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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

#81

Post by aneth »

I did not cheat in school. I wanted to prove things to myself and to learn. However the basic premise of opposition to cheating here is incorrect:

"habitual plagiarism ... can have very serious consequences in their professional life"

This is something academics believe because it justifies their policies, but it isn't true, at least in entrepreneurship. Those who can "cheat" without violating the trust of those who matter or facing legal consequences are those who succeed. Those who play by all the rules bitch on HN about "stolen ideas" and cutthroat business practices instead of synthesizing ideas and looking for unfair advantages.

Cheat if it suits you, learn what you want to learn, get the credentials you need, cover your ass, and build the life you want. Life is not a your grade, but neither is it the opinion of a professor over what you should be doing with your time - copying or writing.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#82

Post by graupel »

william42 wrote: post #71
graupel wrote: post #61

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…

All of those are ethnic origins.

Compared to the others listed, it's out of place - all Greeks originate from Greece - where do all Jewish people originate from? (and as much as that sounds like the start of a joke, it's not)

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#83

Post by justin_vanw »

This professor is a huge part of the problem. He's a tenured professor saying "caring about cheating is counter productive", which to me says "I would rather have an easy life where I don't have to work hard than to protect the reputation of the institution I work for and ensure that students that graduate have learned something along the way".

He complains he had to work almost 44 hours (2 hours * 22 cheaters) and repeatedly moans and bitches about how much time that is, despite being spread over the course of an entire semester. I assume he's been in academia his whole career, because I can't remember a week where I've worked less than 50 hours.

My only solace is to know that this guy is a professor at a business school giving incredibly simplistic homework in excel, and his students are too stupid to do it. I can't think of a better punishment for someone who puts his leisure and student assessments above academic integrity than to have students like that.

Finally, what is the value of his class at all? If he can't tell his students are cheating without globally searching everything with this software, what are they supposedly learning? I would favor just eliminating this class; if you can't tell whether a student took it or not, they didn't learn anything. If you can't quantify the learning experience, it shouldn't carry credit.

This may be my strong bias as a Math major, but I know there is no way I could have cheated in almost any of my classes. If I had copied someone's homework, either the professor would have recognized it right away (since most professors actually knew and cared about the students in their class), or I would have failed all the exams. Do business school students not have exams that they can fail? If not, what are they supposedly learning? I know lots of business schools really drive their students hard to learn skills that they will use later. My opinion of NYU's business school (where the author of this is a tenured professor) is now so low that I will do a bit more diligence on MBA students with a degree from there as I review resumes and gauge job candidates in the future.

Edit: removed something criticized as a personal insult. This comment was modded up to 10, and at the time of this is now modded as 4. There should be some kind of meta-karma for controversial posts, since they inject lively debate instead of just attempting to game the system! That is my biased view anyway.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#84

Post by ams6110 »

walexander wrote: post #49
reso wrote: post #25

Holy crap. They let so many people get away with copy-paste assignments, and they call themselves a postsecondary institution? That's fucking horrific. Where I'm from, a single sentence similar to one of your sources is marks deducted. A paragraph puts you on academic probation. Anything bigger is a bus-ticket home.

Yeah, I personally couldn't believe he had people copying entire articles into their paper and simply let it slide with a lecture on how to source articles. I've always tried to agonize over drawing some unique conclusions from a variety of source material. Looks like the more efficient method would have been to just reword the wikipedia article. All of the stories about education bubbles, unemployed graduates, etc,…

I think you are right in your comment about education bubbles. Cheating as blatant as this could be a sign that many of the "students" are either unqualified or there for the wrong reasons.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#85

Post by endgame »

pnathan wrote: post #43

When I TA'd, I took a hard line on any cheating I detected. Basically it was a 2-strikes approach. I didn't use turnitin or other mechanisms. I figure, if someone is smart enough to cheat well enough that it's not detectable, it's okay to pass that person. It's not "great", but it's not unleashing a total disaster onto the world. The cheating I detected was usually because those students were moronic. I am not talkin…

You think that's bad? I had a pair of assignments for which the output of `diff -u` was less than 10 lines long.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#86

Post by onan_barbarian »

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…

Ah, the starchy HN argument style, lacking only a demand that I provide citations. Unfortunately, you're deploying your pomposity in the service of refuting something I didn't actually write.

I didn't say that 22/108 was "non-standard for a large US research university's business school". I said it was "big". It is big. This doesn't change if the norm at every other business school is 32/108. The OP also thought it was big and was unhappily surprised by it.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#87

Post by endgame »

scott_s wrote: post #56
brudgers wrote: post #32

Once the author decides that the academic standard allows copying and pasting, it ceases to become cheating - and he has joined those for whom the term "academic honesty" has lost all meaning. Seriously, when 44 hours over the course of a semester is too much work to uphold a minimum standard, the issue is not confined to students and the author has no moral high ground because they have abandoned the tough part of t…

I think you seriously underestimate the emotional toll it takes on a person to go through 44 hours of "I know you cheated" with dozens of students. Merely calling that "work" - as if it's equal to prepping for lecture - is not fair. I think you also ignore the chilling effect this had on the class itself. It's quite possible that the students who did not cheat experienced a worse class because of the change in atmosp…

I had to do this once, when I TA'd. It's a seriously hard talk to have.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#88

Post by Lost_BiomedE »

vacri wrote: post #72
reso wrote: post #25

Holy crap. They let so many people get away with copy-paste assignments, and they call themselves a postsecondary institution? That's fucking horrific. Where I'm from, a single sentence similar to one of your sources is marks deducted. A paragraph puts you on academic probation. Anything bigger is a bus-ticket home.

I remember doing some work on an essay with a friend of mine over the phone. There was one particular sentence he came up with that was absolutely stellar. I know it was original because we were working from the same text and discussing it over the phone - I was there when he came up with it. When he got his essay back, this one sentence was circled in red with the comment "If you're going to plagiarise, be less obvi…

This happened to me in English comp. I decided to make the most of the class by really studying style. I turned in three papers utilizing different author's styles in my own way: H.P. Lovecraft, Hunter S. Thompson, and Henry Thoreau. I learned a hell of a lot but was told that I cheated. I told them I would sit after class and write a paragraph or two of each style for them. They said it wasn't necessary as they could 'tell', and that since they couldn't prove I cheated, the highest I could get was a C.

I almost quit college over it. That aside, the amount of cheating in my engineering courses was high. There was only a 10% grad rate within 4 years and 16% total. I think it was the top 10% and cheaters that could graduate.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#89

Post by ams6110 »

esrauch wrote: post #7
shaggyfrog wrote: post #4

While I sympathize with the instructor and think he should be incentivized to fight cheating, I'm not pleased with the use of services like TurnItIn. Basically, the student gives someone some faceless company a license to whatever they create for perpetuity. Are these companies ever compelled to delete material on request? And who could audit that?

I completely agree with this sentiment. It is difficult for me to express how extremely inappropriate I think it is for a school to transfer ownership of a student's assignment to a third party who uses it strictly for profit. It would already be iffy if turnitin was a nonprofit, but they aren't. Papers that students legitimately write and no third party ever gains access to, are still inflating their essay counts an…

So would writing "Copyright (C) 2011 J. Random Student, all rights reserved" on ever essay you hand in make any difference?
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