I gave my students a take home exam over spring break. (This is normal where I teach) One of the questions was particulary difficult. It came down to a factor of three in the solution. That factor inexplicably appeared with no justification on many of their exams. I intend to have the students I suspect of cheating come to my office to solve the problem on the board. What would you do?
Edit: I gave them the Tuesday before spring break until the Thursday after. I didn’t want it to be right before or right after.
When I say normal I mean giving take home exams.
If you don’t want students to work together and learn from each other don’t give home assignments. It’s not like they won’t be able to work together irl
Hold an in class quiz with essentially the same problem but with different values. The students that actually worked through the problem should be able to do it again with the changes. Those who didn’t understand and just put down what their peers got will struggle with a quiz. Bonus points if you can restructure the problem in a way to elucidate which specific aspects you think the students were skipping over with help from their peers. Feel free to have specific requirements assigned point values in the problem statement.
Don’t call them into your office and put them on the spot. That will make this adversarial. Your job is to teach them how to solve problems and communicate their methods in a clear fashion. You should reevaluate your problem writing and grading policies if just looking up answers can earn a passing grade. If you give a quiz, be up front with them that you have concerns about some students skipping the work and copying answers. Reiterate that the point of the exam was to make sure they can solve problems, the correct answer is merely a byproduct.
I will add speculation that there is a difference between what your students think you expect from an answer and what your expectations actually are. Mismatches in expectations are immensely frustrating for both parties. So don’t leave your students guessing. Give them specific examples of work of different quality and what aspects earn full points and what things might lead to point deductions. Some of the best professors I had would publish all the prior year exams with their solutions. That gave everyone the opportunity to mimic the workflow and match the level of detail expected. That also elliminates the concern of students finding the answers online or from prior year students for exams as the teacher will have had to avoid reused questions entirely.
This is pretty much what I’ve done previously. I’d say the best way to go about it. Bonus points if it’s on a final haha.
Wait. How do you think they got this “factor of three” and what rule did they break in doing so?
A take-home exam implies open book, open internet, open ask-another-student, etc. It’s not really for gauging how well the students have the concepts down. It’s for giving the students incentive to go review the material again to hopefully make it stick better. Wherever they got the answers is fair game for a take-home exam.
If they didn’t show their work and you’ve made expectations for showing their work clear, then mark off points for not showing their work. But this isn’t a “cheating” thing.
If you sent this test home with them with the instructions that it’s not open book and you think they used the book or internet or whatever, then… well, that was kinda… a bad idea. Don’t do that again. And if you really think it’s necessary (but only if you really think it’s necessary), you could create a new test and give it in person in place of the take-home exam or just remove that test from consideration of the grade for the whole class. It might make you unpopular to pull a stunt like that (and, honestly, if it all went down the way it sounds like… you kinda deserve it if you punish them for your misstep) but definitely don’t punish the class for your mistake any more than that.
This is the big question: was it made clear what resources were allowed
I mean, even if the teacher specifically said “this isn’t an open book test and only use the knowledge in your head” when handing it out, this teacher is still entirely out of touch with reality and needs to a) never do that again and b) not punish the students. If it’s in person and the teacher says it’s not open book (or even if the teacher doesn’t say it’s open book) and someone is getting answers from the internet on their smartphone or from the book or their notes or whatever, that is 100% a cheating situation and should be handled as such. But honestly I’m not sure how someone can hold “take home test” and “the students cheated” in the same brain at the same time.
First thing I would do is not give students graded homework/exams over spring break. What the hell did you expect OP? You dont respect them enough to let them have one week off unmolested.
What were the rules for the exam? Were you clear what resources were acceptable and which weren’t?
Especially for a take home exam, establish a rule where you give points for showing work as well as for correct answers. It’s almost impossible to enforce a perfect honor policy for a take home exam, so you should have structured your grading to account for that.
I wouldn’t do anything. Your job is to teach, not to discipline. Your students can choose to do or not do whatever work you set them; it’s their education and their choice. Ultimately cheating only affects them and their learning.
