Live data from Hacker News

Why I will never pursue cheating again

behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com

461–470 of 506 posts

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#461

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…

> 22 cheats out of 108 is big Looks like standard 80/20 to me, nothing surprising.

Please learn what's actually meant by 80/20 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle - "roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes".

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#462
post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> (2) one student cheated off of the other You might believe that it's morally wrong to penalize the person who did the work, but I would have to disagree with you. Both Cheating and giving others the ability to cheat undermine the credibility of an institution and harm the legitimate efforts of others.

not really. people who do the work are usually pressured to share it, and are ostracized if they don't. I don't really think its fair to punish a victim unless there's some kind of evidence that they played a more insidious role.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#463

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…

"Most of us who went to American grade schools can remember long hours of copying articles out of encyclopedias. 'The abode of the penguin is a hard and difficult one.' It was called doing research. Then in college we found that it was also called plagiarism."

-- Mary Claire van Leunen, "A Handbook for Scholars"

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#464
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In the end, the only people they are harming is themselves " No they're not. Grades are important in moving on in academia and moving on one's career ultimately. Cheaters are hurting other students by out-competing them on graduate entry exams and job applications. They hurt their prospective employers by not learning and out-competing competent students for jobs, (possibly becoming one of those jerks you read about…

This is only true if you think that good employers are hiring on the basis of grades. You know what, I've hired a half dozen or so programmers, and I've done interviews with about 100, and not once have I ever looked at their grades or their faculty. I don't think I'm unusual in that respect. I think employers using grades as a basis for a hiring decision is every bit as silly as professors worrying about their stude…

Employers in software regularly use grades to do entry level hiring. In some fields (law), your JD grades follow you around for the first 5-7 years of your career.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#465
post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> 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.

I had a professor who would actually give the person who did the work the worse grade, under the justification that you can never get rid of demand, but you could discourage supply. I thought it was a pretty clever solution. If I'd worked my ass off and somebody copying me got a 50% where I got a 0%, I'd be much more careful about what I shared.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#466
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correlation != causation, but I doubt it wasn't related. You might not have marked him down for his anti-cheating stance (directly), but chasing cheats might have affected his attitude (playing "prison guard" may not have put him in a nice mood), which caused you to mark him down. Here's a theory - Panos burnt himself out trying to chase the cheats, and deal with the bad-will and tantrums. This left a lot less time a…

would you rather be taught by a hard-assed jerk who cracked down on the cheats, or a nice guy who turned a blind eye? The guy who turns a blind eye will probably be an effective teacher to those willing and wanting to learn. Removing a cheater from the class does not help them learn more effectively, nor does it help the non-cheaters learn more effectively. Why waste on policing, what can be spent on teaching. It is…

Because grades matter a lot and cheaters devalue everyones legitimately-earned grades.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#467
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

James, I did exactly what you suggested. Every single student came to protest. I believed that things would play out exactly as you are thinking. Unfortunately, they turned out very differently.

In my law school, everyone is graded on a strict curve and honor code violations are handled first by a board of students. Does wonders for reducing cheating.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would you rather be taught by a hard-assed jerk who cracked down on the cheats, or a nice guy who turned a blind eye? The guy who turns a blind eye will probably be an effective teacher to those willing and wanting to learn. Removing a cheater from the class does not help them learn more effectively, nor does it help the non-cheaters learn more effectively. Why waste on policing, what can be spent on teaching. It is…

Because grades matter a lot and cheaters devalue everyones legitimately-earned grades.

Also, professors will adjust the difficulty of the course to get the right grade curve. If everyone is OK with a 3,000 word essay, bump it up to 5,000 words. Eventually, you will more or less have to cheat if you want to pass.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt that I am teaching a class full of kids that come just for the grade, and not for learning. From reading your blog post and your comments here, I got the impression that you cared more about your pay raise than about the students learning. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I could have misinterpreted whats been said and that you were probably a victim of circumstance, but you blame the guy for demonstrating…

I got the impression that you cared more about your pay raise than about the students learning. I get the impression that most people care more about their compensation than about . Money is an important thing in the modern world, and I guarantee that 99.99% of people in the workforce do their work solely for the money. Stop paying them, they leave. So it's natural that this professor would want a pay raise, too. Eve…

Jesus. Thank you.

My wife just finished a grueling, thankless year for bullshit pay as a visiting professor at a local branch of a state college. She poured her heart into it, ended up with health problems from lack of sleep and irregular access to food (not that she'd admit that, but I'm on the outside and could see it clearly), and didn't get her contract extended because she was so perturbed at people cheating their way through class instead of sitting the f* down and learning some really simple physics that she couldn't bear it. Couldn't sleep, really. (She's kind of an idealist.)

I loved Panos's post for this very reason, knowing the human side of academia as nyustern and GP obviously don't. This attitude that people should teach for the love of the field and that wanting to be paid for it is venal - that's sheer poison.

The triviality of the pay is just the last droplet of spittle.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#470
post #335
post #191

From the post: "My role is to educate and teach, not to enforce honest behavior. This is a university, not a kindergarten." In my opinion this is one of the primary issues with a lot of teachers: I don't believe a teacher's job is specifically to narrowly teach the subject matter at hand, but more broadly teach the student whatever it takes to assist the student in succeeding in life, and especially within their give…

I'm a university teacher myself. I typically teach a hundred students every semester. Don't you think it's a bit too much to expect me to do whatever it takes to assure each and every of my student, including cheaters, to succeed in life? That's noble, but too much for any individual.

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 (other than the students themselves), 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.

Post reply on HN