After an unnecessary struggle (& a refusal to take any placement exams or participate in orientation activities), I am now enrolled as an undergraduate student taking a Computer Science intro course. A lot of the content is familiar because programming languages are pretty consistent over time. What’s weird is: 1. Being a student in a class with students that have taken my lab class before, 2. Having a higher terminal degree than the instructor, 3. the ethical and moral conflicts that come from sitting at the intersection of being faculty and student. Let’s get into it.
Academic Integrity & Me
We had our first exam last week and as it’s programming, we have to use our personal laptops and lockdown browser. Annoying but fine. The class takes place in 2 different classrooms and the one we took the exam in is stadium seating. I sit towards the back of the room because it put me at eye level with the projector. This is just to say, I’m far back but not in the last row.
The instructor asked us to put our cellphones face down either behind our laptops on the desk or next to us. Basically somewhere visible to her. Same with smartwatches etc. Cool. Makes sense. The exam starts and I watch a student in front of me pull out a *second* cell phone and take pictures of their screen. It’s a multiple choice, true/false, and fill in the blank timed exam. Now I’m staring in awe at the commitment to having 2 cell phones to cheat. Every time the instructor comes up to help someone, they slid it into the pocket away from the instructor.
Now I was stuck in the place of as a student, my stance is: that’s none of my business. You do you. As a faculty member and colleague, I felt a push to inform the faculty member of what was happening. Wouldn’t I want to know if there was a faculty member in my class watching a student cheat? Honestly, I don’t know. As a student, I try really hard to hide the fact that I’m a professor from the other students in the class that don’t know me.
The other uncomfortable truth I’m grappling with is the ever present urge to cheat. I was so frustrated by the first quiz that I started thinking about logging into the textbook publisher’s website and downloading the test bank that was clearly being used. Then I realized that was cheating. Every assignment I feel the urge to cheat and I’ve started to think about why. And it’s because it feels unfair. But I’ll get into this more in the Grades section.
Student Habits: Past & Present
I missed the first day of class. I was on a road trip with my family and figured it was going to be mostly syllabus review anyway. I’ll be fine. And I was for the most part.
I went to the second class and was comfortably like “Oh. I got this.” Then the third class hit. The instructor started talking about what we had covered previously and my brain seriously went, “I recognize NONE of this.” I had to spend a few minutes reviewing what we had done before I could remember any of the details to build on. First sign that I am no longer a late teen/early twenties student. That memory don’t do what it used to.
Our instructor told us we didn’t need to purchase the book so I didn’t. Then the first quiz was all vocabulary and since I didn’t have the book, I was hopeless…and pissed. We have lecture slides but some of the questions pulled very specific words that were only mentioned on one slide. It’s supposed to be open everything but we have to do it on a lockdown browser. Explain that to me Sherlock. It’s also the reason I was annoyed our in class exam was similar. I’m not good at vocab. I never have been.
I also forgot to study until the night before the exam and instantly forgot all the effective methods of studying/learning. So it’s been a learning journey in more than one way.
Grades...*Sad Face Here*
This class is graded traditionally and let me say that it has instantly spiked my anxiety any time I do any work in the course. When I submit assignments and I know that I’m right…yet the nervousness as I wait for the instructor to grade it and fear that maybe I’m not right. It’s ridiculous. Especially when you consider I already have a terminal degree. This is for personal enrichment not a degree. What does it matter if I get a C or an A?
The urge to cheat comes from feeling like most of the graded work is unfair. The quizzes are unfair because they are granular and based on the textbook that we were told we didn’t need to buy. You can argue that the answers can be inferred from the slides but that’s not helpful. I can’t help but wonder how much information is *not* in the slides that I’m going to be asked about on the quiz. It’s also stuff that isn’t mentioned in class. We spend class coding. In fact, for our exam practice all we did was code. And then we were told there was no coding on the exam.
It’s already frustrating being graded on work after years of not being graded. Add to it that it feels unfair and irrelevant to what I want to get out of the class and, yeah, I get why students cheat. I also feel a pressure to do well because one bad grade means I’ll be fighting my way back instead of trying to keep a grade. It’s all messed up and I hate it here.
PS – Yes, my TAs are having a blast watching me be a student and also helping me with the course. It’s continue to provide entertainment for all.