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.
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.
That’s a terrible thing to be considered normal. Those students were on break, on vacation. I didn’t do work for my job when I was on vacation! I hate cheating, but I hate that you made them take an exam on break even more.
Edit: “Class, I see some of you did not understand the way I require work to be shown. For this reason, I will reteach my requirements. Those of you who did not understand will be given an opportunity to retake the exam.”
A bigger picture may be; why is sending kids home for break with homework. It is my opinion, that people learn better when they actually have a break during their break. in my opinion, this is a tactic to prepare kids to think its normal to work all the time. That breaks are never actually breaks.
See edit please
What are take-home exams even for? I’ve been a flight instructor since 2010 and I’ve never once given one. I can’t see any possible value in them.
Students’ unsupervised time is for discovery and practice. “Here are some questions. The answers are in FAR Part 91. Read the Part, answer the questions, we’ll discuss them next class.” Or, “That concludes computing wind correction angles. Here are some practice problems just like ones we’ve done in class today, take them home, work them yourselves, get comfortable with this process. Questions?”
Exams are for determining the students’ current knowledge and abilities. What ability does a take-home exam test for beyond “Can you cram for a test given a copy of the test?” Is that what you’re testing for?
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.
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.
I’d praise them for answering the difficult question correctly and then ask if they’d mind giving a short presentation to the class on how they reached to solution… for tomorrow’s class.
You’re highlighting the issue. Allowing them to save face. And now they’re forced to really understand it well enough to give a lesson on it to their classmates.
I gave my students a take home exam over spring break. (This is normal where I teach)
If this is normal, that just means a lot teachers have no respect for personal time.
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.
So? Are you saying a lot of them cooperated on it? Did they copy work from a separate source? Where is the problem?
You assigned graded work during a vacation, which I would assume means you can use any material you have access too, including teamwork and the entire internet. Does it not?
I intend to have the students I suspect of cheating come to my office to solve the problem on the board.
And if they fail, what does this prove? That they can’t reproduce an answer constructed over (potentially) many days of work with references on hand, in a few minutes of high-stress with their teacher breathing down their neck?
What would you do?
Not send graded work home with students if you don’t expect them to cooperate. Procter an exam if you want them to use only their brains.
In fact, you should procter an exam during your vacation, because they didn’t get one either.
I would stop giving work over vacation.
Edit: meant this to be a direct reply to op, but this works too.
Most take-home exams specifically state whether you’re allowed to use other sources or cooperate. If not, many course syllabi or even campus codes of conduct have onerous defaults.
Instead of ragging on op for adhering to practices they may have had no hand in mandating, we should try to help them.
Having been on both sides of such academic misconduct, if your hands are tied in terms of the assignment parameters, I think reissuing solo retests is fine. This is likely a chronic issue though, and I’d be curious to know if you have any options in next steps should anyone fail.
Instead of ragging on op for adhering to practices they may have had no hand in mandating, we should try to help them.
I am. I’m telling them this is a stupid way to test students and not to do it. I doubt their institute mandates take home exams, so never doing them again is a great solution to prevent this from ever happening again.
I also think solo retests are fine, hence the suggestion of proctoring an exam. Because that’s what they should do in the first place, if they want to test the students knowledge.
And if the students fail the exam, they fail the exam.
I’ll go one further and ask what the advantages of a take-home even are? What’s the use case for them that isn’t “less work for the teacher at the cost of quality”?
See edit please
The edit really makes it seem like you’re entirely missing the point everyone is making.
Just don’t be accusing anyone of cheating. It really seems like everything you did would have made it seem to any reasonable person like copying answers from any source was allowed.
You will probably get better answers if you ask this in a community dedicated to teaching/professors. Posting on general asklemmy seems like you’re going to get flamed a bit.
I gave my students a take home exam over spring break. (This is normal where I teach)
That is rough. Nothing you can do about it this time, but, in the future, I wouldn’t recommend giving work over break even if others are doing so. Breaks are there for a reason.
It came down to a factor of three in the solution. That factor inexplicably appeared with no justification on many of their exams.
It’s hard to say without seeing exactly what you mean, but this sounds a little flimsy. You want to be pretty sure before you accuse someone of cheating. You can always just mark the answer as wrong if they didn’t prove to you that they understand it.
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?
