Why I will never pursue cheating again • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#421

Post by lutorm » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 5:48 PM UTC

pseingatl wrote: post #355

lutorm wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

If you think that the Internet contains to answer to all questions, that's amazing.

I don't. I think that the internet contains information that can be used to assemble an answer, for pretty much any undergraduate question you can think of. (That assembly can be done using copy/paste, if you are lazy, and that will generally result in the answer being in substandard language. But it would still have all the relevant information and it would be hard to disentangle a copy/pasted answer from whether someone is just a poor writer.)

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#422

Post by pmb » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 5:50 PM UTC

lucisferre wrote: post #221

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…

Speaking from personal experience (both as a student and a TA) nothing is worse than ECE professors for bad teaching or ECE students for cheating, neither aspect of this scenario really surprise me. I think it is sad but telling that the author gave up so quickly on what is (as the OP pointed out) the basic expectations of his job, but it is also telling about the overall quality and current state of ECE departments…

Business students, not ECE.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#423

Post by iqster » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 6:02 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #210

commanda wrote: post #192

I 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. Hi…

I'm one of those people who want to genuinely learn yet was obsessed with having a perfect GPA. Here's something I experienced ...

Many years ago, when I first started grad school in CS, I wanted to learn graphics programming and enrolled in a course cross-listed between undergrads and grad students. I got the first assignment and was shocked at the amount of code needed to be written (and I consider myself to be a strong hacker!). I only got 80% of the functions working and got a lame mark for the assignment. Then assignment 2 comes along - even more complex and code-heavy than the first! During this time, I happened to go to the undergrad lab for something. What do I see? Multiple groups of undergrads (fours and five students per computer) with what seemed to be like copies of the assignments from the previous year. I subsequently verified that the prof had been using the same assignments every year. It was also a reality check for the amount of plagarism that happens in CS labs (during my undergrad days, I thought it was extremely rare). I was pretty disgusted by the state of affairs and ended up dropping this particular course. My loss.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#424

Post by 0wnr » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 6:21 PM UTC

I think that it would be productive to reframe the usage of plagiarism-detection services such as Turnitin away from a "gotcha" on cheating towards teaching students to properly cite their academic work. For example, I have heard of professors requiring their students to print out the originality reports themselves and turn them in with the assignment in order to promote accountability.

In addition, the turnitin service itself has its own quirks. I remember when we used it back in high school, it would pick up direct quotes even if they were in quotation marks and use those matching strings to contribute to the total "originality score."

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#425

Post by nooneelse » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 6:30 PM UTC

specialist wrote: post #365

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…

> About the issue of a "true capitalist," yes I am a libertarian at heart. And I do believe that people respond to incentives. Libertarian, maximum personal liberty. If you were a libertarian, you wouldn't care about the cheating. Let the little bastards screw themselves. Libertarian doctrine (such as it is) says nothing about incentives. Getting worked up about the cheating, you assume society (or at least your clas…

> Libertarian, maximum personal liberty. If you were a libertarian, you wouldn't care about the cheating.

Not when there is an existing agreement in place otherwise, that being the one between the honest students, the school, and the teacher calling for the teacher to fairly assess performance and grade accordingly. Unless the policy of the school on cheating is "whatever, no problem" (which doesn't seem to be the case), then the libertarian position is to stick to the contract he signed on for. Or is the new libertarian position something more like: honoring contracts is for suckers, screw everyone who hasn't caught on to it yet.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#426

Post by Dove » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 6:41 PM UTC

hackinthebochs wrote: post #413

Dove wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the employer is not interested in rewarding him (or even penalizing him) for doing something that not only is stressful but that takes tons of time away from his useful work, why should he? Because it is the right and honorable thing to do in his position. If doing the right thing were always easy and profitable, we'd have no need for morals. There are lots of situations where people are encouraged and rewarded fo…

This is a common misconception. The professor is there to perform research, only incidentally to teach. It's not his responsibility to police students. It's the responsibility of the entire system to have policies in place that effectively prosecute cheating. When that system fails it is not his moral obligation to carry that burden himself.

I disagree. The incidentiality of the teaching doesn't enter into it. As long as he is giving grades, he has a responsibility to make a reasonable effort to detect and deter cheating.

(I do think the strategy he described -- spending two hours per student trying to force a confession -- is unreasonable. Detection, notification, and escalation to school enforcement is a reasonable approach. Giving up and blaming the system is not.)

I agree that it is the responsibility of the school to have systems in place that provide the right incentives. But it is also the responsibility of the professors to defend the academic integrity of the school as much as they are involved with it.

Moral responsibility does not always add up to 100%.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#427

Post by jrockway » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 6:42 PM UTC

dkersten wrote: post #312

Panos wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I felt that I am teaching a class full of kids that come just for the grade, and not for learning. From reading your blog post and your comments here, I got the impression that you cared more about your pay raise than about the students learning. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I could have misinterpreted whats been said and that you were probably a victim of circumstance, but you blame the guy for demonstrating…

I got the impression that you cared more about your pay raise than about the students learning.

I get the impression that most people care more about their compensation than about . Money is an important thing in the modern world, and I guarantee that 99.99% of people in the workforce do their work solely for the money. Stop paying them, they leave. So it's natural that this professor would want a pay raise, too. Everyone does.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#428

Post by jrockway » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 6:51 PM UTC

This is why I dropped out of college. The other kids ruined it for me: while I was trying to actually do my assignments, everyone else was copying-and-pasting it, getting straight As, and partying late into the night. Nobody ever got caught cheating, but my C work certainly got me a lot of Cs.

In retrospect, most of my friends from college are still unemployed.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#429

Post by yason » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 6:56 PM UTC

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…

As someone who was a student in your class, I can speak for myself and say that I did give you a low rating

What the HECK is that sort of system for? Students rating teachers and those ratings have an effect on the teacher's annual review?

I hope I'm wrong but if that's how it works in that particular school there's no chance for professional integrity if the teacher has to keep the students happy. A teacher should always be in a position where he has an unchallengeable authority over students (with regard to the class, of course), and thus being able to be harsh when necessary without having to self-correlate his behaviour in fear of being financially punished. Otherwise it'll be screaming for A's for everyone.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#430

Post by mirkules » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 7:18 PM UTC

happybuy wrote: post #205

kristofferR wrote: post #62

I 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.

Copying is only plagiarism if you don't cite/reference your sources.

(I'm being somewhat tongue-in-cheek here)