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.

  • bayaz@kbin.social
    0·
    9 months ago

    Whoa – I assumed I would get a notification when you replied, but apparently not. Glad I checked the thread again!

    But what’s the value in a take-home exam, if we assume that the intent is to be closed-book but with effectively unlimited time? Presumably that means it’s a problem roughly on the scale of an assignment, but they’re not meant to be able to look up their notes, review the lecture material, etc.?

    Interesting point! I definitely see where you’re coming from here… If I gave a take-home exam, I would want students to use their notes, some online resources, etc. I just wouldn’t want them to copy an exact answer from online or other students. That may just be impractical today.

    For what it’s worth, I’ve seen first hand that code copy-detection tools are honestly not actually all that great.

    100% agree. I had small enough classes that I could check for plagiarism more directly. And, what you said later is spot on – I think most students who cheated were not subtle enough to make hard-to-detect changes. Though, if they were, I wouldn’t know they cheated, so… hard to say.

    I’m actually not 100% sure on what “proctor” means, but based on how I’ve seen it used in this thread, I gather the two are the same?

    Yep! Based on an online dictionary that said “proctor” was the US version of invigilator :)

    Anyway, you make some great points, so thanks for the discussion!