Paraphrasing tools are getting more sophisticated

[apl68]

What does 'total depravity' mean in the technical sense? And could it possibly be replaced with aggregate abasement? Because aggregate abasement is pleasingly alliterative.

Here it's referring to a point in the Synod of Dort, a 17th-century meeting settling the Arminian controversy (as opposed to Calvinist theology). The outcome of the Synod were five points that can be represented as an acronym, TULIP (the T being relevant here). This is all very simplified, but the students were simply to discuss the five points and their merits/critiques. When the relevant nouns were plausibly deciphered, most, if not all, of the student's submission was traceable to a portion of a chapter in a textbook, found online.

I do agree aggregate abasement is a lovely piece of alliteration, haha! "Total depravity" means something like, "Each person is so affected by sin such that every part of their existence is bent toward that, and they are incapable of responding to God or knowing him on their own." It's just that they needed to reflect on the historical doctrines that came out of this meeting. Agree with it, hate it, modify it, etc., none of that particularly mattered. They just needed to interact with it and not the paraphrased version of an online site doing it for them!

I hope this is not at an historically Reformed-tradition college, or this situation is going to look especially embarrassing. 

[reverist]

What does 'total depravity' mean in the technical sense? And could it possibly be replaced with aggregate abasement? Because aggregate abasement is pleasingly alliterative.

Here it's referring to a point in the Synod of Dort, a 17th-century meeting settling the Arminian controversy (as opposed to Calvinist theology). The outcome of the Synod were five points that can be represented as an acronym, TULIP (the T being relevant here). This is all very simplified, but the students were simply to discuss the five points and their merits/critiques. When the relevant nouns were plausibly deciphered, most, if not all, of the student's submission was traceable to a portion of a chapter in a textbook, found online.

I do agree aggregate abasement is a lovely piece of alliteration, haha! "Total depravity" means something like, "Each person is so affected by sin such that every part of their existence is bent toward that, and they are incapable of responding to God or knowing him on their own." It's just that they needed to reflect on the historical doctrines that came out of this meeting. Agree with it, hate it, modify it, etc., none of that particularly mattered. They just needed to interact with it and not the paraphrased version of an online site doing it for them!

I hope this is not at an historically Reformed-tradition college, or this situation is going to look especially embarrassing.

It is not. We are somewhat of an open enrollment kind of school, and while some students would be quite Reformed, others would come from non-Reformed church traditions, including non-denominational. It makes for interesting discussions, for sure!

[Hibush]

... All they've done is failed to acquire valuable skills.

Which was the goal.

[apl68]

... All they've done is failed to acquire valuable skills.

Which was the goal.

Just what I was thinking.  They've merely defeated the whole purpose of taking the course.

[downer]

The skills are not ones that the students value. Indeed, the students are only in college because of the instrumental and social benefits that it brings.

[Caracal]

The skills are not ones that the students value. Indeed, the students are only in college because of the instrumental and social benefits that it brings.

Yes, that's possibly true, although all of us sometimes do things that don't mesh with the things we actually value, so who knows.

Assessments are just a tool designed to reflect student learning.  Even when students don't cheat, its almost always possible for them to get passing grades without actually acquiring skills or learning the material in a way that will allow them to make use of it later. A student can memorize just enough Spanish grammar and vocabulary to pass exams in intro courses without actually ever learning much Spanish. That's precisely what I did, unfortunately. Like cheating, these other forms of non-learning usually have limits. I could pass the intro Spanish sequence but I doubt I could have passed conversational Spanish without actually trying to learn the language.

Same thing with cheating. Usually a student is going to have to be able to be able to at least partially use skills to graduate, but even that hardly guarantees they will actually internalize the skills in a way that will allow them to use them in other aspects of life. If they don't care about the skills, they probably won't. That's too bad on some level, but I can't make students care or see the relevance of my classes. I can do things that might facilitate those things, and good assessment practices can be part of that, but I can't make them actually give a crap. Lots of students do care, and I want to spend my time trying to get them to care more, not worrying about all the ways students might be able to pass the course without doing what I'd like them to do.

[Hibush]

I want to spend my time trying to get them to care more, not worrying about all the ways students might be able to pass the course without doing what I'd like them to do.

I don't see any downside to this approach. You have to artfully communicate to students that you will be teaching to the students who care. Then those who want to learn, or have the potential to be swayed that way, will know that it is worth putting in effort.

There needs to be something built in so that the interested students don't feel the cheaters are getting a free ride, but that takes little effort on your part.

[downer]

I like the idea that college profs should just focus on teaching well.

However, I also think that someone in administration or even government might want to give a shit about the prevalance of cheating in HS and college. https://oedb.org/ilibrarian/8-astonishing-stats-on-academic-cheating/ and https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2021/09/22/cheating-problem-your-college-spoiler-alert-it are useful though not massively well documented.

I'm not particularly convinced that it isn't a serious problem for colleges, though I agree it isn't the faculty member's problem.

[jerseyjay]

Is cheating prevalent at universities? As far as I understand, yes.

