I gave my students a take home exam over spring break. (This is normal where I teach) One of the questions was particulary difficult. It came down to a factor of three in the solution. That factor inexplicably appeared with no justification on many of their exams. I intend to have the students I suspect of cheating come to my office to solve the problem on the board. What would you do?

Edit: I gave them the Tuesday before spring break until the Thursday after. I didn’t want it to be right before or right after.

When I say normal I mean giving take home exams.

  • Omega_HaxorsEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    The way I see it either you get something or you don’t. If you’re making mistakes it’s because some fundamental skill isn’t there and all repetition is going to do is entrench you further in whatever bad model you already have. Yes it gets you marks in class but that won’t transfer to the real world. For a personal example, the way I count in base 10 goes from 1-3, 5, and then 10. I don’t actually have a mental model to count 4s, 6s, 7s, 8s, or 9s and because I spent a good amount of my formative years getting by without it, that bad model is now entrenched in my mind and I have a really hard time counting a lot of numbers even though better models exist. Got me great grades, though.

    EDIT: For ones I go Inc. Twos is IncInc, Threes are a somewhat awkward IncIncInc, I can’t string four Incs so 4 is impossible. Fives is just a Even/Odd modulo followed by 10 which is just an Inc in the next place. I created a model that works off of an even-odd tree with multiplication. I wasn’t able to parse it mentally but I did program it into a machine once and it was insanely efficient. It’s very easy to find out if a value is going to be even or odd based on its inputs being even or odd, and once you figure that out you’ve halved the possible values. Turns out that’s actually what modern-day ALUs do (with carry bits) in order to maximize processing speed.