Why I will never pursue cheating again • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#351

Post by fab13n » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:14 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #343

[deleted]

There's a key element you seem to have overlooked: he's teaching in a business school.

What are his students supposed to be able to do, eventually? Navigating around the limits of legality to maximize profit; understand, exploit and tweak incentives (the ones they're subjected to, and the one they impose onto others) to get a maximum result out of a minimal investment; bullshitting their way out of avoidable or unrewarding workload; getting as much personal credit as possible, deserved or not, in corporate political games; etc.

They're not expected to value hard work, patience, friendship and fair play; it's their future job to commit as much "aggressive optimization" (which might be called cheating indeed, and would be bad in many other contexts) as they can get away with. These are the rules of the game; you're welcome to dislike them, but then, pick another game.

I believe the author had the choice between embracing these values, or go and teach somewhere else. He's here to maximize the school's bottom line, by juicing out as much money as possible in tuition fees, after all.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#352

Post by gizmo » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:15 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #350

gizmo wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold on a second! The student accused the professor of racism in the post I replied to. I quote: "It got to the point where we [...] discussed it and concluded you were just racist". To accuse a professor semi-anonymously of racism is completely outrageous, so yes, I ridiculed him for that. Especially when absolutely no evidence of potential racism is provided. Careers are destroyed over baseless accusations of racis…

[deleted]

I do have a problem with that. But in this case the professor said he went to great lengths to avoid false positives and only took action against those students who confessed after being confronted with a mountain of evidence.

In this case the professor stated that collaboration was absolutely prohibited. Cite: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2776039

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#353

Post by pseingatl » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:19 PM UTC

haberman wrote: post #108

Having to write an essay for which copy/paste from the internet could be construed as a valid answer sounds mind-numbingly boring. Your job is to express the same information as your sources, but with different wording.

Copy/paste is not an "answer," it is a tool used for document creation. There's nothing wrong with it in the least, as long as sources are documented.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#354

Post by brudgers » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:22 PM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #186

brudgers wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As for confronting students, different schools have different expectations. As others here have pointed out, this school may expect professors to try to work out cheating issues locally first. I can't say. Regarding your second point, if any one thing becomes a trend in a class, you bring it up with the class.

I doubt any school has a policy which does not allow every incident of cheating to be reported and handled through established due process procedures. Administration may prefer molly-coddling of the ATM's, but the written policy will almost certainly not require only reporting the third offense.

As for your second point, preaching to the choir is a waste of time and just makes them uncomfortable (as this case points out), the come to Jesus talk is a one on one affair.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#355

Post by pseingatl » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:24 PM UTC

lutorm wrote: post #170

haberman wrote: post #108

Having to write an essay for which copy/paste from the internet could be construed as a valid answer sounds mind-numbingly boring. Your job is to express the same information as your sources, but with different wording.

What do you mean? Copy/paste from the internet was not a valid answer. Pretty much any question can be answered by copy/paste from the internet. That doesn't mean it would be a good or acceptable answer.

This wasn't a class in Rhetorica ad Herennium, it was a business school class. Copy/paste is a combination of two actions and not an answer to any question (except maybe, how do you precisely move text from one file to another?). If you think that the Internet contains to answer to all questions, that's amazing. However, it may contain answers to the questions Professor Panos asked. If it does, what is wrong with properly presenting those answers? I might point out that my profession is perhaps the only one for which plagiarism is a virtue, and failure to use precedents is usually foolhardy--it ain't called boilerplate for nothing. But I didn't want to hijack the thread.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#356

Post by scott_s » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:30 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #354

scott_s wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As for confronting students, different schools have different expectations. As others here have pointed out, this school may expect professors to try to work out cheating issues locally first. I can't say. Regarding your second point, if any one thing becomes a trend in a class, you bring it up with the class.

I doubt any school has a policy which does not allow every incident of cheating to be reported and handled through established due process procedures. Administration may prefer molly-coddling of the ATM's, but the written policy will almost certainly not require only reporting the third offense. As for your second point, preaching to the choir is a waste of time and just makes them uncomfortable (as this case points…

Why do you assume that everyone who shows up to class is "the choir"?

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#357

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:33 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #352

[deleted] wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I do have a problem with that. But in this case the professor said he went to great lengths to avoid false positives and only took action against those students who confessed after being confronted with a mountain of evidence. In this case the professor stated that collaboration was absolutely prohibited. Cite: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2776039

[deleted]

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#358

Post by brudgers » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:33 PM UTC

kd1220 wrote: post #202

brudgers wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, co…

What your case shows is that the due process worked. If the professor had called you into the office and said, "Instead of handing this over to the honor court, I am going to deduct 30% from your score," that would have been far more unfair and built far more ill will.

To put it another way, a professor should focus on teaching and let those tasked with investigating cheating and listening to excuses sort it out.

And yes it can and should be as impersonal as a parking ticket. Cheating is a simple violation, and it behooves a teacher to forgo emotional investment in each case. Avoiding interrogations and Perry Masonesque cross-examinations would seem like a good way to avoid such an investment. When 1:5 students in a 100 person course is doing so, reporting cheating is a purely administrative matter of the same sort as turning in low grades for poor students - which hopefully is something the author still does not find to be too much bother.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#359

Post by pbhjpbhj » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:34 PM UTC

jackpirate wrote: post #241

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…

>> That is a major professional flaw and a post on how you plan to control your emotion may be appreciated by future students. I think he is readily admitting this is a major flaw, and he plans on controlling his emotions in the future by not obsessing about cheating. This is probably not the ideal response, but it is very human, and you have to give him props for admitting his weaknesses.

What this, and indeed the whole monologue, emphasises for me is that the teachers should probably not be involved in the process of disciplining students. It's wasting their time and decreasing their effectiveness.

Create a position (or probably department) for quality control. Automatically send "you plagiarised, warning" letters to the student and the person who paid for the course if the submitted work receives a score above X threshold for plagiarism (this threshold to be chosen by an inter-university body and preferably standardised across universities).

Obviously a student would be able to appeal and have proper analysis done by a department member. A second warning without appeal would get a student a P grade for "admitted plagiarism".

This way the teacher just teaches, just marks the work submitted and the administrative duty of notifying students that their plagiarism has been spotted is separated and codified.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#360

Post by astine » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:38 PM UTC

demallien wrote: post #344

astine wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In the end, the only people they are harming is themselves " No they're not. Grades are important in moving on in academia and moving on one's career ultimately. Cheaters are hurting other students by out-competing them on graduate entry exams and job applications. They hurt their prospective employers by not learning and out-competing competent students for jobs, (possibly becoming one of those jerks you read about…

This is only true if you think that good employers are hiring on the basis of grades. You know what, I've hired a half dozen or so programmers, and I've done interviews with about 100, and not once have I ever looked at their grades or their faculty. I don't think I'm unusual in that respect. I think employers using grades as a basis for a hiring decision is every bit as silly as professors worrying about their stude…

You're failing to think things through. Employers only base their hiring decisions on grades for recent graduates, but nearly all employers base their hiring decision on the student's degree and the institution it comes from. Good grades help with that. There is also the issue of graduate school which certainly does take grades into account.