Reply to TJ - which middle schools had students accepted in 2017

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[quote=Anonymous]While penalties on cheating students may be instituted, it should not be the primary focus of this discussion. I am more concerned about teachers, who don't care to level the field for their students or actually learn about their students' progress and grade accordingly. If test questions are recycled by the teacher, he/she gets no feedback on whether his students learnt anything at all or simply copied someone's solution from the previous year. If test questions change, but only a portion of the class has access to old exams, that portion of the class has an advantage on the actual test, rendering any grading in that course as well as recommendation letters devoid of reality. But grades and recommendation letters ultimately do matter for the kids' future, who are we kidding? If you are a teacher, don't recycle old test questions in your new tests but do make the old questions available to every student in the class! Why are we trying to hold the kids to a higher standard than adults? It's the teacher's job to evaluate his/her students in a manner that reflects their real knowledge and skills, not their level of honesty or ability to get their hands on the old tests. If this is happening, it's because the teacher is not doing his job!

I had this happen in a grad class (there were ten Ph.D. students in it), that I took years ago. Three students (German, Italian and (white) American) got access to an old exam from a more senior student, while a professor in that course decided to use the exact same exam questions again. The three got A's, the rest landed on a curve. There is simply no way to outperform a student, who comes with readily available answers, on an exam with real time pressure, no matter how smart you are. That's because, even if you are the smartest person in the room, you still need time to think (provided the test questions are not completely trivial).

An excellent Chinese student in that class got an F (since his score was way below the cheaters' score, and the curve adjusts for the mean score), was put on probation, had to repeat the course. He ultimately graduated, but don't tell me that experience was somehow useful for him. He wasted two-three years of his graduate life on that nonsense. Of the three cheaters, two are now professors, navigating their careers quite successfully, I might add: kissing editors' ass...s, stroking egos of important people in the field... you know, "networking." The chinese guy is also a professor (at a slightly less prestigeous school). Honesty is an individual characteristic, not racial. But my point is that grading should not be about honesty or following rules, it should be about finding a way to correctly evaluate students, and it's a direct responsibility of teachers to do that. And, if you think that you will not cheat when stakes are high and everyone around you is cheating, look at the Wells Fargo scandal, which did not involve kids but adults. (I am not Asian, in case you are wondering.)[/quote]

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