On sharing homework on Facebook

It occurs to me that if students could actually cheat by discussing their homework on Facebook, i.e. they could just copy answers instead of doing and understanding the work themselves and still leave the course with a good grade, then the problem is really a poorly-designed course.

In every course I've ever taken even as far back as high school, the point has been to learn how to do something, or to acquire in-depth understanding of something, rather than to regurgitate the correct answers. We've always had opportunities to discuss our work with others - in fact, my resource teachers actively encouraged me to help other students as part of my "enrichment" (an offer I didn't take them up on until uni because I didn't want to help my bullies) - but if you just blindly copied rather than understanding then you wouldn't be able to understand the next lesson and the lesson after that and you wouldn't be able to do well on the exam and on your ISU. So when we discussed homework we'd quiz each other, share mnemonics, explain procedures to people who didn't grok them the first time around, sort of help everyone arrive at understanding the material. Blindly copying the material might possibly maybe get you through one minor assignment (but most likely not), but wouldn't help your overall mark.

So if blindly copying other people's work from Facebook actually works and makes it possible for students who don't understand the material to pass the course, the problem is really how the course is designed, how material is graded, how different assignments/projects/exams are weighted.

One of my favourite profs - a veteran and professor emeritus who addressed male students by surname and female students as Miss Surname and taught us to write an essay so tight you can bounce a quarter off it* without us even noticing that he was teaching us essay skills - allowed students to go to the bathroom unescorted during exams, his logic being that if you've managed to hide something in the bathroom that will give you the in-depth intellectual and analytical understanding of the material needed to write his exams, more power to you. In his classes, you had to actually understand to pass, and we all came out better for it.

Any good course should be designed this way. If you can get by by blindly copying other people's answers without understanding them yourself, then there's clearly a flaw in the course design or evaluation method.

*You're thinking "You can write an essay so tight you can bounce a quarter off it? Could have fooled me!" Apart from entries that are clearly tightly choreographed, everything I write here is first draft, typed up as soon as it comes to me in words, so it isn't really an example of what I can do.