serious academic pursuit or skill.
Edit: it's like asking why we have expensive L1 cache, when ram and disk are cheap and so much bigger. But they're much slower. And it's hit so often that even a few cache misses make for bad times.
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@Benjamin-Hall That's pretty much why I ran out of steam in Math and struggled with Laplace transforms and such. There were techniques in the second semester of Calculus that I never fully mastered — mostly due to insufficient repetition — and much of the more advanced Math really depended on being able to apply those techniques with facility. So even though I grasped the concepts of Laplace and Fourier transforms, I wasn't able to solve them; my recall of the core things was far from effortless.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in But that's cheating!:
So how can doing precisely what you’d be required to do as part of a job in the field possibly be considered “cheating” in a class meant to prepare you for a job in that field?
I remember at school (in the senior years at least) there were two types of exams, known as closed-book and open-book. In closed-book exams, you had no access to material (other than the official equation sheet supplied with the exam paper itself), and in open-book exams, you were expected to bring the standard text books with you and to use them. The open-book exams were much more challenging — you needed to actually know what was in the book in order to be able to find the relevant sections quickly — and more like what you'd do normally.
Also, I suspect that too many places use anti-cheat stuff because they have it, not because it is actually relevant to what they're doing.
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There's certainly no such thing as proprietary knowledge. Everything anyone knows is published publicly.
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@HardwareGeek said in But that's cheating!:
There were techniques in the second semester of Calculus that I never fully mastered — mostly due to insufficient repetition — and much of the more advanced Math really depended on being able to apply those techniques with facility.
One of my general principles in my nightly workout is: "if it's really unpleasant or difficult, it's because you haven't sufficiently developed it, and so it's an area you need to focus on."
Slightly revised to be more generally applicable. (Actually it's "if it sucks, you need to do more of it.")
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More to the real point, when I'm reviewing applicants for a developer position, I need to make sure they can perform basic tasks without asking Stack Overflow. Fizzbuzz level shit.
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Alsoalsoalso, if you think you already know something, it's a huge
from you from using your magic Internet research to figure out how to do it properly (not to mention that there are a thousand wrong answers for every right answer). Dunning-Kruger is very real.
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This is worse than that other Medium article last spring where someone said the COVID chart had reached the flat part of the S curve and therefore the worst was over.
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And even more seriously, when I had an ex who was briefly hospitalized, I kept asking the doctor questions until he finally told me to cut out my "armchair research." People who think Google is equivalent to (e.g.) medical school are dangerous.
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@error What does any of this stream of logorrhea have to do with academic cheating?
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@error said in But that's cheating!:
This is worse than that other Medium article last spring where someone said the COVID chart had reached the flat part of the S curve and therefore the worst was over.
Oh, you mean that one where every country that instituted lockdown, by a complete coincidence, happened to do it 2 weeks before the curve naturally started flattening?
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@Mason_Wheeler said in But that's cheating!:
@error What does any of this stream of logorrhea have to do with academic cheating?
@error said in But that's cheating!:
More to the real point, when I'm reviewing applicants for a developer position, I need to make sure they can perform basic tasks without asking Stack Overflow. Fizzbuzz level shit.
@error said in But that's cheating!:
Alsoalsoalso, if you think you already know something, it's a huge
from you from using your magic Internet research to figure out how to do it properly (not to mention that there are a thousand wrong answers for every right answer). Dunning-Kruger is very real.I'm literally
talkingtyping about potential hires "cheating" on interview tests. Which seems very relevant.Most of the other was about your introduction, where you repeatedly state that you "know everything" because you can look it up at any time. That's worse than wrong. That's actually terrifying.
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This post is deleted!
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@error said in But that's cheating!:
@HardwareGeek said in But that's cheating!:
There were techniques in the second semester of Calculus that I never fully mastered — mostly due to insufficient repetition — and much of the more advanced Math really depended on being able to apply those techniques with facility.
