Why I will never pursue cheating again • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#431

Post by nostrademons » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 7:24 PM UTC

roel_v wrote: post #347

nostrademons wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and total compensation for skilled software engineers is easily more than $150K. So in an apples-to-apples comparison, the techies don't come out so bad. The bulk of the NYU grads cited in the statistics above were working in the Northeast (presumably NYC), so again, comparing them to Silicon Valley engineers is totally apples-to-apples. If anything, it's unfair to the Silicon Valley folks, as cost of living i…

"Right, and total compensation for skilled software engineers is easily more than $150K" [citation needed] 150+ is still rather unusual, as far as I know. Glassdoor.com says that, for example, at Fog Creek (a company that is quite famous and brags about how well it pays its engineers; and has offices in NYC) the one engineer who filled in his salary makes between 92k and 100k. That's a long way off from 150k, and I'm…

Salary survey here on Hacker News 4 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2763932

(When I looked at it last, there were actually a lot fewer responses in the The citation in the poll says that StackExchange's top end is about $200K.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#432

Post by Lewisham » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 7:37 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #359

jackpirate wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

Yes, this is probably the correct thing to do. Unfortunately, most universities are too cash-strapped for such a thing.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#433

Post by yters » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 7:42 PM 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…

The cheaters to non cheaters ration should be 0/108. If 80 of the students are allowing 28 other students to cheat, I'd be definitely pissed off at them.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#434

Post by spne » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 7:43 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #349

gizmo wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

One (not uncommon) scenario is when two identical (or high match) assignments are turned in, and the professor does not know if (1) the students collaborated or (2) one student cheated off of the other. Penalizing both students is clearly wrong if one student did the assignment properly without cheating, and the other student copied the first student's work.

How can the professor determine which student cheated (or if both students cheated), without spending substantially time looking into it and talking to both students?

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#435

Post by dkokelley » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 7:46 PM UTC

How about making a game out of it. A game where cheating is permitted but punishment is administered with more granularity. Let the students know that all assignments are submitted to TurnItIn. Let them also have a look at what you see on TII. Whenever a student's plagiarism threshold is above 50%, their actual score gets docked by 1-(percentage plagiarized). So if a student submits an A paper (say, 93%), but it turns out it was 70% plagiarized, the new grade with cheating penalty becomes .93*(1-.7) = 28%. Smart students will quickly realize that any cheating will at least cut their possible grade in half.

I'm not sure this will work, but people have strange behavioral motivations and incentives. It reminds me of the daycare that wanted parents to not pick up their kids late (as employees had to remain to watch the children). Their solution was to impose a penalty for any extra time over the scheduled pickup time. On the surface, you would think this helped, but instead it had the opposite effect. Parents now understood that it was OK to leave their kids longer because they were being charged for it, whereas before there was a social stigma of arriving late and inconveniencing the daycare center.

With students, it's possible that making plagiarism acceptable on the surface with well-defined penalties may have the desired (and opposite) effect of reducing total cheating.

Also, couldn't the grading structure be established in such a way that it is impossible to pass the class without knowing the material demonstrated through exams? If the only (or most significant) portion of the grade comes through reports and take-home, cheater-friendly exercises, then the grade structure would seem to be broken. Cheating on the homework should only hurt the students, since they won't be able to cheat on the tests, and obviously haven't learned the material enough to do the homework on their own.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#436

Post by yters » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 7:47 PM UTC

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…

Good point. Although, if students are cheating rampantly, which seems likely at your school, then teachers may feel they have to assign more busywork to compensate.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#437

Post by brudgers » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 7:49 PM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #364

brudgers wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Professors often are involved in the official process. Often they have to provide evidence at a hearing. They don't just throw the case over the administrator wall.

It is not a matter of throwing it over the wall. Administration can conduct the Spanish Inquisition more effectively than the professor.

A Turnitin report as cited in the article would be about as much evidence as would be needed. Particularly when Turnitin is the institution's official means for combating plagiarism...not to mention the level of matches described in the article would make it appear open and shut.

Yes, it might require some involvement from the professor - but the implications of complaining that such involvement is too much work is the basis of my criticism of the author's position.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#438

Post by brudgers » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 7:56 PM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #356

brudgers wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

In the example from the article, 80% of the class was presumably not cheating - so even if only half the class shows up for lectures the scolding will not be applicable to the majority of the students. Of course, if there is any correlation between lecture attendance and academic integrity (which one might suspect to be the case) then the majority becomes greater. In other words, the ill consequences cited in the article may well be a part of the author's choice of scolding the innocent along with the guilty. Seriously, at the point students are sitting in a university classroom - they all know what blatant cheating is and have either decided to do their own work or cut and paste. Going over basic citation requirements in class is more appropriate for junior-high school English.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#439

Post by ivankirigin » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 7:58 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 you may (or evidently, may not) know, correlation does not imply causation.

"Evidently, may not" - don't be a dick. Would you say that to his face?

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#440

Post by justin_vanw » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 8:29 PM UTC

neworder wrote: post #340

justin_vanw wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you asked, I would refuse to work anywhere that I was expected to stand aside and ignore fraud, or where I was punished for doing what everyone would agree is the right thing, in this case trying to catch and identify cheaters in compliance with the rules of the institution . I would rail against it every day and try to change the system by doing the right thing and calling out other faculty for not doing so, p…

>I would refuse to work anywhere that I was expected to stand aside and ignore fraud, or where I was punished for doing what everyone would agree is the right thing (...) You don't always have that much choice, do you? >I would rail against it every day and try to change the system by doing the right thing and calling out other faculty for not doing so, publicly. Yeah. You will not simply fail, you'll get screwed by…

I don't think I'd be 'screwed by the system', and no I don't think I'll be taking my lessons from some TV cops and robbers show. Do you have any clue how hilariously bad this advice you are giving is?