

Panos Ipeirotis: A tale about parking - timf
http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/07/tale-about-parking.html

======
pbh
It has been fascinating to watch the reaction to Panos' blog post on cheating.
I agree and disagree with this follow-up post, however. On one hand, I agree
that most reactions have generally been shallow and poorly thought out. On the
other hand, I think that what made Panos' original post so compelling was his
comprehensive listing of the many disincentives to fighting cheating at the
university, including the impact on his salary.

Overall, the result of Panos clicking more or less a single check box (and,
admittedly, doing a few Excel tricks) to detect cheating was: (1) 45 hours of
students crying in his office, (2) his class took on a powerful negative
atmosphere, (3) his best students were turned away during office hours, (4)
his student evaluations went down, (5) he arguably made less money than he
would have otherwise, (6) he was called a racist in at least one public forum,
(7) the reputation of his university and/or program was damaged, and (8) he
was sent a cease-and-desist letter.

Ultimately, this is a huge set of disincentives. It is not surprising that
most would simply choose the more appealing alternative of just deciding that
a professor cannot be responsible for making students want to learn.

What is most discouraging about the salary information is not the money
itself, but the implication that even Panos' department was not willing to
give him support when he tried to fix the problem in his own classroom.
(Arguably, they must have known that addressing cheating would have a huge
impact on course evaluations.)

~~~
techiferous
"Arguably, they must have known that addressing cheating would have a huge
impact on course evaluations."

By the way, the evaluations of students who cheated were not counted, which
mitigates things a little.

EDIT: "Moreover, the course evaluation input of any student who has an honor
code infraction is removed from consideration when evaluating teaching
performance." -- [http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/nyu-prof-vows-
never-t...](http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/nyu-prof-vows-never-to-
probe-cheating-again%E2%80%94and-faces-a-backlash/32351)

~~~
pbh
I think that you make an important point. Not counting detected cheaters in
course evaluations seems like a good policy. This is especially true because
student evaluations have been shown in a number of cases to be very highly
correlated with the student's expected grade.

However, I still agree with Panos' diagnosis that his student evaluations went
down in response to detecting cheating. He presumably has data from hundreds
of students over years of classes. The primary difference between this year
and past years was almost certainly his detection of cheaters. While removing
cheaters from the evaluation pool may mitigate the problem a little, I find it
pretty plausible that evaluations went down because of some cheating-detection
related phenomenon, like the more adversarial atmosphere, his own feelings
about the cheaters, or students feeling attacked or accused.

~~~
techiferous
Yep, I agree, too. It could poison the dynamic of the whole classroom.

------
ekidd
I dislike the analogy between parking tickets and plagiarism. In most US
jurisdictions, parking violations aren't even a misdemeanor, but merely a
"summary offense". Of course the police can ignore them.

But in the context of academia, plagiarism is not a summary offense. Academics
are rewarded primarily for the originality of their work, and plagiarism is an
offense against major community norms. The appropriate response to an offense
against major community norms is removal from the community.

At my university, the punishment for a few copied sentences was a 9-month
suspension and a note on your transcript, and professors were specifically
instructed _not_ to handle first offenses on their own. Second offenses were
handled by permanent expulsion. In practice, there were apparently edge cases
(students with ambiguous evidence and very expensive lawyers being the most
obvious).

So I really _am_ reacting to the first part of Panos' post. I consider
cheating vastly more serious than a parking ticket, and I'm appalled that so
many institutions consider it a minor offense. Panos' suggested workaround of
making cheating more difficult seems strangely irrelevant to the real problem,
which is that a huge minority of NYU think cheating is OK. His students,
perhaps, would be far better served by a sharp lesson in basic honestly than
they would by learning about fleeting technological trends.

~~~
Panos
Thank you for a constructive disagreement. Perhaps car theft and bicycle theft
would have been a better analogy, when talking about the offence (but I could
not find a good analogy for the underlying problem).

"In practice, there were apparently edge cases (students with ambiguous
evidence..."

These where exactly the cases that I focused on. I honestly thought I was
playing in a "Numb3rs" episode. Constructing models for detecting the
probability that an individual student would structure an Excel spreadsheet in
a specific way, measuring likelihood of sentences using Google N-grams, and
other things that are not the obvious things that the honor council would
immediately understand. At the end, the students were admitting guilt but at a
great personal cost for me.

