The teacher effectively filtered out the shy boys/girls who are not brave enough to "hustle." Gracefully.
The time spent challenging exam grades is usually better spent studying for the next exam. I've never gotten a significant grade improvement from it.
This has nothing to do with American Hustle culture and just with that professor's judgment.
She didn't ask them to challenge them, she asked them additional questions. The test already asks them questions.
If you are really shy, a culture where no one cheats is far better because your actual ability and intelligence shines through
Cheaters and non cheaters were punished in exactly the same way. Effectively cheating gave you an advantage and being shy gave you disadvantage.
The world at large rarely accommodates shy people. Coping skills are essential, even if they are unpleasant.
They learned that cheating gives advantage to the cheating individual. They also learned that reporting cheating harms them and non cheaters.
How the heck is that even possible? :o
Because what the cheater is trying to accomplish is to avoid having to think.
It's an act motivated by either laziness, apathy or rebellion (or some combination thereof). Not motivated by trying to get a good grade.
In Germany, the traditional sharp-tongued answer of pupils to the question "How could both of you get the exact same WRONG answer (in the test)?" is: "Well, we both have the same teacher." :-)
He just goes to our local public elementary school.
Of course, when he asked for help with his practice problems I had no idea how they were meant to solve it so I taught him to solve it algebraically.
Knowing the way a lot of professors act, I'm not surprised, but it's always disheartening to see how many behave like petty tyrants who are happy to throw around their power over the young.
Since high school, the expectation is that you show your work. I remember my high school calculus teacher didn't even LOOK at the final answer - only the work.
The nice thing was that if you made a trivial mistake, like adding 2 + 2 = 5, you got 95% of the credit. It worked out to be massively beneficial for students.
The same thing continued in programming classes. We wrote our programs on paper. The teacher didn't compile anything. They didn't care much if you missed a semicolon, or called a library function by a wrong name. They cared if the overall structure and algorithms were correct. It was all analyzed statically.
1. they skip what are to them the obvious steps (we all do as we achieve mastery) and then get penalized for not showing their work.
2. they inherently know and understand the task abut not the mechanized minutia. Think of learning a new language. A diligent student can work through the problem and complete an a->b translation, then go the other way, and repeat. Someone with mastery doesn't do this; they think within one language and then only pass the contextual meaning back and forth when explicitly required.
"showing your work" is really the same thing as "explain how you think" and may be great for basics in learning, but also faces levels of abstraction as you ascend towards mastery.
Unless you're 100% sure that a student cheated, you don't punish them. And you don't ask them to prove they're innocent.
Because the teacher was knowingly giving zeroes to students who didn't cheat, and expecting them to take it upon themselves to reverse this injustice.
> the final exam where somehow people got their hands on the hardest question of the exam.
They got the question but not the answer so they had to work it out before the test. They couldn't explain it later?
Tests were created to save money, more students per teacher, we're just going back to the older, actually useful, method of talking to people to see if they understand what they've been taught.
You weren't asked to write an essay because someone wanted to read your essay, only to intuit that you've understood something
Personally I don't believe that any of the problems caused by AI are going to be solved by "more AI"
People do learn how to use the web, social media, mobile devices to ultimately work for them or against them.
How is this working out in practice? Every piece of technology is absolutely adversarial nowadays and people are getting ground to bits by it.
I'm skeptical. Tests are a way of standardizing the curriculum and objectively determining if the lessons were learned.
The lesson of how to swim sometimes only comes in applying the learning.
The professor noticed it (presumably via seeing poor "show your work") and gave zero points on the question to everyone. And once you went to complain about your grade, she would ask you to explain the answer there in her office and work through the problem live.
I thought it was a clever and graceful way to deal with it.