CHEATING STUDENTS (6 february 2004)
During the last five years of my teaching career I did programming classes. The last programming language I taught was Java.
The final assignment students in such classes had to do was writing a so-called applet. Programs like Three-Letter Lingo , Twenty-Four Game and Animals are examples of the kind of applets they had to make.
The last class that I taught was probably the most disappointing experience of my career: attendance was very poor and when I asked some of them what they were doing, the answers were usually evasive.
Nevertheless, on the date that the assignments had to be handed in I received quite a few assignments, some of which looked very good.
Of course, after the disappointing attendance during classes I was not convinced that what they had handed in was their own work.
One of the applets I received dropped out right away: it was identical to one that had been handed in one year earlier.
Then I searched the Internet to see if I could find any similarity with existing applets. The result of this search was that another 15% of the tests were clearly copies of work of others.
Still, there were quite a few students with good-looking assignments, who had hardly been spotted in class during the preceding period. So I could not just assume the rest was all their own work.
The only way to find this out was by having a very close look at the assignments that had been handed in and making a series of questions for each assignment -- questions that would be no problem if the applet was the student's own work.
This proved to be a very time-consuming affair, which would hardly have been possible for most other teachers. But I had the advantage that this was my only class left, so I could invest massive amounts of time in this detective work.
In the end it became clear that 80% of the students had not made the assignments they handed in. But don't worry, later I held extra classes and there were re-examinations, so things were not as dramatic as you may think.
But still ... with schools increasingly assessing students on the base of assignments that are handed in, I wonder if every teacher will be prepared to do the kind of detective work I could only do because it was my last class.