When nobody else is fighting like that what is the incentive for me to
continue? Not all students go through my classes, so that all have equal
chance of being caught. In a (very) perverse way, it is a matter of fairness
to the students for me to be as vigilant as everyone else.

~~~
ekidd
I like the analogy to car theft. It communicates how shocking plagiarism
_should_ be within a healthy academic community. And stealing cars will
normally attract serious attention from the police.

Of course, if you impose draconian punishments for a first offense, then you
also increase the burden of proof. It's not enough to say that "student X
cheated with 60% probability," any more than you could say, "It's reasonably
likely that the defendant stole the car." You need to have clear-cut evidence.

One of my friends was a lecturer in the computer science department (at the
honors 200 level), and he made it clear that he took cheating as a personal
affront. Every year, he'd catch 2 or 3 students cheating, and he'd devote
considerable time to educating the student judiciary about CS and getting the
cheaters suspended. Despite this, he was an enormously popular lecturer. But
he was operating within a culture where plagiarism really _was_ a serious
offense against community norms.

 _In a (very) perverse way, it is a matter of fairness to the students for me
to be as vigilant as everyone else._

Ultimately, this fight can't be won by a single professor. It's a matter for
your colleagues, your administration and even your student body: Does NYU want
to be a university where cheating is shockingly unacceptable, or one where
cheating is on par with a parking ticket?

------
techiferous
I agree with Panos that the problem is systemic and needs to be treated on a
system-wide level. However, I think that parking violations are not the best
analogy and obscure the dynamics a little.

With traffic congestion, the problem is not cars on the road, the problem is
_too many_ cars on the road. So if someone is double-parked and is not
actually blocking anyone, there really is no fundamental problem.

An academic institution wishes to protect the integrity of its grades and
degrees and also wishes to encourage honest behavior in its students. In this
case, each individual act of cheating is a problem. The problem is not just
_too much_ cheating, but the presence of cheating at all. An academic
institution does not plan for a cheating capacity of 20%, for example.

So I would suggest that the analogy works better if parking violations were
replaced with bicycle thefts, since every bicycle theft is a problem.

~~~
Panos
Well, there was a point in that analogy. In the past, I was catching cheaters
who put no effort in the assignment.

This time, I had a zero-tolerance policy. No matter if you plagiarized the
whole assignment or a paragraph, no matter if you copied the spreadsheet, or
if you just had the solution as a backup to ensure correctness, it was the
same penalty: A -30 for an assignment that had a +30 maximum points and report
to the Dean's office and the honor council.

------
tlrobinson
I think by coming up with "cheating-proof" assignments you'd be ignoring the
real issue, which is that students think it's ok to cheat. Lacking some global
solution, I think it's possible to deal with cheaters without "poisoning" the
classroom. Here's my suggestion, based only on my experience in college and
common sense:

The key thing is not to make such a big deal about about cheating publicly. No
public witchhunts, no Turnitin submissions, etc.

Include your plagiarism/citation policy clearly on your course syllabus, and
briefly go over it on the first day of class, but that's it. Don't have
students submit through Turnitin directly, but use Turnitin yourself
discretely.

Depending on the severity of the infraction, the first one would result in a
stern warning in private, or no credit on the assignment. Subsequent
infractions warrant more severe punishment.

If you let them off "easy" in their eyes (but not too easy) you're the good
guy, but they'll still know you're serious about it.

On the other hand, if you announce you're using Turnitin, or otherwise
publicly dwell on cheating, then students will feel antagonized and band
together against you. If you don't give them a reason to discuss it with each
other they won't. As you mentioned before, the social pressure among peers to
not cheat is strong.

But by ignoring the cheaters you're doing both them and their non-cheating
peers, and the university as a whole, a disservice.

Kids straight out of high school might not even know what they're doing wrong,
and if no one ever tells them they'll grow up to be cheaters in life too.

Of course it's also unfair to the non-cheaters who work harder and receive the
same grades, and ultimately the same degree.

On a larger scale, if a university tolerates widespread cheating the quality
of their graduates will decline, which obviously isn't good for anyone.

[This is a repost of my comment on the blog]

~~~
_delirium
> I think by coming up with "cheating-proof" assignments you'd be ignoring the
> real issue, which is that students think it's ok to cheat.

I think these are related, though. Cheating tends to be lowest when students
feel they're doing valuable, real work, and that also tends to be the hardest
to cheat on; whereas it tends to be highest when students feel they're doing
regurgitation or pointless busywork, and that also tends to be the easiest to
cheat on.

It's not a perfect correlation, but I think it's one factor. I certainly
noticed in my own undergraduate education that cheating was highest in courses
that were more boring and cookie-cutter, and lower when the professor was
particularly motivating, and had creative, interesting assignments. As a prof
now, I don't have enough semesters under my belt for good data, but my
impression so far is that how I teach the course and frame the assignments can
make a huge difference in how likely cheating is.

Put differently, I don't think most people have completely fixed ethics; there
are some proportion of people who would never cheat, and others who will cheat
whenever possible, but a large portion in the middle whose ethics are strongly
influenced by the situation. As in many situations (not only in university),
people are more likely to feel it's okay to do "unethical" things if they feel
that the situation is bullshit, and less likely if they feel
motivated/responsible/engaged with something.

------
badclient
Well I read a quote on HN that went something like "if you want people to see
something, show them one thing."

You mixed up too many issues. If your intention really was to just focus on
the evals, why mention their impact on your salary at all, especially in the
conclusion?

That was poor judgement on your part. As a reader, it is natural to conclude
from your post that you are _most_ upset about the salary loss resulting from
the evals(and thus you've learned a lesson to do better on evals so its
negative impact on your salary won't repeat).

