Why I will never pursue cheating again • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#481

Post by jshort » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 5:13 AM UTC

I am currently a university student, and last semester I took an international economics course. As most first lectures go I expected to sit down and listen to the professor tell us what we would be learning throughout the year and what books to buy. But this was quite different, I and many other students in the class experienced a wide range of emotions from panic to excitement. This was a peer based learning course (Myself and the majority of the class did not know this and several people went on their computers and changed courses), for those of you who do not know peer based learning involves students basically teaching themselves the material and then teaching their peers their findings. This was the best course I have yet to take, I learned not only a lot about international economics but how to better my ability at teaching myself what I need to know. In this course we were given three problems throughout the term that we were to be solved in groups, the problems themselves were very vague and indirect yet through researching and presenting our findings in small groups and then in individually completed essays we became knowledgeable in international economics. A bit more on topic was the fact that our essays were to be written individually (and submitted through turnitin) yet all of our research was done in a group setting. This furthered my ability to take information from various sources (mainly the internet) and formulate my own opinion and use proper citation where needed. For me this style of learning was very awkward at first but the reward for sticking with it was great.

Another course I took that term was statistics for economics, for some of the assignments the data used for the questions were chosen by the students themselves (limited to a specific time frame to prevent plagiarism). In the end I think the professor and TAs only checked our formulas rather than our answers because of the time it would have taken to find the correct solution for each problem but this is an interesting way to combat plagiarism.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#482

Post by sid0 » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 7:04 AM UTC

badclient wrote: post #279

btilly wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why the students cheat. However it is possible to be in their positions and not cheat. I don't want to have co-workers who cheat. I therefore would like to see the book thrown at them so that they learn not to cheat. If they truly had no choice about cheating, then I'd show more sympathy. But they do. By contrast we truly don't get to choose how we as humans are emotionally wired.

Likewise, I know professors who under similar situation do not react like the professor in this discussion. Also I don't understand why the same emotional wiring that can explain the professor's behavior cannot potentially explain the cheating student's behavior?

For what its worth, in the one class I've had where the professor did catch a fifth of the students cheating in the first midterm (and immediately handed everyone Fs), his mood towards the rest of the class changed similarly.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#483

Post by sid0 » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 7:05 AM UTC

badclient wrote: post #279

btilly wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why the students cheat. However it is possible to be in their positions and not cheat. I don't want to have co-workers who cheat. I therefore would like to see the book thrown at them so that they learn not to cheat. If they truly had no choice about cheating, then I'd show more sympathy. But they do. By contrast we truly don't get to choose how we as humans are emotionally wired.

Likewise, I know professors who under similar situation do not react like the professor in this discussion. Also I don't understand why the same emotional wiring that can explain the professor's behavior cannot potentially explain the cheating student's behavior?

For what its worth, in the one class I've had where the professor did catch a fifth of the students cheating in the first midterm (and immediately handed everyone Fs), his mood towards the rest of the class changed similarly.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#484

Post by jackpirate » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 7:21 AM UTC

jamesaguilar wrote: post #275

jackpirate wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has the problem of false positives, and an assumption of guilt. In my experience (at the Naval Academy, so maybe a little different), honor boards were designed solely to award punishment with no realistic chance of presenting evidence in your defense. I imagine that most schools are less strict, but still expect the professor to have talked the matter through with their students before a formal inquest.

Were you actually involved in the honor board at the Naval Academy? If so, I am wondering: is the honor board really only designed to punish, or were the only cases that made it that far so egregious that guilty is the only likely verdict? Of course, I think I would only refer students to the honor board if it was blatantly obvious they were cheating, and they opted to refuse my "warning" punishment.

The board was not "designed" to punish, but that was always the practical outcome. Something around 90% of cases resulted in punishment while I was there.

Basically, a group of students is selected to oversee the trial. They are repeatedly instructed that they must issue a guilty verdict if a preponderance of the evidence (51%) points that way. An overseeing officer (captain or admiral) supervises the proceedings and assigns a punishment after a guilty verdict. This combination creates a strong expectation that students will issue a guilty verdict. (If this does not make sense, then you have not been around "real" authority and I cannot succinctly explain.) For juniors or seniors, punishment is typically expulsion and a $100,000 fine to cover training expenses. For underclass, it is typically a six-month probationary period (this is closer to a jail sentence than a normal college probation).

In some respects, the Navy is an exceptional circumstance. Most people would rather have lots of innocent people be punished than have a potential cheat graduate and be placed in control of nuclear weapons. Still, I have seen lots of innocent people punished (or guilty people punished way too severely) to not be skeptical of a system that has any chance of going this direction.

As for personal experience, I was never accused of an honor violation, but I testified at honor hearings for friends. In my opinion, both were unfairly convicted and punished. All midshipman get training on the procedure at least once per semester, and it is severely indoctrinated in our version of boot camp.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#485

Post by dschoon » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 7:29 AM UTC

The original post has disappeared. Here's the google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zlciYW0...