If I strongly suspected cheating, I would probably do something like that. Just be aware that the environment is different from a paper exam, so you need to be lenient. They are not used to standing in front of a board and working while someone watches. Also, a problem on a take-home exam could be worked on for hours, whereas you presumably expect them to do it quickly. You may need to give them the solution they wrote and see whether they can explain it to you. Or, give them most of the solution, but have them fill in some missing details that they should know if they actually did the problem.
Also, as others have said, there was no cheating unless you were very clear on what resources were allowed and not allowed on the exam.
FWIW, I do strongly disagree with the folks who are saying that any take-home exam should be open-everything. The argument that you will be able to do it in your career doesn’t hold water. School isn’t the workplace. Students are working on simple problems to build up skills that they can use to solve more complicated problems later on. If people want workplace rules about collaboration in the classroom, then the problems need to be scaled up accordingly. In many schools, that does happen later in the curriculum with things like senior projects or some project-based upper-level courses. But, teaching that way from the start wouldn’t give students the time and support they need to gradually improve, so allowed resources need to be scaled back accordingly to account for the deliberate oversimplification of the problems.
On a more personal note, sorry that you have to deal with this. Everyone can appreciate that the situation is tough for the students, but a lot of people don’t realize that dealing with cheating is also very stressful and disheartening for teachers.
I think this is a really good, well-measured answer. The only thing keeping it from being perfect is your bit defending the idea that a take-home exam is not open-book. I think the reply from @livus@kbin.social is excellent here. Any assessment needs to be tailored to the goals of the assessment. A take-home exam is one where the teacher has no ability to restrict a student’s access to their books or the Internet. So they shouldn’t even try. The questions should be tailored to test their understanding of the underlying principles, or even better, should encourage their ability to do research.
Sure, just posting the entire question on Stack Exchange and blindly repeating the answer you get there is cheating. But you need to actually think about the format of the assessment and play to its strengths, not try to ignore them. If you want a closed book exam, have a traditional exam with an invigilator.
Thanks for the reply! I figured that bit would be the sticky point. I tend to give long answers, so let me start by saying that I really struggle with that bit and, although I don’t fully agree, I see your point and acknowledge that I may be wrong here. I don’t want to argue, but I do want to clarify my thoughts and maybe have a dialogue if you’re interested.
First, I want to clarify between two reasons I see when people are posting about this that are distinct but can sometimes get muddied: (1) “real life” is open note, so schoolwork should be too; (2) it is impractical to stop students from using their notes (or whatever) at home, so even if it would be helpful in theory, it just disadvantages honest students in practice.
I strongly disagree with (1) for the reasons in my original post. That’s the main thing that had me somewhat annoyed and led me to post that probably unnecessary section of my previous post. You don’t seem to be arguing for (1), so I’ll just leave that be, but I wanted to clarify for the benefit of anyone else reading. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but (2) seems closer to what you are saying, so I’ll talk about that for now.
As far as (2), I agree, but accepting that wholly runs teachers into another practical issue: in-person time constraints. If I want to test a student’s ability to, say, complete a complicated proof, then putting the time constraint and pressure of a 1 or 1.5 hour exam may be unfair and arbitrary. So, if I need my exams to be in-class and proctored, then I might not be able to test the skills that I am actually teaching, and students tend to dislike that as well. It feels like we’re forced into a choice of either giving a fair exam at home and trusting students or giving a time-pressured or trivialized exam in class. Neither option feels great, but, to me, this makes the take-home exam and trust at least seem like a reasonable option.
The questions should be tailored to test their understanding of the underlying principles, or even better, should encourage their ability to do research.
This is a really good idea. However, without assuming at least some honesty from the students, I don’t think there is really any defending against the methods of just asking the other students or posting the paraphrased question somewhere the teacher won’t see, so it feels like it brings us back to take-home work being impossible, which is a bummer of an endpoint.
Some of it may also come down to “has no ability to restrict…” (emphasis mine). When I used to teach, I taught programming. Although I could not restrict their access to resources outside class, I could detect cheating better than they would expect, and I warned them about this beforehand. I think that if students believe being caught is a credible threat, then it can alleviate that feeling of “if I don’t cheat, I’m just letting everyone else look better than me,” and it makes following the rules a reasonable option. Despite all my rambling above, I probably would not give a take-home exam if I didn’t believe I could detect cheating with at least moderate probability. So, in OP’s case of (presumably) physics, I probably wouldn’t do it. In the end, maybe we don’t even disagree at all in this case. (Edit: I meant to add this link: What it looks like when students copy code . Just a funny take on what I used to see sometimes.)