Also, seconding the fact that if you give people a graded take home exam that implies open book (including the internet and each other)
By giving your students work to do off-time, you are reinforcing the capitalist notion that people should be expected to work off the clock. You can give them supplementary material as an purely optional if they don’t have anything else better to do, but by making it mandatory you are robbing them of precious time they have to grow into healthy adults and making them resentful of education as a whole.
Same is true of home work. You’re already robbing them of a good majority of their “be a kid” time, don’t rob them even more of it.
I hated homework as a student, but many people (myself included) will argue for math homework to the bitter end because that material MUST be thoroughly practiced, and worked through for the student to have an effective understanding. Nobody is going to learn math just in the short time teachers get to present it each day. -That said, exams shouldn’t be “take-home” if a teacher wants to avoid cheating.
If you can’t get your point across during the 4+ hours you have in class you are failing as a teacher. If you have to repeat a process 300+ times to get it you are not teaching, you are making people memorize shit in the short term and that will kick them in the nuts in the long term.
The stuff I was expected to do the most I retained the least, because instead of learning the general use and application of each function I instead put all my energy on just getting the grunt work over with so I could move on to the stuff that was actually fun. Excessive testing can also completely fuck over student’s test scores if they have even one minor weakness. My physics (favorite subject) teacher failed to properly teach Significant Figures, as a result I ended up losing half a point on every question for that reason alone. They just expected me to ‘get it’ through repetition (spoiler: I didn’t) and ended up with a nearly failing grade, even though it was my best subject.
Ultimately I ended up specializing in game design (big mistake, have you SEEN the game’s industry? It’s basically a fraternity!) because it was the only course that didn’t have any busywork. You learned the concept, applied the concept, and then proved you understood the concept, then you moved on to the next concept. At the end you prove that you are able to work everything together and then the course is over and you have everything you need to make a game. It was a really hard course and I almost felt like quitting at times but I don’t think I’ve forgotten even a single it taught me, a point that was proven even further when I took a different game design course and aced it with zero effort.
Couldn’t tell you how to do matrix math though. I just remember it being really really useful if only I remembered the rules all those years later.
It’s funny you mention game development classes because the one game development class I took used a tutorial utilizing Unity and it was fraught with errors that our instructor was often unaware of. In-fact that’s the last class I took before deciding to leave college and my formal training in software development as a whole.
I think I get what you’re saying. There is no excuse for bad instruction. It sounds like your learning style put’s you in the minority. I found repetition helped me understand procedure as applied in math that would otherwise lead to miscounting if I were just winging it. I think the same principle applies to the majority of math students.
The way I see it either you get something or you don’t. If you’re making mistakes it’s because some fundamental skill isn’t there and all repetition is going to do is entrench you further in whatever bad model you already have. Yes it gets you marks in class but that won’t transfer to the real world. For a personal example, the way I count in base 10 goes from 1-3, 5, and then 10. I don’t actually have a mental model to count 4s, 6s, 7s, 8s, or 9s and because I spent a good amount of my formative years getting by without it, that bad model is now entrenched in my mind and I have a really hard time counting a lot of numbers even though better models exist. Got me great grades, though.
EDIT: For ones I go Inc. Twos is IncInc, Threes are a somewhat awkward IncIncInc, I can’t string four Incs so 4 is impossible. Fives is just a Even/Odd modulo followed by 10 which is just an Inc in the next place. I created a model that works off of an even-odd tree with multiplication. I wasn’t able to parse it mentally but I did program it into a machine once and it was insanely efficient. It’s very easy to find out if a value is going to be even or odd based on its inputs being even or odd, and once you figure that out you’ve halved the possible values. Turns out that’s actually what modern-day ALUs do (with carry bits) in order to maximize processing speed.
I appreciate the feedback. Even the negative feedback. You guys really think I’m some kind of asshole 🤣. I typed this from my phone in bed, so now that I’m at a keyboard, let me explain fully.
When I said I gave the exam over spring break, I didn’t mean it began at the beginning of spring break and ended at the end of it. That time was available for them to work on it. When I give exams, I give them a little over a week. From Tuesday to Thursday the following week. In this case, it began the Tuesday before spring break and ended the Thursday after. The reason I did this is because, like many of you, I remember papers being due immediately before or right at the end of breaks. By saying I gave it over spring break, I meant I gave them plenty of time.
