
Why I will never pursue cheating again - Panos
http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-will-never-pursue-cheating-again.html
======
onan_barbarian
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 own up). And it's a lot of work, and I've been around this process
at a couple different institutions and seen how tough it is to see it through
to an appropriate conclusion.

However, all this wasted time, and all this aggravation, wouldn't be necessary
if all the other professors were doing it too. The only reason they're at
28/108 or higher is that people have obviously been getting away with almost
anything.

The author has buckled (understandably) as being the only hard-ass in a
environment where everyone else is getting away with it isn't feasible. From
his perspective, I can see why he didn't fight this, but if he'd stuck it out
for another year or two - and showed the next round of incoming classes just
how ugly it will get - he'd have gone back to 'normal' cheating rates rather
than 28/108.

The idea that you can always produce assignments that are 'unique flowers'
that can't ever be duplicated year by year by cheating students has its own
pitfalls. One problem is exactly that these assignments _are_ unique flowers,
and might turn out to be systematically too hard or too easy or too vague. An
advantage of the rather mechanical, "near-clone of last-years stuff" approach
is that you can learn from last year's assignments and tune them onto the
target. Faculty shouldn't be dumping the same material without fixes every
year, but in many fields it's insane to expect that they have to prepare all
new assessment material every year. They just don't get paid enough or get
enough time for that.

~~~
jamesaguilar
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 aware that you cheated on this assignment. You have received a
failing grade on it. The next instance of cheating will be referred to the
honor board and you will fail the class." Any student who wished to contest
the charge would be referred to the honor board immediately. Contest it with
people whose job it is to handle this sort of thing. The policy on cheating
would be posted at the beginning of class and strictly enforced.

The reason why this is so much more efficient is because the net time spent
compared to a non-cheating assignment is probably negative. This is simply
because you no longer have to read or grade the papers that are found to be
copied. Since there is no conversation to be had with the student, there's
also no extra time spent there. The only marginal cost is if a student wishes
to appeal your verdict, but I doubt there will be much of that happening since
the consequences would almost certainly be more severe.

This also solves the problem of bad ratings. There's no need to play the hard-
ass in this situation, which is probably where the rating trouble comes from.
Since the interaction is terse and factual, the students won't have much face-
time in which to build resentment. You could even put something like, "I know
you can complete this class successfully, which is why I'm not referring you
to the honor board on the first offense. Please come to the TA's office hours
if you're having trouble on your papers in the future. I look forward to
working with you and helping you achieve your goals in this class" at the end
of the email to put a positive spin on it. (Although the idea of having
ratings come from people with whom the professor is in a somewhat adversarial
relationship seems like one that could be improved.)

Anyway, I see where this guy is coming from but I'm not sure his is the right
decision. Maybe I'm wrong though because as they say I have not walked a mile
in his shoes.

~~~
Panos
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.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Huh, interesting. But I got the impression from your article that you
typically had a discussion with the student, presented them with the evidence,
etc. after they protested to you. That's a little different than my proposal,
where in the case of protest you hand it off to the honor board immediately.
I.e. the students should know that the only discussion is one where they risk
suspension if they don't manage to prove their innocence. Also, from what I
read, you actually sent out an email inviting students to come talk with you.
Hard to see what other outcome there could be than students coming and taking
up a lot of your time.

Think about it in terms of incentives and scarce resources. If the students
know they can come and protest to you with no additional consequences, they
will certainly do so, guilty or no. Everyone has heard the story of merciful
teachers and cops that don't give a ticket if you cry. At worst, they are out
two hours, and at best, they may get a higher grade with very little work.
Basically, your time has become a commons whose use has no real cost to the
individuals taking advantage of it, but from which they believe some value can
be extracted.

The economic solution is to make sure the time costs something, so that the
students will consider whether there's really enough utility in protesting to
make it worth the cost. The cost is that if they protest, they run the risk of
suspension in the event they are actually guilty. It should be obvious to
students that this will be the likely outcome if they do protest.

Let me know if I'm reading you wrong because I really am curious if students
protested even though any protest would result in an immediate referral to the
honor board. Also, thanks for fighting the good fight even though it got you
screwed in the end. We need more folks like that.

Oh, I didn't mention the one other advantage this approach has. If you quickly
and forcefully deal with students who have violated class policies, I think
there will be less emotional "splash damage." It's the same way a parent
should not draw out a punishment over a long period of time -- make it hard,
get it over with, and wipe the slate clean so you can smile at each other the
next day.

~~~
Panos
When I detected 15+ cheating cases, I just asked permission from the Dean's
office to notify students over email, and then direct them to the Dean's
office for appeals.

So I did that, notified the cheating students they got a -30 (negative the
points of the homework) and directed them to the Dean's office for appeals.

Well, it was very difficult to enforce the "talk to the Dean's office if you
have a problem with my judgment." When the student comes in my office during
office hours, I cannot say "I do not want to talk to you, get out of my
office". Yes, I could do it, in theory. Hard to do in practice. Would I
physically push the student out of my office?

~~~
jamesaguilar
Of course I would not advocate physically pushing the student out of the
office.

> Instead, I sent an email to the class. I just said that there were cases of
> plagiarism detected and whomever cheated, could come and find me. For the
> rest, I would report the case . . .

I guess I just read this as an invitation to come and discuss the matter with
you. And I understood from this that any who didn't come would be referred. If
I were a student and reading this paragraph, I would make damn sure to speak
with you about my indiscretions. That is the exact opposite of what I'm
proposing, which is that you only refer students to the dean if they _do_ come
and speak with you.

Perhaps you meant to convey something different than what I'm getting from the
blog post, if so, sorry for misreading.

> When the student comes in my office during office hours . . .

Once again, I've never been a professor, although I did TA for a while when I
was in college. That said, I had an expectation that my office hours would be
utilized in some way or another by students. I would propose prioritizing any
student that wants to ask about something other than their cheating
conviction. For students who want to talk about the cheating, just say, "If
you really believe you did not cheat, we can discuss the evidence. But that
will only happen at an academic integrity board hearing. If they find you
innocent, I will regrade your work. Think about it and let me know by email if
that's what you want to do." And then just refuse to talk about it.

Again, you're the professional and I'm the backseat driver. You know more
about how this works than I do. This is simply how I imagine it would go, and
although you've disagreed with me several times I still haven't gotten the
impression that you did what I'm proposing.

~~~
ipince
+1 on the office hours comment.

In fact, I would argue that office hours is NOT the proper venue to discuss
these matters anyway. From my experience, the purpose of office hours was to
clear doubts and further understanding of the class material. I would've been
extremely pissed off if I came to office hours with a legitimate question
about the material, only to waste my time waiting on a bunch of people arguing
about cheating.

