My students cheated... A lot • crumplab

https://crumplab.com/articles/blog/post_994_5_26_22_cheating/index.html This is the tale of a University Professor who must be a goddarn boomer or something, idk. It's hard for me to see someone with the programming chops to do all the data collection, analysis, and automation of penalties/forms be such a goddarn idiot who not only thought his students weren't cheating before, wouldn't go on a snitch hunt when the cheating is revealed, and also unironically believed they would stop cheating once he asked them to.

The highlight of the story for me is in part 5 when he asks people to write an apology letter saying they won't cheat anymore. One fricking idiot copy-pasta's an apology they found online. They literally tried to cheat on the "sorry for cheating, I won't do it again" essay. The professor emails them back a link of where they plagiarized their apology from, and the student writes back "no, I actually stole it from this other site.

The tweet for some reactions: https://twitter.com/MattCrumpLab/status/1529896172231458816

As one Twitter User summarizes: "It reads like the university pedagogy equivalent of the world's greatest detective who also happens to be the world's most credulous probation officer." https://twitter.com/RogueWPA/status/1531700754846654466

Others tie it to the collapse of University standards over the last half a century: https://twitter.com/kitten_beloved/status/1531406440816029696 Following that thread leads to some juicy takes like https://twitter.com/MrGeorgeFrancis/status/1528352527397314561 and his blogpost https://georgefrancis.substack.com/p/imposter-syndrome-is-among-us?sd=fs&s=r That post includes this hilarious tweet, with the quote "Responses to the tweet were in denial and can be characterised by the internet jargon ‘seethe and cope’":

It’s so funny when I read academics (women) write about “imposter syndrome.” I had the exact opposite feeling, like I was the only insightful and serious person and everyone else was doing fake stuff. Seems like the imposter syndrome people should trust their instincts. https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1527689272119070720

Another thing teaching related if you're in the mood for more WORDS WORDS WORDS: I managed to track down a mysterious memoir that had been mostly-purged from the respectable part of the internet, hunting down a ghost from @collectijism 's memories https://rdrama.net/post/25729/someone-get-me-out-of-this/2004316?context=8#context leading to https://degalantha.livejournal.com/4575.html which is the "lived experience" of a public school teacher who taught mostly black kids and came away with the impression that they're all irredeemably dumb as bricks, and he's tired of pretending they're not. One thing that amuses me about this sort of stuff, besides the Lee Jussim angle of "ok, but stereotype accuracy is real", is that I actually have no idea if people are reasonably good at gauging the intelligence of the people around them. I've been safely cordoned off from normies for most of my life thanks to the gifted programs of public schools, and it was always a shock when I interacted with dumber people, but I think I stopped interacting with dumb people irl for at least 12 years now, besides the most minimal stuff like buying groceries. I feel like it's pretty easy to tell within an hour-long conversation with someone if they're dumb, but I'm not sure how accurate that actually is, because we don't all walk around with our IQ's tattooed on our heads. I feel like I wouldn't even know where to meet a dumb person. Despite all the shit you can talk about redditors or tweeters, or whatever, they're all still self-selected to be the kinds of people who can read and write at an 8th grade level, meaning they're above the 50th percentile of the US: https://www.wyliecomm.com/2021/08/whats-the-latest-u-s-literacy-rate/ . Dumb people are likely completely invisible to me. I am very curious on if any of the education academics that think the issue is sociocultural differences that impede black performance are like me: totally bubbled off, and therefore completely unable to tell if a post like this is a horrible "racist screed against black students" or "literally just how it is, and likely will be for a long time".