Hopefully this is a similar view to other students here, but I would drop the class/change professors (even if that meant going into a larger class). Being in an environment where cheating is allowed is not somewhere that I want to be, much less learn in. I would feel like my honest work was just seen as equal to the cheaters'.
Why I will never pursue cheating again
201–210 of 506 posts
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you are molly-coddling the students, then I suppose it could take a lot of time. An email with the Turnitin report would take about five minutes - which is about how long it takes for my spouse who teaches courses online to handle plagiarism. Setting the expectation for academic honesty in the syllabus and directing students to university policies is more than enough. In any event, it should just be handled privat…
scott_s is right. Enforcing cheating policies isn't as impersonal as enforcing parking laws. You can't just leave a citation behind and let the students and administration handle it. The professor will be involved.
There's also the aspect of a student being falsely accused of cheating. I was unfortunate enough to have experienced this during my college career. A fellow student, whom I didn't know outside of class, copied my answers exactly on a German exam. I don't know why he did this, because there were only 15 students in the class and the professor knew us all fairly well. To think the professor wasn't going to notice was a stupid assumption on his part.
I was called in to her office and shown the two tests. The answers were the same down to the punctuation even. It was clear the other guy was very bad at cheating and probably did it out of desperation. I was initially shocked and feared I was going to fail the class despite my innocence. She had to refer the incident to the honor board due to university policy. When I left her office I was so furious that I looked up where the other student lived because I wanted to fight him. But I took a walk, cooled off and decided against it.
I was ultimately cleared by the board and there were no marks on my record. After the proceedings were over, the professor apologized to me and said that she never believed for a moment that I had cheated, or that I had helped him cheat. She pleaded with dean to avoid sending the matter to the honor board, but she had to follow policy.
She said she never had any cheating incidents in the past, and that it was personally distressing for her to handle the situation. It was definitely stressful for me as well.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#203Here's a better solution: let students plagiarize all they want. When they are about to get their degree, do an en masse review of all incidents of plagiarism for the student and, if it's egregious and beyond doubt, retroactively fail them for everything. The university keeps their tuition dues and the student gets what they're due.
And then the university loses all that tuition handling the lawsuits from the families of all those failed students, and due to the age of the cases/faculty leaving/etc., the case becomes hard to win for the university. Losing all around, unfortunately.
Unfortunately, you're probably right. The "shucks, if it weren't for you meddling professors I would have graduated" version is unlikely to happen in the real world.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#204One 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…
Yeah, their really needs to be some independent evaluation outside of the students, I saw many times lecturers have got lots of bad reviews not necessarily because they were bad teachers but because they may have set hard assignments or forced the students to do more work during a lecture.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#205I 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…
"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." - with those kind of skills you could become a top-notch journalist for the huffington post.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#206This 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…
Justin, I am the professor who wrote the article. The 44 hours is not a number to show how much extra I had to work. Believe me, a 14-hour day is a pretty common thing for me. Teaching is only part of my overall job (I also have to do research, supervise PhD students, review papers, serve on committees and many other things). The 44 hours figure is given just as a contrast to the actual time that I spent in class. I…
You're absolutely not alone in this experience, Panos.
A pair of my friends work for online colleges; one for a state college with a pretty good reputation, and another for a for-profit school with a decent reputation. Neither are tenured.
Both of them have had serious issues with student cheating. The one at the state college got support from one of her superiors, and was not penalized for fighting plagiarism, but it was still very time consuming. Another one of her superiors (in previous years) did not support her in any way, and she had to cut back on enforcing academic honesty to help protect her job, save for the most blatant cases.
The other one (at the for-profit college) stopped crusading against cheating when she found out that she'd (effectively) be fired if she continued. Pass rates are a sizable portion of what's used to determine which teachers are given which classes. In one class, more than half of her students should have been failed for academic honesty violations by the halfway point of the year. However, if she did that, her pass rates would have been low enough that it was extremely likely that she would not be given any classes next semester. (Not technically fired, but functionally so.)
So, you are not the only person encountering this, and you're not alone in realizing that fighting cheating can be hazardous to your career. It's a damn shame.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#207One 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.
Given an overall badly damaged classroom dynamic, excluding those found cheating may not have made much difference.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#208Hi Panos. I was actually a student in your class last fall semester. To alleviate any doubt you may have, the class was known as “Info Tech,” and you had two sessions on Mondays and Wednesdays (2-3:15, 3:30-4:45 pm) in KMEC. Now I have a couple of problems with your post. Firstly, you attribute your lower evaluation rating of 5.3 for last fall semester solely to your lower tolerance of cheating. However, there is som…
Some of this might have been better expressed in the evaluations.
I think it's completely fair to respond to a public blog post here. The professor invited the response when he accused his students of giving him a poor rating for the wrong reasons. If I was a student of his, I would probably be offended.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only "token" if you score the same amount on all the assessment items. If you pick up a large portion of your marks on a homework component, it's not token for you. A student gets 80% on a 25% weighted "token" homework component, 60% on a 25% "lab" component (due to copying large portions of someone else's report), and 30% on the 50% exam (there's always a few low apples). They pass with 50%. The lecturer sees t…
25% is not token, that's 1/4th of the course! most math classes i've taken homework has been from .5% to 5% of your grade! if your homework is 1/4 of your grade in the class, that class is a "pass me" class. in some math classes the prof refuses to acknowledge that homework actually has a measurable effect on your grade, but he will use its presence to round up instead of down (i.e. 89.5 becomes a 90 instead of an 89…
There are some classes where homework is more than 1/4 of the grade. Maybe not good math classes in the US.
Cheating doesn't happen when there's virtually no incentive. I stand by my point that you can cheat in Math homework more easily than equivalent non-Math homework, if you want to.
If 400-level Math coures are really impossible to cheat on, but there are 400-level non-Math courses that are possible to cheat on, I'd just argue that this is because they aren't really equivalent.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#210I worked for 5 semesters as an undergrad teaching assistant in the CS department of my university. We had generally 1 to 2 cases of cheating per semester in classes of up to 150 students and ~10 assignments. We identified them using Moss[1] which we ran over all submitted assignments. This plagiarism rate now pales in comparison to the rate the OP has seen. I wonder why there's such a huge gap between my experience a…
My guess? CS vs business school. You can't bullshit a compiler.
An engineer pal of mine eventually went back for an MBA at a top-tier business school. He said that in 2 years, he learned exactly one thing that he wouldn't have figured out on his own with a little thought. (It was the law of comparative advantage, which blew my mind as well.) The rest was building a rolodex and gaining skill in presenting smoothly.
His experience made me pretty suspicious of the intellectual content business schools. Given that, cheating makes a twisted sort of sense. And of course, if one plans to go on to create mortgage-backed securities or asset-stripping leveraged buyouts, one probably has an ends-justify-the-means attitude by the time graduate school rolls around.