How exactly do you define cheating?

A post from Ideas and thoughts from an EdTech focuses on a student who figured out how to unlock a function on a calculator that enabled him to cheat on a state test.

He brings up a fantastic point about it.

Without getting into the whole calculator or no calculator debate, we need to rethink many of our ideas about assessment and evaluation. What engineer or scientist or business person would ever be expected to do their work without technology? Would an architect be asked to design a building without his/her software application?

Amen. There’s more to the equation than simply memorizing how to figure out a problem. This student was genuinely thinking outside the box. A+ in my book. I remember in high school, I had a science teacher who told me a story that has really stuck with me. You were supposed to use some device to figure out the height of the building three different ways. If I remember correctly, you were supposed to use angles and shadows and some math formulas to figure it out. One student wrote down this as an answer:

1) Drop the device off the top of the building. Time how long it takes to hit the ground. Calculate the height from that.
2) Tie a piece of string to the device. Slowly lower it from the roof. Measure the piece of string.
3) Call the building manager. Tell him you’ll give him this shiny new device if he’ll tell you how high the building is.

Obviously the student didn’t calculate the question the way the teacher wanted him to, but he did show a ton of creativity and did list three valid, if a bit unusual, answers. Would I have given him credit for that? To be honest, I’m not sure. But what i do know is that he’s probably going to go pretty darn far with that attitude.

So which is more important? Providing the correct answer by the requested method or figuring out a correct answer regardless of your method? It’s an important question given the tools that are rapidly becoming transparent in our society.

Students may have to be stripped search before tests in order to insure they don’t have access to technology. I’m hoping there’s a better way. I hope that we assess things that measure how we use the technology not if we use the technology. I think it would be akin to asking a mechanic to fix our car without her own tools. Too many tests still give way too much importance to knowledge and memorization. This math test was in part measuring student’s ability to convert decimals to fractions. If there’s no context in which that skill is measured, it’s pretty meaningless. I don’t really care if a mechanic can use a ratchet set. Frankly I don’t care what tools she uses as long as she can fix my car. Does that make sense?

In a word, yes.

4 Comments

larry thmpson
7/10/2005

AMEN! The only thing that truly counts, is: RESULTS…RESULTS…RESULTS!

I am not arguing morals or ethics here!!!

Teach42 » Blog Archive » Cheating? I don’t think so.
7/12/2005

[...] a fascinating topic that needs to be revisited a few hundred times in the next few years. I wrote about it a few months ago. This just isn’t a topic that&#821 [...]

Leslie Healey
3/4/2009

This one is tough for me. I teach literature and composition to teens. I abhore tests: I am not teaching the material as much as I am teaching the critical thinking and analysis they will require to survive as adults. Does an educated person use or need Shakespeare? you may feel not. Can a teacher teach 21st thinking and analysis skills with Shakespeare? You bet.
But I am constantly discouraged by the laziness of those students who steal essays online (or pay for them, doesn’t matter to me). Most of them do not steal good essays. Many lack the ability to read for any length of time or at an adult level. You will not convince me that it is a waste of time to read Beowulf, Shakespeare, Achebe or the Bhagavad-gita. School has become a game to be played, and though we need to clean house, that does not assume that EVERYTHING about school is broken. Cheating is cheating, whether is is online or not. I am going to stop now. It is depressing!

Steve
3/5/2009

First of all, I agree with you. Cheating is cheating. However, that being said, if a student were to go to one of those sites, download a paper, and quote a passage from it, synthesize it and share their own comments about it’s validity, that isn’t cheating is it? IN fact, at that point we’re dangerously close to calling that research, aren’t we?

With that in mind, how do we ask our students questions that they CAN’T find a pre-written paper to on the internet? Or leverage those tendencies for our own needs?

For example: Compare a character in Hamlet to a character in a TV series that is on television right now. How might that character have been influenced by SHakespeare and how do the character traits differ?

How would Romeo and Juliet’s story be different if they had access to today’s technology? Discuss one scene in depth and share the implications for the story over all..

And so on.

I’m not saying those are great assignments, but they’re examples. I just figure it’s our responsibility to give assignments that aren’t able to be answered by papers that are 5-10 years old.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!

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