Chemical Forums
General Forums => Generic Discussion => Topic started by: Arkcon on March 07, 2008, 01:06:51 PM
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... make sure you won't end up like this poor guy:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/07/0355244
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More details:
http://www.theeyeopener.com/article/3816
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The college is closeminded and behind the times. They should have assigned a faculty moderator instead.
I would encourage my students to work together and use the technology to learn from each other. Anyone who is truly cheating and just copying answers will show their ignorance on tests.
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I would encourage my students to work together and use the technology to learn from each other. Anyone who is truly cheating and just copying answers will show their ignorance on tests.
Truly, they are behind the times. However, the folks at /. have figured out (one of) the problems. A study group can share some ideas, but a forum, like this one, can store every question asked, for years. Over time, every old exam question, trial exam question, and possible homework problem may end up stored on here. In a keyword searchable format.
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This is now and the future and students who take time to search and actually read the chemistry problems are better than ones who ask their friend for their answers and copy without even reading what the question was.
Professors must at least be challenged to keep current in both material and technology. It is not that hard to change numbers or elements in a chemistry problem.
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It is not that hard to change numbers or elements in a chemistry problem.
Using EBAS in stoichiometry problems - for example ;)
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... make sure you won't end up like this poor guy:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/07/0355244
I dont want to speak bad about the USA, but for some reason I only hear things like that in usa news.
PS. Arkcon : you are right when you state that they might store all the questions on a website and thus know every examquestion, but even then, whats the problem?
I would easly spot the diffrence between a student that understands the questions and a student that simply learn it by heart and doenst know what he or she is stating.
(for written examens, its another case, but who carse they get good grades the first year when they have written examens? In the end I think all important examens are oral ? or isnt this true for the us?)
A true teacher should know the diffrence between those that study and understand and those that simply study and copy paste...
(however I agree on the next thing: lots of teachers dont or they dont seem to care and only want you to reproduce what they said... and to be honest: if I have such a teacher then why not simply copy and paste! He doenst care, its the teacher fault then, not mine!)
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Professors must at least be challenged to keep current in both material and technology. It is not that hard to change numbers or elements in a chemistry problem.
I'd agree with you, but I think it's not too rare to see instructors disinterested in doing that. I remember my final year in college, my Classics professor was using mimeographed sheets, that she'd clearly been using for years, if not decades, with typos, cross outs, and, when the margins ran out on her, handwritten up the side. Presumably, mimograph media was expensive in it's day, but that sort of behavior was a lack of professionalism that the nuns beat out of me in grammar school.
Meantime, in Developmental Biology, I was loosing points on labs, because I was doing (admittedly somewhat crude) hand drawn diagrams of developmental stages, and the other students were smoking past me with Macintosh draw programs.
So I'm not at all shocked to hear that a college encouraged students to work together, and penalize them when they did. Nor, when they demand that students have the resources and ability to take advantage of technology, and instructors react against it later. I don't think there is enough metaphorical sunshine we can shine on this dichotomy to make the college admit there is a problem, we'll just get mock trials to preserve the status quo in closed-door fashion.
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Professors must at least be challenged to keep current in both material and technology. It is not that hard to change numbers or elements in a chemistry problem.
I'd agree with you, but I think it's not too rare to see instructors disinterested in doing that. I remember my final year in college, my Classics professor was using mimeographed sheets, that she'd clearly been using for years, if not decades, with typos, cross outs, and, when the margins ran out on her, handwritten up the side. Presumably, mimograph media was expensive in it's day, but that sort of behavior was a lack of professionalism that the nuns beat out of me in grammar school.
Meantime, in Developmental Biology, I was loosing points on labs, because I was doing (admittedly somewhat crude) hand drawn diagrams of developmental stages, and the other students were smoking past me with Macintosh draw programs.
So I'm not at all shocked to hear that a college encouraged students to work together, and penalize them when they did. Nor, when they demand that students have the resources and ability to take advantage of technology, and instructors react against it later. I don't think there is enough metaphorical sunshine we can shine on this dichotomy to make the college admit there is a problem, we'll just get mock trials to preserve the status quo in closed-door fashion.
I can give another example about how stupid some professors really are.
I once had biology and we needed to draw what we saw , so when we worked on a flatworm and we needed to discect it and then draw what we saw.
Because I am horrible at drawing I always ended up getting 10/20 or even lower grades, simply because I suck at drawing!
