Prof. calls out student for cheating via Math StackExchange

After spending 9 years in school, I have very little regard for Professors that both don't understand how this generation of kids work, nor understand that take home finals in technical fields such as math have zero merit.<p>The smart kids are always going to be penalized because the cheating kids are going to ask for help. In other words, this kid got caught. We can discuss if this kid should have known that he was cheating or not (and I believe that there is good evidence that modern kids have a difficult time grasping the idea of original work). That is both a process and a procedure that colleges should teach kids. Ethics 101 should be a required course.<p>(Then again, Allen and Gates bought DOS from Seattle Computing Products and sold it as their own.)<p>My problem is the other 50% of the kids that find a friend that can help them, and thereby cheat but have no avenue to be caught.<p>Simple solution is to have tests in class on a sample of the work done during the quarter/semester. If you can't do this, then you don't understand how to test for knowledge<p>While this won't stop cheating, it should bring it down dramatically. The best way to slow cheating is to not give an opportunity to cheat in the first place.

So, does this mean I can register an account on Math StackExchange and ask for help with an alias, which is possibly a fellow student's actual name and that person will be penalized for my cheating?

This is a dilemma for me. On one side:<p>Is it wrong to ask for help?? In the professional world, being able to communicate and collaborate in finding an answer is more usefuel than doing it all by your own.<p>On the other side:<p>If what you want to do is to develop in your brain the mental models to do math. then you need to do your homework... is like triying to get in shape, it's ok to have a personal trainer but he can't lift weights for you.

The prof also busted him on another question:<p><a href="http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/256822/product-of-two-polynomials-p-and-q-with-rational-coefficients-has-a-integer-coef#comment562581_256822" rel="nofollow">http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/256822/product-of-tw...</a>

This kind of thing does cause serious issues evaluating students.<p>On one hand, students, employers and lecturers all agree (I think) that allowing students to do larger projects, over a period of time, allows them to better show their strengths and tackle interesting problems.<p>On the other hand, without locking people in a room with nothing but a pen for 3 hours or so, it is very difficult to check they aren't getting someone else to do all their work for them.

This kind of thing is only ever going to get easier, not harder. Overall it's a good thing that sharing knowledge has become so easy.<p>So we need to rethink the way we structure education and credentials.<p>Why is there an incentive to cheat like this? Frankly, because most of the hoops a student jumps through during their education really don't impart any lasting measurable value. What fraction of educational content is still usable in the average student's brain ten years after they learned it? Very little.<p>Mostly this comes down to the rigid and one-size-fits-all way we teach most things. Learning is orders of magnitude more effective when the learner has a personal motivation for why they want to learn something and how they intend to apply it in their life -- factors that are frequently missing from our traditional classroom model.<p>The real value in school is the meta skills. Learning how to learn. Today we expect students to get those as a side effect of learning a bunch of pointless (to them personally) stuff, but more often than not they pick up the wrong set of meta skills: they learn how to cram information just long enough to regurgitate it for the test and then forget it forever.<p>If you want people to learn the really valuable meta skills, you need to let them practice those meta skills in domains the students actually care about.

Is there any way to be absolutely certain that "John Paul" is really John Paul?<p>Otherwise this does not mean anything more than <i>"somebody better be confessing, but I am not sure who".</i><p>(The fact that there was a an attempt on the question does not bode well for this guy, but again, that could be faked too... right?)

The best part is that the student edited the question and replaced it with a bunch of garbage characters, and then an admin rolled back the edit, ~2 hours before the professor's comment.

Its a trap. A written confession may result in serious consequences; without that, prof can't prove John is John...

Teachers in my High School caught students doing this several times. The teacher would go on the <i>Answers sites the night of an assignment and </i>incorrectly* answer a question to catch the students cheating. Pretty clever on the teachers' part.

I'm skeptical anything will come from this. It's not like a Stack Exchange username is legitimate proof of identity. The professor called out the student for cheating but unless the guy actually turns in the form along with the exam, there's probably no way to legitimately link the student's identity with the stack exchange identity, unless the guy was stupid enough to sign up with his actual name.<p>That being said, this would be an effective way to screw over someone else, if you signed up with their name and plastered these types of questions all over the internet. The first thing that any HR rep is going to do when considering a job application is searching for the persons name. If this type of garbage comes up, that resume will probably be instantly tossed into the bit bucket.

I got to see the editor powers in action as the professors comment was deleted after a reload. The edit makes sense, anyone can post under any name and bad news travels faster then good and can be stickier so reputations can be damaged incorrectly.

I'll never understand why professors give take home exams and expect that the internet won't be used to help answer the questions. Even if he didn't just post the question without trying, who's to say a similar question isn't already there?<p>Do History professors do this? I mean a math problem is something you might be unlikely to find on the internet, but I'm guessing wikipedia knows when the battle of Gettysburg took place.<p>If you are allowing for "open book" but not "open internet" give the test in class and set their book on the table.

This story and discussion is the perfect example of how wrong people are when thinking about schools and what's going on in there.<p>A teacher provides two services: teaching (obviously) and evaluate students to let them know how well they are prepared to pass an official exam.<p>So cheating or not cheating here is a non-issue except for the student that clearly doesn't know what he's doing. And the the teacher who seems enjoys playing the sheriff's role could be ridiculous, except he doesn't know what he is doing either.<p>That's a pretty sad story, actually.

So his username on the Math site is John Paul, but if you click over to his Stack Exchange network profile, it says his name is Stephen Hilger. Definitely some shenanigans here.

It's nothing new - the same has been going on on Stack Overflow and other forums for ages. Here's a particularly egregious example of someone cheating on a Regional Olympiad level competition: <a href="http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/155319/150097" rel="nofollow">http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/155319/150097</a>

Just now, the professors answer disappeared in front of my eyes after a page refresh. For those seeing this after me, apparently his professor was watching the thread and told him he show he is cheating and send a copy of the url and/or his post history to discuss his penalty.

The professor (under a false name) should post an answer in a specific way and then see if any students submitted the exam with the copied answer.<p>But in honesty what did the professor expect from students who are given take home exams? That they won't go online and look for answers?

So was this a CMU student? :(

Don't use your real credentials when asking for help on school work.<p>I don't think this student was asking for help so much as asking someone to do the work for him, but I'll keep it in mind either way.

This also happened with a Portuguese 2nd year CS student, no one was sure if it really was the teacher.

Is there anything to say that the professor actually is the professor? It's a new account.

OP had it coming. Why would you use your real identity in this situation? What a n00b.

Member for: today<p>Hmmmmmmmmm

wooh wooh wooh, so whos real and whos not here?

Is this hacker news?

ouch.

Yowch.

I think this is wrong. The professor does not understand how the world spins around nowadays. He caught that guy,but there is no guarantee nobody else was cheating. Personally,as a non-English student attending a university in the UK I could easily ask questions in a language the professor could not understand, on forums he doesn't know exist. My point being - if somebody wants to get away with it,they will - as many people pointed out,it would be enough if he posted that question under a fake name.<p>So if the professor cannot guarantee that no-one is cheating,then any marks obtained for that exam/homework/whatever are completely meaningless.