Is cheating new? As far as I understand, no.

Is cheating more prevalent now than in the past? I have not done any research on my own, but based on a quick search of newspaper and other articles, it appears that yes, it very likely is.

If I had to speculate as to why, I would say (1) because the internet makes it easier to cheat; (2) university degrees are becoming ever more important even as many students lack either the academic skills and/or a desire to get a university degree for any other reason than as a credential; (3) many university instructors are overworked and underpaid (especially adjuncts) and have little time or incentive to crack down on cheating. Again, I freely admit this is speculative (i.e., not evidence-based). None of these trends is going away, as far as I can tell.

As an instructor, I take the serenity prayer approach to cheating.

I craft assignments that cannot just be downloaded from the internet but require more thought about the readings and the task. I try to work with my students so that I get a better sense of when they turn in work that is different than their norm. I try to scaffold the assignments so students are not stuck a week before the paper is due without having done any work. I will also google passages of a paper if it seems what it is not what I was expecting.

But I am not going to dedicate the rest of my life to cracking down on cheating.

I agree that there are students who will do the minimum required to pass a class and nothing more. While it may be too bad that most students do not seek to master maths AND science AND arts AND history AND humanities and instead do what they need to pass their required class, I am not sure this is new or runs counter to the point of requirements. I expect a business major who passes my history class to have a basic understanding of the subject. I don't expect them to like the subject or be enthusiastic about it. It would be great if they did, but the idea of general education courses is to establish a baseline for everybody.

[Kron3007]

The skills are not ones that the students value. Indeed, the students are only in college because of the instrumental and social benefits that it brings.

Yes, that's possibly true, although all of us sometimes do things that don't mesh with the things we actually value, so who knows.

Assessments are just a tool designed to reflect student learning.  Even when students don't cheat, its almost always possible for them to get passing grades without actually acquiring skills or learning the material in a way that will allow them to make use of it later. A student can memorize just enough Spanish grammar and vocabulary to pass exams in intro courses without actually ever learning much Spanish. That's precisely what I did, unfortunately. Like cheating, these other forms of non-learning usually have limits. I could pass the intro Spanish sequence but I doubt I could have passed conversational Spanish without actually trying to learn the language.

Same thing with cheating. Usually a student is going to have to be able to be able to at least partially use skills to graduate, but even that hardly guarantees they will actually internalize the skills in a way that will allow them to use them in other aspects of life. If they don't care about the skills, they probably won't. That's too bad on some level, but I can't make students care or see the relevance of my classes. I can do things that might facilitate those things, and good assessment practices can be part of that, but I can't make them actually give a crap. Lots of students do care, and I want to spend my time trying to get them to care more, not worrying about all the ways students might be able to pass the course without doing what I'd like them to do.

I did the same in spanish, even failed it once (only course I ever failed...) From not doing the work.

However, I still know a lot more Spanish than I did before I took it.  Intro Spanish is not meant to make you fluent, just to set a foundation, so even with my non-learning habits I think it worked.  I really need to learn Spanish now for work, and while I wish I would have applied myself earlier, it will still help.

As a teacher, I don't expect all of my students to leave the course as experts in the field, but hope they come out more informed than they started.  Like you, I prefer to focus on providing a good training experience for the students who are engaged rather than worrying too much about the ones being dragged along.

[marshwiggle]

Is cheating prevalent at universities? As far as I understand, yes.

Is cheating new? As far as I understand, no.

In Nanjing, China the civil service had exams that students would take to qualify. This testing goes back 900 years. The historical information about the place includes some examples of how students attempted to cheat.

I'm guessing any ancient culture with any sort of education had cheating.

[apl68]

The skills are not ones that the students value. Indeed, the students are only in college because of the instrumental and social benefits that it brings.

Yes, that's possibly true, although all of us sometimes do things that don't mesh with the things we actually value, so who knows.

Assessments are just a tool designed to reflect student learning.  Even when students don't cheat, its almost always possible for them to get passing grades without actually acquiring skills or learning the material in a way that will allow them to make use of it later. A student can memorize just enough Spanish grammar and vocabulary to pass exams in intro courses without actually ever learning much Spanish. That's precisely what I did, unfortunately. Like cheating, these other forms of non-learning usually have limits. I could pass the intro Spanish sequence but I doubt I could have passed conversational Spanish without actually trying to learn the language.

Same thing with cheating. Usually a student is going to have to be able to be able to at least partially use skills to graduate, but even that hardly guarantees they will actually internalize the skills in a way that will allow them to use them in other aspects of life. If they don't care about the skills, they probably won't. That's too bad on some level, but I can't make students care or see the relevance of my classes. I can do things that might facilitate those things, and good assessment practices can be part of that, but I can't make them actually give a crap. Lots of students do care, and I want to spend my time trying to get them to care more, not worrying about all the ways students might be able to pass the course without doing what I'd like them to do.

I did the same in spanish, even failed it once (only course I ever failed...) From not doing the work.

