I think this kind of approach is the root of (the US's) hustle culture. Instead of receiving a fair score, you get a zero and need to "hustle" and challenge your teacher.

The teacher effectively filtered out the shy boys/girls who are not brave enough to "hustle." Gracefully.

I don't even think it is about shyness. Some professors do not respond well to being challenged on every possible exam question.

The time spent challenging exam grades is usually better spent studying for the next exam. I've never gotten a significant grade improvement from it.

Nah, the professor wasn't American (as is often the case) and she had a tricky situation. She had strong reasons to believe people were cheating and had to sort out who did and who did not in a swift way.

This has nothing to do with American Hustle culture and just with that professor's judgment.

This is completely incorrect. Hustle culture is what made kids cheat in the first place.

She didn't ask them to challenge them, she asked them additional questions. The test already asks them questions.

If you are really shy, a culture where no one cheats is far better because your actual ability and intelligence shines through

They had to challenge her first. So, yes, challenging her was the only way to get better grade. And you still knew im advance what questions are giing to be.

Cheaters and non cheaters were punished in exactly the same way. Effectively cheating gave you an advantage and being shy gave you disadvantage.

> And once you went to complain about your grade

Only if she advertised that option somehow. I worked two jobs in college, I didn't take time off to go complain about my grades.

Not to mention there'd be at least a few students too timid to challenge the teacher, even if they knew they got it right.

That's a valid and useful lesson, especially for the shy students. Arguably, it's probably more important than whatever the question on the test was.

The world at large rarely accommodates shy people. Coping skills are essential, even if they are unpleasant.

Only if she advertised it somehow. The dick version is, of course, to tell the class that “you know, until now, if you had come in to challenge your grade I would have let you fix it. Too late now!”

Except they did not learned to not be shy. There was no such lesson. This is like saying that stealing from a student is ok, because it is teaching them thieves exist.

They learned that cheating gives advantage to the cheating individual. They also learned that reporting cheating harms them and non cheaters.

Lol, in 3rd grade algebra, a teacher called 2 of us in for cheating. She had us take the test again, I got the same exact horribly failing score (a 38%) and the cheater got a better score, so the teacher then knew who the cheater was. He just chose the wrong classmate to cheat of of.

I don't get it. If she called you too it was because your results were good, no? Who cheats to get a bad result?

I assume that the cheating student didn't know that he was copying answers from someone who was doing poorly. It was third graders after all; one wouldn't necessarily expect them to be able to pick the best target every time.

Oh. That would have never crossed my mind! So the cheater student was copying from GP who had worse results, and when they both redid it all by themselves the cheater answered correctly, and GP did not.

How the heck is that even possible? :o

> How the heck is that even possible? :o

Because what the cheater is trying to accomplish is to avoid having to think.

It's an act motivated by either laziness, apathy or rebellion (or some combination thereof). Not motivated by trying to get a good grade.

The students had identical answers, I presume

Which, in a subject like algebra, is extremely suspicious ("how could both of them get the exact same WRONG answer?").

> Which, in a subject like algebra, is extremely suspicious ("how could both of them get the exact same WRONG answer?").

In Germany, the traditional sharp-tongued answer of pupils to the question "How could both of you get the exact same WRONG answer (in the test)?" is: "Well, we both have the same teacher." :-)

I know the US has fallen behind in math, but where are you taking algebra in 3rd grade? We didn't get it until 8th..

My son is learning algebra in 2nd grade. They don’t call it “algebra” yet nor mention “variables”, but they’re working on questions like solving “4 + ? = 9”.

He just goes to our local public elementary school.

Yeah I guess technically that's algebra but at that age it is based on memorization (you just learn that 4 + 5 = 9) and you're not actually using algebra to solve the problem e.g. "subtract 4 from both sides of the equation."

True, and it’s only 2nd grade, but it’s clearly setting the foundation for learning algebra properly.

Of course, when he asked for help with his practice problems I had no idea how they were meant to solve it so I taught him to solve it algebraically.

Except the power imbalance: position, experience, social, etc. meant that the vast majority just took the zero and never complained or challenged the prof. Sounds like your typical out-of-touch academic who thought they were super clever.

It's an incredible abuse of power to intentionally mark innocent students' answers wrong when they're correct. Just to solve your own problem, that you may very well be responsible for.

Knowing the way a lot of professors act, I'm not surprised, but it's always disheartening to see how many behave like petty tyrants who are happy to throw around their power over the young.

