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Why I will never pursue cheating again

behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com

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Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#61

Post by graupel »

This is fascinating, aside from one huge, glaring bit of stupidness on the authors part - highlighted here:

"One interesting observation: Almost all cheating happened within ethnic lines. Koreans copy from Koreans. Indians from Indians. Greeks from Greeks. Jews from Jews. Chinese from Chinese."

Korea=country India=country Greece=country China=country Jewish=religion

This would appear to show some form of bias, or at least a lack of cultural understanding by Panos Ipeirotis, who I'm assuming is of Greek origin based on his name.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#62

Post by kristofferR »

I can't speak for college, but I cheated quite a lot in high school. I cheated "better" than the students in this post though, by copying sentence by sentence from various sources, rewriting it to make the cheating non-detectable, and reading over it to make sure the flow was good. It saved me at least 50% of the time compared to writing something from scratch, and the quality was good too.

Do I feel bad about it? Absolutely not.

It's imporant to consider why people cheat before you deem it bad. I cheated because the assignments were a waste of time. Plain and simple, a waste of time. It often felt like something the teacher gave us just so we shouldn't spend our evenings having fun. It wasn't something you were supposed to learn something from, it was something you were supposed to do because you were supposed to do it.

I should point out that that the Norwegian high school system is quite different from the American system. We couldn't choose our subjects, we had to take what the education law said we had to learn. Because of that I had a lot of subjects that I didn't have any interest in whatsoever, the only thing important was the grade I got. When you don't have any reason to study a subject other than to get a high number on a paper, it's natural to cheat. It's borderline impossible to be motivated to do something forced on you.

However, if the subject or course is your own choice, like the case with most university courses, cheating is something different. If the the only value the students get from a class is a grade and not relevant and valuable knowledge, I understand and sympathize with the cheaters.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#63

Post by r4vik »

I think an easy solution would be to immediately show the TurnItIn results to the student when they submit. They are then given a chance to resubmit if it picks up plagiarism. The first time they'll probably keep tweaking the content until it passes but they'll soon get bored of it (and the time it consumes) and start writing their own papers.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#64

Post by [deleted] »

pbh wrote: post #53
onan_barbarian wrote: post #19

While there's much to be said in favor of more creative assignments that aren't minor variants of last year's assignments, the author has drawn the wrong conclusion from what happened. 22 cheats out of 108 is big - and the real proportion may have been even higher, given that it seemed like he caught only either blatant cheats or conscience-stricken/less brazen cheats (the latter category from when he acted people to…

Your claim that the author has drawn the wrong conclusion relies on a major assertion for which you have failed to provide support. Specifically: why do you think a 22/108 cheating rate is non-standard for a large US research university's business school? Are there institutions that check such things in any sort of systematic fashion (e.g., TurnItIn run on a substantial portion of the classwork)? It seems to me that…

[deleted]

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#65

Post by pge »

One of the problems here (which I've heard is common to most universities) is the use of student evaluations to evaluate professors. That creates a very unfortunate incentive for profs to try to please their students. Not all students value the best education; some just want a high grade for as little work as possible. Their evaluations are not going to be in line with the goals of the university. By using them as part of the prof evaluation, the school is encouraging behavior it almost certainly doesn't mean to.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#66

Post by jackpirate »

awegawef wrote: post #45

With prompt given for the assignment, I'm hardly surprised by the amount of plagiarism.

Seriously. I hated classes that had stupid assignments. Personally, I opted not to do them at all because I didn't want to cheat. I was fine accepting a B in a class to avoid these assignments. Eventually, this bit me in the butt when applying for grad schools (not severely, but reduced funding), so I totally understand why people would copy them to keep their grades from falling.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#68

Post by wisty »

If universities faced de-registration for allowing plagiarism to go on, it would dry up in an instant. Create a national ombudsman. Take calls from disgruntled lecturers and the students who can't stand working 10X as hard as their peers to get the busy-work done. If the university can't clean itself up, it loses the right to profit from federal teaching loans.

Disgruntled students could abuse a complaints system, but there's tonnes of ways for them to create trouble already, so I doubt that's a big downside.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#69

Post by JesseAldridge »

onan_barbarian wrote: post #19

While there's much to be said in favor of more creative assignments that aren't minor variants of last year's assignments, the author has drawn the wrong conclusion from what happened. 22 cheats out of 108 is big - and the real proportion may have been even higher, given that it seemed like he caught only either blatant cheats or conscience-stricken/less brazen cheats (the latter category from when he acted people to…

> However, all this wasted time, and all this aggravation, wouldn't be necessary if all the other professors were doing it too.

This is exactly why the author stated, 'The Nash equilibrium is to let the students cheat and "perform well"'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhrnFGP4zks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#70

Post by wisty »

kristofferR wrote: post #62

I can't speak for college, but I cheated quite a lot in high school. I cheated "better" than the students in this post though, by copying sentence by sentence from various sources, rewriting it to make the cheating non-detectable, and reading over it to make sure the flow was good. It saved me at least 50% of the time compared to writing something from scratch, and the quality was good too. Do I feel bad about it? Ab…

A waste of time? Not if you learnt from them.

Still, they need to separate "formative" and "summative" assessment. If a piece of assessment is easy to game, it should be "formative" - the marks you get should not go to your final grade, and should only be used as a feedback. If the assessment is hard to game, it should be "summative".

UK universities used to give a final vocal exam, after three years of study. You can't cram for it, there's too much to cover. And it's an exam, so there's a hell of a lot less cheating. Still, it does seem a little extreme.

PhD thesis (and other research-grade work) are another example, but I guess its too hard for 90% of undergrads.

Commercial quality work might be another option, but it won't assess the fundamentals that universities should be teaching.

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