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#486

Post by majmun » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 7:31 AM UTC

mirkules wrote: post #430

happybuy wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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)

I remember once doing my assignment witch consisted of nothing but citations. it was perfectly valid by rules of writing such papers. as long as citations are proper. but that school was not very good, anyway.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#487

Post by pseingatl » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 8:10 AM UTC

Swannie wrote: post #441

pseingatl wrote: post #309

What bothers me about this episode is that it highlights what is wrong with education in America and confirms what many think about academia as being too insular. What is the “cheating” that Professor Panos complains of? In many of the cases the cheating was not the mindless copying of math problems from someone seated nearby. Instead, the professor asked questions which the students were to research and submit an an…

There is a skill called "critical thinking", another called "report writing", and it seems for this course "comprehension of a market, and competing technologies within this market". Copy paste demonstrates or develops none of these, other than "report composition", and possibly "identifying worthwhile sources". If you think consultants, such as McKinsey, require the later skills only, and NOT the former, you are rat…

Copy/paste is not an answer, it's a method; a tool. I've worked a lot with consultants. I'm not picking on McKinsey, and when I hire them I want them to check precedents. I want them to look at their (and others) past projects and see if there's anything relevant to my problem. If they find an answer that someone else has come up with that solves my problem, and it's not a trade secret, copyrighted or otherwise off-limits, I'm thrilled. There is all too much reinvention of the wheel. I still see this as a failure to document sources, not "cheating." One of my points is that the exercise of writing papers should not be the only way to learn. Take a macro view of things: some have written that with respect to Turnitin that they are horrified at 40% of the papers are plagiarized. Really? These papers for the most part are not word-for-word copied (though I admit that some are). Do you really think that hundreds of thousands of high school students have original insights about Salinger's Catcher in the Rye? Or that there is similar originality in readings of Aristotle's On the Parts of Animals? In a way it's reassuring that statistically these papers tend to converge. Of course, whether it is worthwhile to include Salinger in a curriculum is another story. As far as original insights, my guess is that Jerry's troubles at summer camp (bed wetting) might have contributed in some way to his oeuvre. Haven't seen a college paper about it, though.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#488

Post by ubernostrum » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 8:20 AM UTC

ElliotH wrote: post #397

Panos wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 speak as an undergraduate here, so I realise that there may be some things about your position that I can't really appreciate properly. 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…

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 learned about this sort of thing in a roundabout way. I did my degree in philosophy, and everyone in the department actively encouraged students to be talking to each other both in and out of class, bouncing ideas off each other, etc., and it worked out quite well. We all learned to get along with each other, and we all learned a lot more than we would have individually.

Meanwhile, I had friends who were over in the various sciences, and who would talk about how that sort of thing could never happen in their classes because of strict policies against students "collaborating". One professor (and I actually got this confirmed, rather than just believing the anecdote) went so far as to state that if a student came to her -- the professor -- for something as simple as pointers to journals (not individual articles -- journals) which covered particular sub-fields, she'd bring them up on academic charges.

Depressingly, I found out later that my school's science departments were not unique in this attitude; this level of hostility toward collegiality seems to be a common part of studying the sciences in many places.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#489

Post by pseingatl » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 8:23 AM UTC

roel_v wrote: post #305

paganel wrote: post #242

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but what's wrong with cheating? Isn't using other people's code, as in open-source, "cheating"? Isn't Google cheating just because it created a fancy clone of FB + Twitter? Wasn't Plotinus cheating because he borrowed one of Plato's main ideas and just fancied it up a little? Wasn't all Western Medieval philosophy cheating because it was barely a commentary to Aristotle and then later…

The point of these assignments, in case you don't realize, is not to write something new or groundbreaking, it's to give students experience in doing research and writing. What they write about exactly isn't that relevant, it's the process of going through it. And by skipping that, the whole point is lost. Not sure if I'm feeding a troll here, but the amount of 'why do I have to read this book, I will never need what…

That was my point: the class isn't about writing. The class isn't about getting experience in writing. If you want to do that, there are much better alternatives. This class was about content (I used the term "Answers" in my posts). When it comes to content, the required skill set is finding the answer, compiling the answer, assembling the answer, putting a team together to collaborate to find the answer, etc. Learn writing somewhere else. The fault is thinking that writing is the only way to express these skills. Writing has certain formal conventions, such as citing sources. A failure to cite sources is considered plagiarism. Content is different. Facts cannot be copyrighted, and this class was about content and those facts. With respect to facts, the conventions are different. It makes no sense to pretend to teach students to write when you are trying to teach them content. We do it in academia because except for medical school, law school--where writing papers is relatively uncommon, compared to other disciplines--we don't know another way to do it. But don't call this cheating. Failure to document sources, OK. Academic dishonesty if there's a misrepresentation, OK. Providing the professor with the content he asked for in business school? That's not OK??

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#490

Post by neworder » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 9:26 AM UTC

justin_vanw wrote: post #440

neworder wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

"The Wire" is not "some TV cops and robbers show", but a complex narrative that depicts exactly the kind of situtations we're talking about (yes, it's styled as police drama, but it's much more than that).