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DOES COLLUSION HAVE AN MLS PROBLEM?

10/10/2017

 
Vol 12, Issue 11

'GUY INCOGNITO'

As an pseudonymous coordinator of two compulsory subjects with weekend take-home exams, I read the De Minimis article on collusion with great interest. And amusement.

But first the moralising. Collusion – talking to others about an exam while you’re sitting it – is seriously against the rules (unless the rules say otherwise.) And breaking rules is bad, m’kay? If you’re caught, the Uni will fail you or worse. And you may be barred from legal practice. Indeed, it’s much easier to make an example out of a team than an individual.

​
Picture
Leaked image of Faculty Members reacting to the article
Even worse, if you’re not caught, you’ll end up becoming a lawyer and then getting booted out of the profession (or worse) for breaking other rules, ‘cos rule-breaking is addictive. The higher you rise, the harder you’ll fall. Just ask Marcus Einfeld.

Forget rules and morality, though. Last week’s author, ‘Anon’, says that collusion ‘is rife at MLS, more a product of fear than anything.’ As a pseudonymous marker who’s been at the law school for 15 years, I wouldn’t call collusion ‘rife’, but it certainly happens – we take-home examiners see it occasionally in rather strange patterns in answers.

The author argues that if some students collude, then it makes sense for everyone to do it – and MLS does its students a disservice by demanding a ‘shroud of deception’.  Interestingly, as Anon notes and I can confirm, there’s little (indeed, no) sign of collusion in the Evidence take-home, where some talking about the exam is expressly allowed.  

But it’s also noteworthy that Anon’s cheating in constitutional law ‘didn’t even turn out that well. My group didn’t get amazing scores’.  Yeah, no kidding. That pattern of similar answers we sometimes see? It’s ALWAYS a pattern of similarly bad answers.

It’s not hard to see why. Who runs around organising cheating groups? Who joins them? Not the good students, or the diligent ones. Instead, it’s the ones who spend more time covering up their lack of study than actually studying. Anon faintly claims, ‘Is there a clear cut advantage? Possibly.’ After all, are two, or five, thick heads better than one?

Anon also claims (surely tongue-in-cheek) that collusion isn’t a ‘problem’ either: ‘Employers ask for students with teamwork skills and this is what such projects provide.’ Earth to Anon: teamwork sucks.

To put it nicely, teamwork is very difficult to do well. To put it less nicely, teamwork is a great way of doing everything badly.  Those team members of yours? At best, they’re scared to criticise your bad ideas in case you get narky. At worst, they’re feeding you their worst ideas in the hope that at least they’ll do better than you. They are definitely keeping their best ideas to themselves, just like you are.

Only children and university administrators think that teamwork is a good way to do anything. Everyone else avoids it like the plague, or finds a way to do the whole team’s work themselves. If you didn’t manage to learn any actual law in constitutional law, at least you should ‘take home’ that life lesson.

Is MLS worried about collusion? Hell yes, because our reputation is everything (to us and to you.) And because marking lousy answers is such a drag. But are we in a panic? Nope. Not unless we start to see suspicious patterns of good answers. This pseudonymous professor won’t be holding his breath.

Guy Incognito is the author of The Ouija Board Jurors (Waterside Press, 2017), to be published on 4 October.

This article is responding to:
  • Does MLS Have a Collusion Problem

The rest of this issue:
  • They Weren't Free in Vegas
  • Women's Portfolio Year in Review
  • The Demise of Critical Thinking at MLS
  • It's Only Recently I've Felt Inadequate

​
M
10/10/2017 04:52:51 pm

Yikes

Ben Wilson
10/10/2017 05:10:25 pm

Crim law take-home coming up. This article is encouraging. I hope you're right.

Captain Planet (he's a hero)
10/10/2017 05:38:32 pm

'Only children and university administrators think that teamwork is a good way to do anything.'

YES. And coming from me that's a damning admission. I am free.

Max Power
10/10/2017 07:35:27 pm

This is amazing.

Qodratallah Sultani
10/10/2017 08:02:04 pm

Y no name?? Thanks for an unofficial advice!

Google
10/10/2017 11:18:39 pm

You know how the sign off mentions a book the author wrote? Yeh you can Google that.

Oh and how many staff are "coordinator of two compulsory subjects with weekend take-home exams".



KJS
10/10/2017 10:27:38 pm

How does anyone even have time to collude?! For all the take home exams, I remember sleepless nights and a feeling of racing, head long, towards the submission deadline. I barely had time to breath let alone consult and discuss the exams with other people. During the Evidence take home, my partner called with some lovely words of support and got nothing but a primal scream in response - I did not have time!!

A. Nonymous
11/10/2017 02:34:18 am

I think our mysterious author is mostly right that those students who collude/cheat spend more time trying to cheat that they could just use studying, and they would do this because they hope to mooche off the good work that someone else has done.

Even so, I don't doubt there are some people who plan it well with close and trusted friends who help each other out, and get good marks. Those are probably few and far between. I also don't doubt that some students for who mummy or daddy is a barrister or some other sort of hotshot lawyer, use this to their advantage in take-home exams.