~~~
Panos
Well, for non-office hours I can always say to the student that they cannot
come in, as I have other things to do. There is a legitimate excuse not to
even start the conversation.

However, during office hours, any student can come in and discuss class-
related topics. I cannot prevent students from entering my office, just
because I believe that they _will_ want to discuss their cheating penalty.

------
bluehat
A housemate of mine had a very creative solution: as a teacher he said that he
would give anybody who cheated a 0 and that appeals could be filed with the
Dean's office to prove they did not cheat. Most importantly, nobody would be
told if they had been caught cheating, the zero would just show up on their
grades.

The system plays on the student's mind: when they submit the first assignment
and cheat their motivation to bother to make the minimal effort to dick around
with the next one waivers. Most of the cheaters apparently dropped before the
midterms. Any whiners with the balls to claim they had not cheated get to make
their case to the Dean and voluntarily submit themselves to the school
judicial process, but this was generally unneeded as apparently most cheaters
dropped the class before midterms. No whiners in your office, and the reviews
of you as a teacher are in before you fail them. Seems like it addresses all
your problems.

~~~
athst
That's pretty awesome - it's like The Tell-Tale Heart way of dealing with
cheaters

------
kristofferR
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? Absolutely not.

It's imporant to consider why people cheat before you deem it bad. I cheated
because the assignments were a waste of time. Plain and simple, a waste of
time. It often felt like something the teacher gave us just so we shouldn't
spend our evenings having fun. It wasn't something you were supposed to learn
something from, it was something you were supposed to do because you were
supposed to do it.

I should point out that that the Norwegian high school system is quite
different from the American system. We couldn't choose our subjects, we had to
take what the education law said we had to learn. Because of that I had a lot
of subjects that I didn't have any interest in whatsoever, the only thing
important was the grade I got. When you don't have any reason to study a
subject other than to get a high number on a paper, it's natural to cheat.
It's borderline impossible to be motivated to do something forced on you.

However, if the subject or course is your own choice, like the case with most
university courses, cheating is something different. If the the only value the
students get from a class is a grade and not relevant and valuable knowledge,
I understand and sympathize with the cheaters.

~~~
wisty
A waste of time? Not if you learnt from them.

Still, they need to separate "formative" and "summative" assessment. If a
piece of assessment is easy to game, it should be "formative" - the marks you
get should not go to your final grade, and should only be used as a feedback.
If the assessment is hard to game, it should be "summative".

UK universities used to give a final vocal exam, after three years of study.
You _can't_ cram for it, there's too much to cover. And it's an exam, so
there's a hell of a lot less cheating. Still, it does seem a little extreme.

PhD thesis (and other research-grade work) are another example, but I guess
its too hard for 90% of undergrads.

Commercial quality work might be another option, but it won't assess the
fundamentals that universities should be teaching.

~~~
kristofferR
I would surely learn a lot about the lastest in pop music if I watched MTV
five hours a day for a month too, but that doesn't mean that it would be a
good use of my time since I have no interest or reason for learning about pop
music. A lot of the assignments I got and subsequently cheated on felt just
like that.

You actually pointed of something I didn't mention in my previous comment. If
you learn something, it shouldn't matter how you learned it. I actually
learned the topics and passed the exam with flying colors even though I
cheated on a lot of the assignments.

------
reso
Holy crap. They let so many people get away with copy-paste assignments, and
they call themselves a postsecondary institution? That's fucking horrific.
Where I'm from, a single sentence similar to one of your sources is marks
deducted. A paragraph puts you on academic probation. Anything bigger is a
bus-ticket home.

~~~
carbonica
Where I attended college, you get a year's suspension for getting caught
copying a sentence without citation. Anything as egregious as this presented
would've meant a class full of suspended students.

~~~
gamble
I'm sure that was the policy, but how often was it enforced? Most universities
have draconian policies against cheating that are never enforced, except in
the most egregious cases. It's extremely rare for any school to discipline as
many people as this; when it does happen, it tends to be national news.

~~~
carbonica
28 students last year (out of about 4,000) were reported. 17 were suspended, 7
got probation, 3 were found not responsible, and 1 had the allegations
formally rescinded.

This is roughly consistent year-to-year.

~~~
btilly
Unless your school is dramatically different from other schools, you've just
provided very strong evidence that only a tiny minority of actual violations
are pursued.

------
pge
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 part of the prof evaluation, the school is
encouraging behavior it almost certainly doesn't mean to.

~~~
josephcooney
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.

~~~
pavel_lishin
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.)

------
shaggyfrog
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?

~~~
esrauch
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)

~~~
ams6110
So would writing "Copyright (C) 2011 J. Random Student, all rights reserved"
on ever essay you hand in make any difference?

~~~
SoftwareMaven
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.

~~~
nostrademons
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.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Yeah, my comment was unclear. I didn't mean to imply the students lost their
rights, just that the courts have decided this particular use supersedes their
rights under the fair use doctrine.

------
justin_vanw
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
repeatedly moans and bitches about how much time that is, despite being
_spread over the course of an entire semester_. I assume he's been in academia
his whole career, because I can't remember a week where I've worked less than
50 hours.

My only solace is to know that this guy is a professor at a business school
giving incredibly simplistic homework in excel, and his students are too
stupid to do it. I can't think of a better punishment for someone who puts his
leisure and student assessments above academic integrity than to have students
like that.

Finally, what is the value of his class at all? If he can't tell his students
are cheating without globally searching everything with this software, what
are they supposedly learning? I would favor just eliminating this class; if
you can't tell whether a student took it or not, they didn't learn anything.
If you can't quantify the learning experience, it shouldn't carry credit.

This may be my strong bias as a Math major, but I know there is no way I could
have cheated in almost any of my classes. If I had copied someone's homework,
either the professor would have recognized it right away (since most
professors actually knew and cared about the students in their class), or I
would have failed all the exams. Do business school students not have exams
that they can fail? If not, what are they supposedly learning? I know lots of
business schools really drive their students hard to learn skills that they
will use later. My opinion of NYU's business school (where the author of this
is a tenured professor) is now so low that I will do a bit more diligence on
MBA students with a degree from there as I review resumes and gauge job
candidates in the future.

Edit: removed something criticized as a personal insult. This comment was
modded up to 10, and at the time of this is now modded as 4. There should be
some kind of meta-karma for controversial posts, since they inject lively
debate instead of just attempting to game the system! That is my biased view
anyway.

~~~
Panos
Justin, I am the professor who wrote the article.