One of my general principles in my nightly workout is: "if it's really unpleasant or difficult, it's because you haven't sufficiently developed it, and so it's an area you need to focus on."
Slightly revised to be more generally applicable. (Actually it's "if it sucks, you need to do more of it.")
Lifestyle thread is
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@Jaloopa said in But that's cheating!:
@error said in But that's cheating!:
This is worse than that other Medium article last spring where someone said the COVID chart had reached the flat part of the S curve and therefore the worst was over.
Oh, you mean that one where every country that instituted lockdown, by a complete coincidence, happened to do it 2 weeks before the curve naturally started flattening?
You mean the one where "correlation does not imply causation" was thrown around to prove that "correlation implies there is no causation"?
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@dkf said in But that's cheating!:
Also, I suspect that too many places use anti-cheat stuff because they have it, not because it is actually relevant to what they're doing.
Yes and no. I've had some pretty normal people going full conspiracy nut when it comes to students cheating, to the point where you'd think students were some sort of scourge with no other purpose than cheat their way through whatever tests the noble examiners come up with. But, alas, I'm also prepared to concede that there being e.g. a Whatsapp group among (some) students where they could cooperate on solving exercises during an exam (if left unsupervised) isn't entirely inconceivable.
Collaborating during an exam isn't something that is fixed by having an open-book exam. I'm not a fan of the shitty systems that we occasionally hear about (and, frankly, I've yet to hear of one that doesn't sound bypassable by a clever student, at least when it comes to CSE). AIs tracking eyes and flagging suspicious eye movements sounds like a pile of bullshit. Exams are already somewhat stressful, no need to make them extra obnoxious.
(Are there other solutions? Stuff like individual exams have for sure been discussed. The problem is scaling to a cohort of several hundred students without very significantly increasing manpower. Creating a reasonable exam is a fair chunk of work already.)
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@cvi said in But that's cheating!:
@dkf said in But that's cheating!:
Also, I suspect that too many places use anti-cheat stuff because they have it, not because it is actually relevant to what they're doing.
Yes and no. I've had some pretty normal people going full conspiracy nut when it comes to students cheating, to the point where you'd think students were some sort of scourge with no other purpose than cheat their way through whatever tests the noble examiners come up with.
I mean, they're not wrong.
(Are there other solutions? Stuff like individual exams have for sure been discussed. The problem is scaling to a cohort of several hundred students without very significantly increasing manpower. Creating a reasonable exam is a fair chunk of work already.)
Personally, I think people need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Exams are supposed to test knowledge that's deemed necessary for future success. Cheating - as understood by examiners - is passing the exam through methods other than having the knowledge. The reason it's bad, they argue, is that students will be lacking the knowledge needed in their future jobs.
Question: do cheating students actually fail at their future jobs?
I believe the answer is no. And that leads us to the second question: if both honest and cheating students achieve success, does the exam actually do what it's designed for?
Or in other words - is the knowledge that's being tested by the exam actually useful?
That's what actually needs fixing. Not the form of exams, but their contents.
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@Gąska said in But that's cheating!:
Exams are supposed to test knowledge that's deemed necessary for future success.
I don't necessarily personally disagree with that statement, but it is not what the regulations/guidelines for assessment tend to say. Additionally, while the intentions behind your statement are good, "necessary for future success" is so nebulous and hard to pin down that it's essentially a useless guideline at best. Who gets to decide if something is necessary for future success? Can we even objectively agree on it?
The "necessary for future success" is something that needs to be evaluated at a higher level (and it is -- if a school is serious, it will have e.g. input from relevant industry partners when designing/updating a curriculum).
Question: do cheating students actually fail at their future jobs?
I believe the answer is no.
If you want my cynical opinion: catching the dumb and incompetent cheaters is enough. If cheating is difficult enough that passing by cheating puts you above average competency, that's fine I guess.