However, I still know a lot more Spanish than I did before I took it.  Intro Spanish is not meant to make you fluent, just to set a foundation, so even with my non-learning habits I think it worked.  I really need to learn Spanish now for work, and while I wish I would have applied myself earlier, it will still help.

As a teacher, I don't expect all of my students to leave the course as experts in the field, but hope they come out more informed than they started.  Like you, I prefer to focus on providing a good training experience for the students who are engaged rather than worrying too much about the ones being dragged along.

I worked diligently in Spanish (Had to--my mother taught the class!), but never got beyond an intermediate level and have long since acquired a heavy coating of rust.  But I have been left with a much greater awareness of how there are different cultures out there, and how language functions as a part of culture.  For all that taking some foreign-language classes in school has had limited practical benefits for me, it has done a great deal to broaden my outlook on the world, and on other people.  That may sound awfully "soft" and subjective and hard to quantify.  And yet isn't it a big part of what higher ed is supposed to be about?

That's why some of us are so deeply concerned with the pervasive instrumental idea of education as training in narrowly-targeted skills for narrowly-targeted career goals, and all of it justifiable only insofar as it can be quantified in hard numbers, preferably with dollars attached to them.  A hard-nosed utilitarian ROI type could make a case that the most sensible and efficient and cost-effective way to produce librarians is to have undergrad students go through a "library administration" track where they study what they need to know about the library business, and don't bother about frivolous stuff like history and literature and foreign languages.  But I can tell you that in my work I use what I gained from all these other courses and more every day in my work as a librarian.  So do other librarians I know.  So do people in a host of other professions.

I keep hearing higher education and its degrees as being mere "signal mechanisms."  It's obvious from all the cheating out there that a very large--and it would seem, growing--number of students have fully absorbed this idea of education.  Since learning takes extra effort, and is not understood to be the goal, then naturally they're going to try to get through the classes and check all the boxes with minimum effort.  And maybe they will succeed in passing courses by the skin of their teeth, and getting degrees without ever having learned anything to speak of.  And then what?  They're going to go into the world with minds that have failed to take advantage of opportunities to grow and develop.  They're going to be poorer for it.  So is our wider society, which could really use some people with more broadly-developed minds right now.

[mamselle]

+1,000

M.

[downer]

I remember cheating in HS a few times, and getting away with it. If I were to be super cynical, I might argue that cheating is a useful skill for many jobs and we are doing good work in fostering the skill. I find it annoying when my students cheat because it feels like a personal insult, and I wish the students would go away. I also find after the initial annoyance of realizing they cheated, I stop caring much about it.

In the big picture, it seems clear that a lot of college students shouldn't be in college, or at least shouldn't be in a lot of gen ed courses, and would be better off learning a trade skill. It would be better for faculty if more of their students really wanted to be in the classes they are taking.

There is a portion of students who didn't initially want to be in college courses, but discover they learn something and are enriched by the experience. We like to talk about that portion a lot, because it helps to justify making them take courses. I wonder how many such students there are. 

Unfortunately, trends are for a greater proportion of HS students being pushed into college, so the problems are going to get worse, not better.

[marshwiggle]

I think there are really three different groups of students being considered here.

I worked diligently in Spanish (Had to--my mother taught the class!), but never got beyond an intermediate level and have long since acquired a heavy coating of rust.  But I have been left with a much greater awareness of how there are different cultures out there, and how language functions as a part of culture.  For all that taking some foreign-language classes in school has had limited practical benefits for me, it has done a great deal to broaden my outlook on the world, and on other people.  That may sound awfully "soft" and subjective and hard to quantify.  And yet isn't it a big part of what higher ed is supposed to be about?

The good students, even if not really engaged in a specific course, will probably pick up enough by osmosis to get some benefit. Students who get some flavour of B in my course have learned enough to have some value; students who got C: maybe; students who got D: no way.

That's why some of us are so deeply concerned with the pervasive instrumental idea of education as training in narrowly-targeted skills for narrowly-targeted career goals, and all of it justifiable only insofar as it can be quantified in hard numbers, preferably with dollars attached to them.

For specific skills required for specific jobs, students wil need to succeed in those specific courses. Faking, cheating, or barely passing will ultimately foil their career plans unless and until they actually acquire those skills.

I keep hearing higher education and its degrees as being mere "signal mechanisms."  It's obvious from all the cheating out there that a very large--and it would seem, growing--number of students have fully absorbed this idea of education. 

If everything a student studies is box-checking, so that no specific course matters, then that suggests society has no real reason for these people being there. Students who get through without having learned anything have just successfully played the game.

So to reiterate, there are:

• Good students, who will learn enough by osmosis to get some benefit from anything.
• Focused students, who need to get knowledge specific to their goals.
• Box-checkers, who are there because they have been told to be, who are neither bright enough to learn by osmosis or motivated enough to learn specific skills, and who will get very little from the experience.

Failing to recognize these distinctions sets up individual institutions and society as a whole for a lot of wasted resources and disillusioned graduates.