The final exam for my modern physics class is this morning, which means I'll have a bunch of time to kill while I proctor the test. This will likely involve a lot of brainless time-wasting, but I need to be on hand both as a formal guard against cheating, but more importantly to answer questions about the test should any come up.
Our sections are small enough that I don't worry too much about cheating, but it's a much bigger worry at lots of other places, and there are all sorts of ways of dealing with it. So here's a possibly entertaining question to pass the time:
What's the most amusing anti-cheating strategy you know of?
I'm thinking here of ways to mess with the heads of students who are inclined to cheat. I'm thinking of things like the story I heard about a fairly famous physicist who told the students in a huge lecture class that there were four different versions of the test, to prevent copying. When exam day arrived, the tests were handed out, and were printed on paper of four different colors. So the students who wanted to copy just looked for the person closest to them with paper of the same color, and copied all their answers.
The thing was, the paper color had no relation to the version of the test. So all of the copiers failed in spectacular, and hilarious, fashion.
Do you know of anything comparable? Leave it in the comments.
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This isn't a strategy on my part really, but it does work to punish cheaters in my math classes.
My students, benighted as they are, are under the distinct impression that being ethnically East Asian improves one's ability in mathematics. So they jockey to sit near and, yes, cheat off of the typically one or two East Asians per section. Fortunately for me (and karmic justice), this is usually a mistake. I've had a quarter of the class because Mr. Kim failed.
The best part is that they usually don't learn from their mistake.
I TA'd for a professor who told me that same "colored paper" story, and played a very similar trick with her exams. We'd make up two versions of the test (usually differing only in the numbers -- a 10kg mass vs a 15kg mass, etc) and half of each would be labeled "Version A" and the other half "Version B." We even had students put their exams into two piles, based on the "version" of their test. Then we'd go through the piles and re-sort them. I won't give away the trick that we used to distinguish the real two versions quickly, just in case someone from the class is reading this, but it involved capitalizing certain letters. We did catch a few cheaters copying the answers from the other test, presumably because they were both labeled "Version A."
When I was taking a first your undergraduate psychology class the prof excitedly told the story of how he had just caught cheaters. (He taught like 10 sections of the same course each semester and was lazy and administered the same exam to all of them). He explained how he suspected some students from one of the later sections were getting answers from students in an earlier section.
His method for catching the cheaters? For the first sections exam he didn't scramble the answers to his multiple choice exam. Every answer was A. For the second class he left the first 10 questions as A and scrambled the rest. He was so pleased with himself he had to tell our entire class this story (it had happened earlier that week). Its pretty funny, although as a lot of bad consequences for the rest of the students, since grades were assigned on a curve.
One of my junior high school English teachers told such a story (similar to the anecdote from Steven #3). One year she taught two sections of a certain English class, and she suspected that the fifth period class was getting quiz answers from the first period class. One day, when the quiz was about classifying sentences, she arranged for the first period class to spread the word: 7 and 10 were compound complex and the rest were simple. Of course, any resemblance between those answers and the correct answers was purely coincidental. A large fraction of the fifth period class fell for it, and she showed the evidence to the principal.
Unrelated anecdote: One of my high school classmates reputedly had the best grades money could buy. I don't know whether anybody caught him who was in a position to do anything about it, but by our senior year many of the teachers suspected. His GPA was in the top 5 of >600 students, but he did not get any other academic awards as a senior.
hard to beat the story in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" by LecCarre. The french teacher leaves a preliminary copy of the upcoming exam in a place where a student suspected of selling answers can get it. Then on the day of the test, he hands out a different exam.
When I was a TA the Intro Physics final exam was given in a large gymnasium. Every student (a few hundred? in total) had their own table. Anyway, all of the TAs during the exam had to go down a column or two and check the (photo) ID of each student to prevent someone sending in a ringer to take the exam for him or her.
Anyway, one of the other TAs discovered something strange. There were 2 students with the same name (for our purposes, Student X), in the same column, one maybe 3-4 seats behind the other! One had a student ID and the other a driving license. A quick check of the class roster confirmed that there was only one real Student X in the class.
Anyway, we take the 2 outside and beat them silly (just kidding!). We take the 2 outside and question them. It turns out Student X was in my discussion section so I was able to point out the real Student X. Eventually he was expelled. I don't know what happened to his accomplice (or if he/she was even a student).
Certainly not the perfect crime.
please can anyone provide amusing cheating strategies also, to even the playing field?