But, ask yourself, what kind of "cheating" would you be OK with from a candidate if you were e.g. interviewing somebody? Googling? Probably OK? Calling their best friend and having them answer your questions? Probably be looking to hire said friend.
Or in other words - is the knowledge that's being tested by the exam actually useful?
That's what actually needs fixing. Not the form of exams, but their contents.
Assessment is difficult, and whether one wants or not, there's more to it that just what's being tested.
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@Gąska You're skipping a step with assessment.
Assessments have two parts--validity and utility. Validity asks "does the assessment measure what it thinks it measures", while utility asks "what do we want to measure?"
Cheating breaks validity. It means that the assessment is invalid, and that even if the assessment would be useful, it's now meaningless. It's like a unit test that doesn't actually hit the code in question.
Utility is a completely separate, subjective criterion. And mostly unconnected to cheating.
90% of the time (especially at the pre-college level), what we're testing are not end-user skills and knowledge. No one will ask you to write a 5-paragraph essay on <stupid piece of literature>. Even if you're a literature reviewer. Instead, they're scaffolds. Have you mastered enough of the content at <this level> to be able to keep up with the pace needed for <next level>.
And yes, having to google basic concepts is a huge flaw. Imagine hiring a programmer who had to google the basic syntax for simple tasks every single time (and worse, had no concept of elementary logic). You can't master higher concepts and abstract concepts without a very very firm, almost automatic grasp on the lower level building blocks. If you're not sure what 2 + 2 means,
ax+byis going go right over your head. And if you don't understand the underlying concepts at least at some level, even reading the documentation won't help--you won't grasp the meaning or will spend so much effort just getting the basics that the subtext and real meanings and patterns will fly right by. I've seen this thousands of times during my teaching career and even my (short-lived so far) programming career.It's funny. In physical things like sports, we fully accept that you have to drill the basics until you no longer think about them. But in academics, suddenly drilling and memorization is horrible. What about languages--it's widely accepted that just using Google Translate won't cut it. You need to actually work with it and memorize vocabulary and make automatic the process of constructing sentences. The same goes for anything. Mastery requires being able to do something without looking it up. And mastery is progressive--you must master the basic skills before the ones that depend on them.
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@cvi said in But that's cheating!:
But, ask yourself, what kind of "cheating" would you be OK with from a candidate if you were e.g. interviewing somebody?
I think this is the wrong question to ask. The correct one is: what skills do you expect from an employee?
Personally, if I were interviewing somebody, my preferred approach would be live coding session where they're allowed to Google anything. Except what they googled for would absolutely be taken into consideration in final decision. There's a difference between looking up API reference and copying code from SO. There's also a difference between copying a small snippet and copying basically the entire solution. It's also possible to look at SO answer to see how things work and write your own code based on newly acquired knowledge.
The one thing I wouldn't let slide is if they didn't know the language itself (in a typical scenario where they're applying for a job in one specific language and that language is fairly popular). You have to know the language to work efficiently. Also, using the debugger.
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@Gąska said in But that's cheating!:
I think this is the wrong question to ask. The correct one is: what skills do you expect from an employee?
Indeed. However, keep the context in mind: I did directly write this in reference to your original comment regarding cheating and failing in future jobs. Perhaps we misunderstood each other in what we understand as "cheating".
Personally, if I were interviewing somebody, my preferred approach would be live coding session where they're allowed to Google anything. Except what they googled for would absolutely be taken into consideration in final decision. There's a difference between looking up API reference and copying code from SO. There's also a difference between copying a small snippet and copying basically the entire solution. It's also possible to look at SO answer to see how things work and write your own code based on newly acquired knowledge.
So, in essence, your interview would be somewhat akin to an open-book exam. In these cases, having access to reference material and/or Google wouldn't be considered cheating at all.
To also return to my earlier post. You are saying that what was Googled for should be taken into account. In a sense, you're actually suggesting very strict supervision of the test taker, since that kind of data also needs to be recorded. Imagine scaling that idea to hundreds of test takers ... how would you do it? (Interviews are super high effort in terms of manpower, which is why candidates are frequently very strictly filtered before deciding on the small subset of candidates to invite.)
