Here's an interesting post on cheating at McMaster on what I'm assuming is a BIO 1M03 final. The post is currently on the second page of Reddit. Any thoughts?

interesting way of mapping it out and finding the outliers. Moral of the story.. dont cheat

Interesting way, sure, but also too simplistic and assumes the 4 people who supposedly cheated are able to see that far.

http://www.thespec.com/news-story/52...y-of-waterloo/

Waterloo takes cheating to a whole other level, I wonder if this happens at Mac too.

Originally Posted by Farhaan

Here's an interesting post on cheating at McMaster on what I'm assuming is a BIO 1M03 final. The post is currently on the second page of Reddit. Any thoughts?

Bio 1M03 definitely has way more than 200 people. It's likely Bio 3SS3 (Population Ecology taught by Dushoff).
People who cheat really piss me off.

This would be interesting for the stats engineering course

I don't get how they could be guilty of cheating? for example, one of the 4 outliers is "32 shared correct answers and 7 incorrect answers.

How does that suggest they are cheating? Those 7 questions they got wrong could have been just due to chance, especially if the multiple choice had a trick answer.

Also, the students that are near each other could be friends who helped each other study, and therefore, they have similar approaches to answering the multiple choice questions.

I can get how someone may think they're cheating if they got 20 right and 20 wrong answers that are shared, but having 10 incorrect shared answers doesn't really cut it for me. There's so many reasons that could've happened.

Originally Posted by bradyr

I don't get how they could be guilty of cheating? for example, one of the 4 outliers is "32 shared correct answers and 7 incorrect answers.

How does that suggest they are cheating? Those 7 questions they got wrong could have been just due to chance, especially if the multiple choice had a trick answer.

Also, the students that are near each other could be friends who helped each other study, and therefore, they have similar approaches to answering the multiple choice questions.

I can get how someone may think they're cheating if they got 20 right and 20 wrong answers that are shared, but having 10 incorrect shared answers doesn't really cut it for me. There's so many reasons that could've happened.

Statistics -- it's a wonderful thing. As the author of the blog post pointed out, the chances of those results occurring are so ridiculously small... We rely on stats conclusions like this for so many other aspects of our world, that there's no point in disbelieving it.

Admittedly, there would be some influence if they sit near each other, know each other, studied with each other... But it would be small -- not so strong as to take their results so far away from the distribution of the rest of the class (unless we are to believe that no one else in the entire class studied with their peers...)