Back in Calc 1, during the final, all of a sudden my teacher said “You two, get up, come with me.”
I looked up to see two students sitting next to each other with a “OH *#$#” look on their face, total deer in the headlights.
My teacher took their tests, stapled them together, and ushered them out of the classroom. They were cheating apparently, and the scene scarred me until this day.
After pushing your way through all of the troubles a class like Calc 1 has to offer, why would you do something like cheat on the final and get yourself caught? The whole semester, down the drain.
Cheating on a math, physics, or chemistry test is pretty damn hard, given that they are timed and free response. At least in my classes.
It’s ironic that the people who cheat on tests are the ones who are too lazy to put in the time and hard work to study, but they usually go to more strenuous lengths to cheat and get by.
Cheating on a test, stupid.
Cheating on insanely difficult homework/take home quizzes, now that I am all for. My classical mechanics teacher gives these INSANE take home quizzes, like one question will take you days to correctly answer. When i cheat, i usually get low scores, but when i take time to study and go to his office hours, i get A’s. shrug
Are you talking about the movie about the Chicago Inner City School Academic Decathlon team that beat Whitney Young? And found out they cheated for everything? I don’t remember the name of the movie but it is damn good.
Guilty as charged…however I am not alone in my classes… my tests are all just trick questions…even if I studied the material for the test some of the questions are not even related to what was in the book and this has been going on in some of my classes…people copy word from word from books and from other people as well…and then like the one test I had in history there where 10 questions and each one counted for 10 points…seven of those questions the answer was D…“all of the above” or “none of the above”
this is because the edition of the book is 2010 and the the test questions are 2008…new material apparently
I’d say in the strict definition of “cheating = trying to get the good grade without studying,” yeah, they are attempting to cheat by preying on your possible desires. But since you would have a hard time proving their intentions or what constitutes (subtle) flirting, I’d ignore it if I were you. I mean, I’m assuming they’re not being blatant about it, and just hoping to land a date that leads to sex in hopes of black mailing sexual harassment for a grade.
And I’m surprised you thought it was an urban legend. A friend who is a grad student told me his professor gets propositioned and warns him that temptation is the hardest part of the job lol. And in college I had friends that would “date” the TA every quarter.
edit: My proudest cheating moment was in 8th grade math. The teacher was hella suspicious of people cheating so on test day we’d only be allowed into the room with scratch paper (which she inspected) and a non-TI calculator. I got a hold of the multiple choice answers and made braille like impressions on my scratch paper, so it passed her inspection. I thought I was so clever at that age =P
This is the main reason I don’t feel bad at ALL for cheating. Half the professors don’t so much quiz you on the material and instead give you bullshit trick questions that are worded funny. I don’t get that shit, I’m here to learn material, not learn to solve fucking riddles.
Other reasons I don’t feel bad are half the classes you take for any degree are completely unrelated to your major. Why do I need Biology, Chemistry and Art classes for a fucking Computer Science major?
For my actual CS and programming classes, the professor lets us use notes, books, internet and whatever. This makes a lot more sense to me since it’s not about pointless memorization that you will forget with in a year, it teaches you to use the resources you have available to find any answer.
People saying that cheating is screwing yourself out of an education sound like they’ve never finished college and got a real job. The vast majority of shit you will forget or will be completely worthless in a real working environment. All your “training” in the field means jack shit unless you are becoming a doctor or something. The most blatant example of this business majors, I can’t even count the amount of times I’ve seen a human resources or business major hired straight into a leadership position only to figure out they know nothing about running a place and get fired within months only to be replaced by someone who worked their way up in the company and never attended college and but runs the place great.
Yeah I think I have to chalk this up to my being naive about it. I mean I just spent so much time working to get through grad school and Ph.D. work that I never looked. I mean when I was a graduate student at George Mason, it didn’t happen. When I was doing my assitantship it never happened. And it had never happened in the two years I had been a full time professor until this week.
Yeah I mean I couldn’t prove it and two of them were subtle… the third was not… but they didn’t get anything so I don’t think any harm was done. Like I said, maybe I just have to chalk this up to being naive and maybe not paying attention while going through grad school… Maybe I just didn’t pay attention because I was already happily married… I guess it just really caught me off guard… it’ll probably be akward when I see those girls in class on Monday…
And like I said, I’m not very attractive… which further compounds my confusion… I mean if you were an attractive college sophomore you’d have to be pretty desperate to try to hit on me for a grade…
Yeaaah, thanks man for bringing me way back. [media=youtube]2-_Me2tfZKA[/media] That was back in the day when I could only watch HBO off the fuzzy channel on my TV and we had to dangle with the foil on the antenna to make it a bit more clear. Now that that I am free of wondering what that movie was I can talk about this. So let me begin… I agree somewhat with Tanner.
Uh, no. The reason is you’re at a university, and you’re proving that you can get a well rounded education and not just be a person who knows computer science. If you want to go to school and JUST learn computer science, go to ITT Tech or some other trade school; it’s that sort of attitude that lessens the value of the degrees that we all have (computer science Bachelors degree here too). Theres school for what you want, and theres a reason they’re considered less prestigious.
As far as cheating, I’ve been at both ends of the spectrum. I cheated in a few courses (I had an astronomy final exam that was so fucking crazy that 80% of the class dropped before the final), and his format was weird where you had to answer questions from an essay from a list of questions. 2 of them he said “You will definitely have these questions to answer” and posted them up, the other 3 questions he would give a set of 5 on test day and you pick and choose 3 to answer. Had to do it in one of those blue books and he had to initial it at the start of the exam. Well, I got ballsy and answered the 2 definite ones ahead of time in the middle of the book, then had him initial it; he didn’t check. Managed to pass the class, which was glad because I didn’t want to have to switch to a different science elective.