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@Gąska said in But that's cheating!:
@cvi said in But that's cheating!:
But, ask yourself, what kind of "cheating" would you be OK with from a candidate if you were e.g. interviewing somebody?
I think this is the wrong question to ask. The correct one is: what skills do you expect from an employee?
Personally, if I were interviewing somebody, my preferred approach would be live coding session where they're allowed to Google anything. Except what they googled for would absolutely be taken into consideration in final decision. There's a difference between looking up API reference and copying code from SO. There's also a difference between copying a small snippet and copying basically the entire solution. It's also possible to look at SO answer to see how things work and write your own code based on newly acquired knowledge.
The one thing I wouldn't let slide is if they didn't know the language itself (in a typical scenario where they're applying for a job in one specific language and that language is fairly popular). You have to know the language to work efficiently. Also, using the debugger.
Most school work (until the very end of college) is much more in the "knowing the language" category.
Anecdotally, when I started my PhD program they told us something like:
You learn the same physics multiple times. First in high school, after which you know nothing. Then again during your underclass years, when you can finally do it at a high-school level. Then again as an upperclassman, where you can finally do it at a beginning-college level. Then again in your PhD classwork, where you finally get it at the full college level. And then finally in your research, which is when you can finally do something useful with your knowledge.
And it was really true. The content repeats over and over, each one requiring the previous level and building incrementally on it (with lots of backtracking). And even after all that classwork, you still are useless in the field until you have to confront real problems head on and more or less on your own. But you couldn't confront those problems and learn from them without the iterative work.
Edit: in large part because you need the math that goes along with it. As well as the intellectual maturity and capacity for abstraction that only comes with handling it little by little for a long time.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in But that's cheating!:
@Gąska said in But that's cheating!:
@cvi said in But that's cheating!:
But, ask yourself, what kind of "cheating" would you be OK with from a candidate if you were e.g. interviewing somebody?
I think this is the wrong question to ask. The correct one is: what skills do you expect from an employee?
Personally, if I were interviewing somebody, my preferred approach would be live coding session where they're allowed to Google anything. Except what they googled for would absolutely be taken into consideration in final decision. There's a difference between looking up API reference and copying code from SO. There's also a difference between copying a small snippet and copying basically the entire solution. It's also possible to look at SO answer to see how things work and write your own code based on newly acquired knowledge.
The one thing I wouldn't let slide is if they didn't know the language itself (in a typical scenario where they're applying for a job in one specific language and that language is fairly popular). You have to know the language to work efficiently. Also, using the debugger.
Most school work (until the very end of college) is much more in the "knowing the language" category.
Not from what I remember. Of course there's a difference between physics and, say, biology. That said, during my CS degree, most exams from most subjects were rote memorization of random facts that didn't contribute to any practical skills. Who cares what the compression method used by JPEG is called? Who cares which HTML attributes are invalid for a button? Who cares how long you have to wait with sending a packet with a particular MAC method? Yes, all of these things are useful. Sometimes. When you do this one particular thing. And when you do, you can easily look it all up. And then it's useless again for another 2 to 5 years until you need it again, at which point you can look it up again.
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@Gąska
I refrained from asking because I was afraid of the answer
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@Luhmann said in But that's cheating!:
I refrained from asking because I was afraid of the answer
I get that a lot.
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@cvi said in But that's cheating!:
To also return to my earlier post. You are saying that what was Googled for should be taken into account. In a sense, you're actually suggesting very strict supervision of the test taker, since that kind of data also needs to be recorded. Imagine scaling that idea to hundreds of test takers ... how would you do it? (Interviews are super high effort in terms of manpower, which is why candidates are frequently very strictly filtered before deciding on the small subset of candidates to invite.)
