391–400 of 506 posts
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By whom?
By the administration, which separates the credits for the courses into "recitations" and "lectures". The TA's get paid for the recitations/activities-based hours, the professors for the lectures.
The system is broken.
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…
> what really irks me about your post is your complacence with cheating because it’s not in your self-interest to pursue those who cheated Why don't you hold the other professors to the same standard? It's not as if the other professors are oblivious to rampant cheating. But what's the point of trying to catch cheaters if it hurts the class dynamic and if those who get caught don't even get suspended? The students ar…
This exact scenario happened in a class I attended some years back. Guess who felt nervous? Those who knew they cheated on the assignment and those who plagiarized habitually but didn't remember whether they plagiarized in this instance. The students who would never, ever, ever, copy-paste plagiarize did not feel the slightest bit worried.
That isn't true at all. I've never cheated once -- from elementary school through grad school -- yet I've been accused of it twice by professors. In one case, I created something so novel and excellent, the professor assumed I had taken it from an obscure book; in another, the professor misunderstood how my software worked and thought it couldn't possibly produce the output I claimed.
If a blanket accusation of plagiarism went out, I would be very concerned that another student might have found a way to copy my work, or that I might have subconsciously reproduced something, or that there might be some other false positive. I would definitely show up to find out what was going on.
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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.
You're failing to think things through Really? 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. False, I am a walking talking counter-example, but it's the same for all of the companies at which I have sat on recruitment interview boards, and also true for every company that has eve…
This is just flat out wrong. Not all companies use grades, or care about the institution you graduated from. But there are entire industries where your main ticket for admittance is your pedigree. Cheaters water down the degree affecting everyone who didn't cheat.
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> what really irks me about your post is your complacence with cheating because it’s not in your self-interest to pursue those who cheated Why don't you hold the other professors to the same standard? It's not as if the other professors are oblivious to rampant cheating. But what's the point of trying to catch cheaters if it hurts the class dynamic and if those who get caught don't even get suspended? The students ar…
What's wrong with just giving people who cheated a bad grade, rather than wasting hours talking to them?
Then again, they'll do that anyway.
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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…
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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…
You've got that exactly backwards. Behaving professionally means turning off emotion and acting appropriately. Anyone whose job involves dealing with people has to do it, from grocery store cashiers and waitresses to doctors and lawyers.
It's expected, and literally millions of people do it successfully every day.
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…
Wait, as I just noticed this: You collaborated with another student? In an individual assignment? In which you had very clear directions not to collaborate with other students? I am really sorry that I did not catch you. You would have received the penalty that all other students who "collaborated" received, which I guess would have brought your grade to a C-.
I also think that if you made it very clear that NO collaboration was allowed then it is true, this student cheated.
However, I would say that a no collaboration rule is something you may want to be wary of if you're keen to have a good class ethos. I have always found that classes where some level of conferring between students has seemed to bring the best out of the assigned task. Direct copying and working together is obviously outside this, here I am for instance talking about doing your work at a computer next to someone doing the same work - and discussing the task with them as you go through. The very best lecturers I've had, whose coursework I have learned the most from, have been the ones who allowed and encouraged this practice.
The end result is a class ethos and atmosphere where people learn from one another and take an active interest in the subject matter. Another result is that people can become more competitive among themselves, especially if the coursework is creative enough to allow some 'flair' to take place. (For instance in a programming task 20% of the marks are often given for extensions). A side effect of this competition is that students will not tolerate other students stealing from them. They certainly won't tolerate copying from previous years solutions. Quite apart from this intolerance of cheaters the sense of competition allows a sense of personal pride, whereby students want to hand in a good piece of original work.
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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…
People do respond to incentives. That is an intellectual fact, and should be taken into account when designing systems. But to say that a given individual always should or always will is a moral absurdity. It is tantamount to justifying all criminal action.
If your moral axiom is "I am most important", selfishness is rational behavior. But that is only if that is your axiom. If it's "everyone is equally important" or even "other people are most important" things will look quite different.
It comes down to how you relate to the rest of humanity -- as an enemy, an equal, or a friend.
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> what really irks me about your post is your complacence with cheating because it’s not in your self-interest to pursue those who cheated Why don't you hold the other professors to the same standard? It's not as if the other professors are oblivious to rampant cheating. But what's the point of trying to catch cheaters if it hurts the class dynamic and if those who get caught don't even get suspended? The students ar…
all the students had received your email demanding those who plagiarized to come in to talk to you, naturally everyone, even those who didn’t cheat, felt very uneasy and worried This exact scenario happened in a class I attended some years back. Guess who felt nervous? Those who knew they cheated on the assignment and those who plagiarized habitually but didn't remember whether they plagiarized in this instance. The…
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Anyone who disagrees isn't thinking? Please. I've been in interview loops for years at different companies. We discuss every candidate's demonstrated problem-solving and design abilities, and culture fit for the ones we don't rule out quickly. Nobody ever brings up the reputation of any school they went to. We just don't care at all. Allegedly somebody out there does, but I have yet to see it happen.
"Anyone who disagrees isn't thinking?" I didn't say that. But the whole world is not the Bay Area. I've known folks for whom this was an issue.
My brother went to West Point and got a degree in CS. At West Point people with higher grades get first pick the corps they go into. People with exceptionally low grades get saddled with chem-corp or transpo.
I have a friend who is a librarian. Librarianship has a huge bias towards degrees and a qualified individual without a degree will be routinely passed over for an unqualified individual with a high level degree, even if that person is antagonistic to the project.
I have another friend who is a school teacher, his academic credentials are checked whenever he has to change jobs and they are the major limiter in his ability work for better schools.
The people on this forum mostly belong to an exceptional segment of an exceptional industry. I agree that academic credentials really shouldn't matter as much as more objective evaluations of ability, but for most of the country, they do and not realizing this implies a certain myopia and failure to think outside of one immediate condition.