MOOC cheating (model this)

From an email from Coursera:

Several students have contacted me about cases of cheating on the Final Exam. Frankly, why anyone who do this in a course that focuses on learning and offers no credentials, beats me. Students who cheat are really cheating themselves. If you are sure an answer is plagiarized from somewhere else (often easy to determine with a quick web search), you could simply award 1′s everywhere, which amounts to a score of 0. Whether you do that for one question or the whole exam is up to you. If there is any doubt that the student has broken the honor code, you have to give the student the benefit of that doubt. 0 on the whole exam is more significant than on one question. Though again, the stakes here are essentially zero; it’s mostly about self esteem, surely. For truly egregious cases, send me the details (your login id and the Student number (1, 2, or 3) and I can take it from there. Violation of the honor code is cause for expulsion from the class. Expulsion has occurred, in this class and others, I’m sad to say.

Meanwhile, if you want to know how evaluation training and peer grading looked from our side (the instruction team and the folks at Coursera who were making sure the ship stayed afloat), check out my latest post at MOOCtalk.org to see what was going on behind the scenes. Enjoy!

I thank AA for the pointer.