Why I will never pursue cheating again • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#251

Post by btilly » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 5:45 AM UTC

badclient wrote: post #228

Panos wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me start by indicating some logical flaws in the timing of the events: The office hours for the class were from 12.30 to 1.30, Monday and Wednesday. The class was starting at 2pm. According to your account, I showed up at 1pm, being 30 mins "late". Then the first student came in at 1pm and came out at 1.20pm? Then it took me another 50 minutes while I was running around? So I came to talk to you at 2.10pm, when I…

I don't think being pissed at 28/108 students is a valid excuse for acting pissed at everyone. That is a major professional flaw and a post on how you plan to control your emotion may be appreciated by future students. I have had professors that had me write huge essays and then proceeded to just put a huge ass check and never really read past the first paragraph. If I plagiarized and cited my frustration with all th…

I don't think being pissed at 28/108 students is a valid excuse for acting pissed at everyone. That is a major professional flaw and a post on how you plan to control your emotion may be appreciated by future students.

FYI professionals are humans first and professionals second. If think that professionals can easily turn off how they are feeling and always act properly, then I conclude that you have little understanding of humans and little experience of how professionals act.

Rather than see this as a flaw, I see this self-awareness as something to compliment the professor on. OF COURSE spending so much time dealing with unpleasantness towards students is going to affect any human's mood towards the class. That's human nature. But now that the professor is armed with an awareness of this fact, it will be easier to address the underlying cause.

I know that you do not agree with me. But hopefully after you have a few decades of experience in a professional environment, and possibly experience as a spouse and parent as well, you'll learn the truth of what I say.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#252

Post by badclient » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 5:49 AM UTC

btilly wrote: post #251

badclient wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think being pissed at 28/108 students is a valid excuse for acting pissed at everyone. That is a major professional flaw and a post on how you plan to control your emotion may be appreciated by future students. I have had professors that had me write huge essays and then proceeded to just put a huge ass check and never really read past the first paragraph. If I plagiarized and cited my frustration with all th…

I don't think being pissed at 28/108 students is a valid excuse for acting pissed at everyone. That is a major professional flaw and a post on how you plan to control your emotion may be appreciated by future students. FYI professionals are humans first and professionals second. If think that professionals can easily turn off how they are feeling and always act properly, then I conclude that you have little understan…

It goes both ways. Are you willing to listen to the many excuses for why each student may have plagiarized and potentially extend the same they-are-human-too sympathies?

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#253

Post by Panos » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 5:50 AM UTC

nyustern wrote: post #244

Panos wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me start by indicating some logical flaws in the timing of the events: The office hours for the class were from 12.30 to 1.30, Monday and Wednesday. The class was starting at 2pm. According to your account, I showed up at 1pm, being 30 mins "late". Then the first student came in at 1pm and came out at 1.20pm? Then it took me another 50 minutes while I was running around? So I came to talk to you at 2.10pm, when I…

First off, many of the details you cited are inaccurate. However, its pointless to argue over such things. I was not aware of your health condition, but given the pattern of treatment given to me and a handful of others, I was left to assume you were acting as usual. Anyway, my post was to make you aware of a few other reasons as to why you received a low evaluation score. Blaming the students wholly is unjust and th…

Again: read the article until the end. I do not blame the students.

Students respond to incentives. If I give them opportunities to cheat and remain undetected, they will cheat. I do the same as a human. If I were getting a 50% increase in my salary for detecting cheating so aggressively, next year I would have tried to detect cheating even when there is none.

What I truly blame in the article is the structure of the homeworks and the overall student evaluation approach. Which is something that I use. And I criticize my approach of trying to detect cheating post factum, instead of building projects and homeworks in which cheating is just meaningless.

Just tell me: Could anyone cheat and copy the presentation on augmented reality by your fellow classmates? It was simply stunning and they fully deserved the 10 points extra that you and your fellow classmates assigned to them. That is an evaluation strategy, where nobody could cheat because nobody could cheat your own instincts for detecting and recognizing quality.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#254

Post by btilly » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 5:52 AM UTC

carbonica wrote: post #234

gamble wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that was the policy, but how often was it enforced? Most universities have draconian policies against cheating that are never enforced, except in the most egregious cases. It's extremely rare for any school to discipline as many people as this; when it does happen, it tends to be national news.

28 students last year (out of about 4,000) were reported. 17 were suspended, 7 got probation, 3 were found not responsible, and 1 had the allegations formally rescinded. This is roughly consistent year-to-year.

Unless your school is dramatically different from other schools, you've just provided very strong evidence that only a tiny minority of actual violations are pursued.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#255

Post by lyudmil » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 5:54 AM UTC

sorbus wrote: post #137

kmm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He doesn't lose money, he gets a smaller raise.