I am very clear what is and is not permitted for an exam in my syllabus. They get an equation sheet, the allotted time, and they can work with a partner. Nothing else. Except for AI in which case they must screenshot everything. This is mostly for my curiosity. It still doesn’t work for physics.
When I say normal at my institution, I mean to give a take home exam. I wasn’t deviating from the norm by doing this, and it is the way I typically do it. As we have all experienced, you may have a day when you have 3 exams. Maybe that happens to only a few students. It disproportionately effects them. Giving this time, they can work it into their schedules.
So what did I see that constitutes cheating? It’s very clear to me that the students used solutions from Chegg and/or other sites. If you’ve done this sort of thing with code, you know that folks will change the names of the variables, but not the structure or logic. It reads exactly the same. That was the case here. A few students were so (hilariously) guilty of cheating, they actually rewrote the solution to a similar, but different problem. Those problems had a different number of parts!
This is not my first time doing this. I’ve done this at several other universities. In those cases, I didn’t have the issue of cheating, so I don’t have a very explicit cheating policy in my syllabus. I’m taking the advice that some have given and giving them credit for what they’ve done. I will however be telling them on Tuesday (a conversation I am NOT looking forward to having) that I know many of them cheated, that I have evidence of it, and that I will refer them to the honor council should it happen again.
The part that sucks the most is I trust students. Having done this before, I’ve found that if you trust students, respect them, they in turn respect your expectations. Given how blatant this cheating is, it feels like a betrayal. Thanks again to everyone who replied, it has given me plenty to think on.
Unless you explicitly stated in the exam that they had to show their work with their answer or fail, even if the answer was correct, then I say pass them. It’s on you to be specific as to what you want to see on the exam. Maybe they worked it out on scratch paper and didn’t turn that part in with the exam?
I would parade the cheaters through town naked while ringing a bell and saying “shame” over and over again.
Or just give them a 0 for the assignment if I had evidence of cheating.
Not being able to solve a problem in class that they could solve at home is not evidence of cheating. Neither is not showing your work on hard problems, especially in the take home format where students could not only use other resources, but other sheets of paper, if they wanted.
If showing all your work is required for answers, then I would have clearly stated that prior to giving the students any work and remind them before all tests to do so.
If you are sending take home tests over a vacation, you also need to, as a teacher, clearly define what is and isn’t cheating if it’s not defined in your syllabus.
As the teacher it’s your job to set the requirements and boundaries clearly, and not be reactionary when you’ve failed to do so.
It’s unclear from your description if you gave proper guidelines on all of this, but it does seem like you didn’t set up the requirement of “show your work, or I will accuse you of cheating without any evidence,” so I would prepare to get much deserved backlash from this.
Getting the problem wrong on the board isn’t evidence of cheating, but it might be evidence that you need to cover that subject in more depth for the students. Learning is the point after all, not test scores and your pride.
If they cheat and find an answer online, they’ve proved they can use resources available to them to find the answer and recreate it. Honestly I don’t see a practical difference between that and knowing the answer in a closed book setting.
Not the same thing, but when I was proctoring an exam I saw someone very un-sneakily using their phone, so I quietly sat down next to them for the rest of the exam as a quiet threat (then of course let the prof know when they turned in their exam too).
Probably treating as “forgetting to write down their steps” before jumping to cheating; presumably you’ve been teaching them to show their work and they forgot to do that here.
Give them the chance to show you how they solved it on the board, if they can then great! Give ‘em the points and send em on their way. If not, then give them a zero for that part of the test and move on.
I’ve seen various ways to handle it. My favorite is to grade the rest of the exam extremely harshly, where even a minor mistake could get full points taken off. Unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to prove cheating. I’ve had students copy word-for-word from Google and that still wasn’t enough evidence. I don’t think even having the students solve it in the board could convince the higher ups to do anything
For the students that can’t solve it in person, explain why cheating is bad and that they’re only hurting themselves, and give them a 0 on the exam. That’s probably enough for them to get the picture.
Also maybe focus on them a bit more, since they’re struggling. If someone cheated because they can’t do the assignment, then they’re struggling. So maybe offer them extra credit to make up for the exam if they come in after school to study with you where you can answer their questions.