I collude with imaginary friends :)
11/10/2017 02:05:38 am

It seems in each piece published on this topic recently the ethical dimension has been noted in passing, in a superficial manner, and as 100% NOT the decisive element in the discussion. Almost as a tip of the hat that seems necessary but without articulating why that’s the case... as if in fear that law students will more likely be pursuaded by rational considerations of their career prospects, than what’s simply right and wrong :(

Also, IF collusion produced the correct answers in an assessment, wouldn’t that collusion likely be hidden? Correct answers shouldn’t be unusual - ideally lots of students are saying the same (or v similar), correct things (where such “correct” answers are straightforwardly possible). Besides collusion leading to unusual, wrong responses, and collusion leading to unusual, correct responses, how confident can markers at MLS actually be that collusion isn’t rife, and really successful? Just curious about how it’s actually identified and how MLS is quite so certain it’s not rife and not successful (or should that info not be publicised.......?) :)

Guy Icognito
11/10/2017 04:31:14 pm

Actually, the good answers are almost always good in quite different ways. The opposite of Anna Karenina, I suppose.

I collude with imaginary friends
12/10/2017 09:14:25 am

Thank you for your response :)
I remain uncertain why the faculty seems quite so confident in its collusion-detection superpowers. It appears to amount to an assurance that: given our experience, when it happens, we’re likely to recognise it. I don’t see how that gets around the reality that the faculty would have no way of knowing when successful collusion is being performed by intelligent, amoral law students. And consequently no real way of knowing how rife such behaviour is.
“I wouldn’t call collusion ‘rife’, but it certainly happens – we take-home examiners see it occasionally in rather strange patterns in answers”. I’m worried that a student has said it is rife, and the faculty has responded by saying: we know it exists because we detect it occasionally, and what we detect must be the extent of it. Aren’t the students telling you you’re missing something? That the confidence in detecting might be misplaced?
This issue is part of what seems to be a deeper cultural problem at MLS that may never be shifted. It’s a problem that this week’s de minimis article on critical thinking also points towards. It’s a problem pointed towards when the discussion of the morality of collusion amounts to: don’t break rules because that’s bad (and you’ll later be caught doing the same in your career). Why would somebody stop colluding when the basis for their not colluding is a rational calculation of their long term (career) self-interest? Some times that calculation might not come out with the “don’t-collude” answer we’d hope.
There has to be another reason not to collude. It’s sad that it seems like too few students (and maybe faculty...) can really articulate that reason.

Bill Pilla
12/10/2017 09:36:51 am

@I Collude

A friend and I were talking about this article recently, and if you want my two cents--coming from a student who is more intrinsically motivated than by your standard career considerations, it's because I'd feel like no matter how well I did, it wouldn't be a reflection of what I know and how well I applied the law.

Yes, I would still feel unbearably guilty (that Catholic life), yes, I would also be perpetually paranoid that one day I'd be discovered, but above all, I'd feel like it would show that I'm not actually capable of doing the work well. At the end of the day, I'm not here to fuck spiders, I'm here to test myself--and I can hardly be said to have done that where I've needed to rely on other people to get through an exam which was designed to test my own knowledge.

Guy Incognito
12/10/2017 12:16:07 pm

True, we can't know. We can only guess. Indeed, those patterns we do see may not be collusion either, just (not particularly) great minds thinking alike. We infer as best we can - and surely reading 60 or 120 papers is about the best method available (maybe the only one?) to detect this problem? One response to lack of complete certainty is to eschew any empirical knowledge, but I don't think that's the only available response.

I collude...
12/10/2017 12:41:01 pm

Agreed. And thank you for your contributions on the issue. Of course collusion will continue to occur and the faculty can't do much about successful collusion. So it will continue to happen and continue to be rife amongst this group of people.

Presumably the current approach is the only way of detecting. I'd just hope detection is not the only form of addressing the issue. Perhaps there are ways of addressing the bigger problem of WHY students would be choosing to do this in the first place? Could that problem even be addressed? How?

And so it goes...

Homer J. Fong
12/10/2017 08:47:08 pm

I am a H1 student and I collude

Where is your god now?


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  • Home
  • ABOUT US
  • Podcast
  • Your Learned Friend
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  • Art
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  • Constitution
  • Archive
    • 2018
    • 2017
    • 2017 >
      • Semester 2 (Volume 12) >
        • Issue 1
        • Issue 2
        • Issue 3
        • Issue 4
        • Issue 5
        • Issue 6
        • Issue 7
        • Issue 8 (election issue)
        • Issue 9
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    • 2016 >
      • Semester 1 (Volume 9) >
        • Issue 1
        • Issue 2
        • Issue 3
        • Issue 4
        • Issue 5
        • Issue 6
        • Issue 7
        • Issue 8
        • Issue 9
        • Issue 10
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        • Issue 12
      • Semester 2 (Volume 10) >
        • Issue 1
        • Issue 2
        • Issue 3
        • Issue 4
        • Issue 5
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        • Issue 7
        • Issue 8 (Election Issue)
        • Issue 9
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    • 2015 >
      • Semester 1 (Volume 7) >
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