The 44 hours is not a number to show how much extra I had to work. Believe me,
a 14-hour day is a pretty common thing for me. Teaching is only part of my
overall job (I also have to do research, supervise PhD students, review
papers, serve on committees and many other things).

The 44 hours figure is given just as a contrast to the actual time that I
spent in class. I would _much_ rather spend these 44 hours on helping
students, on creating new assignments, on finding things in the news that are
relevant to tomorrow's class and so on. Instead, these 44 hours were literally
wasted on the students that should have been the least deserving. (When I had
the student crying in my office, I had actually lines of students waiting
outside to ask me questions about the material in the class. Most of them
ended up leaving, as they could not wait for so long.)

Also blaming NYU/Stern for this is a rather shortsighted approach. I would not
be surprised if the situation is identical in many other schools but just
nobody has the incentives to fight cheating.

Just a note: My PhD is in computer science. I have a technical background. I
code for fun, and I detected cheating in the Excel assignments using my own
code.

~~~
dlytle
You're absolutely not alone in this experience, Panos.

A pair of my friends work for online colleges; one for a state college with a
pretty good reputation, and another for a for-profit school with a decent
reputation. Neither are tenured.

Both of them have had serious issues with student cheating. The one at the
state college got support from one of her superiors, and was not penalized for
fighting plagiarism, but it was still very time consuming. Another one of her
superiors (in previous years) did not support her in any way, and she had to
cut back on enforcing academic honesty to help protect her job, save for the
most blatant cases.

The other one (at the for-profit college) stopped crusading against cheating
when she found out that she'd (effectively) be fired if she continued. Pass
rates are a sizable portion of what's used to determine which teachers are
given which classes. In one class, more than half of her students should have
been failed for academic honesty violations by the halfway point of the year.
However, if she did that, her pass rates would have been low enough that it
was extremely likely that she would not be given any classes next semester.
(Not technically fired, but functionally so.)

So, you are not the only person encountering this, and you're not alone in
realizing that fighting cheating can be hazardous to your career. It's a damn
shame.

~~~
atourgates
It's not shocking that a for-profit college was more motivated by getting
happy graduates through their program than by enforcing academic honesty. But,
this speaks to the larger issue of for-profit education as a whole.

As a whole, this seems like an administrative issue, rather than an issue with
a single professor. In an environment where departmental heads and academic
deans expected, and encouraged professors to report plagiarism - then dealt
with it in a fair, consistant manner, this would be a non-issue.

Another big part of what this story illustrates is that individual professors
shouldn't be responsible for both detecting and punishing academic dishonesty.

------
nyustern
Hi Panos. I was actually a student in your class last fall semester. To
alleviate any doubt you may have, the class was known as “Info Tech,” and you
had two sessions on Mondays and Wednesdays (2-3:15, 3:30-4:45 pm) in KMEC.

Now I have a couple of problems with your post. Firstly, you attribute your
lower evaluation rating of 5.3 for last fall semester solely to your lower
tolerance of cheating. However, there is something very wrong with this logic.
As you may (or evidently, may not) know, correlation does not imply causation.
In other words, your lower overall rating was not necessarily due to your
increased surveillance of plagiarism; it could have been due to other factors.
As someone who was a student in your class, I can speak for myself and say
that I did give you a low rating, and it was NOT because you punished the
cheaters—it was far from it. To put it rather simply and bluntly, you were
unkind (that’s an extreme euphemism) out of the classroom. Sure, you had your
favorites (my best friend being one of them) as most professors do. However,
you had, what I perceived to be, an irrational disdain for some of your
students, I being one of them. When I asked questions in class, you’d quietly
giggle or give me a blank stare as if the question I asked was completely
stupid (forgive me, I’m not technologically inclined), which of course
discouraged me from participating in class. When I stayed after class to ask
you questions I was too shy to ask in class, or to just discuss the subject
material in greater depth, you’d answer in a very short, annoyed tone, as if
you had more important things to do. My thank you’s went unanswered. My smiles
to you were not reciprocated. Sure, it sounds silly, but it was very clear you
did not like me. And I had no idea why. Some people noticed, while others in
the class also felt like you hated them for no apparent reason. It got to the
point where we, as well as others who experienced better treatment, discussed
it and concluded you were just racist. Now, I know you and many others reading
this post probably think I’m just a pissed off student who didn’t get the
grade he wanted and is now bashing his teacher out of revenge. However, that’s
really not the case; I just figured I’d give you my honest opinion of you
seeing as your perception of your students’ mentality towards you is
completely mistaken. I’ll just quickly recount one experience that perfectly
illustrates my overall experience with you. For the WiMax assignment (which is
what your blog post is based on), after all the students had received your
email demanding those who plagiarized to come in to talk to you, naturally
everyone, even those who didn’t cheat, felt very uneasy and worried. I, who
collaborated with a friend on one small part of the assignment, got worried
and came in to see you during office hours. When I arrived, there was one
other student waiting in the seating area; she said you weren’t in your
office. So we waited for a good 30 minutes until you came strolling in. She
then went in to speak with you. About 20 minutes passed until she emerged. You
then walked out, saw me, and then said “I’ll be back soon.” 50 MINUTES
ELAPSED, and you finally returned. You were munching on a sandwich. As you
walked by me, you mumbled “emergency.” So, almost two hours after I had come
to your office, I finally was able to speak with you. We went in, you looked
up my assignment, and then you said “there’s no problem with your assignment;
you’re fine.” So I left. There was no apology.

Now, aside from me having a bad experience with you, what really irks me about
your post is your complacence with cheating because it’s not in your self-
interest to pursue those who cheated. A true capitalist at heart, I guess. As
a student who did not cheat, worked very hard, and still received a relatively
low grade in your class, there’s nothing more infuriating. Is it not your job
as an educator to make sure those who put in the most effort and demonstrate
the highest level of achievement are awarded grades accordingly? Is it not
your job to make sure the playing field is level, especially at a school where
there is such a high pressure to do well as a result of a strict grading curve
policy? I guess you don’t believe so. I mean, after all, you did give my
friend, who consistently received a B average on assignments and exams
throughout the semester, an overall grade of A (which he was very, very
shocked by).

Anyway, that is not to say I did not learn a lot from your class. You were a
great teacher inside the classroom. However, teaching evaluations don’t just
measure your ability to give good lectures; they are holistic--meaning, they
also measure intangibles, such as the professor's willingness to help
students, or his attitude. And that, Panos, is where you failed.

~~~
mentat
"who put in the most effort and demonstrate the highest level of achievement"

I've noticed a growing problem with people equating effort with achievement as
the parent does. Just because one "works really hard" doesn't mean that one
creates something of value. I'm not sure where this belief arose from, but it
doesn't apply in school and it certainly doesn't apply in life.