Tough questions like this are one of the (many) reasons I no longer teach, so bear in mind that this is all just the view of a washed-up former professor :)
(Also, I learned the word “invigilator” today, so thanks for that)
Yeah so I definitely don’t believe in (1). (1) would imply that closed-book exams should never be applied, ever, which I think is silly.
(2) is a pretty good summary of my position here.
If I want to test a student’s ability to, say, complete a complicated proof
So, I think this comes down to the question of what are exams good at, and what are assignments good at. If it takes longer than about 2 hours, it’s probably just not a good topic for exam-like assessment. Exams, whether completely closed-book, completely open-book, or somewhere in between (“one page of notes” seems fairly common), specifically test someone’s ability to work under time constraints, which in turn necessarily means it’s also testing their ability to focus in addition to testing their actual understanding of the subject. Up to about 2 hours, that seems reasonable, but when you get too long, it starts getting unfair because the “focus” aspect starts outweighing the “understanding of the subject”.
And if time isn’t a constraint, and you allow them to work on it at their own pace over a week or more, well…that’s just the definition of an assignment. In the modern world, I’ll concede that assignments are very tricky. When I was in uni I regularly used Stack Overflow for some of my programming assignments, finding pre-existing answers to specific aspects of problems I had, in precisely the same way that today as a professional software engineer I often end up on SO. A couple of times in uni, I even asked questions on SO. Though these were not just asking the whole assignment on SO, but instead a narrow, focused problem I was facing. In my opinion, this should be considered acceptable.
What should not be acceptable is if someone puts the entire assignment up on SO and asks someone to solve it for them. I actually saw that once, when it came up as I was searching for help myself. They didn’t get useful answers, thankfully.
And then there’s a fuzzy line as to exactly how much help it should be acceptable to get, and I don’t know how to draw that line.
Closed-book exams are useful because they test a student’s ability to work under pressure and they test how well the student understands the information. Assignments are good because they test a student’s ability to apply their understanding at a much deeper level when working on a larger problem.
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.? I just don’t understand what the point of that is. So even taking the practicalities of enforcing it out of the equation, I just don’t think it’s a worthwhile thing to do for a problem of such a scale. But when you do add in the practicalities, it becomes far clearer: much better to just let them use what resources are available and make it an assignment rather than an exam.
What it looks like when students copy code
For what it’s worth, I’ve seen first hand that code copy-detection tools are honestly not actually all that great. Yeah, if they’re stupid enough to just rename some variables and move some lines around, they’ll get caught. But if you do even a moderate amount of refactoring—breaking some pieces into different functions, un-breaking-out some other material from methods into one big method, finding a set of variables that previously got used together and turning them into a class—even if the actual underlying steps the code is taking end up identical, the tools get fooled and the plagiarism is not detected. It’s a classic case of how criminals (in this case, plagiarists—obviously not technically criminal) tend to be really stupid and that’s the only reason they get caught.
Also, I learned the word “invigilator” today, so thanks for that
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? Proctor being American-English while invigilator is British- and Australian-English.
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!
I assumed I would get a notification when you replied, but apparently not
Yeah, that happens sometimes to me, too. It’s incredibly frustrating.
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 does cheating mean in this context? What did they have access to that you wish they hadn’t? And if that’s the case, then why did you make this a take home exam?
This. It’s a case of poor assessment design on the part of @wuphysics87.
In creating assessment you need to know what you are asking them to do, how you want them to do it, what you are measuring and how. The format you choose needs to accurately reflect those things.
First of all, school or uni?
As many others have said, don’t give a take home exam during a break, however ‘normal’ it is considered in your community.
Second, have clear guidelines on what is allowed and what is cheating. We never had take-home exams in school, and in uni every take-home exam was open book, open internet and open discussion. In the absence of any statement to the contrary, your students would also be justified in assuming so.
Asking someone to repeat the answer is fine, but it doesn’t really prove anything - they might have simply forgotten all the formulae over their break.
The best option at this point would be to cancel that question and conduct future tests during class hours, under your supervision.
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?
If the curriculum format teaches students to be test takers, I’d give them extra points for working smarter.
If my job gave me work while on my vacation, I’d be talking to the labor board if they didn’t pay me at my consultation rates.
See edit please
Your edit isn’t winning anybody over.
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.
