Why I will never pursue cheating again • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#151

Post by soundsop » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:32 AM UTC

It sounds like the course marking scheme is broken.

In my engineering courses (both as a student and TA), assignments were worth very little, or sometimes not handed in at all, and were instead a tool for the student to learn the coursework. Marks were largely based on quizzes, midterms and finals (usually worth 80 to 90% of the course grade). It's not an ideal solution, as there are skills that cannot be tested in these conditions, but it eliminates the need to spend time on detecting cheating on assignments. Of course, it is important to prevent cheating during examinations, but this is a much more tractable problem.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#152

Post by nostrademons » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:36 AM UTC

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #103

ams6110 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So would writing "Copyright (C) 2011 J. Random Student, all rights reserved" on ever essay you hand in make any difference?

You already have a copyright just by writing it. Courts have ruled this is fair use, which means the courts feel this use of content is more valuable to society than writers keeping their rights. I wonder if laws would change if we were talking about combatting plagiarism in film schools by keeping a database of all films to match against.

If it's fair use, the student keeps copyright, they just can't go after Turnitin etc. for copyright infringement. Lack of infringement != losing copyright. If the professor were to, say, publish an anthology of student papers, this would not be fair use and he'd have to either get permission or risk being sued by the students.

There're various other cases of fair use that make this fairly obvious, eg. when you DVR a TV show, that's fair use, but it doesn't mean that the MPAA has lost copyright over that show and can no longer go after people who share it on Bittorrent.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#153

Post by wisty » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:37 AM UTC

justin_vanw wrote: post #129

abduhl wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are varying degrees of cheating. There is flat out copying, which this article addresses, and then there are the lesser degrees of cheating. Having experienced upper, lower, and graduate level courses in math and engineering (as well as taught at the lower level) I can honestly say that the amount of people that directly copy another student's assignments is much higher than most people think. This type of chea…

The 'group study' thing is true, but often explicitly allowed by the professor. In the end the exams should sort it out, since homework is rarely worth more than a token amount of the total grade.

It's only "token" if you score the same amount on all the assessment items. If you pick up a large portion of your marks on a homework component, it's not token for you.

A student gets 80% on a 25% weighted "token" homework component, 60% on a 25% "lab" component (due to copying large portions of someone else's report), and 30% on the 50% exam (there's always a few low apples). They pass with 50%.

The lecturer sees that the exam is too hard, and makes it easier the next year.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#154

Post by Panos » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:38 AM UTC

shaggyfrog wrote: post #4

While 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 am the professor who wrote the blog post.

What you mention was a very big problem for the adoption of services like Turnitin. In fact, when there is a match, there is no way of seeing the "source" of the homework, unless you get a permission from the "owner" of the homework.

Also, students when they submit the assignment to Turnitin, they assign a license to index the content for plagiarism detection purposes, and for nothing else.

And students have the right to remove their assignments from the index, if I understand the language of the agreement correctly.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#155

Post by pavel_lishin » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:38 AM UTC

josephcooney wrote: post #101

pge wrote: post #65

One of the problems here (which I've heard is common to most universities) is the use of student evaluations to evaluate professors. That creates a very unfortunate incentive for profs to try to please their students. Not all students value the best education; some just want a high grade for as little work as possible. Their evaluations are not going to be in line with the goals of the university. By using them as pa…

This +100. Surely the student's review of the teacher should only be one factor used when evaluating the students. A band-aid fix would be to preclude students found cheating of reviewing their teacher (or their review doesn't count), but all in all this systems seems set up to be abused.

How about delaying the release of this information? Students would fill out a review, but it would be locked and unaccessable by the university for a period of 3 years. (The professor ought to have access, if only to gather feedback.)

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#156

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:42 AM UTC

jamesaguilar wrote: post #141

onan_barbarian wrote: post #19

While there's much to be said in favor of more creative assignments that aren't minor variants of last year's assignments, the author has drawn the wrong conclusion from what happened. 22 cheats out of 108 is big - and the real proportion may have been even higher, given that it seemed like he caught only either blatant cheats or conscience-stricken/less brazen cheats (the latter category from when he acted people to…

I made a different conclusion. There are several problems, but the biggest is his approach. Now, I'm not a teacher, and all those caveats. But in my imagination, my approach would be much less time-consuming. I cribbed this from my high school physics teacher. It involves little detective work and no long drawn out confessions. When cheating is detected, simply send a note to the student with the following: "I'm awar…

[deleted]

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#157

Post by Panos » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:46 AM UTC

e1ven wrote: post #14

sparky wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On second reading, the OP was being sarcastic, and derisively noting that if he changed his assignments, he never would have caught the cheaters in the first place. So he rejects one form of making cheating useless (making traditional assignments, but changing them up each year) and embraces another (choosing different types of assignments that are structurally not cheatable).

I believe the intended reading is that he does "change" them, by adjusting the font, etc, as mentioned just earlier. His colleague was suggesting that he write entirely new assignments each year. The author misunderstood what his colleague meant (Or at least, only does a half-measure), which is why he says that "He is" changing them.

(I am the blog post author).

No the suggestion was not to create entirely new assignments every year. This is problematic, not because it takes time, but because is it hard to "debug" the assignment, and make it to be not too hard, not too easy, and not ambiguous. You cannot know this before actually giving the assignment out to students.

The senior professor was just suggesting to change the numbers, or small elements of the assignment. A thing that I was doing already.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#158

Post by nostrademons » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:48 AM UTC

mikecane wrote: post #133

Welcome to the future where the stupid with "credentials" will be ruling you. While you're busy doing actual work, building something, they're building networks of support in your employer's structure to enable them to rise. So when you explain something to them and get a blank look or questions that make it clear they haven't understood anything, you'll know why. But hey, they have a Business Degree. They win, not y…

Median base salary for a Stern school graduate is only $60K:

http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/rankings/undergraduate_...

I made more than that straight out of college, and now make much more than that. So no, they didn't win. Technical skills pay if you're good at them.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#159

Post by yummyfajitas » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:48 AM UTC

justin_vanw wrote: post #83

This professor is a huge part of the problem. He's a tenured professor saying "caring about cheating is counter productive", which to me says "I would rather have an easy life where I don't have to work hard than to protect the reputation of the institution I work for and ensure that students that graduate have learned something along the way". He complains he had to work almost 44 hours (2 hours * 22 cheaters) and r…

He is complaining about 44 hours extra work. This is in addition to 32 hours of lecture time and however much time he spends on research.

(Based on his research output, I'd suggest he spends a lot of time on research.)

Further, his complaint seems to be that putting in this extra work resulted in a smaller pay increase (as a result of poor student evaluations), not that it cut into leisure.

Most people complain when they do the right thing and get punished for it.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#160

Post by Panos » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 1:50 AM UTC

graupel wrote: post #61

This is fascinating, aside from one huge, glaring bit of stupidness on the authors part - highlighted here: "One interesting observation: Almost all cheating happened within ethnic lines. Koreans copy from Koreans. Indians from Indians. Greeks from Greeks. Jews from Jews. Chinese from Chinese." Korea=country India=country Greece=country China=country Jewish=religion This would appear to show some form of bias, or at…

You are correct. I did not want to sound racist. Perhaps "cultural ties" would be a better term. Btw, most of this happens because students with common cultural ties tend to socialize together in student clubs, etc.