It has been more than 40 years since I personally had to deal with this BS.
The stories I hear from my children confirm what you say. One result seems to have been students cooperating online to do homework. That seems to be impossible to police. For sure that would have been “cheating” when I was in school, but it seems there is no practical alternative for students who want to get decent grades. Perhaps peer pressure makes students try to contribute to the group effort, which might ensure that most of them learn some of the material. There may be positive effects—students to some extent specialize in doing homework in subjects they find easy, and get extra help on subjects they find hard. That could be a good thing (there’s always a tension between exploiting natural talents and being “rounded”).
AFAICT this doesn’t seem to have reduced the amount students actually learn. But I worry about the effect on standards of probity (but have no evidence that there has in fact been a negative effect so far).
The simplest solution for school administrators might be to insist that teachers grade assignments personally (no outsourcing to students or the Internet) and promptly—within 48 hours of receiving the homework.
The students themselves could police that, and it would naturally place some limits on how much homework the teachers can assign.
How would students police that, exactly? Could you elaborate?
Also, coordination was tried, like when I made a deal with a friend named Griffin to do a homework exchange, but parents shut that down because that’s considered plagiarism and “cheating is wrong”.
I occasionally did homework swaps, and more often let friends copy off me. Such practices were rampant at my school, and I went to a small nerd high school. Your mistake was letting anyone except the person involved know about the trade.
By policing that, I mean if the students don’t get the graded homework back in 48 hours, they can complain to administrators and parents, who can pressure the teacher. This assumes the administrators decide to make and enforce the 48 hour rule.
Re coordination, I’ve seen kids using “group chat” on Facebook or similar. In some schools (good ones) it seems to be de rigueur.
It has been more than 40 years since I personally had to deal with this BS.
The stories I hear from my children confirm what you say. One result seems to have been students cooperating online to do homework. That seems to be impossible to police. For sure that would have been “cheating” when I was in school, but it seems there is no practical alternative for students who want to get decent grades. Perhaps peer pressure makes students try to contribute to the group effort, which might ensure that most of them learn some of the material. There may be positive effects—students to some extent specialize in doing homework in subjects they find easy, and get extra help on subjects they find hard. That could be a good thing (there’s always a tension between exploiting natural talents and being “rounded”).
AFAICT this doesn’t seem to have reduced the amount students actually learn. But I worry about the effect on standards of probity (but have no evidence that there has in fact been a negative effect so far).
The simplest solution for school administrators might be to insist that teachers grade assignments personally (no outsourcing to students or the Internet) and promptly—within 48 hours of receiving the homework.
The students themselves could police that, and it would naturally place some limits on how much homework the teachers can assign.
How would students police that, exactly? Could you elaborate?
Also, coordination was tried, like when I made a deal with a friend named Griffin to do a homework exchange, but parents shut that down because that’s considered plagiarism and “cheating is wrong”.
I occasionally did homework swaps, and more often let friends copy off me. Such practices were rampant at my school, and I went to a small nerd high school. Your mistake was letting anyone except the person involved know about the trade.
Yeah, my high school was a lot of teamwork, and the university even more so.
The right thing to tell the parents is “we are going to learn together”.
“Want to study together? ” was code for “want to split up the problems and copy off each other?”.
By policing that, I mean if the students don’t get the graded homework back in 48 hours, they can complain to administrators and parents, who can pressure the teacher. This assumes the administrators decide to make and enforce the 48 hour rule.
Re coordination, I’ve seen kids using “group chat” on Facebook or similar. In some schools (good ones) it seems to be de rigueur.