~~~
nostrademons
I agree in general, but remember that we're talking about an MBA program here.
Just what "value" is there to be created sitting in class?

The point of schooling is to develop the skills that will help you in the real
world. Hard work is one of those skills; it's not outside the realm of
plausibility that schools should incent it. (FWIW, cheating - when you don't
get caught - is another one of them. Maybe schools should incent cheating and
teach you how to not get caught. Oh wait, they do. Mission fucking
accomplished. ;-/)

~~~
mentat
Though I certainly can't speak with authority about what might constitute
value in an MBA program, I would think it would be the ability to understand
systems and their organization and to think creatively about solutions to
complex problems. I'm probably wildly optimistic.

~~~
nostrademons
From what I've heard from friends and coworkers who've gone to HBS - the value
of the MBA is almost entirely in the network, in getting to know all the other
folks who also got into Harvard. (This is perhaps a little bit less valuable
at NYU, but the general principle still applies.) Logically, therefore, if you
want to maximize value as an MBA program, you should have your students party
all day. Which may not be all that far from the current truth.

The classroom aspects of the MBA have been uniformly criticized by the people
I know that've gone through them, except for the few idiots who believe every
business situation is like a case study and then run their businesses into the
ground basing decisions on that. Business is just too complex to reduce to
classroom principles. I think Marc Andreesen once wrote on his blog that at
the time the executive makes the decision that an HBS case study will
eventually be based upon, he has less than 10% of the information that the
students who will eventually be critiquing him have.

------
nekitamo
Computer science undergrad here, final year in a very nice public university.
For a long time now I've observed how business majors (my roommates) go on
unpunished for years of blatant cheating. It has made me completely lose faith
in the system. In computer science, cheating is not such a simple proposition.
Our university CS department has a no-bullshit cheating policy: first offense
results in failing grade, suspension for one semester, and mark on your
transcript. Second offense results in expulsion from the school of Computer
Science. I've seen this punishment applied in person many times; I know the
dean isn't bluffing when he says he'll do it. Also, the school CS department
uses a modified version of MOSS: <http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/>

to detect the cheating. Maybe you can circumvent it if you're smart enough.
Personally I have better things to do with my time.

Business majors, on the other hand, already have a reputation as the "bullshit
major". You curriculum is a joke. You study for exams the day before. You
party on finals week while the rest of us study. It's the major you go to when
you want the easy ticket through life. And the blatant cheating they get away
with just serves to rub it in the face of all the majors who actually have to
_gasp_ work for their degree.

More reading here:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/education/edlife/edl-17bus...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/education/edlife/edl-17business-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2)

When my roommates are done with college, they'll be screwed. I'm not disputing
that. They have a degree that won't be worth the paper it's printed on, in a
heavily oversubscribed major (25% of all US undergrads are business majors),
with no marketable skills, and a tendency towards laziness and dishonesty.

Why do Business schools let this kind of stuff go on? I've talked to people in
other schools, hell even business majors themselves, and they all acknowledge
it. Don't people realize that they're just screwing themselves over in the
long-term while accumulating the animosity and disdain of their peers? It's
crazy, self-destructive, sad, wasteful, and it's ruining lives.

The entire system is broken. Cheating is just a symptom.

~~~
aidenn0
I would be careful generalizing the business school at your university.

I went to Purdue. I started as a Physics major and switched to computer
science. I had several friends who started as an engineering or science major
and then switched to other majors.

The academic standards in the Physics program were significantly higher than
in CS, and liberal arts was a joke. There is a reason for this more than just
Physics > CS > Liberal Arts:

Let's say you're a quality student who has decided against a private college
for whatever reason (e.g. you don't want 6 figures in student debt) in
Indiana:

If you want to major in liberal arts, you go to Indiana U.

If you want to major in CS and you don't mind the medium increase in cost, you
go to the University of Illinois

If you want to major in Physics, you go to Purdue.

So there is some selection bias here. I don't know much about business
schools, so I don't know if your generalization is valid or not. This is just
something I've noticed in my own narrow experience.

------
rdl
The 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.

------
nateberkopec
Hi Panos, another NYU Stern student here.

All I have to say is THANK YOU. The sense of entitlement in Stern classes at
the undergraduate level is ridiculous. I'm glad to see someone cracking down
on cheating at my university. Even though I know how prevalent cheating at
Stern is, it was still shocking to hear some of the numbers (1 in 5 being
admitted cheaters).

I'd like to add that as a student who genuinely enjoys learning (in certain
topics that I'm interested in, of course), those "creative" or "open ended"
assignments that you mentioned are way more fun as a student than the typical
stuff you get in an intro Info Tech class.

I took Info Tech last year with another professor and absolutely hated it. The
professor was clearly "checked out" and working on other projects. It
certainly does nothing to help the atmosphere of Stern (if you don't go to
work at a big financial firm, you're worthless) if the IT intro class is so
boring and bland (when there's so much interesting shit going on right now in
IT!).

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

------
wisty
If universities faced de-registration for allowing plagiarism to go on, it
would dry up in an instant. Create a national ombudsman. Take calls from
disgruntled lecturers and the students who can't stand working 10X as hard as
their peers to get the busy-work done. If the university can't clean itself
up, it loses the right to profit from federal teaching loans.

Disgruntled students could abuse a complaints system, but there's tonnes of
ways for them to create trouble already, so I doubt that's a big downside.

------
commanda
I worked for 5 semesters as an undergrad teaching assistant in the CS
department of my university. We had generally 1 to 2 cases of cheating per
semester in classes of up to 150 students and ~10 assignments. We identified
them using Moss[1] which we ran over all submitted assignments. This
plagiarism rate now pales in comparison to the rate the OP has seen.

I wonder why there's such a huge gap between my experience and this
professor's; undergrad vs. graduate school? CS vs. business school? Moss vs.
Turnitin? Arizona vs. New York?

1\. <http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/>

~~~
wpietri
My guess? CS vs business school. You can't bullshit a compiler.

An engineer pal of mine eventually went back for an MBA at a top-tier business
school. He said that in 2 years, he learned exactly one thing that he wouldn't
have figured out on his own with a little thought. (It was the law of
comparative advantage, which blew my mind as well.) The rest was building a
rolodex and gaining skill in presenting smoothly.