That might have been the only time I cheated I think, except one time where it happened by accident. Wasn’t really cheating, my friend gave me a teachers math test from the year before, so I studied it to make sure I knew the material; when the exam came it was the same exact exam (with different numbers of course) so it made the test easier for me; Wish I would have studied the test even more. For the second test I studied my friends exam exclusively, and this time it was completely different so that theory went out the window : P
On the other side, I was taking a computer science exam when the guy in front of me kept pulling notes out of his pocket and using it to answer the test. This was the class where I was setting the curve so I was like hell no, after the test I sent an e-mail to the teacher, and when the lab section started a bit after the test the teacher showed up angry. She started telling people she knows people were cheating, etc, but wouldn’t name names; she was being super cold to the guy in question though.
the last time i’ve cheated was in HS, and that was only to help my friend coz i guess he just didnt really understand physics. anyway, we made up signals for multiple choice tests. for instance stretching would be A, tapping finger would be B, brushing your nose would be C, and i forgot what D was. i cant believe it worked either, since we sat in the front of the class, right next to the prof
I dunno about breaking into your professorsor’s or teacher’s class/home/car in order to get the test in advance…
…everything else is fair game imo, lol. However, its really really hard to cheat in most engineering/math classes without doing some straight up illegal shit. 90% of the time we get to use any calculator and bring in an extra sheet of equations, and sometimes we even get to use our books! No way to “cheat” on those exams. People still straight fail most of the exams in my classes despite this opportunity (except for the open book tests, lol, those are mad easy)
A lot of the kids will write their homework solutions on their extra sheet of paper though, even though this is heavily frowned upon/grounds for getting an F if you get caught (teachers hardly check though). Most professors are too lazy to write their own exams and just pick problems out of the book, so if you lucked out and wrote down the right problem then congratulations!!
I think cheating is only possible when your teacher is too lazy too care. Giving you online exams, not having you spaced apart in class when taking an exam, letting you bring in your own scratch sheet of paper instead of handing you a pre-made sheet with all the equations you’ll ever need, using any calculators beyond TI-30, etc.
I have found a strong correlation between my teachers being not lazy ( ie doing some of the things I’ve mentioned above) and overall being my best (or hardest) professors. Teachers who let us bring in our own equation sheet? None of the test problem even resemble the hw and they’re super abstract. Open book? Same thing. You can use your typewriter calculator? Time to write a proof.
Seriously, bad teachers/joke majors are the only classes you can cheat in.
there are different ways to cheat, technically. I’ve seen some good points mentioned in this thread.
Personally, I find that some tests, the questions dont deserve to be there. Questions that ask me about which version of MS Server 2008 should I buy, are stupid. No way would I buy ANYTHING without at least reading up on it, or researching it. Short answer exams, featuring shit that you would literally just google on the job, are also stupid. Same shit with physics/math classes that do NOT give you formula sheets or anything.
I’m not saying you should find SOME way to cheat, but if somebody else has the exact same exam as you, only 4 hours before your class, is him giving you answers (or at least telling you the questions), cheating???
I’ve been to ITT Tech and almost enrolled in a primarily art based school and they still require you take general courses not related to your major, so what’s your point?
I used to be fire and brimstone about this, but after reading an article about this a while ago, I’m a little more ambivalent about academic honesty in general. It’s not there’s technically anything intrinsically morally wrong about cheating–it’s just a question of breaking the academic code of conduct, and risking embarrassment and (depending on what you’re trying to do) your future career. For different people, there’s going to be a different answer.
I have never and will never cheat on a test, mainly because the embarrassment of getting caught would stay with me forever. If you don’t attach shame to cheating, then convincing you why it’s not worth it to cheat is going to be hard, especially when it feels so easy. There have been professors I’ve had who I have personally loathed–for those classes, I would have rather made a point of flunking his class by drawing dicks on my final before I ripped out my pride because of some hidebound sadist in an ivory tower. But that’s just how I feel about it.
Edit: Okay, I lied. The last time I cheated on an exam was in second grade, when I started a multiplication table quiz a few minutes early. I’d be prouder if that had been the age I lost my virginity, but sigh no luck there. And okay, maybe there was that time in sixth grade too when I didn’t put down my pencil when the standardized test proctor told us to put down our pencils and I continued bubbling. And, wait a sec, there was that time too when…
in high school, I programmed my TI-83 to do soooooo much of my work. I kinda think that programming the TI-83 was actually harder than doing the actual work.
Yeah, I have a class next semester that EVERY student has to take called Active Citizenship…and first semester there was a class, Communications. It was just writing lame ass essays every day. Meanwhile there were like 10 books required, that cost a small fortune (and were NOT used). It was basically a cash grab class for the college. I wrote my final essay in that class, during an exam, entitled “Why The Fuck Am I Writing An Essay Exam At 7pm And Missing My Hockey Game?” then proceeded to be a dick for like 2 pages. Then handed it in and went home. I still dunno what my mark in that class was (or the “Video games and online communities” class I took where our teacher told us she got stuck teaching the class, didnt know anything about it, didnt want to, and that we had already recieved perfect and no longer needed to come in to class…on the first day)
TI calculators were great. I use to program flash cards in it for all my classes. Ironically, after spending all that time writing the program, I had memorized everything and didn’t even need them.
Yup, college is a business, and like any business they are mainly in it for the money. There’s absolutely no reason I should have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars on classes and books for shit that is completely unrelated to my major, except the college wants to make extra money. Having to waste my time and hard earned money (don’t have any help from the parents) on fucking PE classes like walking or bowling to complete the requirements for my computer science major is extremely frustrating.