Wrong way

At the University of Twente we have been very busy for the past year, and will be equally busy during the next few years, with revising the entire organisation of the Bachelor curricula - all of them. As of this year, rather than following a number of courses on mostly unrelated topics during one quarter, students take part in a module which ideally covers various aspects of a single larger topic and also reserves a substantial amount of time for project work. I have spent a major portion of 2013 in helping to create two such modules for the first-year Computer Science curriculum.

Naturally, a major change like this, which involves redesigning the entire curriculum from the ground up, meets with a lot of resistance, some of which is reflex or comes from well-known quarters (mathematicians especially are ultra-conservative) but a lot of which is centered around hard questions. To name just two: how do you grade a module? and what happens if a student fails a module?

Ideally we would like to have good, generally accepted answers before starting such a major experiment, but an ideal world is not what we live in, so instead we solve them as we go along. Grading a module is a fantastically complex algorithm into which we pour the results of eight or nine tests and as many assignments and retakes of those tests. If a student fails a module he must try again next year. And oh yes: if he fails two modules in the first year then we kick him out. Gone are the good old days when our first-years could dive into the student life and not emerge until half a year or more was past! Thou shalt perform!

No doubt as a direct consequence of the above, today I had to notify the Examination Board for the third time in as many days of suspicion of fraud in one of the assignments that I have set up. Fraud meaning here that students have submitted work that is a (slightly modified) copy of that of others. If the Examination Board confirms and establishes fraud, they will automatically fail the assignment and thereby the entire module.

This is unexpected, frustrating, and worrisome. The last case of fraud that we had to deal with is five years ago, and the last one before that as long ago again. I do not believe our students have suddenly lost their sense of morality. The correlation with the change in the curriculum is too clear, and an explanation lies close at hand: we are putting them under a lot of pressure, and some of them can only cope with this by taking shortcuts - probably in the hope that they will not be found out.

How do we proceed? Should we show clemency, or do we set an example? Do we try to decrease the pressure, or is it an allowable method of selection? I hereby open the discussion.