[lit-ideas] Re: lit-ideas The Shadow Scholar
- From: John Wager <jwager@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 14:25:46 -0600
Donal McEvoy wrote:
. . .John Wager, a man incapable of a dishonest thought, nevermind deed, feels
those under his tutelage are less cheating than preceding generations, whereas
I - a practiced cheat - think this cannot be so because the facilities for
cheating have so much improved since my day, almost to the point where
ingenuity and daring are no longer called for. Nowadays there is such a
terrific amount of material simply waiting to be cut and pasted from the web. .
. .
I resemble that remark! In fact, I have often -- make that almost
always -- tried to cheat my students when they take a multiple choice
quiz in one of my classes. (If the idea of a philosophy teacher giving
multiple choice quizzes seems even more outrageous than the article on
cheating, or the morality of the teacher cheating on a test, well,
that's another message exchange.) I almost always tell the class before
the quiz that I will sell them "all the correct answers to the multiple
choice questions for a quarter." Someone usually bites. "All the
correct answers are 'a.' 'b,' 'c,' 'd,' and 'e.'" I tell them. Only
once has this been met with outrage from a student who demanded that I
give the correct numbers of the questions that accompanied the answers.
For another quarter, he got "The questions are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, . . . "
Why would you trust a cheater is the obvious lesson here. (Less obvious
is that the teacher seems to be a cheater, and thus, untrustworthy, but
nobody's ever called me on that, yet.)
I must say that in my experience mostly with introductory level
students, anybody who I have actually observed and "caught" cheating has
never made it through the whole class to get a grade; they give up
before the end. So I usually tell students that if I see them cheat and
do NOT call them on it, it's because I expect that they won't make it
through the class anyway.
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