Hi folks,Here's an idea for a Big Thirsty:
From today's Inside Higher Ed: "A student at the University of Kentucky climbed through ceiling ducts and dropped down into a faculty member's office to steal an exam Tuesday night," Kentucky.com reported.
The rest:
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/05/04/student-drops-ceiling-steal-exam
Big Thirsty:
What is the most creative cheating method you've detected in your classes?
--Hungry Hungry Hippocampus
This scenario happened to me. It drove me to submit a story about it to some old website that you've probably never heard of. http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/2008/03/come-quickly-we-solved-case-it-guy-who_2719.html?m=1
ReplyDeleteI heard the story on NPR yesterday morning, and immediately thought of you, Ben.
DeleteThe detail I really liked: in this case, it didn't work because the professor was still in his office (your detective work was a bit more sophisticated than getting hit on the head by a descending student, but hey, whatever works).
Partially my fault, but...
ReplyDeleteThe course I teach is one night a week (because of my day job.) After giving an exam one week, I go over it the next week at the beginning of class. I had a student miss the exam, so zhe wasn't allowed in for that part and needed to do a makeup at the Testing Center the following week.
Zhe shows up and check-in folks in the Testing Center notice something a little "off" about the scantron zhe brought in, took a closer look at it, and could see very, very faint lines on some of the answers. They gave her a fresh one.
The test was different anyway, but nice try.
And my day job at the time? TESTING COORDINATOR
(I have had a variety of "Student Services" positions, hence moniker.)
I haven't really experienced any clever ones (or they were so clever I didn't detect them). Then again, I don't give many tests. As for annoying/infuriating strategies, years ago, when I was working as an adjunct, I gave a take-home exam, and had students drop off the finished results to my campus mailbox. This was, of course a mistake; put it down to me being still somewhat new at the whole teaching business at the time, coming from a grad school that takes honor codes so seriously that exams aren't proctored, and giving the exam at a church-affiliated school that also has a pretty good reputation for taking ethical issues seriously. Most of you won't be surprised to hear that I received two suspiciously similar exams. I thought it was pretty clear who had copied from whom, since there was no dispute about the order in which the papers had been handed in, but the honor council disagreed, and nobody was penalized.
ReplyDeleteI also had a student copy her roommate's paper, at another school with a supposedly strong, student-run honor code system. That one was especially infuriating, and sad, because the innocent roommate ended up spending exam period terribly worried that she was going to end up getting thrown out of school, upset by the roommate's betrayal, and generally distracted (she was young and perhaps a bit naive and generally unfamiliar with human perfidy, but that's the natural state of some college students). And the guilty roommate was transferring out, and the honor council never pursued the whole thing.
On the whole, I'd prefer students coming through the ceiling*. At least they're likely to harm only themselves, the ceiling, and/or me.
*And I have to say that I'm a bit surprised that they're still coming through the ceiling these days. Wouldn't hacking be the way to go? Or would a student good enough to hack into the professor's computer just go ahead and take and pass the exam?