# Tag Info

28

It's not just one student. As mentioned in comments, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Various studies gauge the percent of college students who cheat at somewhere between 75% and 98%. I would recommend that you have in-class, proctored exams. That's the only way to ensure that one's math course is not, essentially, a fraud. You may even want to check ...

26

I think it is helpful to let students know that you are looking for their thinking while problem-solving, and not just answers. Then you can ask questions like: Find all of the points on a circle of radius $8$ that have a slope of $\frac{3}{4}$. so that they can explain their problem-solving. Even if they do end up using advanced calculators, they will ...

23

Some of Chegg's competitors are Studyblue, Course Hero, Slader, and Cramster. However, Chegg is the market leader by a mile. It's a little difficult to sort out which of these businesses actually sell solutions, because they don't admit they do that. For example, the NY Times did a softball interview recently with Chegg's CEO, where they asked, "Many ...

18

If you are teaching algebra or calculus courses, Mathway and Symbolab have algorithms that allow paying users to see full solutions with steps shown. The algorithms often do strange things that no human would do, which allows you to catch students who use them. For example I gave the following question: Use the comparison test to show that this series ...

13

My own experience is to not give any high-stakes take-home exam-like content (I'm not speaking of a paper, of course) in a lower-level course. There is too much incentive for even well-meaning students to cheat, and not in such egregious ways as you are mentioning. It's key to note that many students who do this either do not recognize it as cheating or ...

12

First off, I challenge the framing of the question. You seem to be seeking answers for the question How did the student get the correct answer from this work? Unfortunately, I don't think that there is any possible way to answer that question without being the student. Maybe they cheated. Maybe they got lucky. Maybe they did some work in their heads ...

11

As a student currently taking college Programming Fundamentals II and Pre-Calculus II, but having the experience of the world (33 years old, 8 year army vet), I can say that a student has significant incentives to cheat, if provided an opportunity. To fail and retake a course would be costly, due to the additional work, the tuition, and the books. I find ...

10

Do you give full credit for answers without clear work?? If you don't then I suggest you give partial credit and meet with the student in the guise of helping him write his work more clearly so that he can get full credit next time and possibly even a little more credit. Put the responsibility on him to explain how he got his answer and help him write what ...

9

Note: It's possible that in the future, Wolfram Alpha will improve and be able to answer the questions in this answer, so it's best to actually try them in Wolfram Alpha first. Use questions that involve conditional statements and generic expressions. For example: If $\lim_{x\to\infty} f(x)=1$, then what is $\lim_{x\to\infty}\frac{f(x)}{x}$ equal to? ...

7

Not organised sites like Chegg but I try to keep an eye on several sources. Freelance "teachers" who solve exercises, sometimes somehow disguised as classes - classes where your exercises are solved. They can be found by Googling the name of the subject and "exams", the name of the institution or the exercise. It's easier in languages ...

6

Some students will cheat. (So do some grownups.) In my experience it's not a large fraction, despite the studies that seem to say otherwise. I think I caught most of what went on in my classes. I was unwilling to forego the educational benefit of take home exams, group work and well thought out projects that could be honed and reassigned just to catch the ...

6

My school math teacher was very smart and I'll tell about his solution of (any) cheating problem. If anybody is suspected in cheating just call him to the desk and ask about doing same(or very similar) exercises. If one fails to do something, one has already done, it's cheating and if not, there is no reason to punish the person, because the one has got the ...

6

I think timed exams are a better way of assessing mastery of material than take homes. If you can't do it fast, under pressure, and with limited assistance*, than you don't really know the stuff the way you should. *And take homes are fraught with all kinds of aspects of outside assistance. P.s. And you ruin their nights and weekends by giving take homes....

5

Imagine a scenario where you don't have a hypothesis about your students' unwillingness to ask questions in class or during office hours. Your question may just boil down to: "How do you get students to interact with you in class, without expecting them to initiate?"Absent your hypothesis, you might: Ask them to (anonymously?) submit their answers to a ...

5

What if a day or two after the take-home test was turned in you gave a short in-class test that covered some of the same subject matter (very similar questions). You could use this to weight the take-home test. For example, you could say that you get the lesser of the grade on the take home and in-class tests. I suppose to be fair you might further say ...

5

4

How were the "cheggspert" (i.e. the person employed by chegg to solve students' exam questions) and my student able to locate the github repository containing this question? Here's a possible timeline: A student posts the question to Chegg. The Cheggster, who probably keeps a trove of solutions to real analysis problems, digs up the solution and sells ...

4

From the picture you gave, it seems like he wasn't cheating. The whole solution, including how he got there, is there, even though in a bad style and wrong in some places: He started by getting the left hand side on one fraction by multiplying the first one by $$\frac{x+2}{x+2}$$ and the second one by $$\frac{x-1}{x-1}.$$ This is the first line of the ...

3

I had a professor who had dealt with a similar situation, although in computer science, and dealt with it like this. The assigned homework was considerably more difficult than the tests, and group work was permitted for the homework. The tests were fairly trivial compared to the homework, not testing much more than "can you do the absolute bare minimum". The ...

3

I agree with much of what's already been said here already, but looking at the question from a different angle, you said: I've always had problems taking timed exams myself and find the anxiety crippling, so for this reason... Do you not think that this is a really good reason to get the students used to operating under these conditions? The "real" ...

3

In my Business Calculus classes, I have three standard in-class tests and four to five projects that they have one week to complete. The projects test the kind of more creative thinking that I think you feel you can better assess with your take home tests and the in-class tests evaluate more procedural, textbook-type questions. There's always the ...

3

My opinion here is that 44hrs is plenty of time for the course to be taught (based on most higher academic institution course lengths), but you are doing them a favour based on your experience, and unfortunately sometimes one person can ruin it for everyone. ****Putting that aside... The only other option you'd have (instead of changing to in-class exams), ...

2

Related rate word problem question with some geometry needed as part of the problem. But. I would caution you that if you are teaching weaker students, there is a problem in assigning tough problems in that you don't well evaluate their ability in basic methods. I would instead suggest alternatives like short duration (fixed time) remote exams. Also ...

2

Most in-class exams I have seen are indeed too long and, as it happens, essentially highly redundant. So, how about giving shorter exams which require a bit of thinking ---as opposed to "example duplication". The downside, of course, is that the instructor her/himself must not ... duplicate examples while teaching and that in fact the whole approach requires ...

2

One course I took on University had a simple approach on this: Everyone had to explain one of their answers in front of the class, and failure to do that appropriately resulted in the student loosing twice the points awarded for the question (thus a question omitted or only half-answered meant less points to be potentially lost, rewarding honesty). Of course ...

2

This is quite a simplistic approach to the one individual so forgive me if its too simple to be workable - but how about calling him in and putting the exact same exam paper in front of him and asking him to re do it? In general though, from a uni student's perspective, I recently received a take home exam from our online portal and although I didn't cheat ...

1

I'm a very firm believer of the idea that everybody needs to do his or her own work, whether it be homework, tests, exams or anything else. Let's start talking about homework: Nowadays many teachers are giving homework exercises, which students can "make" at home by filling in something using their computer. Yeah, right! When using such a system, you risk ...

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