I had a discussion this weekend regarding our educational system and it reminded me of a post I made at the Volokh Conspiracy regarding cheating in school. So I don’t have to go searching for it again, I’m going to archive it here…

Posted on 05-18-2006 at 11:52am

Ahh, nothing like a good old fashioned argument about cheating in school. It is so refreshing to see that the arguments haven’t changed much at all since, well, the beginning of public education! Lets have a quick review of the “problem” and what most people think of as “solutions”:

The Problem: Students cheat. They find new ways to do it all the time. Every time one form of cheating is stamped out, these little bastards come up with a new one. When will the madness end?!? If these students are so clever and intelligent, why don’t they just spend their mental resources on actually learning things?!?

In the year 2106, people will still be complaining about this.

Proposed Solution #1: Technological warfare! Every time the students come up with a high tech way to cheat, the teachers should come up with a high tech way to beat it. Teachers should spend as much time thinking about ways to defeat cheating as the students think about new ways to cheat!

Of course, in order for this to work the teachers would have to have as much at stake as the kids.

Proposed Solution #2: Harsher punishments! The punishment for cheating should be so harsh that students would have to be insane to cheat.

A punishment so harsh that only a teenager with a penchant for risk-taking behavior and a lot at stake would dare to cheat! Hell, with stakes that high a student would have to spend more time studying ways to not get caught than studying for a test. Insane I tell you!

Proposed Solution #3: Outsource anti-cheating mitigation and discovery to a 3rd party. Teachers don’t have the time or resources to bother with trying to stop cheaters. It is much better to increase tuition and taxes to pay for private enterprises that specialize in stopping and catching cheaters.

Of course, a 3rd party will always have the students best interests in mind. They’ll work to permanently solve the cheating problem so that they won’t be needed in the future.

My crazy idea: How about we stop using grades as a measure of the value of a student and start using tests, papers, and quizzes for their intended purpose: Knowledge gap remediation (i.e. find out what the student missed and fill the holes in their knowledge). If we continue to use a student’s past errors as a measure of their academic achievements, what message are we sending? That the grade is more important than the knowledge.