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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

#101

Post by josephcooney »

pge wrote: post #65

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 pa…

This +100. Surely the student's review of the teacher should only be one factor used when evaluating the students. A band-aid fix would be to preclude students found cheating of reviewing their teacher (or their review doesn't count), but all in all this systems seems set up to be abused.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#102

Post by justin_vanw »

hrabago wrote: post #96
justin_vanw wrote: post #83

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 r…

I don't know where in the article there was mention of the number of hours he worked in a week. I've conducted several training sessions in the course of my career, and I can tell you that the time consumed by the actual class/training is a very small portion of the time spent by the one giving it. Preparation time can be 5-20 times as long, depending on the complexity. Now it is true that professors would reuse past…

Q: What interferes with learning? A: When the student's don't pay attention to anything going on and do all the assignments by turning in someone else's work.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#103

Post by SoftwareMaven »

ams6110 wrote: post #89
esrauch wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You already have a copyright just by writing it. Courts have ruled this is fair use, which means the courts feel this use of content is more valuable to society than writers keeping their rights.

I wonder if laws would change if we were talking about combatting plagiarism in film schools by keeping a database of all films to match against.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#104

Post by kmm »

justin_vanw wrote: post #83

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 r…

I can sympathize with him, as it seems he actually loses money if his student evaluations aren't high enough. The fault would then lie with the institution that doesn't properly asses the teaching prowess of a professor.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#105

Post by stonemetal »

mmahemoff wrote: post #50

"Instead of the usual evaluations that were in the region of 6.0 to 6.5 out of seven, this time my ratings went down by almost a point: 5.3 out of 7.0." Way to bias ratings. Students caught cheating should certainly not be rating the professor who caught them. I won't say "problem solved", but that would make a fine start.

From the sound of it his honest students probably rated him lower because he wasted a lot of lecture on his forays into cheater cheater chicken eater land. I know I would have, lectures about how many people cheated on the last assignment would bore the crap out of me.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#106

Post by reinhardt »

justin_vanw wrote: post #83

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 r…

You have to put this into perspective. It's easy to condemn someone as "a lazy coward" if he was the exception in an environment where most professors "work hard to protect the reputation of the institution they work for" and "ensure that students that graduate have learned something along the way".

From the tone and from personal experience, I'd guess he has been the exception - in the other direction. Seasoned professors have already learned their lesson and reached the same conclusion he did eventually: doing "the right thing" by going after the cheaters is a losing proposition because (a) it steals resources that could be better spent on non-cheaters and (b) makes all involved parties (students, teachers and administrators) look bad. It may still be a problem for future employers and society at large but demanding from someone to sacrifice his personal well-being for the greater good (when most others don't) is unrealistic.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#107

Post by justin_vanw »

kmm wrote: post #104
justin_vanw wrote: post #83

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 r…

I can sympathize with him, as it seems he actually loses money if his student evaluations aren't high enough. The fault would then lie with the institution that doesn't properly asses the teaching prowess of a professor.

Perhaps next semester he should teach 'business ethics' in which he can explain to his students that when confronted with the choice of 'do what you think is right' and 'maximize your income', he went with the latter.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#109

Post by neutronicus »

Dove wrote: post #99
wisty wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A math majors can just copy the homework. 90% of it is mechanical, and 10% requires a "twist". You can copy the "twist", and the rest is easy. Or copy it all (in a slightly different format), and just claim that it's the same because it's ... well, the same. Unless you both make a mistake. But it's even easier than copying essays. Still, the exam will be a problem. But if lots of students cheat, the lecturers will st…

A math majors can just copy the homework. 90% of it is mechanical, and 10% requires a "twist". That may be true in the lower level courses, but around 400 level, the work switches over entirely from calculations to proofs. Proofs are as widely varied and difficult to copy as essays, and are much harder to edit without screwing up unless you really understand them.

I would say the proofs required for an undergrad math degree are "90% mechanical, 10% twist". If you have a general idea what a proof is supposed to look like, it's pretty easy to fill in the details.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#110

Post by reduxredacted »

justin_vanw wrote: post #83

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 r…

It hurts me to have to disagree with you because you invoked the He's a tenured professor statement (I have a general bias against tenured professors) and the rest of your argument was right on. I was spitting at my screen until the last few paragraphs of the blog.

I don't trust a college degree from anywhere to prove anything other than that the student was able to finance his/her purchase, regardless of school. I know this will not be taken well by several folks, but it's not a complete disregarding of higher education (take me on my word or call me an idiot, you'll probably be right).

Cheating is a fact of life. When I was in college, the punishment was expulsion. This rarely happened. It was the old "make the punishment so awful that nobody would want to commit the crime", and it fell flat as soon as human beings were put in the picture.

Those who knew how to get away with it almost always got away with it. And even when caught, the book was rarely thrown at them. This "tenured" professor is trying to find a way to separate cheating from passing. I don't know that he'll be successful. But the traditional "Turnitin" approach is working as well as anti-malware software/devices work. It's an arms race. The solution isn't to build better detection or encourage better behavior from users ... it's to make the attack irrelevant.

I'm skeptical that it can be done, but I like the approach. I don't believe this is a Lazy Coward operation (good to edit it out, but I didn't downmod you, I thought your comments were fair). It's a creative, and possibly disruptive, method to teaching.

Edit: Sorry, it's really difficult to write out a reasonable reply without reading it over a few times and making changes.

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