A Disturbing and yet Familiar Tale...
Monday, July 18, 2011 at 7:11PM I caught wind of an interesting post today: "Why I will never pursue cheating again" on a blog that I will now be following: A Computer Scientist in a Business School. I'd highly recommend a read. It's the story of a young assistant professor who was excited about the opportunity to teach undergrads. However, he soon discovered that a shocking number of students in his class were cheating. He quickly realized that the time he spent attempting to confront and discipline the perpetrators outweighed the amount of time spent actually teaching the class, so he decided to give up on bothering to deal with the cheating1.
Anyone who's ever dealt with teaching or TAing knows that it's the very few, legitimately involved students that make any of this stuff bearable. I've made it a point to try to avoid blogging about interactions that I've had with students on account of a time some years ago when a student tried to blackmail me. She alleged that a blog post that I'd written was specifically about her and proved that I was biased towards giving her low marks, going as far as to threaten to take it up with the Dean's office. She had no real case (the blog post was about general difficulties with pleasing everyone as a TA), but that and other horror stories convinced me that describing any public dealing with students was unwise.
Regardless, it seems fairly clear from my own experiences as well as analysis of actual data, that many (possibly most) people attend university for the 'college experience' rather than legitimately wanting to learn about something. Is it any wonder that students cheat? A recent issue of The Economist pointed out a new study that shows that in terms of lifetime earnings in the US, you're better off not doing a BA. BA holders see no appreciable gains in salary and yet are saddled with crippling amounts of debt. Are such programs really serving the needs of society? Solutions are not obvious and some proposals for reform are controversial; however, I think we can all agree that something has to be done.
1That's not the most disturbing aspect: During the year that he spent actually cracking down on cheating, his student evaluation results dropped, leading to a reduction in his typical annual salary increase. That must make the whole effort feel all the more frustrating.
11.07.18 UPDATE
The actual post seems to have been taken down by the blog's author. Perhaps the post was too specific (it detailed examples of actual plagiarism and named classes and depts) and he was asked to take it down? Regardless, I'm leaving my own post up as is - hopefully there will be a statement from the blog's author soon.
11.07.21 UPDATE
Indeed the blog's author, Panagiotis Ipeirotis, has indicated that:
I took the blog post down after NYU received a "cease and desist" letter, and I was advised by my superiors that I may be liable for legal liabilities if I keep the post up. They could not perform a full legal analysis, and as a precaution they asked me to take the post down. For work-related issues, the employer has the right to restrict "free speech", a ruling supported by many decisions of the Supreme Court. It made no sense for me to disobey and try to fight the C&D letter by myself.
Education
Reader Comments (5)
Not fair. I can't post, yet you get Gucci/knock-off spam :-(
I would argue that the problem in that story is professor-versus-uncaring-admin problems. Cheating was far more widespread at SFU than it was where I did my undergrad. The difference was harsh penalties (kicked out of program style) for plagiarism, etc. It had the effect of scaring the cheaters and supporting the profs who were reporting it.
At SFU, the profs seemed hamstrung by an admin that was too worried about enrollment numbers, so let the students get away with everthing...
I'm beginning to tire of the bot that I've obviously attracted - apparently my friends are beginning to receive spam mail from it. I need to contact the Squarespace admins.
I agree with your assessment though I would point out that having 20% of the class cheating is pretty disturbing. On the other hand, that number has to be taken with a bit of salt because everyone does their assignments in groups even though you're 'not supposed to'. The real idiocy here is copying your friend's writing word-for-word!
With regards to admin hamstringing profs, my experience is that this problem is pretty widespread. It's difficult to see a fix - you want to make sure that there are protections in place for student. On the flipside, my experience is that bad students are almost unassailable because of the amount of red-tape surrounding punishing them. It's even worse in grad school. At Mac, I saw incidents where, for example, a grad student physically assaulted another student and yet was kept in the program for months before finally being let go. A similar incident in a company setting would probably have been dealt with immediately, if only to avoid litigation. There needs to be reasonable mediums here.
Urgh. I'll be teaching a class in the winter semester (January - April 2012) and while I'm not expecting any serious cheating or other academic misconduct, stories like this make me nervous. I don't know what the attitude of administration is regarding such isssues around here, and I hope I don't find out. Blech, I don't even like thinking about this.
Well, it appears that the 'optimal' solution to prevent cheating is to make your assignments be short-answer questions that change from year to year (that's how my Ph.D. advisor ran his class). Unfortunately, this also makes teaching all the more tedious and time-consuming - people fall back on simple assignments because they're easy to prepare and easy to grade.
The saddest thing about this whole 'episode' are some of the comments from students to the original blog post. I've seen comments like 'if an assignment is so pathetically busy-work oriented then it deserves to be cheated on', etc. I really don't know what the solution is... Well, I have a non-simple theory: Less people in university. Obviously a large portion of the people attending aren't getting anything out of their experience, so maybe we nee to rethink how to handle post-secondary education.
Where there is a will, there is a way.-luxury Tag Heuer Indy 500 watches