And so begin the news stories about the new and exotic ways to cheat that students are now dreaming up. http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/education/backtoschool/article/859760--student-cheaters-have-plenty-of-tricks-up-their-sleeves
There is, of course, a perfectly simple way to stop almost all cheating immediately: *stop giving grades*. If a student gets nothing from the thousands of dollars s/he spends on college education other than the development and improvement of his/her own ideas, then there is no incentive left to pretend that these changes are more extensive than they really are. (By the way, not giving grades also solves most problems related to students not attending class, not paying sufficient attention in class, not participating in class discussions, not completing assignments, not complete assignments on time, not being present for tests due to illness (or "illness"), etc.) The entire point of school becomes actually learning something, not acquiring a code that (fallibly) indicates that you have learned something (which is the source of all these various problems). Of course, many people will immediately respond to this proposal with "practical" questions like, "Do you really want a physician treating you or an engineer building a bridge you cross every day who hasn't been shown (via course grades) to have acquired the skills necessary to do his or her work?" I have two answers to such questions: (1) I'm talking about education here and don't really care much about what professional training does (as long as the physicians and engineers know what they are doing). (2) If I did care more about professional training, I would say that this problem can be resolved pretty well completely by simply having aspiring professionals write (and pass) licensing examinations, which most of them do anyway. There is no real need to have a grade associated with each and every course they take. That is an enormous waste of time and energy. (For those of you with a business bend: no grades is much more efficient!) "But what about employers? How will they know whether students have learned the skills they need their employees to have?" To which I respond: Why should we be subsidizing employers' applicant screening procedures? If an employer wants to discover what his/her applicants know about a particular field of interest, that employer can pay to have an appropriate examination developed and scored him-/herself. The real reason we have grades (though we have nearly forgotten), is so that one school can communicate efficiently with another school (e.g., a graduate school) what a student's performance has been like. Time was, we actually knew our students, and there weren't so many of them that professors couldn't write in longhand their impressions of a student's performance. Eventually that process got reduced to a single alphabetic character. Naturally, I do not want to return to writing out letters longhand for every single student who passes under my watch. But, I think that the costs associated with reducing learning to grades (not just cheating, but a whole raft of burdensome and mostly pointless courses administration duties) now far outweigh the benefits that the system may have once bestowed. Anyone have a solution to this problem? Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 [email protected] http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ========================== --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=4750 or send a blank email to leave-4750-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
