Trust or Distrust Students or...

On Twitter was:

My professor hot take is that trusting students makes life so much better than assuming they're all lying or trying to cheat on everything.

Recently (in my 60's), from psychology books (e.g. The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, by Ariely) I've learned that we all are willing to cheat. Often we even fool ourselves, telling ourselves it wasn't really cheating or that it was justified.

Well, not me. Except if I think back hard, the few times I was really stumped, my eyes did wander a few times... I also worked exceptionally hard at times. Wa it fair to put in more hours than other students could because they had other projects due, or had to work 10 or 20 hours a week to pay for school?

Sure, it's not cheating. But shouldn't we have the conversation just to bring it out in the open and deepen our appreciation?

Professor: Do you talk with the class about cheating? You could empathize with the pressure they're under, how at times the material might elude them or their work/fatigue/mood doesn't allow them to study or makes studying slow. Some people take more time to learn, or if the material subconsciously conflicts with things they already know it might take more days to understand it than they've been given. And, of course, give them the opportunity to share in response.

I recall zero such conversations either in high school or college. If there had been such conversations, I think I would've asked for ungraded quizzes. I noticed in high school that often aking a test revealed what I didn't understand well, and correcting it with the answers allowed me to clear it up. Why not do this as part of the learning process?

What might others contribute to the conversation?

In one applied-math class, there was a pre-final study hall that everyone attended, astonishing the (young) prof. He asked us what we wanted him to cover. No hands went up. He then asked if someone could summarize what the course was about. Again, no hands.

He then summarized how the first half of the course was about making computations more reliable by tracking the precision of the computations, and finding alternatives when an operation expanded the error much. The second half was about minimizing the error when curve-fitting.

We were all astonished. His lectures had been so mired in the details and the equations that the big picture had eluded us. But it was too late. The average on the final was about 25%.

The was about 3/4 of the way through college. While I appreciated learning about how important context is in learning, I didn't really learn the lesson explicitly till a few decades later.

In retrospect, the big-picture of the course should be given at the beginning, and then repeated at least weekly, summarizing what kinds of things have been learned so far, what's next to learn, plus a bit about what's to come.

Of course, this is just an idea. I'd love to hear from people who've tried this.

PS: The quote was made by an English professor. I never took a lit course in college, so I don't know if my experience applies to them.

In high school, in one class we read "The Merchant of Venice." I didn't really notice how anti-semitic it was. Recently, I read "People Love Dead Jews." Chapter 11 has a beautiful summary of how anti-semitic it is, including how my 17-year old self could have missed it. (It certainly wasn't the most painful experience my adolescent mind blocked out.)