His experience made me pretty suspicious of the intellectual content business
schools. Given that, cheating makes a twisted sort of sense. And of course, if
one plans to go on to create mortgage-backed securities or asset-stripping
leveraged buyouts, one probably has an ends-justify-the-means attitude by the
time graduate school rolls around.

~~~
iqster
I'm one of those people who want to genuinely learn yet was obsessed with
having a perfect GPA. Here's something I experienced ...

Many years ago, when I first started grad school in CS, I wanted to learn
graphics programming and enrolled in a course cross-listed between undergrads
and grad students. I got the first assignment and was shocked at the amount of
code needed to be written (and I consider myself to be a strong hacker!). I
only got 80% of the functions working and got a lame mark for the assignment.
Then assignment 2 comes along - even more complex and code-heavy than the
first! During this time, I happened to go to the undergrad lab for something.
What do I see? Multiple groups of undergrads (fours and five students per
computer) with what seemed to be like copies of the assignments from the
previous year. I subsequently verified that the prof had been using the same
assignments every year. It was also a reality check for the amount of
plagarism that happens in CS labs (during my undergrad days, I thought it was
extremely rare). I was pretty disgusted by the state of affairs and ended up
dropping this particular course. My loss.

------
brianleb
After reading this thread (more than once, now... it about doubled while I was
asleep), I just have to say thank you to Panos. Obviously you've hit on a
topic that everyone finds relevant and of merit to discuss. Unfortunately,
you're encountering a lot of unconstructive negative feedback and emotional
responses. In reality, I think very few of the responders truly understand
what being a professor is like mentally and emotionally, and (understandably)
only equate it to the three hours a week they saw their professors back in
college.

You've identified a very real and very serious problem, and come up with some
ways to beat it. You tried doing things the 'normal' and 'right' way (e.g. to
pursue cheaters) and found the system to be a total failure in this regard.
People read your title, however, and think you're giving up. They started
skimming and didn't make it to the end where you explain that you aren't
pursuing cheating because you are going to change your assignments to prevent
it entirely. This isn't a matter of criticism - it's a matter of applause.

Simply by reading a lot of the comments here, I'm particularly bothered by
people's attitudes and understanding (or lack thereof) for your situation.
Your capacity thus far to proceed with calm conversation has been impressive,
and I hope all the negative feedback doesn't get under your skin. I know that
having thick skin is part of being a teacher (though should it, really?), but
we're all human on the inside - something most people never think about the
teachers they've met.

------
apinstein
That was one disturbing article, on so many levels.

I cannot even imagine that someone caught doing this wouldn't be instantly
suspended from school and possibly expelled. Why on earth are you in college
if you want to cheat?

Even worse is a teacher that thinks it's "not worth pursuing".

That said, I do like his ideas of changing the assignments to deter cheating,
but that doesn't make it right.

With such creativity to try to "fix" cheating, why wasn't one of his
suggestions to have the teacher evaluations exclude scores from students that
were caught cheating? This would stop the mis-aligned incentives that caused
him to find a way to not report cheaters.

------
atarian
It seems like the professor tried to personally deal the problem on a case-by-
case basis; this will always end up being more work for him in the long run.
What he should have done is just immediately hand the case off to the proper
authorities and let them decide the case. However, I'm assuming from the post
that the council at this particular college is considered to be a last resort
option; other colleges have committees that are dedicated to dealing with
cheating and it's standard procedure amongst faculty to forward all cases to
them immediately.

------
mikecane
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 you.

Me, bitter? _maniacal laughter_

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

[http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/rankings/undergraduate_...](http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/rankings/undergraduate_mba_profiles/stern.html)

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.

~~~
equark
That's nyu undergrad business majors. MBA is 150k on average.

[http://www.stern.nyu.edu/OCD/Recruiters/PlacementReports/ind...](http://www.stern.nyu.edu/OCD/Recruiters/PlacementReports/index.htm)

~~~
nostrademons
Total compensation. Only $100K base salary. From the salary survey posted here
a couple days ago, a number of HN readers are doing better.

Also, remember that that includes an average of 5 years work experience. How
much do engineers with 7 years of work experience, or 5 years and a master's
degree, make?

~~~
roel_v
Not sure why the distinction base/bonus matters. What counts is the total one
makes at the end, no matter how it's divided.

Re: 150k, outside of the Valley & NYC, significantly less.

~~~
nostrademons
Right, and total compensation for skilled software engineers is easily more
than $150K. So in an apples-to-apples comparison, the techies don't come out
so bad.

The bulk of the NYU grads cited in the statistics above were working in the
Northeast (presumably NYC), so again, comparing them to Silicon Valley
engineers is totally apples-to-apples. If anything, it's unfair to the Silicon
Valley folks, as cost of living is higher in Manhattan than SV.

~~~
roel_v
"Right, and total compensation for skilled software engineers is easily more
than $150K"

[citation needed] 150+ is still rather unusual, as far as I know.
Glassdoor.com says that, for example, at Fog Creek (a company that is quite
famous and brags about how well it pays its engineers; and has offices in NYC)
the one engineer who filled in his salary makes between 92k and 100k. That's a
long way off from 150k, and I'm highly skeptical that even 'skilled' softwared
engineers will can _easily_ make more than 150 as an employee.

(EDIT: Median software engineer salary in NYC is 80k according to
glassdoor.com.)

~~~
nostrademons
Salary survey here on Hacker News 4 days ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2763932>

(When I looked at it last, there were actually a lot fewer responses in the
<$60K and $60-100K range...maybe all the students and junior devs responded
over the weekend.) This is for base salary, so it's comparable with the $100K
number. There are roughly 700 respondents that make over $100K base in the
poll, and close to 200 that make $150K+ base, which I would consider a fairly
decent-sized chunk.

The citation in the poll says that StackExchange's top end is about $200K.

~~~
roel_v
Yes, I saw that survey, but I don't see why it's base salary only; the more
logical reading of it is total compensation, and I think many people filled it
in as such.

150k+ is the 93th percentile in that survey, and the whole survey is I think
biased towards the upper end. But even without that, calling the 93th
percentile something that a merely skilled developer can "easily" make is a
stretch, to put it mildly.

