Possible class of cheaters

[hamburger]

Hi, this semester I teach a class of 2nd year STEM students. In the first test, I found that they don't even know how to calculate the average of five numbers. I am almost certain that they cheat all the time. Here are some examples:

- The classroom is very long horizontally along the axis of my extended arms. My desk is at one end of the room. In the lab test, the majority of the students were sitting on the other end with their screen facing against me. Since IT could not disable the internet nor usb ports of the lab computers, this allowed them to communicate with each other as there is no way that I could watch all of their screens at once. Some students were distracting me. I suspect that they did that on purpose so that they could take turns and cheat. I suspected that somebody did the work and sent the answers to them.

- I gave them two on-line quizzes so far. 15 minutes to answer two simple questions in each quiz. In the first quiz, except for two students, the rest were all sitting far away from me with their screen facing against me. Those two students took a long time to finish. I just told the class to wait as two students were still working on it. The other students knew who they were.  It means that they communicated with each other. In the 2nd quiz, one question was about definition and the other required some thinking. People with a common sense should be able to answer it. The majority of the class stopped completely. I suspected that they sent the questions to somebody outside the class and waited for the answers.

- In the labs, the majority of the students just came in, showed me their work and left. Last week, I saw them sharing usb memory sticks. I noticed that several students made the same mistakes in their programs. One student told me that they were working on the assignment together. The other student was angry with him.

- Last week, they were supposed to hand in Lab X but a student showed me Lab Y. When I pointed that out, it took him only a few minutes to show me Lab X. That is a very poor student. There is no way that he could complete the entire lab in a few minutes.

- Students were supposed to enter some numbers from the keyboard and displayed some information. When I asked them to enter 1 2 3 4 5 from the keyboard, 2-3 students typed: 12345. They knew nothing but when I asked them to enter a space in between the numbers, their programs worked perfectly. It means that they just copied from somebody.

- This week, they were supposed to write a computer program to read a data file to a program and print out the contents. All of them made the same mistake that they entered the data from the keyboard. When I pointed that out, they were all surprised. Some students left the lab temporarily while others started sending messages from their phone. It means that they were looking for help. I mentioned that if they just submitted as is, they would lose some marks. I even told them that the solution is just a slight modification from an example I gave in the lecture. Half of the class did not bother to try. They would rather lose some marks and left. As for the remaining, most of them were just sitting in front of the screen doing nothing except waiting for *something*. Then, I found that nobody knew how to create a text data file using Wordpad or Microsoft Word. Even I showed them how to do it, they still could not follow.

- Some students wanted me to sit next to them to tell them what to type letter by letter. The guy who said that he paid for my salary got annoyed. He wanted me to debug his program. I found three  mistakes: 1. While he continued to change his program, the compiler was compiling another file!  2. He declared some variables like: Total, Income. Then in his program he used total and income. 3. He was supposed to write a program to read the data from the file and calculate the total cost. In his program, he tried to read the total from a file!

- I told them many times to go over the examples I taught in class but obviously, none of them listened.

Based on the above, I suspect that I have a class of cheaters. Regardless of how much effort and time I spend on them, they don't have the will nor ability to do even the most basic things. I don't know how they made it to 2nd year. Some students just told me that they have jobs and are too tired! Others told me that they have taken the same course a few times. Shall I just let them continue what they have been doing? If I report to the department, they may consider me as a trouble maker as in the past, administrator told me that nobody had problems with their class except me. I am sure some colleagues just played dumb and just take the salary without challenging the students.

[Ruralguy]

Either find ways to prevent cheating, report the cheating, or accept that some might cheat, and make the class reasonable for anyone who wants to learn. By the way, didn't you quit?

[hamburger]

So far, whenever I tried to do something for the good of the students, I ended up digging a hole for myself to fall into. For example, last semester the students were so poor that it took them 3-4 more time to complete some simple tasks. I had to waste my time to adjust the timetable for them each week. At the end, most of them got over 90s. Yet, they posted on RMP and gave me poor ratings in student evaluations saying that I was not organized. They did not say how low level they were.

Perhaps just spend the time for job hunting as some of you suggested before.

I left the department where complaining to get high marks is a culture. I am teaching a course for another department as mentioned before.

[the_geneticist]

One easy solution is for you to NOT be at the front of the room.  Walk around the room so you can look at their screens, ask them what they are working on, what questions they have, etc. 

[hamburger]

I have done that.

[Hegemony]

Well, I think you need to devise uncheatable exams. They all have to start at the same time, they each get a different set of questions  (have the LMS draw random questions from a question bank), they all have that lockdown feature where if they go to another tab, they get frozen out of the exam, they all have a limited amount of time per question, they all have to have their phones visibly facedown on their desk so they can't be used, etc. Just assume that they will try to cheat, and write tests and establish conditions where they can't.

[polly_mer]

Quit!

Go do something else.  There's no way this is worth your time and energy.

[Caracal]

I have done that.

Everything has been canceled. There are no sports anymore. I'm going to have to give my essay exams online and make them open note. This does increase the possibility for cheating. I'll give everyone a short stern lecture about this. The good news is that people who google things about us history are likely to end up with weird responses that don't reflect what we did in class. If I see examples of clear cheating I'll deal with it, I will probably miss some among crummy students who are getting C+s anyway. It isn't really my biggest worry right now. Stop angsting about this stuff.

[lalochezia]

Quit!

Go do something else.  There's no way this is worth your time and energy.

this. every single post you make here describes how much you hate your job and have disdain for every aspect of it and the people involved. do something else.

[Wahoo Redux]

If you don't quit, do what my wife does. 

She schedules computer tests in a specific computer lab in which the tables are all aligned facing the front.  She sits at the front and asks me and/or another person to station themselves at the back of the room monitoring the computers the students are using.  Depending on the test, students are sometimes allowed to look stuff up online, but generally they are required to only open up Blackboard to retrieve the test. 

I generally stand at the back of the room for the first 5 minutes, trying to look serious and intimidating (and failing miserably on both counts).  Just the idea of a proctor / watching eyes seems to do the trick, however.  After 5 minutes I do my own work, making sure that I get up and wander just a bit to make it seem like I am overseeing what the students are doing.

Can you ask a colleague or a staff to help monitor? 

You should maybe ask IT about remote monitoring. 

Or quit.  Do something that does not make you paranoid.

[hamburger]

I remember at a previous university, an Associate Professor and I delivered the test papers. Then, he took a chair to the back and had a nap.