When I was in high school, the most common cheating was "borrowing" homework answers. Cheating on a test was a much bigger deal, and I can only recall one instance where I knew of people cheating on a test.
By all accounts, cheating is much more prevalent in high schools these days. So far in my teaching career (3 months), I have caught and referred two students for cheating on a test, and there were two more that escaped for lack of hard evidence. It creates quite the dilemma for a teacher. Should I...
A) Make my tests as cheat-proof as possible. This creates problems in its own right - more work creating and grading multiple copies of the test, photocopying students' answer sheets to ensure they don't change them, strict rules about bathroom breaks and what students can and cannot do after they're done with the exam, calculator and cell phone monitoring, and constant vigilance.
OR
B) Create "normal" tests and make students take ownership for their own behavior.
I'd love to be able to use option B - I feel like high school should be "practice" for real life, and students of that age should be able to make their own ethical decisions. But if a student is caught cheating, there are major consequences, including failing a course for an entire semester and notification of any college they may have already been accepted to. So, what to do?
2 comments:
I think the lack of comments shows how difficult this quandry is. Could you construct questions such that the answer had both a definitive, quantitative part and a more creative 'how i went about solving this problem' part? Much harder to grade, but would be difficult to fudge, wouldnt it? And perhaps give even a wrong answer some credit for approaching a problem correctly. And very little credit, if any, for not explaining how one got there. not having studied any physics whatsoever, i wonder if this is even workable.
mother-in-law, who is glad she is not dealing with this issue
On topic
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