All data contradicts it - not just this poll, glassdoor.com, other informal
surveys, but also e.g. the bureau of labor statistics
(<http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm>)

Don't be fooled by people reporting ranges and then taking the top end. By
that standard, if you go work for a Fortune 500 company people make 'up to 15
million' if that's what the CEO makes. Professional basketball players don't
make 'up to 50 million a year', there are maybe a few who do that, but that
doesn't make it attainable for the regular ones, or even the 90th percentile.

~~~
nostrademons
Man, I would've felt so much better about my answer on that survey if I'd
assumed it was talking total compensation. :-)

I suppose a lot depends on your definition of "easily". Yes, the poll is
biased towards the high end - because it's on Hacker News, and typically
people who aren't passionate about programming don't visit here. But what's
the question that readers of this comment thread are asking? My guess is it's
whether _they_ can be making $150K+ after being out in the real world for 7
years or so.

And I don't think that's all that unreasonable. They're already part of the
self-selecting group that the poll is being drawn from. We know from other HN
polls that HN skews young: I don't remember offhand the proportion of readers
that are over 30, but I believe it was only 15-20%. If we assume that
experience and salary are pretty sharply correlated, that's a pretty large
chunk of the older crowd that are raking in the big bucks. It's not a lottery
ticket; it's something that a good number of the people you're talking with
have achieved.

------
cantbecool
I am surprised no one brought up the pervasive cheating within ethnic lines.
From my anecdotal evidence, just graduating from a private school in
Philadelphia in IT, the majority of ethnic students would simply pass
assignments and essays to one another from term to term. It was extremely
demoralizing seeing these students at graduation standing for the academic
honors, e.g., cum laude and magna cum laude, and get applauded for their fake
accolades.

Additionally, has anyone thought that people cheat because of financial
reasons? I know at my alma mater people were given a grant up to 15 thousand,
half of tuition, if they maintained a grade point average over a 3.0.

~~~
MartinCron
I haven't seen it personally within ethnic lines, but when I as a student at
the University of Washington, the files of previous assignments and tests kept
by the fraternities were legendary.

------
WorkInKarlsruhe
It is interesting that so many people think that Panos should have taken a
hard line. Panos seems to have had few options (and I applaud the approach he
ultimately chose for the reasons he gave), but that is only if you constrain
yourself to the current system, which is grade based. Removing the grades from
the system is an option, but few consider it, and there is much evidence from
the people that have stopped using grades that it nets great results. My PhD
experience, since it inherently was not graded, was a data point for myself
--- everyday was a day of glory, pursuing my passions; and I could dive deeper
into what a professor said, or ignore other things that I wasn't yet ready to
hear, without a second thought about earning a grade. I learned a ton, more
than at any period of my earlier life (now I learn, as in gaining
understanding, more per day than during my PhD), and I attended some "good"
schools. Using grades has poor psychological side effects, one of which is to
groom people for employment, as opposed to preparing them to start companies;
another is to drive self consciousness and fear of mistakes (which are
horrible side effects to have associated with learning); competitiveness; and
focus on pleasing others to the extent of deceiving them. I think many people
in their 30s or 40s realize what a waste of life those years of earning grades
was (but won't admit it) --- now they probably use the skills gained from
passing tests more than they use the knowledge that they accumulated.

~~~
techiferous
I taught middle school science for a few years and _totally_ revamped the
grading system, an experiment that worked well. I made sure that the grades
were a simple and objective measurement of the mastery of the learning
objectives instead of what they often are: a paycheck-like incentive or a
means of manipulating student behavior.

(By the way, I used to work in Karlsruhe.)

------
espeed
Don Norman has written on this. Here is his preamble to _In Defense of
Cheating_ :

"No, I am not in favor of deception, trickery, fraud, or swindle. What I wish
to change are the curriculum and examination practices of our school systems
that insist on unaided work, arbitrary learning of irrelevant and
uninteresting facts. I'd like to move them toward an emphasis on
understanding, on knowing how to get to an answer rather than knowing the
answer, and on cooperation rather than isolation. Cheating that involves
deceit is, of course wrong, but we should examine the school practices that
lead to cheating: change the practices, and the deceit will naturally
diminish."

<http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/in_defense_of_cheating.html>

------
r4vik
I think an easy solution would be to immediately show the TurnItIn results to
the student when they submit. They are then given a chance to resubmit if it
picks up plagiarism. The first time they'll probably keep tweaking the content
until it passes but they'll soon get bored of it (and the time it consumes)
and start writing their own papers.

~~~
wisty
No, they won't. They will just keep tweaking until it passes. Eventually, they
will learn to tweak first, but that will simply make it impossible to ask them
to write their own ideas.

------
AndyKelley
Here's a radical idea:

Get rid of grades.

Let's think about the consequences of that for a minute. You still pay for
college. There are still classes. There is still homework. Exams are
unnecessary. Do away with prerequisites. In this system, everybody in class is
there because they want to learn. It is the _only_ motivating force.

And what do we lose? Companies might look at grades for determining how well
suited a possible employee is for a job, but it seems to me that other
qualifying material such as previous jobs, skills, extracurricular activities,
and projects are equally important. And besides, you wouldn't want to hire
someone only based on their grades, you would want to interview them first.

Anything else? It might be a worthwhile trade off.

~~~
Afton
No, you'd still want exams as a focusing tool. But they'd be corrected, not
graded. (and depending on your stance on pedagogy, they might be timed, closed
book, or they might be take-home. )

Remember also to include advanced studies in your list. It was 'common but
unconfirmed knowledge' that students from UCSC (where they have a 'narrative
evaluation'+Pass/Fail option) would be passed over by medical schools since
you couldn't reduce a student down to a GPA for the first-pass of application
cuts.

I'm actually rabidly anti-grading, but I think it also has to start much, much
earlier. I've literally gotten into shouting matches with (undergraduate)
students who couldn't conceive of how they could function in school without
grades. I found it even harder to explain to people how it could work than
explaining how homeschooling/unschooling works.

------
SeanLuke
As a CS professor with a lot of concern about cheating in general, one
sentence stood out to me:

> One of the offenders was actually a repeat offender from the prior
> assignment and was also dismissed from the class.

This tells me that this professor who posted the blog entry may not quite
understand the problem.

Ethics aside, students cheat because they believe that there is a positive
utility in doing so. That is, they believe the expected likelihood of cheating
is better than the expected likelihood of turning in their assignment cheat-
free, even for a zero. Ultimately the only way to curb cheating is to make the
utility negative. And not only negative: it has to be so obviously and
publicly negative that it shatters the students' own rosy visions of cheating
and getting away with it.

So what did he do wrong here? He allowed a student to cheat not once but
twice, and then the only punishment was to fail him. Let us presume that
turning in a zero twice, plus average work for the rest, will land you an F.
If there is even an infinitesimal chance of cheating and getting away with it,
this tells a desperate student that the net utility of cheating on two
assignments is positive. If you need three zeros to land an F, you still only
need a small probability of getting away with it. And so on.

Basically he slapped the students on the hands. He's part of the problem.

My recommendation to his institution would be as follows: a minor offense (as
ultimately decided by an Honor Court, not the faculty member) would be course
failure. A major first offense would be course failure plus community service.
A second offense would be dismissal from the University with no readmission.
And whenever a student is failed or dismissed, the department lets their
students know that such an event occurred (with no details). Students should
be made aware of how often they get caught as a group.

Then there was this sentence:

> Students would come to my office and deny everything.

It sounds to me that he was handling cheating on his own. This has two very
high negatives. First, it sucked up enormous time on his part when there's a
perfectly good institutional mechanism (the Honor Court or whatnot). Second,
punishing such cases on his own opens him up to direct liability. Faculty can
and are sued by students for doing such things. One of the purposes of an
honor court is to have his institution take the liability since they made the
decision. He should have simply written the students up, submitted to the
honor court, and wiped his hands clean.

------
brudgers
Once the author decides that the academic standard allows copying and pasting,
it ceases to become cheating - and he has joined those for whom the term
"academic honesty" has lost all meaning. Seriously, when 44 hours over the
course of a semester is too much work to uphold a minimum standard, the issue
is not confined to students and the author has no moral high ground because
they have abandoned the tough part of their job and are doing the grading
equivalent of cutting and pasting.

