Student Faces Expulsion for Facebook "Study Group"

[JeffM]

147 "study buddies" not doing their own homework:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/07/0355244&threshold=5&mode=nested#22674642

 

On Mar 7, 3:12 pm, JeffM <jef...@email.com> wrote:

147 "study buddies" not doing their own homework:http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/07/0355244&threshold=5&m...

Interesting. If you share answers on Facebook its cheating, but if you
do it in the school library it's "studying". Kids have been doing this
forever, they just have a new medium.

I am a junior in High School that refuses to cheat in any form. Thus,
I am in the regular classes. I have many friends in Honors that share
answers all the time. That's one of the many problems with our
education systems. One of my "smartest" friends (and by smartest I
mean high GPA, represenative of nothing) has openly told me she cares
more about the grade than the education and she will do anything to
get her grade. I can't picture her cheating on a test, but she doesn't
seem to have a problem copying homework answers without even reading
the question.

I for one care about the education and do all my own work. This is why
I got C's in my honor classes Freshmen year and then dropped to the
normal classes.

(P.S. I'm in the electronics group, I'm a math and SCIENCE kid. I'd
appreciate it if we can avoid the low blows pointing out all my
spelling and grammatical errors in a posting while we discuss
education. It's happeneed before.)

 

[Joel Koltner]

<ngdbud@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:f38b70bc-0552-43bf-a6e1-11c922bcddd3@s12g2000prg.googlegroups.com...
"Interesting. If you share answers on Facebook its cheating, but if you
do it in the school library it's "studying"."

No, if you copy your buddy's answers in the library it's cheating as well, and
you can bet that any university will crack down on you if you make the fact
that you did so public.

I TA'd a class while in grad. school and it was obvious that many of the kids
were cheating (meaning, just copying one "master copy" of the homework
solutions rather than working out the problems themselves). With a couple of
exceptions, we didn't go after them because it is pretty much impossible to
actually *prove* who cheated and who really did do the work.

As a result, at least at my college, homework usually accounted for only a
small percentage of your grade -- often no more than 10-20%. In some classes
it counted for absolutely nothing!

"One of my "smartest" friends (and by smartest I
mean high GPA, represenative of nothing) has openly told me she cares
more about the grade than the education and she will do anything to
get her grade."

I knew people like that in high school too... they only took the required
courses and avoided the harder/more rigorous optional ones like advanced
physics and math.

One of the things they don't bother telling you in high school (in fact, if
anything they tend to tell you the exact opposite) is that there's little if
any correlation between how difficult the material you study and master is and
how successful you'll be in life. If you want to use, say, money as a measure
of "success," it's clear that those who do the best don't need any
particularly advanced schooling: Professional athletes, Hollywood actors, even
people like Bill Gates and Donald Trump used a lot more of their innate skills
they anything they learned in school to succeed. People who are out to make
money and find they are something inclined towards technical topics are best
off getting some bachelor's in engineering and then getting an MBA or a law
degree or similar.

---Joel

 

[JeffM]

Joel Koltner wrote:

I TA'd a class while in grad. school
and it was obvious that many of the kids were cheating
(meaning, just copying one "master copy" of the homework solutions
rather than working out the problems themselves).
With a couple of exceptions, we didn't go after them
because it is pretty much impossible to actually *prove*
who cheated and who really did do the work.

I'll bet it was pretty obvious after the exams were taken and graded.

I saw a snippet of an interview with the guy who started Kinko's
(by his admission, not a stellar student).
He said that he waited for the 2nd semester to apply to college.
By that time, there was space available
after some lazy/cheating/got-there-taking-crip-courses types
had been weeded out.

A "study group" with 147 members is obviously a cheat mechanism.

I note the post to the Slashdot page by the educator
who mandated that his student do things in groups of 3
--and graded them in part based on that.