Academic cheating and dishonesty have long been a problem. But with YouTube students have discovered a new avenue for actually promoting such fraud. Liz Losh, a rhetorician at the University of California at Irvine, notes that there’s now a genre of videos that combine cheating advice with a “do-it-yourself aesthetic.” She flagged one of them Wednesday on her blog. It shows a student using a scanner and photo-editing software to make a cheat sheet on a Coke bottle.
Of course, the deception works only if students can have beverages with them when they’re sitting for exams. —Andrea L. Foster
9 Responses to Students Show How to Cheat via YouTube
Robert Talbert - March 6, 2012 at 3:27 pm
You’re flagged, Peter. Take it elsewhere.
kentdm - March 6, 2012 at 5:53 pm
Thanks for this look into the running operation of the new venture. It is a happy day that we see someone has finally taken that next step forward with educational technology. Some people will do better with this and some better with traditional classrooms; there’s not one single way we need to follow.
elie_s_dad - March 6, 2012 at 7:03 pm
Thanks for your article. It sounds like a great course. Re the pedagogical goal of the Collatz Conjecture:
I had not heard of this before, but after reading the wikipedia it seems logical that this would be in a CS course ; the goal being to benefit the student for whom this will not be a terminal course.
Unless I’m mistaken the primary application of graph theoretical ideas such as the one described on wikipedia in “real life” is for use in the design and analysis of algorithms (i.e. complexity theory, recursion theory, etc.).
Apologies if you already know this! Just saying :).
daveatudacity - March 6, 2012 at 8:39 pm
Thanks much for your comments and feedback on cs101.
I can answer some of your questions.
We are committed to always having a free path through all of our courses. Part of Udacity’s mission is to make higher education available to everyone everywhere, and the only price that makes sense for this is free.
The reason for offering grades is partly as an added motivator for some students, but also with the goal of building a full CS curriculum and allowing students to take a series of courses and develop a transcript as they do this. Students who wish to make their transcripts visible to prospective employers will be able to do this, and we will be able to provide recruiters with lots of information to help them identify the students they want to hire (and view this as a better way to get revenues than charging students). That said, we are happy to have students go through the courses without worrying about grades, and students who want to do the classes just for personal interest and empowerment are welcome to do things at their own pace without worrying about grades or missing homework deadlines.
Robert Talbert - March 6, 2012 at 9:51 pm
Thanks a lot for stopping in, Dave, and thanks for your comments.
Robert Talbert - March 6, 2012 at 9:53 pm
I think bringing in the Collatz conjecture is a really cool twist to the course, and it sets up a question that beginning programmers ought to think about: Just because a program SEEMS to always terminate, does that mean it really DOES always terminate? Perhaps the whole question is to set up an advertisement for Udacity’s upcoming Algorithms and Data Structures class. At any rate, it just seems to me that perhaps this one question was a little too tangential to the task at hand.
oschwimmer - March 7, 2012 at 5:09 am
An interesting point is that while CS101 at Udacity is quite entry-level in a professional developer’s point of view, many students of this course are experienced programmers (either with a formal education in the field or strong autodidact achievers), are enjoying it and are very useful and helpful in animating the forum you talk about.
There is a strong potential impact of students on the creators, administrators and teachers of the course. This is the kind of feedback and empowerment which is very rare in classical university courses where you have the feeling that the machinery is too complex or too fossilized to even hear suggestions.
So I think this is going much beyond making an electronic version of a course.
Robert Talbert - March 7, 2012 at 7:17 am
That’s a great point. You can tell that there’s a range of abilities among the participants. There are complete newbies, people like me who have some programming experience but aren’t professional programmers, and people who’ve been coding for 20 years. What’s great is that in the forums, the more experienced people can — and do — really help out the others. That sort of peer learning is powerful and yeah, unfortunately it’s far too rare in traditional higher ed.
elie_s_dad - March 7, 2012 at 3:02 pm
Totally fair observation. It’s good to give CS students who aim to continue a taste of this stuff. One could easily imagine the student who is an expert coder / web developer but doesn’t consider himself good at math being a little surprised to find that some of his upper level or grad CS course are essentially indistinguishable from math. Students in math programs who haven’t done a ton of analysis in undergrad are often a little surprised at the nature of the coursework during their first grad semester (at least that was the case with me :) ).