~~~
scott_s
I think you seriously underestimate the emotional toll it takes on a person to
go through 44 hours of "I know you cheated" with dozens of students. Merely
calling that "work" - as if it's equal to prepping for lecture - is not fair.

I think you also ignore the chilling effect this had on the class itself. It's
quite possible that the students who did not cheat experienced a worse class
because of the change in atmosphere.

~~~
brudgers
If you are molly-coddling the students, then I suppose it could take a lot of
time. An email with the Turnitin report would take about five minutes - which
is about how long it takes for my spouse who teaches courses online to handle
plagiarism.

Setting the expectation for academic honesty in the syllabus and directing
students to university policies is more than enough. In any event, it should
just be handled privately. There's no reason to jump up and down and hold your
breath in front of the class.

~~~
kd1220
scott_s is right. Enforcing cheating policies isn't as impersonal as enforcing
parking laws. You can't just leave a citation behind and let the students and
administration handle it. The professor will be involved.

There's also the aspect of a student being falsely accused of cheating. I was
unfortunate enough to have experienced this during my college career. A fellow
student, whom I didn't know outside of class, copied my answers exactly on a
German exam. I don't know why he did this, because there were only 15 students
in the class and the professor knew us all fairly well. To think the professor
wasn't going to notice was a stupid assumption on his part.

I was called in to her office and shown the two tests. The answers were the
same down to the punctuation even. It was clear the other guy was very bad at
cheating and probably did it out of desperation. I was initially shocked and
feared I was going to fail the class despite my innocence. She had to refer
the incident to the honor board due to university policy. When I left her
office I was so furious that I looked up where the other student lived because
I wanted to fight him. But I took a walk, cooled off and decided against it.

I was ultimately cleared by the board and there were no marks on my record.
After the proceedings were over, the professor apologized to me and said that
she never believed for a moment that I had cheated, or that I had helped him
cheat. She pleaded with dean to avoid sending the matter to the honor board,
but she had to follow policy.

She said she never had any cheating incidents in the past, and that it was
personally distressing for her to handle the situation. It was definitely
stressful for me as well.

~~~
brudgers
What your case shows is that the due process worked. If the professor had
called you into the office and said, "Instead of handing this over to the
honor court, I am going to deduct 30% from your score," that would have been
far more unfair and built far more ill will.

To put it another way, a professor should focus on teaching and let those
tasked with investigating cheating and listening to excuses sort it out.

And yes it can and should be as impersonal as a parking ticket. Cheating is a
simple violation, and it behooves a teacher to forgo emotional investment in
each case. Avoiding interrogations and Perry Masonesque cross-examinations
would seem like a good way to avoid such an investment. When 1:5 students in a
100 person course is doing so, reporting cheating is a purely administrative
matter of the same sort as turning in low grades for poor students - which
hopefully is something the author still does not find to be too much bother.

~~~
scott_s
Professors often are involved in the official process. Often they have to
provide evidence at a hearing. They don't just throw the case over the
administrator wall.

~~~
brudgers
It is not a matter of throwing it over the wall. Administration can conduct
the Spanish Inquisition more effectively than the professor.

A Turnitin report as cited in the article would be about as much evidence as
would be needed. Particularly when Turnitin is the institution's official
means for combating plagiarism...not to mention the level of matches described
in the article would make it appear open and shut.

Yes, it might require some involvement from the professor - but the
implications of complaining that such involvement is too much work is the
basis of my criticism of the author's position.

------
emmettnicholas
"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."

...or maybe it's just that people copy from their friends?

~~~
icegreentea
And their friends are generally within ethnic lines. In engineering school
right now. You would have to be blind, or incredibly naive to not see that a
majority (I cannot say how great) have their closest ring of friends from the
same ethnic backgrounds.

Especially the Koreans. Most tight-knit group I know.

------
mmahemoff
"Instead of the usual evaluations that were in the region of 6.0 to 6.5 out of
seven, this time my ratings went down by almost a point: 5.3 out of 7.0."

Way to bias ratings. Students caught cheating should certainly not be rating
the professor who caught them. I won't say "problem solved", but that would
make a fine start.

~~~
stonemetal
From the sound of it his honest students probably rated him lower because he
wasted a lot of lecture on his forays into cheater cheater chicken eater land.
I know I would have, lectures about how many people cheated on the last
assignment would bore the crap out of me.

------
shriphani
Catching copying is a O(n^2 * m) algorithm (n = no. of kids, m = length of
assignment). Fuck that shit, no grad student or prof has that kind of time.

If by any chance you hire 2 TAs and if they got to catch plagiarism, they're
cooked since they can't distribute work and have to go through each
submission. No point in doing that.

And I am an Indian undergrad and I've seen this ethic cheating first hand - it
is fucking disgusting and destroys the educational experience for everyone in
the class because the honest guys are competing individually against the
efforts of a 5 - 6 person team.

PROFESSORS and TAs : If you see a group of same-race people sitting together
in an exam, fucking break that group up ASAP.

------
jrockway
This is why I dropped out of college. The other kids ruined it for me: while I
was trying to actually do my assignments, everyone else was copying-and-
pasting it, getting straight As, and partying late into the night. Nobody ever
got caught cheating, but my C work certainly got me a lot of Cs.

In retrospect, most of my friends from college are still unemployed.

------
kev009
This article made me cringe as I remembered how incompetent the M.Sc. interns
from schools like this were over my summers. 4.0 GPA engineering Masters
students barely worth the cubical they took up, let alone any stipend. Group
think; hive mind; worthless.

Additive sum, I think academia is doomed. It's done a worse job adapting than
politics and religion, equally baroque and antiquated fields. I long for
something like Ars Digita or Kahn Academy to become the norm. We need to push
education out to the individual and get rid of the institutionalized cookie
cutter bullshit.

People either want to enhance their understanding of the world or they don't.
A credential or piece of paper doesn't do that, and that's all the vast
majority of people in education are going for. We need to cut down to the root
and find ways to instill genuine thirst for knowledge and then let people
pursue that in much less rigid ways at their own pace.

\--

As an anecdote: I went to The Citadel. We had an honor code. Lie, cheat, steal
-- you're gone. The honor court is run by students. Regularly, they'd expel
close friends. Point being, you can hold people to standards if you hold
people to standards.

My GPA was dismal but I can say sure as shit I never cheated or plagiarized to
earn it. Only people who know what the school was all about would even account
for this, which is kind of depressing.

------
Herring
> _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?