Other students that could make nice drawings got 16/20 or even more and for what reason, because they could draw nicer then me ???
that pissed me off big time.
I was under the impression it was about what you noticed and what you could name etc... not about : how good can you draw an organ or whatever.
I do know that things like this are simple things and you normally only gain points because there is nothing hard about cutting something open and then draw it... but for me its was really sh*tty to know I lost points because I couldnt draw.
(especially when you know that classes like this were also classes to check your ability to work and your character (taking attention, not playing around..)
People that played all day but draw nice picture got good grades while I and others that did pay attention and didnt play but couldnt draw nicely got bad points...
If you study arts and want to become a painter I understand this, but for a biology class???
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Ugh, this stuff is getting ugly ... http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/04/04/2248251.shtml
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Ugh, this stuff is getting ugly ... http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/04/04/2248251.shtml
haha
only in the usa
lol
if this is no april fool joke, then they are really getting crazy
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This is the first time I've heard about class notes being copyright violations. But I had heard about a professor not wanting to be recorded, or not allowing laptop notetaking, because it was too good a copy of their speech. And once on these boards, someone did ask for a website of links to recordings or videos for their class, as if it were even possible for us to have it.
Obviously, this question is a gray area, notes are of course allowed, as fair use, but a company paying people to stenograph the teacher's words, for resale, while the teacher attempts to market their own lectures, sold by a company outside the university while meantime, presumably, under a paying contract with the university for lesson production, muddles the question to the point where the whole argument dissolves into polarized opinions.
But the whole concept does hinge back on the sometimes "gimmie gimmie" attitude people can have when it comes to knowledge.
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Bad things like this happens in Canada too. At my university, they said that we weren't allowed to discuss questions from the assignment nor "give formulae to solve the problems". A lot of us totally disagreed with the profs and the way they treated the new on-line system ideas. So, about 60 of us (the chemistry students) made our own private forum to discuss the insanely hard questions ourselves. We never copied each other's questions because virtually every question was somehow unique but we talked about it, a lot. After a year, omg, we got shut down and the person who started this, got into real big time trouble. The engineer students did something similar but they got penalized a lot harder (they got an F while we only lose points for the assignments).
I'm telling you, it's getting crazy and a lot uglier.
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It'll get better in time.
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Wow, I had no idea that discussing work was frowned upon anywhere. I was actively encouraged by my tutors to discuss assignments with my peers. We had a small study group for the whole of the first year!
I suppose the problem may lie in the way you are assessed in these places. From what I gather, your assignments are graded and those grades count towards your final grade, correct? If every assignment "counts" I suppose I can understand the attitude that discussing it is "cheating", although I don't agree it is. The assignments for my degree were marked, but only with ticks, crosses and comments. Never any grades for assignments. The exams at the end of each year were what counted towards your degree class, and there's no way to discuss them before they happen. I think that's a better system.
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Likewise, I liked to discuss things afterwards - It engrains what you've learnt into your memory and everyone can iron out anything they misunderstood - It is what learning is about :( I found one of the BEST ways to cement info in my head after learning, was to explain it to someone else.
Also - people learn better in different ways, some prefer discussion to notes, others reading, others something practical. (just like in the "Find out hoe you learn thread" http://www.chemicalforums.com/index.php?topic=4578.0)
EDIT: To add further - when I was at school, our physics teacher came down heavily on me and a friend because we had made the same mistake in the homework. He accused us of copying. We explained that we HAD discussed that particular question because neither of us understood it properly and that was the answer we came up with. We told him that we regularly discuss the work as it was a good way of checking that we understood it. He calmed down after that and agreed that it was actually a good way to work.
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Personally, I think the university were correct to reprimand the student in the Ryerson case. As it was reported the students were specifically warned not to discusss the assignment on Facebook. In this instance, the student ignored the instruction, and left himself open to the repercussions.
I'm amazed at how many threads get locked by the moderators because some student somewhere thinks we'll do his assignment for him.
As one of the many dinosaurs who did their degrees and masters before the wonders of the internet arrived, this kind of laziness appalls me and , to an extent, reinforces the opion that academic standards in early education are falling and leaving students ill equipped to progress through the higher stages of education.
I work as a manager of an analytical group and as part of the interview process used to set a small quiz (10 minutes max), basic high school chemistry, nothing complicated. In seven years of asking candidates to complete this only 10% ever got full marks,this really demoralized me as the candidates I was interviewing were graduates and post-graduates.