Getting a raise less than the rate of inflation is losing money. His purchasing power declined.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#256

Post by kev009 » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 5:55 AM UTC

This article made me cringe as I remembered how incompetent the M.Sc. interns from schools like this were over my summers. 4.0 GPA engineering Masters students barely worth the cubical they took up, let alone any stipend. Group think; hive mind; worthless.

Additive sum, I think academia is doomed. It's done a worse job adapting than politics and religion, equally baroque and antiquated fields. I long for something like Ars Digita or Kahn Academy to become the norm. We need to push education out to the individual and get rid of the institutionalized cookie cutter bullshit.

People either want to enhance their understanding of the world or they don't. A credential or piece of paper doesn't do that, and that's all the vast majority of people in education are going for. We need to cut down to the root and find ways to instill genuine thirst for knowledge and then let people pursue that in much less rigid ways at their own pace.

--

As an anecdote: I went to The Citadel. We had an honor code. Lie, cheat, steal -- you're gone. The honor court is run by students. Regularly, they'd expel close friends. Point being, you can hold people to standards if you hold people to standards.

My GPA was dismal but I can say sure as shit I never cheated or plagiarized to earn it. Only people who know what the school was all about would even account for this, which is kind of depressing.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#257

Post by Panos » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 5:55 AM UTC

jackpirate wrote: post #245

Panos wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the proposed solution at the end of the article. Please read that part as it is at the very heart of the point that I want to make.

One thing you don't address in the article that I would like to hear more about is how you handled cheating in previous semesters? Do you think it was just as prevalent, but you simply weren't aware because of no automated processing? Or were you teaching classes where cheaters were much less likely (such as an upper level research course)? I think the comparison would add a lot of valuable info to the debate.

Ah correct. I should have mentioned that.

I was detecting some cheating in Excel assignments, but I was only pursuing the very obvious cases. At most a couple of cheating cases per semester.

For essays, it was pretty much impossible without the use of Turnitin, which I used for the first time in the Fall 2010 semester.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#258

Post by jackpirate » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 5:56 AM UTC

carbonica wrote: post #234

gamble wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that was the policy, but how often was it enforced? Most universities have draconian policies against cheating that are never enforced, except in the most egregious cases. It's extremely rare for any school to discipline as many people as this; when it does happen, it tends to be national news.

28 students last year (out of about 4,000) were reported. 17 were suspended, 7 got probation, 3 were found not responsible, and 1 had the allegations formally rescinded. This is roughly consistent year-to-year.

The "were reported" is key. Who knows how many professors pulled a promising young student aside, gave them a stern lecture, and a second chance.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#259

Post by badclient » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 5:57 AM UTC

Panos wrote: post #249

badclient wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think being pissed at 28/108 students is a valid excuse for acting pissed at everyone. That is a major professional flaw and a post on how you plan to control your emotion may be appreciated by future students. I have had professors that had me write huge essays and then proceeded to just put a huge ass check and never really read past the first paragraph. If I plagiarized and cited my frustration with all th…

I see your point. But consider the following: these numbers are for the students that admitted cheating. There was a significant number of other assignments for which I suspected cheating but I did not have enough evidence. So, I erred on the side of having false negatives in the accusations, rather than false positives. Now, if you are teaching a class where you have some suspicion that half of the students have che…

Fair nuff.

Though each time you point out your former student's grade seeking tendencies, you are just highlighting the disconnect between you and your students. Many of us would love the utopian dream of going to class to learn without worrying about grades, but at the end of the day, grades matter. May be a lot, even.

It is why you care about folks plagiarizing. It is why your former student cares about his grades.

Again, I don't think you would take kindly to a student who plagiarized complain that you are still stuck up about that one incident when the student has demonstrated he's learned a buncha stuff from your class that is as reflective of him as the plagiarizing.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#260

Post by Panos » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 6:01 AM UTC

jamesaguilar wrote: post #229

Panos wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

James, I did exactly what you suggested. Every single student came to protest. I believed that things would play out exactly as you are thinking. Unfortunately, they turned out very differently.

Huh, interesting. But I got the impression from your article that you typically had a discussion with the student, presented them with the evidence, etc. after they protested to you. That's a little different than my proposal, where in the case of protest you hand it off to the honor board immediately. I.e. the students should know that the only discussion is one where they risk suspension if they don't manage to pro…

When I detected 15+ cheating cases, I just asked permission from the Dean's office to notify students over email, and then direct them to the Dean's office for appeals.

So I did that, notified the cheating students they got a -30 (negative the points of the homework) and directed them to the Dean's office for appeals.

Well, it was very difficult to enforce the "talk to the Dean's office if you have a problem with my judgment." When the student comes in my office during office hours, I cannot say "I do not want to talk to you, get out of my office". Yes, I could do it, in theory. Hard to do in practice. Would I physically push the student out of my office?