My only critique of the teacher here is not having a enough empathy for these students and spending far more energy trying to catch cheaters than address the fact that these students have gotten a raw deal.
I agree, except that this teacher did have tons of empathy for the students. That's pretty clear from the lengths they went to individualize the repercussions, offer second chances, and so on.
I suspect this teacher has perhaps a bit of fun catching cheaters? I'm not sure. They've written code to detect plagiarism in the past. They use a quiz/exam structure that's ripe for cheating: multiple chances for quiz retakes, long windows for exams, and question re-use between quizzes and exams. They wrote code to archive the chat log daily, identify students, and determine instances of cheating. They gave second chances, creating a new syllabus, after which cheating still occurred. Then they wrote this article.
So I agree - the teacher spent a disproportionate amount of time on the cheaters, which is unfair to the honest students.
Why not use cheat-resistant course material? They were able to restructure the second midterm exam this way - one question at a time, no backtracking, randomized order, and no question re-use. I suppose this is also time sink to combat cheating, but it seems more efficient than spending additional time filing reports and writing chat analysis code and so on.
I agree, except that this teacher did have tons of empathy for the students. That's pretty clear from the lengths they went to individualize the repercussions, offer second chances, and so on.
I suspect this teacher has perhaps a bit of fun catching cheaters? I'm not sure. They've written code to detect plagiarism in the past. They use a quiz/exam structure that's ripe for cheating: multiple chances for quiz retakes, long windows for exams, and question re-use between quizzes and exams. They wrote code to archive the chat log daily, identify students, and determine instances of cheating. They gave second chances, creating a new syllabus, after which cheating still occurred. Then they wrote this article.
So I agree - the teacher spent a disproportionate amount of time on the cheaters, which is unfair to the honest students.
Why not use cheat-resistant course material? They were able to restructure the second midterm exam this way - one question at a time, no backtracking, randomized order, and no question re-use. I suppose this is also time sink to combat cheating, but it seems more efficient than spending additional time filing reports and writing chat analysis code and so on.