The big problem confronting many of us right now is academic dishonesty: How do we make sure our students don’t cheat?

Here’s the easy answer: You can’t.

More specifically: Unless you intend to “Big Brother” your students and watch every move they make via webcam, it is impossible to prevent students from using unauthorized resources.

For example, there’s been some buzz about “lockdown browser” software: once a student starts the exam in a lockdown browser, they can’t open a new window and look up the answer. That works great…except that there are several smartphone apps (Symbolab and Socratic among others) that will allow students to take pictures of questions; the app will then produce a solution complete with steps. Students can then just copy the steps down onto paper, and they’ve “shown their work” (a traditional remedy against cheating).

So what can we do? The reality is there is nothing we can do to prevent this type of cheating. Add to that an important idea: Teachers are not policemen. None of us entered this profession because we got joy and satisfaction catching miscreants. None of us like the idea of having to monitor students to make sure they don’t cheat, and quite a few of us have used the line “If you cheat, you’re only hurting yourself.”

Still, the academic dishonesty issue is important: the student who sails through their classes with As may well become your doctor, and you’d like the reassurance that their academic performance reflects their competence. So what can we do?

I’ll pass on something I learned from my first years of teaching:

Always ask yourself “Why am I asking this question?”

In this case, let’s ask ourselves: Why do we care if students “look things up?”

Anyone remember the birth and death dates of James Monroe? How about Article 5 of the US Constitution? The speed of light (in m/s)? The 1735th decimal digit of e? In the real world, in our professional lives, we look things up all the time. If “education” is supposed to be training students for the “real world,” we should encourage looking things up.

“But they’ll need it for the next class.”

Ah, that’s a good point. Students will need to know how to solve quadratic equations for their next class.

But the number one criticism of math by everyone who’s not a mathematician? “I don’t see how this applies.” Remember the vast majority of math students are not going to become mathematicians. So while it’s true that a calculus teacher might want a student to solve a quadratic equation “by hand,” the engineering teacher just wants the student to design bridges that don’t collapse. The nursing teacher just wants student who correctly calculate drug doses. The marketing teacher just wants students who can find the correct price point for a product.

And when they get to the real world, their supervisor doesn’t care if they know the quadratic formula. They want the bridge that doesn’t collapse, the patient that doesn’t die, the marketing campaign that makes money. The ability to solve a quadratic equation “by hand” becomes a skill like knitting or brewing: it’s really neat when you can do it, but you still buy your clothes off-rack and buy beer at the packy store.

So stop worrying about academic honesty and focus on the real task: helping students learn. I’ll talk about that next time.

CUNY is going to be shut for another week or so as part of a “recalibration”.

The problem is that the sudden shift to online teaching has placed a burden on the collective infrastructure of society. Internet traffic has exploded so much, with everyone now video lecturing or putting materials online or checking their emails, and while we joke that every student has a smartphone that’s better than my laptop, the reality is that it takes more than a smartphone.

What this plague is going to reveal are all the little cracks in our society that have been masked by those near the top.

K-12 schools closed? Good idea. Except, for a “civilized country,” we have an embarrassingly large number of kids whose only meals of the day come from school lunches.

Online classes? Good idea. Except, for a “civilized country,” we have an embarrassingly bad broadband infrastructure in rural areas.

Perhaps the fundamental problem comes from the sentiment, begun by Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, that seniors are willing to die for their country:

https://www.snopes.com/ap/2020/03/25/texas-lieutenant-governor-says-us-should-get-back-to-work/

But that misses the point. It’s not whether you are willing to die for the country.

It’s whether the country is willing to kill you to make money.

Some people and some companies get it: they understand that human life is more valuable than cash flow.

Comast is offering a variety of free services: https://corporate.comcast.com/covid-19

Zoom has expanded the functionality of its free accounts: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2020/03/13/zoom-video-coronavirus-eric-yuan-schools/#618bd2594e71

Kahoot! has done something similar: https://kahoot.com/blog/2020/02/27/kahoot-free-access-schools-higher-education-coronavirus/

These things help, of course (and after the crisis, they’ll have a whole batch of new customers who’ve learned to rely on them, so what they’re doing is both altruistic and good business). But the fundamental problem remains our digital infrastructure. Free service from Comcast, with videoconferencing by Zoom and polling with Kahoot! won’t help the student trying to access the internet on cables put down in the 1990s.