That was my answer in context of interviews. Of course it doesn't scale well; it doesn't have to.
In school setting, I'd probably disallow use of internet. Instead I'd let students bring in whatever notes they want, in paper or electronically on their phones and laptops. I had a couple college teachers who allowed that (although only in paper - I guess there weren't any Faraday cage rooms available), and it's a very nice compromise.
Also, up until early 2010s, oral exams were still very common in Poland.
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@Gąska said in But that's cheating!:
@cvi said in But that's cheating!:
To also return to my earlier post. You are saying that what was Googled for should be taken into account. In a sense, you're actually suggesting very strict supervision of the test taker, since that kind of data also needs to be recorded. Imagine scaling that idea to hundreds of test takers ... how would you do it? (Interviews are super high effort in terms of manpower, which is why candidates are frequently very strictly filtered before deciding on the small subset of candidates to invite.)
That was my answer in context of interviews. Of course it doesn't scale well; it doesn't have to.
In school setting, I'd probably disallow use of internet. Instead I'd let students bring in whatever notes they want, in paper or electronically on their phones and laptops. I had a couple college teachers who allowed that (although only in paper - I guess there weren't any Faraday cage rooms available), and it's a very nice compromise.
I'm suddenly remembering one time in high school, the teacher gave everyone an index card and said we could use whatever notes we could fit on that card in the upcoming test.
One student transcribed the entire chapter we were being tested on, by writing it out phonetically in Japanese characters, which are a much more compact script than English.
The teacher never offered such a test aid again.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in But that's cheating!:
I'm suddenly remembering one time in high school, the teacher gave everyone an index card and said we could use whatever notes we could fit on that card in the upcoming test.
My HS physics teacher had the cheat sheets pre-printed. Every function you would need on the test, any unit conversions, common values, etc... All of the things that a student knowing the material would likely reference in solving the test.
His stance was, you still have to know what
is, when to use it and how to use it to solve the problem. So why waste precious cycles on memorizing its exact formula.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in But that's cheating!:
@Gąska said in But that's cheating!:
@cvi said in But that's cheating!:
To also return to my earlier post. You are saying that what was Googled for should be taken into account. In a sense, you're actually suggesting very strict supervision of the test taker, since that kind of data also needs to be recorded. Imagine scaling that idea to hundreds of test takers ... how would you do it? (Interviews are super high effort in terms of manpower, which is why candidates are frequently very strictly filtered before deciding on the small subset of candidates to invite.)
That was my answer in context of interviews. Of course it doesn't scale well; it doesn't have to.
In school setting, I'd probably disallow use of internet. Instead I'd let students bring in whatever notes they want, in paper or electronically on their phones and laptops. I had a couple college teachers who allowed that (although only in paper - I guess there weren't any Faraday cage rooms available), and it's a very nice compromise.
I'm suddenly remembering one time in high school, the teacher gave everyone an index card and said we could use whatever notes we could fit on that card in the upcoming test.
One student transcribed the entire chapter we were being tested on, by writing it out phonetically in Japanese characters, which are a much more compact script than English.
The teacher never offered such a test aid again.
That's so dumb, on multiple levels.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in But that's cheating!:
the teacher gave everyone an index card and said we could use whatever notes we could fit on that card
I remember having the kind of open-but-limited-notes exam. Didn't know how to write in Japanese, though. I think I had @Dragoon's style, too.
@Dragoon said in But that's cheating!:
His stance was, you still have to know what
is, when to use it and how to use it to solve the problem.
Woo! I know that. Haven't really needed to use it for a few decades, though.
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@Dragoon said in But that's cheating!:
@Mason_Wheeler said in But that's cheating!:
I'm suddenly remembering one time in high school, the teacher gave everyone an index card and said we could use whatever notes we could fit on that card in the upcoming test.
My HS physics teacher had the cheat sheets pre-printed. Every function you would need on the test, any unit conversions, common values, etc... All of the things that a student knowing the material would likely reference in solving the test.
