Why I will never pursue cheating again

I responded with this to hpguy who also responded to my comment (a university teacher):

I would love to hear your thoughts on this:

What I mean is: You do what you can within your means and within the reasonable timeframes given to you by the course, and not necessarily carry the complete burden of their success on your shoulders. In my opinion it's the responsibility of everyone -- parents, peers, the community, teachers, administrators, and whoever else -- to teach, and foster the learning environment in such a way that maximizes the chance of success to the younger citizens of this world. If you view the responsibility as being shared between all, the pressure naturally significantly decreases as you know you directly can't be blamed if things don't work out for your students. It's a complex system.

At the simplest level, don't people attend school to assist them in being successful in life? Assist them in growing and developing into whatever they want to be? If that's so, and being that teachers are the most important parts of the school environment, isn't one of the teacher's primary jobs to assist in this success? Because teachers spend so much time with students, they naturally have tremendous (though varying degrees of) influence. If a teacher is lazy, naturally students will be encouraged to be lazy. If a teacher acts like it's OK to cheat, naturally students will be more likely to think it's OK to cheat.

There are bigger questions at hand than the direct and concrete subject matter of an individual university course, and in a lot of cases I believe these questions are just as important, if not more important. Most importantly, keeping these larger questions in mind assist students in staying properly focused and motivated, and thus increasing chance of achievement.

So yes, I do believe you should do what you can to bring success to your students.

I totally agree about teaching being everyone's responsibility. This idea has been lost in this country for some reason. Teachers have been saddled with more and more responsibility. Its no longer enough to teach the material, it has to be made exciting. The teacher is expected to coddle each student (and their parents!) to cajole them into putting in any real effort. Somehow the responsibility for a students success has been transferred completely to the teacher.

I think students in this country respond to this, and thus internalize this dynamic. If they get a bad grade, it must have been because the teacher was boring, or the subject wasn't interesting. This idea is pretty unique to this country from my understanding. The sense of entitlement is just astounding.

>isn't one of the teacher's primary jobs to assist in this success?

Ideally, this would be true. I just think its an unfair burden on a teacher to be expected to accomplish this, no matter how ill prepared or unfocused a student is. I believe the student has to come to class prepared to learn. The teacher cannot be expected to mold an unwilling child into a willing one.

The situation changes even more at university. The professor's main job isn't teacher. He can no longer be completely focused on helping each student succeed. He's there to impart his knowledge and experience. Its up to the student to get as much out of it as they're willing. Somehow the growing responsibility of teachers in a K-12 setting has crept up into university as well. Probably because the students and parents carry that expectation along with them. We're no longer seeing the students as adults who are there because they want to (I guess this is actually true these days with social pressures making college an extension of high school). Simply put, the burden is just too much for a teacher of possibly hundreds of students. The coddling and babying has to come from elsewhere.

I completely agree that students themselves should be responsible for their learning, even in high school. The sad truth is that most high school and even university students don't take responsibility for their learning. In that aspect I believe they're still children (as I was in uni), seeking and requiring pedagogical environments rather than andragogical. (why this is, is another troubling matter).

So let's assume for a moment that students, as they should, take that responsibility. What then is the role of the professor?

Even here, my belief is that it's still the professors duty to seek to create the ideal learning environment for each student (or the majority). This includes trying to maximize learning outcomes by making the course as interesting as they can. Wherever possible, this includes learning about each student, learning where they are mentally in their journey (through personal time, tests, projects), and wherever it benefits the student, be open to that change wherever it makes sense.

At research universities I agree professors have a dual duty. However, I disagree that these duties are and should be separate, and rather often (again, not always) should and can be reciprocal and build off of one another.

> The situation changes even more at university. The professor's main job isn't teacher. > He's there to impart his knowledge and experience.

Studies show over and over again that knowledge isn't "imparted". You can have a professor stand at the front of the class and talk for 50 minutes about what he knows. Is that "teaching", even if 0/100 of the students are listening, or if 0/100 can comprehend what the teacher is saying? Why is the focus on lecturing, or "imparting knowledge", rather than on enabling learning? I believe this shift in mindset would change nearly everything. Anyway, I sat through numerous classes like described above, and the amount I learned from the lectures ranged from nothing to very little. I agree I would've learned more if I would have taken responsibility for my learning, however I fear I would've faster quit or changed schools/courses than go to another one of their classes because of the incredible inefficiency of it. Teaching/lecturing can be worth while, even for an autodidact, however not unless the teacher deeply cares about learning outcomes in addition to lecturing.

One last point: Students/parents pay ridiculous sums and go into ridiculous debt for a university education. You have to understand that saying that the professors (the core of the university experience) main job isn't teaching is something very hard to grasp for both students and parents. Perhaps for a good reason?

These are weekly homework assignments. 5 hours on average. It's not too bad.

Students, this is why many great employers don't put much weight on the Education section of your CV.

(Cheaters, you should be figuring out how to crib a nice github account, not how to pass exams.)