Digital infrastructure is (in the 21st century) as fundamental to living as water and electricity. It’s as important as roads. It’s a critical as fire and police departments.

So the question you have to ask yourself is this: How much should the government support this critical part of society?

A tip from my long past days as an HTML coder: Things look different from the outside.

‘way, ‘way back in the day, when everyone who didn’t use Netscape used Mosaic (except for those oddballs who spoke ftp), the rule was: see how your web page looks on every browser available, because even though HTML was a standard, it appeared slightly differently on different browsers.

Many videoconferencing platforms provide you a window of how you appear to others. The problem is that this window is “local”, meaning that it’s using information that hasn’t passed through the internet. The problem is that if your internet connection is spotty or dies midcall, you won’t know it.

So here’s a quick tip: If it’s at all possible, join your own meeting from another account. That way you can see yourself exactly as others see you.

(Another quick tip: If you do this, make sure you mute the sound on the secondary device. Otherwise you’ll get some horrific feedback.)

CUNY has suspended all on-campus classes for the semester. The big question on everybody’s mind is: So how are we going to do exams?

Let me start with a basic assumption: Unless you are physically present, it is effectively impossible to prevent students from using disallowed resources on an exam. I don’t care what online activity monitoring software you want to use, students who want to cheat will cheat.

So what can be done? Some suggestions include having students do their work in front of a webcam, which might work as long as they don’t have “technical difficulties” (and let’s face it, we’ve all been on a videoconference where someone’s screen froze). And if a student accidentally knocks their camera over a and doesn’t fix it immediately, are we going to assume they’re cheating?

Thinking this over, it occurred to me that we’re trying to solve the wrong problem: trying to prevent students from cheating on an exam is not the problem we should be solving. Rather, the problem is making sure our exams reflect student understanding. If the exams are structured so they reflect student understanding, then it is (by definition) impossible to cheat.

There’s an old saying in math (and, I’m sure, many other disciplines): the best way to learn the subject is to teach it. To that end, here’s one possibility. Imagine that part of the assessment is having the student create a short video where they solve the problem while explaining every step they take.

Why does this work? I don’t know; I haven’t tried it. But why do I think it will work? There are many places on the web you can type in a question like “What is the derivative of f(x) = x^3 sin (ln x)”, and a handy little CAS (computer algebra system) will spit out the answer. In some cases, you can pay for a step-by-step solution. If the exam has a question like “What is the derivative of f(x) = x^3 sin(ln x)”, it’s easy enough for a student to cut-and-paste the solution.

But now make them explain the steps of the solution. At this point, the student who has cut-and-pasted the answer won’t be able to do much more than say “That’s the rule that you follow to get the next step.” If they can’t provide an explanation of how they got from A to B, it’s a safe bet they don’t know what they’re doing.

Will this work? I don’t know. But at this point, anything is better than nothing…

If you’re planning on videoconferencing, one of the things you might want to do is construct a screen so that students won’t be able to see the piles of laundry or undone grading behind you, and if you live with somebody (a spouse, kids, feral dingos), they won’t distract students by walking behind you. So here are step-by-step instructions for making an improvised greenscreen for about $25 plus the cost of a bedsheet. The only tool you need is a saw.

First, you’ll need to get some supplies. I used 1″ PVC, available at any hardware store. You’ll need four 10 foot segments. You’ll also need some connectors: two elbows and two T-junctions. Finally (and optionally) you can get some end caps:

Now cut 3 foot segments off the end of four of the PVC pipes.

If you got the end caps, cap one end.

Now attach two of these to the opposite ends of the “T” junctions.

Remember you cut 3 feet off of a 10 foot pipe? That leaves 7 feet. Take one of the 7-foot pipes and put elbows on both ends. (The picture shows two of the 7-foot pipes, but don’t join them yet)

Now take the (unelbowed) 7-foot pipes and join them to the T junctions. These will give you the uprights:

Now for the only difficult part: while you can probably do this on your own, with a chair and some choice expletives, it’s probably easier if you get someone to help. If you’re living with somebody, you can draft them (the feral dingos aren’t so helpful; I recommend the high school age kid who’s taller than you…).

Take the bar with the two elbows, and attach it to the two uprights. Then hang a curtain over the top:

And voila (random professor not included)! You now have a greenscreen and can webcast like the best of us.