His stance was, you still have to know what
is, when to use it and how to use it to solve the problem. So why waste precious cycles on memorizing its exact formula.
Yeah. We gave formula sheets. They didn't help the people who didn't know what the symbols were or what they meant.
I found that when I had formula sheets, the only value was in writing them out myself. Trying to reference them in a test situation other than a very quick "I know exactly where this is and want to verify that I'm not dropping a factor of 2" check ate way too much time. But by writing them out by hand (often a couple times, the first few with annotations as to use and meaning), they stuck.
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@Dragoon said in But that's cheating!:
@Mason_Wheeler said in But that's cheating!:
I'm suddenly remembering one time in high school, the teacher gave everyone an index card and said we could use whatever notes we could fit on that card in the upcoming test.
My HS physics teacher had the cheat sheets pre-printed. Every function you would need on the test, any unit conversions, common values, etc... All of the things that a student knowing the material would likely reference in solving the test.
His stance was, you still have to know what
is, when to use it and how to use it to solve the problem. So why waste precious cycles on memorizing its exact formula.
I had a stats module for A level that I was convinced I was going to do really badly in, because I didn't really like stats and hadn't applied myself. I went in to the exam and the cheat sheet had every formula with a name that made it fairly obvious where it should be used, and I did really well. I don't know how anyone could have done badly in that exam
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@Jaloopa said in But that's cheating!:
@Dragoon said in But that's cheating!:
@Mason_Wheeler said in But that's cheating!:
I'm suddenly remembering one time in high school, the teacher gave everyone an index card and said we could use whatever notes we could fit on that card in the upcoming test.
My HS physics teacher had the cheat sheets pre-printed. Every function you would need on the test, any unit conversions, common values, etc... All of the things that a student knowing the material would likely reference in solving the test.
His stance was, you still have to know what
is, when to use it and how to use it to solve the problem. So why waste precious cycles on memorizing its exact formula.
I had a stats module for A level that I was convinced I was going to do really badly in, because I didn't really like stats and hadn't applied myself. I went in to the exam and the cheat sheet had every formula with a name that made it fairly obvious where it should be used, and I did really well. I don't know how anyone could have done badly in that exam
Yet, having been a teacher, I'm sure some people did do poorly.
Heck, I've given open books, open notes tests. And not even difficult ones--these were basically "freebies". For many of them, they even had the questions exactly from previous tests. Yet people still failed.
As a grad student, I gave an in-class quiz. Before the quiz I worked through the problem that would be on the quiz, heavily hinting (as in "you might need this in a few minutes") that I was giving them the answers. Those who normally did well on quizzes did well. Those who normally didn't do well, didn't do well. Basically, giving them that info made no significant difference in scores.
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@Benjamin-Hall Some people are so clueless, they probably would have failed even if you'd left the worked-out problem written on the whiteboard with a box around labeled "This is the answer to problem #1".
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@HardwareGeek said in But that's cheating!:
@Benjamin-Hall Some people are so clueless, they probably would have failed even if you'd left the worked-out problem written on the whiteboard with a box around labeled "This is the answer to problem #1".
I've basically done that. And people didn't notice it. Heck, I've given questions like
What is foo of bar?
a. This is not the answer.
b. Neither is this.
c. Don't pick me.
d. baz(except with real things instead of foo, bar, and baz as "free points" when I had to pull a question last minute (due to external changes). The correctness rate was not 100%.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in But that's cheating!:
@Jaloopa said in But that's cheating!:
@Dragoon said in But that's cheating!:
@Mason_Wheeler said in But that's cheating!:
I'm suddenly remembering one time in high school, the teacher gave everyone an index card and said we could use whatever notes we could fit on that card in the upcoming test.
My HS physics teacher had the cheat sheets pre-printed. Every function you would need on the test, any unit conversions, common values, etc... All of the things that a student knowing the material would likely reference in solving the test.
