I agree. But there is a "gold rush" out there in the academic world where the idea is to offload more and more work to "on-line."
My son just started school at a respectable US university.
Two of his five courses are entirely on-line.
A third course (genetics) is done in person, but the exams and quizzes are done on-line.
I overhead three undergraduates talking about how easy it is to defeat the anti-cheating software for their on-line courses ("The professors don't review the videos...Just hold your phone out of view of your laptop camera and google the answers...I've never been caught ...).
It was disheartening and I told my son to avoid on-line classes in the future because he was just putting himself at a disadvantage.
Pretty much confirms what we already know: standards are declining, more unqualified students are attending university because the job market demands it, colleges make bank on tuition and don't want to stop the gravy train. Now online even offers another way for administrators to cut costs while reducing the quality - but no one really cares. Most students want their degree and want to get out now - not blaming them, they're playing the game.
Even a decade ago I was seeing obvious cheating when I was TAing classes. International students would hand in an essay with clearly broken english, then follow that up with essays with complex, well written english that was obviously not in their "voice" or even in the same intellectual ballpark as exhibited in the in-person class and discussions. Even pre-internet, essay writing was widely regarded as " library stenography" by students.
The meat of the matter really comes down to the professors and how they approach the exams. Generalized essay prompts are hilariously easy to cheat on; complex hyper specific prompts that extend on something specifically discussed in the class are far harder. On-line classes, by their "mass distributional" nature (ie, save money by making them reusable) are almost by definition far more generalized than you would want.
> The meat of the matter really comes down to the professors and how they approach the exams.
Until the professor actually asks real questions and grades them as they should be graded. Then the students complain, and the grades are "renormalized" or whatever euphemism they use. And certainly in the US, students have a lot of influence, since they're the paying clients. It's really not surprising that employers ask academic titles for so many entry-level jobs.
> My son just started school at a respectable US university.
> I told my son to avoid on-line classes in the future because he was just putting himself at a disadvantage.
At a disadvantage for what?
For learning the material - sure, when an easy avenue for cheating with obvious incentives is available, it's unreasonable to expect people not to take advantage of it. Also, I expect that teachers have significant incentives to reduce their lecture efforts - why read the room, modify the lecture in response to Q&A, and tailor curriculum to the actual class progress, when you can just push "play" on the recording from last semester?
On-line classes give him an advantage for getting a piece of paper from a respectable US university, however - less work, same piece of paper, same results as far as job eligibility and resume eye-catchers...
I'm sure you enjoy being contrarian, but I also suspect you know precisely what I meant.
In the short-term, yeah, what's the big deal? But in the long-term, this devalues the courses and the degrees.
It's not in the long-term interest of the universities to behave this way because the course they offer are, ostensibly, a way of determining who understands the material and who doesn't.
Also some people have hard time breaking the rules even when they know that everyone else is breaking those rules and they are unlikely to get caught. We probably want to discourage systems that give cheaters advantage over honest people.
I agree. But there is a "gold rush" out there in the academic world where the idea is to offload more and more work to "on-line."
My son just started school at a respectable US university. Two of his five courses are entirely on-line. A third course (genetics) is done in person, but the exams and quizzes are done on-line.
I overhead three undergraduates talking about how easy it is to defeat the anti-cheating software for their on-line courses ("The professors don't review the videos...Just hold your phone out of view of your laptop camera and google the answers...I've never been caught ...).
It was disheartening and I told my son to avoid on-line classes in the future because he was just putting himself at a disadvantage.