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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

#291

Post by Groxx »

sliverstorm wrote: post #288
Groxx wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In non-life-or-death situations, people endure quite a large amount of discomfort to achieve other goals. But a high-enough level of discomfort kills people. Does this mean the ones enduring small amounts are irrational? Reducto-ad-absurdum is a proof only when it takes into account everything in the argument. In life-or-death examples, other normally-included portions are dropped, making the argument something else…

It's not a straw-man. I have attempted to refute nothing. I was merely asking my parent to consider how he might behave in such a situation. I used a different situation, it is true, but only because I have found being on the instructional end of cheating feels very different than you might imagine, so I guessed my parent was not familiar with it.

You attempted to refute the claim that people should control themselves better in such situations. And you did so very clearly, by inferring that spreading the mood to the 75% was perfectly logical.

As a student who has not cheated, but has had to sit through countless lectures about cheating, and a few where large portions of the class did, I ask you and (other?) teachers this question: to whom are you teaching? The ones who are learning, or the ones who are cheating?

I understand that you're stuck with both, but either find motivation in the successes or consider another line of work - it's part of the job. Otherwise you're screwing the ones who did the right thing.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#292

Post by badclient »

sliverstorm wrote: post #261
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…

Imagine yourself living in a small colony of 109 individuals, 108 plus yourself. At least 25%, or one in four, want to kill you, and you don't know who they are. Would you act friendly, trusting, kind and natural around everyone because up to 75% of them do not deserve your fear and suspicion? It is perhaps a bit of an extreme thought experiment, but I think it illustrates handily how the human mind reacts in this ki…

No one wants to kill anyone here.

I am all for using analogies to reassess my views, but the degree of comparison should be similar for the analogy to work. I can't even process for a second how cheating is anything like threatening to kill someone.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#293

Post by bane »

I would love to see a "citation graph" of the papers in turnitin's database.

I had a professor in college who had used the exact same test for 10 years. It was so well known that a "key" had been cobbled together over the years with all of the correct answers and you could readily get n-generation photocopies of this "key".

Only a few of us declined this tempting document, wanting to actually learn the material. It eventually became known that the test itself was a copy of a test from another professor at another school.

Later in my grad program, we received quite a bit of instruction from professors who were clearly just using the slides that came with the textbook as their lecture material.

I've always wondered if one could trace assignments and exams and answers through some very large citation graph...even better over time, seeing how one ancient paper has provided passing grades for generations of students.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#294

Post by badclient »

btilly wrote: post #290
badclient wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise, I know professors who under similar situation do not react like the professor in this discussion. Also I don't understand why the same emotional wiring that can explain the professor's behavior cannot potentially explain the cheating student's behavior?

How so a similar situation? You have known many professors who are going through reporting a fifth of their class to the deans for cheating? You know how they feel and act during that event? Really? I firmly disbelieve. I spent 9 years in a university setting, knew a lot of professors, and I personally knew exactly nobody who went through that. And from what I know of human nature, and the likely emotions that someon…

Can't help if you choose to twist my use of the word "similar" into "same".

I've been through multiple stop-te-cheating lectures and each time, the professors went out of their way to appreciate the non-cheats and minimize negative impact on the innocent due to the actions of the guilty minority.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#295

Post by koenigdavidmj »

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?

There are many ways for which most of the same benefit can be gotten, such as having the software be paid for by each school, which would host it itself and maintain its own database. Crawling from the web would still be feasible (just with a lot of duplication of effort between universities), and you would still be able to catch students at the same school who copy from each other---and most of the students who copy from others are going to copy from students who attend the same institution.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#296

Post by holdenc »

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…

It's good that you've found a career that will tolerate your unapologetic selfishness, whining and indifference. All of these things will surely limit your success outside academia.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#297

Post by roel_v »

nyustern wrote: post #189

Hi 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…

"I, who collaborated with a friend on one small part of the assignment,"

So you admit you cheated and then you turn around and say "this guy is a racist"? LOL. I guess I could make some more observations from my own experiences here, but that would make me "racist" too I guess...

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#298

Post by Groxx »

Panos wrote: post #257
jackpirate wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Essays are inherently problematic in most fields, because they're effectively always at least partially graded on the quality of writing, which doesn't have any connection with how well something was learned (which should have a connection with grade). Some profs separate it out better than others, but students usually have only vague or zero knowledge about who falls where, so the default approach is that, regardless of what the prof states, writing quality matters. Copying from someone who is a better writer than you is a sure-fire way to sound better, which usually leads to a disproportionately-higher grade than an equivalent amount of copying simply the information.

If I write extremely poorly, the pain of reading through it taints what data exists. The irritation lowers the perception, which lowers the grade. It's a pretty well known phenomenon, lots of studies supporting it, probably most classically known as: sitting in a hard chair makes you more "hard" in your dealings with people.

Note that your example with the presentations only supports the belief that the delivery of the proof-of-learning matters. Not that there's a way to fix it, of course - awesome results are awesome, and should be encouraged. It's simply that I wish more professors were (more acutely?) aware of it, so it would (hopefully) have less impact. I would think that there would be a bit less cheating if delivery didn't matter.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#299

Post by roel_v »

Panos wrote: post #257
jackpirate wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A bit too meta for a comment maybe, but ah well.

You're getting downvoted quite a bit in the comments in this thread I see, even for this one which seems very factual and without any reason to downvote. I guess it's because the average age of the audience of HN has gravitated downwards over the last year or two, and that many readers are still students who identify much more naturally with your students than with yourself; causing you to start with a disadvantage in the pathos department, so to speak.

I guess it's the same dynamic that is causing the discussion on the business-type articles to be much more, well, anti-business nowadays.

Anyway, just to say that I feel sorry for you for having to work in a system that is set up in such a way (by no individual's fault, btw) that those with the best intentions are destined for failure. It reminds me of my experiences with doctors in a hospital I've been interacting with a lot lately, who share your fate - they all mean very well but the deck is stacked against them in the form of a dysfunctional system they have to work in. My wife is a professor too and I recognize your dilemmas all too well; I've posted about it here in the past, but back in those days I still got upvoted for it ;)

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#300

Post by qq66 »

roel_v wrote: post #297
nyustern wrote: post #189

Hi 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…

"I, who collaborated with a friend on one small part of the assignment," So you admit you cheated and then you turn around and say "this guy is a racist"? LOL. I guess I could make some more observations from my own experiences here, but that would make me "racist" too I guess...

Each university and individual course has its own collaboration guidelines. Collaborating with a friend on a part of the assignment could be completely kosher. Not enough information to judge.
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