His stance was, you still have to know what
is, when to use it and how to use it to solve the problem. So why waste precious cycles on memorizing its exact formula.
I had a stats module for A level that I was convinced I was going to do really badly in, because I didn't really like stats and hadn't applied myself. I went in to the exam and the cheat sheet had every formula with a name that made it fairly obvious where it should be used, and I did really well. I don't know how anyone could have done badly in that exam
Yet, having been a teacher, I'm sure some people did do poorly.
Heck, I've given open books, open notes tests. And not even difficult ones--these were basically "freebies". For many of them, they even had the questions exactly from previous tests. Yet people still failed.
As a grad student, I gave an in-class quiz. Before the quiz I worked through the problem that would be on the quiz, heavily hinting (as in "you might need this in a few minutes") that I was giving them the answers. Those who normally did well on quizzes did well. Those who normally didn't do well, didn't do well. Basically, giving them that info made no significant difference in scores.
This is basically the thesis of my article: it's absurd to call access to outside information "cheating" when what actually matters is knowing what to do with the information.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in But that's cheating!:
@Benjamin-Hall said in But that's cheating!:
@Jaloopa said in But that's cheating!:
@Dragoon said in But that's cheating!:
@Mason_Wheeler said in But that's cheating!:
I'm suddenly remembering one time in high school, the teacher gave everyone an index card and said we could use whatever notes we could fit on that card in the upcoming test.
My HS physics teacher had the cheat sheets pre-printed. Every function you would need on the test, any unit conversions, common values, etc... All of the things that a student knowing the material would likely reference in solving the test.
His stance was, you still have to know what
is, when to use it and how to use it to solve the problem. So why waste precious cycles on memorizing its exact formula.
I had a stats module for A level that I was convinced I was going to do really badly in, because I didn't really like stats and hadn't applied myself. I went in to the exam and the cheat sheet had every formula with a name that made it fairly obvious where it should be used, and I did really well. I don't know how anyone could have done badly in that exam
Yet, having been a teacher, I'm sure some people did do poorly.
Heck, I've given open books, open notes tests. And not even difficult ones--these were basically "freebies". For many of them, they even had the questions exactly from previous tests. Yet people still failed.
As a grad student, I gave an in-class quiz. Before the quiz I worked through the problem that would be on the quiz, heavily hinting (as in "you might need this in a few minutes") that I was giving them the answers. Those who normally did well on quizzes did well. Those who normally didn't do well, didn't do well. Basically, giving them that info made no significant difference in scores.
This is basically the thesis of my article: it's absurd to call access to outside information "cheating" when what actually matters is knowing what to do with the information.
Except that if you make everything "open information", you can't easily distinguish between "I knew what I was doing, but had to look things up for details" and "someone else did the work and I don't know anything."
Basically, once you allow fully-open resources, your assessments have no validity. There's no way of knowing what they measure, if anything. You will always need proctoring and restrictions to enable validity.
And there is a lot of information needed to know how to use the later information where having it hard memorized is vital. And that memorization should be tested. Things like chemical naming conventions. Unless you can do those without references (for the simple classes at least), you won't be able to go on. And the later stuff will just fail and you'll waste everyone's time. Whereas if the teacher knows "you can't name an ionic compound", they can work with that.
Memorization tests (and other closed-information tests) are unit tests. They test specific knowledge and skills. Things that you have to have at the instinct level before you can work at the more abstract levels of higher-order skills. Just testing the higher-order stuff means you don't have enough access to figure out where the fault happens, just like only doing integration tests.
Are closed-information tests overused and (in most cases) poorly written? Absolutely. But that's a separate issue entirely--testing is hard, whether we're talking software or people. And testing people is even harder than testing software.
Edit: and open-book, take-home-style tests only work for higher-order skills. Which represent a tiny fraction of education, because they're dependent on the whole layers of lower-order skills and content knowledge.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in But that's cheating!:
Yet, having been a teacher, I'm sure some people did do poorly.
