Why I will never pursue cheating again
behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com
Why I will never pursue cheating again
1–10 of 506 posts
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#2The takeaway of applying aikido-like redirection techniques (don't try to fight cheating head-on, but instead change the problems so cheating is meaningless) is a generally applicable life lesson.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#3>I was also lectured by some senior professors that "I should change my assignments from year to year". (Thanks for the suggestion, buddy, this is exactly how I detected the cheaters.)
what? how can there be cheaters to detect if the assignment is completely different?
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#4While I sympathize with the instructor and think he should be incentivized to fight cheating, I'm not pleased with the use of services like TurnItIn. Basically, the student gives someone some faceless company a license to whatever they create for perpetuity. Are these companies ever compelled to delete material on request? And who could audit that?
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#5> I was also lectured by some senior professors that "I should change my assignments from year to year". (Thanks for the suggestion, buddy, this is exactly how I detected the cheaters.) what? how can there be cheaters to detect if the assignment is completely different?
My guess is that the OP was a bit imprecise, and that he kept some assignments the same as previous years. If 3 assignments are same-same-different, and a student gets grades A-A-F, that could be what they call a 'tell' :)
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#6Great tale, and I like the approaches he suggest at the end that make cheating impractical. Hopefully, as a tenured professor, he can serve the likely storm of pressure he will get from his university for publishing this.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#7While I sympathize with the instructor and think he should be incentivized to fight cheating, I'm not pleased with the use of services like TurnItIn. Basically, the student gives someone some faceless company a license to whatever they create for perpetuity. Are these companies ever compelled to delete material on request? And who could audit that?
I completely agree with this sentiment. It is difficult for me to express how extremely inappropriate I think it is for a school to transfer ownership of a student's assignment to a third party who uses it strictly for profit. It would already be iffy if turnitin was a nonprofit, but they aren't.
Papers that students legitimately write and no third party ever gains access to, are still inflating their essay counts and therefore making some guy rich.
The courts upheld that it isn't a copyright violation since they decided it was fair use, but I have to say even if it is legal it is morally abhorrent for schools to go along with it. Plagiarism is unavoidable from individuals that are trying to scam their way through school, and something that needs to be combated, but universities are supposed to be bastions of enlightenment not cronies for privately held corporations.
To be clear, I don't see any problem with automatic plagiarism detection. I do see a problem with very significant profits being made due to usage of students work that they cannot possibly opt out of (especially high school students who don't even have the option of transferring schools if they don't want their work being used that way)
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#8Jeez, is it so hard to do your own damn homework? Maybe the prof should just let things get messy until it becomes more work to cheat than to just do it legit and maybe actually get some value out of school.
But I guess school is now just a status thing that you do to satisfy other people instead of yourself (or so everyone says), so why should anyone care about doing it honestly?
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#9"Cheating" is a meaningless concept once you reach college in my opinion. Either students are learning or they're not. They're (usually) paying money to be there and the only applicable metric is if the skills they acquire while chasing down the degree are worth the money they or their parents spend. To that end, I was impressed with the OP's thoughts on deterring this sort of behavior in the future. Because really, the only person suffering from this behavior is the student. By altering the coursework to make the motives for copying virtually meaningless the professor's goal is accomplished with a minimum amount of effort.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#10[deleted]