I have always frowned on collaborative cheating efforts and on lazy dumb cheats. But inventive exam takers who beat a pompous TA or prof in his own game and never get caught ought to be celebrated
Good story about the physicist. I'll try that sometime.
For my students, I find that having graduate assistants just stand in the back of the classroom works nicely. Cheaters, always self-interested, want to know who might be watching their head and eye movement. So they find all sorts of reasons to look to the back of the classroom, from checking the time to picking up a dropped pencil, to tying their shoes - it's funny. This is best in a large lecture hall with stadium seating, but it works nicely in smaller classrooms too. It's very fascist, but wonderful all the same.
NS
A ploy regularly used by politics professors is to use the same exam questions year after year. The correct answers are new every year.
Not exactly what you're looking for, but on a history exam in high school I noticed someone copying off me, so I purposely got the entire exam wrong, and noted on the top of my exam what happened...
I worked several summers at PROMYS, a summer math camp for high school students. We weren't very concerned about cheaters, since all the courses were for fun, so we used the same exams every year.
One year, we counselors learned that a second year was selling copies of the exams. We were furious -- until we saw that he was actually selling the practice exam. The day before the test, when we passed out the practice exam to everybody, it was beautiful watching the faces of students who realized just what they'd spent their money on.
I don't really have an amusing anti-cheating strategy. As far as I'm concerned cheating should result in a student being automatically expelled from a program. Maybe at a high school level, it's something worthy of having fun with, but at a college level, plagiarism is almost criminal... and if you force students to sign that they have not cheated on the exam (which is pretty typical in my engineering courses), and they cheat anyway, I'm pretty sure it IS criminal.
Maybe it comes from being an engineering student, where there's more emphasis on the duty of an engineer to protect public safety through engineering ethics, rather than with a pure sciences student, but I don't think cheating's a laughing matter. It fundamentally breaks the trust given to a student that they are showing their own work and effort in their exams, and I don't think that trust ever comes back, or that it ever should. If I was teaching a course and found out that a student had cheated an exam, I would take it as a great personal insult.
Besides, while I can see the potential humor in screwing with the heads of students who cheat, I much prefer the warm smug feeling of seeing cheaters get absolutely demolished and sent packing. Then again, I'm kind of a jerk.
Sorry... I'm no fun.
(I did get a bit of a giggle out of the colored paper though)
Tell everyone you have anti-cheating snipers positioned around the room. Hire an actor to wear a few blood squibs and sit in the middle of the class.
As Math major/Physics minor in college 40 years ago, I struggled to work through the problems and never had the time to work out how to cheat. I guess the assumption is that given the right circumstances, everyone might cheat. So, unfortunately there have to be anti-cheating methods. Even software (like Adobe InDesign) provides the capability to produce tests using layers to produce different tests with same material.
Alex, having been at a school shooting incident in which a friend's father was killed (40+ years ago, no less), I find your suggestion in bad taste and not in the least helpful for this discussion.
I am a GCE Economics teacher. Well what we have so far are -
- Different colored question sets with different versions in same color.
- Similarly making different secret versions of questions, showing as same version on paper top.
- Scrambling the answer patterns of MCQs for students taking same test at different time.
- Carelessly leaving a fake forthcoming question copy around students, and present a different question on test day.
- Keep a thorough eye on the heads of the students standing on the back, very usual but effective.
- The SNIPER tricks....ooooppss!
- Using software e.g. InDesign, to manipulate the test paper layers.
Thanks to all for nice and funny thoughts. I might add some thoughts:
- Use few real/fake web cams hanging on top, inform students that anyone found dubious from computer video recordings would be penalised. One might use it for real.
- Check the answer scripts for repeatedly done same unique mistakes.
- Instruct students that they would be asked for oral answers randomly with reasoning in the following class that would effect exam results.
- Keeping few ethical and secret students to spy in exams, and later use their independent comments for cross reference; though may not correct always.
- For MCQs, ask to state reasons for each of their answers, and inform that the answer is correct only if reason is correct. This may reduce random answering short side picking. Imposing very strict exam time frame may also discourage wasting time to cheat.
- Inform students that they are being secretly penalized for moving heads or eyes around, -5% for each time, without notice.
- and finally one can always hire invisibility cloak from Mr. Potter and use that to randomly walk around the hall to catch cheathers. A jinx or curse that a cheater would have a black smoke over head might add up. (yeah, now i am getting haywire...!!!!)
Cheers