Heck, I've given open books, open notes tests. And not even difficult ones--these were basically "freebies". For many of them, they even had the questions exactly from previous tests. Yet people still failed.I suspect what happened was that I was strong enough at maths in general, and with a good enough memory of the general form of the equations and which tests they were used in, that the formulas were enough to jog my memory.
My memorisation skills served me very well until they didn't, when I got to the last year of university and discovered I'd never really learned to study because it had always come so easily to me before. When I came to concepts I didn't grasp as intuitively it started to fall apart a bit
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@Jaloopa said in But that's cheating!:
@Benjamin-Hall said in But that's cheating!:
Yet, having been a teacher, I'm sure some people did do poorly.
Heck, I've given open books, open notes tests. And not even difficult ones--these were basically "freebies". For many of them, they even had the questions exactly from previous tests. Yet people still failed.I suspect what happened was that I was strong enough at maths in general, and with a good enough memory of the general form of the equations and which tests they were used in, that the formulas were enough to jog my memory.
My memorisation skills served me very well until they didn't, when I got to the last year of university and discovered I'd never really learned to study because it had always come so easily to me before. When I came to concepts I didn't grasp as intuitively it started to fall apart a bit
Yeah. Memorization is necessary, but often kids don't get used to learning abstract thinking because they've been able to brute-force memorize all the needed information.
That's the downside of relying too heavily on tests of memorization. But can be solved without giving open access to information, as worked-out problems have enough variety that you can't simply regurgitate an answer.
Multiple choice tests are a necessary evil that should be kept to a minimum IMO. Necessary because there's no way you can test over all the material otherwise and still be able to grade it and give feedback in anything like a reasonable time, even for small classes. Evil because it's a (comparatively) low-validity measure that can be gamed in many ways (including simple logic + guessing or other side-channel attacks that aren't even cheating).
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@Benjamin-Hall said in But that's cheating!:
I found that when I had formula sheets, the only value was in writing them out myself. Trying to reference them in a test situation other than a very quick "I know exactly where this is and want to verify that I'm not dropping a factor of 2" check ate way too much time. But by writing them out by hand (often a couple times, the first few with annotations as to use and meaning), they stuck.
In Poland, the high school finals are standardized at national level, and back when I was taking the finals, we've had these Ministry-certified 20-page formula books for math. The common ones, yes, it's much faster and pretty easy to memorize - but the ones that you don't use that often, being able to look them up was very helpful even if you had to search for them page by page. So again, it all comes down to how often you need the particular piece of information.
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@Jaloopa said in But that's cheating!:
I got to the last year of university and discovered I'd never really learned to study because it had always come so easily to me before. When I came to concepts I didn't grasp as intuitively it started to fall apart a bit
I ran into that in high school. I had a math teacher who didn't grade homework at all, so I got in the habit of not doing it. I still did ok, because I understood the concepts and could get decent marks on the quizzes and tests. The real problem was that habit spread to my other classes and persisted beyond that one class. I continued to get decent grades in HS, and community college was easy because I readily grasped everything except the math, and that was easy, too, at first, because it largely a repeat of HS Calculus. I struggled from that point on, though, and it's a significant part of the reason I went into digital electronics rather than more math-intensive analog.
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@Dragoon said in But that's cheating!:
This thread has no remaining capacity for electrical puns.Please react to this
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@Jaloopa said in But that's cheating!:
My memorisation skills served me very well until they didn't, when I got to the last year of university and discovered I'd never really learned to study because it had always come so easily to me before. When I came to concepts I didn't grasp as intuitively it started to fall apart a bit
Had a similar issue. Never worked as hard for a D as I did for Organic Chemistry. First class that I didn't just "get".
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@kazitor said in But that's cheating!:
@Dragoon said in But that's cheating!:
This thread has no remaining capacity for electrical puns.Guilty as charged.
