I occasionally teach a college course as an adjunct (fun, and a little extra spending money). I don't know how wide spread cheating is, though if it were extremely common then students wouldn't struggle so much with some of the material. But personally, while I have an "instant F" policy if caught, I didn't really care: My philosophy and that of many other instructors is not one of indignant, "surely I'd know!" about cheating, It's that it's the student's time, their future debt. If they want to waste it, that's on them.
> It's that it's the student's time, their future debt. If they want to waste it, that's on them.
I mean, it is pretty unfair to the kids who actually do honest work. if enough people cheat and get near perfect scores, it makes it hard for the instructor to understand what a reasonable two week project is. grades are also (unfortunately) pretty important for internships.
on the other hand, sometimes people who cheat are really bad at it. in one of the courses I TA'd, there were two groups of 3-4 students who would always sit together in labs. they would always turn in nearly identical labs and homeworks, including all the same mistakes! it looked like the only differences came from transcription errors. I never bothered to report them because they failed all the assignments anyway.
I've never had a problem determining what a reasonable project length or level of difficulty should be. I don't adjust it if I have a particularly apt group of students. Students who really shine are given direction to support that ability but that is case by case, not baked into the overall difficulty of the course. These things can be rubric driven based on what material should be learned and not just improvised based on perceived class characteristics.
There's no unfairness to an honest student who gets just as much out of a course with or without cheaters. Perhaps more if I'm not trying to put together complicated "gotcha" assignments and tests to catch potential cheaters.
Besides, I didn't say I ignored cheating. My fault if I gave that impression. I put in reasonable effort to look out for it, but don't obsess over it. if it went on without me finding out then by definition it wasn't something I could act on, and neither I nor the honest students were the ones losing time and money.
> I've never had a problem determining what a reasonable project length or level of difficulty should be. I don't adjust it if I have a particularly apt group of students. Students who really shine are given direction to support that ability but that is case by case, not baked into the overall difficulty of the course. These things can be rubric driven based on what material should be learned and not just improvised based on perceived class characteristics.
first of all, I don't mean to criticize you personally.
I'm not talking about adding or removing topics/depth to or from a course semester to semester based on the group of kids. in aggregate though, I think you'll definitely notice that the topics covered in a particular class vary a lot from school to school based on the expectations they have for the students. there's a lot more depth in a data structures course at a tech school than in the same class at some liberal arts school's vestigial cs department. if, instead of having brighter students, a school actually just has a much larger proportion of effective cheaters, the professors might unknowingly assign too much work to complete honestly. you personally might not change your assignments much, but I'm not sure how you could prevent this drift from occurring across an entire department over the span of a decade.
> There's no unfairness to an honest student who gets just as much out of a course with or without cheaters.
this depends on what you think the point of college is. if it's strictly about mastery of material for its own sake, sure, cheating only hurts the cheater. unfortunately, most students don't just go to college for the pleasure of learning. they go because they believe it will help them get a job. when you apply to your first internship, your GPA likely one of most important things on your resume. it is very much unfair to be competing against people who didn't earn theirs honestly. if a cheater takes your spot in the recruiting pipeline, you're out for this round. the company isn't going to call you up out of the blue because they realized the other person is an incompetent clown halfway through the summer.
