OT: 83 OSU students accused of cheating via social media app
Ohio State University has accused 83 of its students of cheating by using the GroupMe app to work on classwork together.
The app, which lets users send chats to large groups of people simultaneously, is permitted to be used by the school's rules, but is subject to the same scrutiny as any other form of communication.
Sounds like they started using it as a work-around. No students names have been released, and no football players or other athletes have been implicated in the article.
Link: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/11/13/scandal-rocks-ohio-state-univers…
November 13th, 2017 at 2:28 PM ^
MSU has jumped recently. They used to be second to last and in the 100's but they've made some gains the last couple of years.
November 13th, 2017 at 11:53 PM ^
As much as we like to make fun, there really aren't any "bad" traditional Big Ten schools.
November 13th, 2017 at 12:29 PM ^
Was Daniel Capron involved?
November 13th, 2017 at 12:29 PM ^
November 13th, 2017 at 12:30 PM ^
November 13th, 2017 at 12:43 PM ^
Yeah, except when there's 83 people on a thread, it's easy to always just get the answers and never do the work.
November 13th, 2017 at 12:32 PM ^
Is this true? Could this possibly be any worse for OSU? Now granted it doesnt involve the football team in any way shape or form and basically just reports that students have found a new and creative way to do what students have all done since time and formal education began, but still. IT HAPPENED AT OHIO STATE!!!!!
Even more shocking I believe the report also when on to say that 65 of the 83 cheaters didnt eat breakfast regularly as well and if memory serves that's the most important meal of the the day.
This is bad. Really, really bad.
November 13th, 2017 at 1:45 PM ^
November 13th, 2017 at 12:42 PM ^
Can someone use it to easily find and contact attractive coeds that just might happen to have some "daddy issues"?
Asking for a friend.
November 13th, 2017 at 12:43 PM ^
November 13th, 2017 at 12:42 PM ^
Only hurts them in the long run.
November 13th, 2017 at 12:43 PM ^
Can (and probably does) happen anywhere.
November 13th, 2017 at 12:45 PM ^
November 13th, 2017 at 12:50 PM ^
I guess I'd need to know more about the violations to have an opinion. If it was students working together on a problem set, that's one thing. If it's one guy getting all the answers and them messaging everyone else with the answers, that's another.
At the same time, people cheat all the time. I was a TA a decade and a half ago for an introductory EECS class and the number of ways people cheated would surprise you. And I know this will burst some CS kids' beliefs about their cleverness, but usually it was pretty obvious. 3-4 students would submit code with the same spelling error in a comment, a particularly novel way of manipulating images would be repeated a couple of times by students across the grade spectrum, guys pulling C's up until the second-to-last project would complete the hardest assignment 2 days early and with no bugs, a group of students in the middle of the exam suddenly talking (loudly) in a native tongue and then everyone scribbling an answer at the same time, etc. But my feeling was always that people make mistakes under pressure, and in the end your level of competence sort of showed.
November 13th, 2017 at 12:50 PM ^
As I recall, you could talk about how to get the solution together. But then everyone had to do their own work to submit. That type of collaboration worked in groups of 2-5 in my experience, but using a message app to "collaborate" with 83 students is definetly sharing solutions not discussing how to get the solution.
I took EECS 280 the same semester as my brother, and I remember we worked on our projects "together" but that was mostly just us sitting next to each other and bouncing ideas off one another. Occaisionally we'd look at each other screens, but it was never to direct copy off one another. We'd talk about the higher level code structure and function prototypes, but the actual coding was done independently. He had already had an internship where he wrote code so he was a better programmer at the time, ended up getting a half letter grade better than I did. Good times.
November 13th, 2017 at 12:59 PM ^
A few were caught writing on their hands too:
November 13th, 2017 at 1:21 PM ^
After this illicit online collaboration, 83 tosu students now know the exact location of Waldo.
November 13th, 2017 at 1:35 PM ^
Problem is, if stupid copies from stupid, the answer is still stupid!!
GO BLUE!!
November 13th, 2017 at 1:39 PM ^
you can buy the app at dave brandon's (former?) place of business.
November 13th, 2017 at 1:50 PM ^
Stay classy Columbus!!!
November 13th, 2017 at 1:52 PM ^
Take a stroll through the ugli or the fishbowl, you'll see plenty of "collaborating"
November 13th, 2017 at 2:27 PM ^
Cheating in colleges, especially online, is comically out of control. I've gone back to school recently and I was simply appalled at the scope and unapologetic nature of it.
On a possibly related note as someone who routinely hires college gradutes, the quality of candidates has dropped exponentially over the past 6-7 years. The failure rate on my technical exam in interviews is nearing roughly 90% (context: the failure rate used to be closer to 50%). While the sample size is rather small (several hundred interviews), I think it's enough to show a trend and something my peers have mentioned as well.
November 13th, 2017 at 2:33 PM ^
November 13th, 2017 at 3:13 PM ^
November 13th, 2017 at 4:14 PM ^
If UNC got nothing then this is not a thing either.
November 13th, 2017 at 9:29 PM ^
November 13th, 2017 at 11:57 PM ^
Wow, I hope we defend Ohio State this well on November 25th.