~~~
Panos
Mea culpa. I just wanted to close the loop and identify a point that people
would relate to. (I was not sure that people would relate to the fact that the
student evaluations dropped. Apparently most people do not even know that
student evaluations _are_ used to determine salary increases.)

In retrospect? One of my biggest mistakes to even mention it.

~~~
zb
I think one of your biggest mistakes was to only mention your ideas about how
to reduce double parking, I mean cheating, right at the end of a very long
essay with a linkbait title that was basically the equivalent of "Why I'll
never write another parking ticket" in this analogy.

Don't get me wrong, I read the whole thing and I thought it was a great
article. But while I don't believe for a second that you did it on purpose, if
you had wanted to create a media firestorm focussing on the wrong issues you
couldn't have found a much more effective way to go about it.

Personally, I would hate to see the essay form get replaced by something more
like a newspaper story, with the conclusions at the start and the exposition
after. But maybe that's going to become essential on controversial topics like
this, I don't know. The lesson I'll be taking away is to ensure that the key
point makes up the bulk of the writing, and if it doesn't then keep cutting
other stuff until it does.

I imagine it's been rather an unpleasant ride, but thanks for giving us all
the opportunity to learn something.

~~~
Panos
Yes, indeed, the post was supposed to be "a story with the twist." Had I known
that I was going to have hundreds of thousands of people reading the post, I
would have followed the standard journalistic practice of writing a summary at
the very first section. (See <http://t.co/2kJEkJW> for a copy of the post.
Note: I asked the post to be taken down until I repost the original article
but the journalist is really playing childish games.)

I kind of felt this a few hours after the post went out, so I added two
clarification points early on in the article: 1. I am not giving up the fight,
I will just fight differently, please see the conclusions (link), 2. This was
not about NYU and people cheating in business schools; people cheat
everywhere: the story gives an explanation why they remain undetected.

Oh well, people could not even read these two points.

But I want to write stories in my blog, not papers with an abstract, executive
summary and table of contents.

------
mirkules
"In fact, the blog post was in my folder of draft posts for a few months now,
long before receiving my annual evaluation."

In a few months, there was plenty of time to reflect on the negative points of
that post and how they could be taken out of proportion. There is a reason
employers frown upon employees making public statements that involve the
company they work for - not because they may say something stupid (that would
also mean that they hired the wrong person) - but because the media tends to
latch onto the smallest details and blow them WAY out of proportion. PR
departments exist so that public statements are filtered, watered down,
focused and devoid of any potentially negative connotations about the company.

Lesson learned, I guess, and I hope NYU's reputation was not damaged as a
result.

~~~
Panos
No, I could not really think of that. I do not filter my blog posts through
any PR department, and I have written plenty of stories that received wide
attention. And going through a PR department typically means that the
resulting document lacks any punch and originality. (Been there, done that,
for other types of communication.)

If I could think that people could leverage the post to post their negative
preconceptions about business schools, NYU, Turnitin, academic, US, or
whatever else they hate, I would have not posted the blog post to start with.

In most of my blog posts I try to propose and describe solutions, even when I
"whine". (See, for example, [http://behind-the-enemy-
lines.blogspot.com/2010/10/plea-to-a...](http://behind-the-enemy-
lines.blogspot.com/2010/10/plea-to-amazon-fix-mechanical-turk.html) and
[http://behind-the-enemy-
lines.blogspot.com/2010/12/mechanica...](http://behind-the-enemy-
lines.blogspot.com/2010/12/mechanical-turk-now-with-4092-spam.html)). The blog
post about cheating was not an exception.

The reason that it was in my draft folder was because I did not want to put it
out just to talk about cheating. The post felt incomplete. Yes, I could
complain. But after that, what?

It took me a while to realize that people did not cheat in some of the
assignments, but tried in others, was because some assignments were designed
to withstand cheating. And that was a point worth talking about.

~~~
epochwolf
This may not be the best place to say this but, I found both your cheating
article and this one interesting. Please continue posting.

~~~
ljlolel
Agreed. Sometimes people stop writing due to a minority of very loud people
being rude dismissive shallow whiners. I think Steve Yegge stopped writing for
a few years because of these people.

Don't stop writing, please.

------
wairagu
I'm beginning to like this guy,