If you cheat, you should get a zero. How is this controversial.

Since high school, the expectation is that you show your work. I remember my high school calculus teacher didn't even LOOK at the final answer - only the work.

The nice thing was that if you made a trivial mistake, like adding 2 + 2 = 5, you got 95% of the credit. It worked out to be massively beneficial for students.

The same thing continued in programming classes. We wrote our programs on paper. The teacher didn't compile anything. They didn't care much if you missed a semicolon, or called a library function by a wrong name. They cared if the overall structure and algorithms were correct. It was all analyzed statically.

I understand both that this is valuable AND how many (most?) education environments are (supposed) to work, but 2 interesting things can happen with the best & brightest:

1. they skip what are to them the obvious steps (we all do as we achieve mastery) and then get penalized for not showing their work.

2. they inherently know and understand the task abut not the mechanized minutia. Think of learning a new language. A diligent student can work through the problem and complete an a->b translation, then go the other way, and repeat. Someone with mastery doesn't do this; they think within one language and then only pass the contextual meaning back and forth when explicitly required.

"showing your work" is really the same thing as "explain how you think" and may be great for basics in learning, but also faces levels of abstraction as you ascend towards mastery.

It's like with the justice system: if you have to choose between the risk of jailing an innocent and the risk letting a guilty person go free, you choose to let a guilty person go free. All the time.

Unless you're 100% sure that a student cheated, you don't punish them. And you don't ask them to prove they're innocent.

It's extremely reasonable to ask student to show their work because tests are testing understanding. The understanding IS the work.

> If you cheat, you should get a zero. How is this controversial.

Because the teacher was knowingly giving zeroes to students who didn't cheat, and expecting them to take it upon themselves to reverse this injustice.

Story doesn't make sense.

> the final exam where somehow people got their hands on the hardest question of the exam.

They got the question but not the answer so they had to work it out before the test. They couldn't explain it later?

It's unstated as to whether they got the answer as well.

This is a nice approach. The students who know the material, or even who manually prepare before seeing the prof achieve the objective of learning.

It's not great for the teacher though. They're the ones who will truly suffer from the proliferation of AI - increased complexity of work around spotting cheating 'solved' by a huge increase in time pressure. Faced with that teachers will have three options: accept AI detection as gospel without appeals and be accused of unfairness or being bad at the job by parents, spend time on appeals to the detriment of other duties leading to more accusations of being bad at the job, or leave teaching and get an easier (and probably less stressful and higher paid) job. Given those choices I'd pick the third option.

4. Use AI to talk to the student to find out if they understand.

Tests were created to save money, more students per teacher, we're just going back to the older, actually useful, method of talking to people to see if they understand what they've been taught.

You weren't asked to write an essay because someone wanted to read your essay, only to intuit that you've understood something

I really believe this is the way forward, but how do you make sure the AI is speaking to the student rather than to another AI impersonating the student? You could make it in person but that's a bit sad.

You make it about the student and the material in all ways. There are teaching frameworks and methedologies that help.

> 4. Use AI to talk to the student to find out if they understand

Personally I don't believe that any of the problems caused by AI are going to be solved by "more AI"

Technology doesn't solve the problems created by technology on it's own.

People do learn how to use the web, social media, mobile devices to ultimately work for them or against them.

> People do learn how to use the web, social media, mobile devices to ultimately work for them or against them

How is this working out in practice? Every piece of technology is absolutely adversarial nowadays and people are getting ground to bits by it.

> Tests were created to save money

I'm skeptical. Tests are a way of standardizing the curriculum and objectively determining if the lessons were learned.

Both can be true at the same time. You outlined the objective, the money is an extra constraint (and let's be honest, when isn't money an extra constraint?)

Tests are a way of largely seeing if a response to a question was memorized.

The lesson of how to swim sometimes only comes in applying the learning.

> Tests are a way of largely seeing if a response to a question was memorized.

Some tests require memorized knowledge, like what is the stall speed of your airplane. Some tests require reasoning skills, like what is the stress in this beam.

These are different levels of learning.

There are learning frameworks that explain it all well enough.

Learning what something is, vs applying what you learned has different terminology in the learning world, but not everyone might use that.

You were also asked to write an essay because to learn to write you have to ... write.

Or option 4 (a lot more likely in my opinion), pretend nothing is happening.

option 4b: resolve the teacher from being the gatekeeper who has to "prove" knowledge has been imparted, accepted and consolidated? It's your idea, but with explicit candor and not a sly wink :)