Would you like some pumpkin with that?

Cheating. It's the bane of every teacher and it's something I struggle with. Being an economist, I realize there's a trade off. I could vigorously guard against every possibility for cheating, but it'd be costly for me. COMPLETELY new tests every semester (actually for every section of every class), a total randomization of seating order for each test, extensive hovering, etc. On the other hand, I could just ignore it completely (as my favorite lit teacher did in college) and pretend it doesn't exist. Like most, I choose a middle ground. [Oh, quick point. I know some who do the completely new test approach, but that involves almost complete reliance on publisher provided test banks and those things just suck.]

I'll admit that I get a little lazy about recycling test questions from semester to semester. I rationalize that by theorizing that we're a community college/commuter school, so there's not THAT much opportunity for test files, etc. I'm not a complete idiot, though, and I use certain questions from semester to semester as a sort of cheating barometer. These are questions that students often miss (because they've overlooked a crucial "tweak" to a central concept perhaps) and so I look for situations where an unusually large number of students get those questions right.

Now what would you do if you were a student who had access to old exams that you thought would be of benefit in your class? Smart students would keep the tests to themselves and use the info prudently. You know, only share with your "best bud" and make sure you miss a few questions just in case. I nailed a couple of students last summer (when the compressed time frame makes us teachers get really lax about new tests) when they forgot that last part. These two girls did exceptionally well on the first test despite the fact that their attendance was spotty and I'd had one of them in class before and she was performing way "above her pay grade" (to use a HSV-area government saying). Let me just say test 2 was much different from the previous semester and both girls exhibited extreme "mean reversion." Then there was the guy who came to me and asked me a question that was DIRECTLY off a previous exam. I answered it for him and then designed an almost 100% new test for his class.

I got to thinking about all this when I read this post from the freakonomics blog about how NOT to cheat. Evidently some folks figured out how to hack an online poker site so they could see the actual cards of their opponents. What would you do?

If you were a total idiot, you would do exactly what some cheaters on the Web site Absolute Poker appear to have done recently. Playing at the very highest stakes games, they allegedly played every hand as if they knew every card that the other players had. They folded hands at the end that no normal player would fold, and they raised with hands that were winners but would seem like losers if you didn’t know the opponents’ cards. They won money at a rate that was about 100 times faster than a good player could reasonably expect to win.

Their play was so anomalous that, within a few days, they were discovered.

What did they do next? Apparently, they played some more, now playing worse than anyone has ever played in the history of poker — in other words, trying to lose some of the money back so things didn’t look so suspicious. One hand history shows that the players called a bet at the end when their two hole cards were 2-3 and had not paired the board … there literally was no hand that they could beat!

I guess I should be encouraged that so many cheaters are apparently great big dolts, but it's still disheartening to see how idiotic people can be. To quote one of my favorite philosophers, "Dragons is SOOO stupid!"