~~~
sparky
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' :)

~~~
sparky
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).

~~~
e1ven
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.

~~~
Panos
(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.

------
tetrarchy
At the school i'm going to right now (actually the other big school in
nyc...), cheating in the CS department is a huge issue. Big enough that the
main focus of orientation seemed to be about how if you got caught even on
just weekly assignments, you'd get kicked out pretty fast. Was a bit more than
I was expecting.

I later found out the reason for this, the high population of foreign
students. I'm generally not one to stereotype, but to have thought otherwise
was to simply be living under a rock. It was pretty obvious that they tended
to work together in fairly large groups or between several groups on their
assignments and projects, and that the rest of us who were not were at a
significant disadvantage. And while generally, I didn't /really/ care, as my
grades tended to be good enough, and I am not the type to shoot for the A+, it
really did make doing the assignments on my own very frustrating when I would
get stuck. Spending all that extra time to figure it out on my own just wasn't
as satisfying when I knew the class average for the assignments would just be
artificially high anyways.

But in the end, i'm really going to grad school to learn, and not so much for
amazing grades. It just would be nice to not be penalized for doing my own
work.

~~~
yardie
I went to a school in Virginia and while they spoke a good deal about what the
penalties for cheating were the actual punishment was much tamer than what the
student handbook would have you believe. Out of all the cheaters that I've
met, and people speak pretty freely when inebriated, not one of them was ever
kicked out of school.

The professors knew who the cheaters were and the cheaters knew what they were
doing but when it actually came time to present the evidence to the academic
review board the accused had a lame, but valid, excuse or tried the emotional
appeal (death in family, drug abuse, child abuse).

------
layzphil
I have taught (as a PhD student) similar material and this is no surprise to
me. But then, is it realistic to expect undergrads to turn out a thoughtful
piece on LTE and 4G comms? If it is a technical comparison, sure, but even if
you don't plagiarise your sources what are you really doing? You're going to
read some articles on the internet, form an opinion, and rewrite that stuff in
your own words. So long as they are learning, what's the difference?

------
juiceandjuice
Why not have the grade of papers be multiplied by the inverse of the
plagiarism score? For example, your first author would get a maximum of a 3%
grade on his paper. Of course there are false positives to think of as well,
but this would force the authors into more and more original content.

The very first assignment I did in college was my own, some code I wrote for a
programming class. I turned it in, but my friend was in the class didn't do
his assignment. I figured it was a basic enough problem and I really just
turned in the assignment for him. We both got slaps on the wrist, but I never
blatantly plagiarized again. I'm not saying I've never reused a sentence from
another document on occasion, but usually it was either cited or more
unconscious.

The big bummer in college was exactly what he talks about though: the
propensity for students in some sort of group to help each other out. The
fraternities and athletes were always the worst offenders. For the general
eds, everyone in class knew that so and so had a copy of this professors test
which he barely changes from year to year, or this fraternity keeps all their
papers from previous classes categorized(!) so other members can use them, and
that sort of stuff.

~~~
Tsagadai
Because Turnitin is pretty terrible software and there are a lot of false-
positives. I remember having to "explain myself" for an essay I wrote where
what was copied was direct, cited quotes. It uses word pairs sometimes and
will highlight any uncommon phrasing that someone may have used in the past.

------
erikpukinskis
If I was him I would at least write a letter to the department of Academic
Affairs (or whoever handles cheating) informing them of the way he was
penalized for reporting students. They, if anyone, are the ones with an
incentive to fix that problem.

------
deckardt
Great 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.

------
badclient
My observation hanging out with friends of different nationalities was that
foreigners are a lot more susceptible to plagiarizing than someone who went
through the American HS system. Almost all my Indian friends who came here
just for college ran into some kinda trouble with plagiarizing. The last time
_I_ got into trouble for it was in 6th grade when an entire assignment was
scrapped because given the few online resources for the topic, almost everyone
had the same paper. This was late 90s and the teacher gave us am earful about
how we cannot be doing this and the seriousness of the offense. Sometimes I
feel my counterparts in other parts of the world don't get this lesson until
their first offense at an American college. Good percentage of my friends who
got caught end up going to med school or getting degrees far more advanced
than mine leading me to rule out that plagiarism is a strong indicator of
longterm failure.

------
biot
Here's a better solution: let students plagiarize all they want. When they are
about to get their degree, do an en masse review of all incidents of
plagiarism for the student and, if it's egregious and beyond doubt,
retroactively fail them for everything. The university keeps their tuition
dues and the student gets what they're due.

~~~
brianleb
And then the university loses all that tuition handling the lawsuits from the
families of all those failed students, and due to the age of the cases/faculty
leaving/etc., the case becomes hard to win for the university. Losing all
around, unfortunately.

~~~
biot
Unfortunately, you're probably right. The "shucks, if it weren't for you
meddling professors I would have graduated" version is unlikely to happen in
the real world.

------
pnathan
When I TA'd, I took a hard line on any cheating I detected. Basically it was a
2-strikes approach.

I didn't use turnitin or other mechanisms. I figure, if someone is smart
enough to cheat well enough that it's not detectable, it's okay to pass that
person. It's not "great", but it's not unleashing a total disaster onto the
world.

The cheating I detected was usually because those students were moronic. I am
not talking "slightly different". I'm talking, copy-pasted from prior
semesters, with 1 modification: the name. Or copy-pasted from the other person
in the class with 1 modification.

~~~
endgame
You think that's bad? I had a pair of assignments for which the output of
`diff -u` was less than 10 lines long.

------
jsskate
I don't know where this guy works but there was a zero tolerance policy on
cheating and plagiarism were I went to university. Heck my CEGEP had the same
policy too. There's an independent review board to investigate then discipline
students so that professors and TAs can focus on teaching. Students
automatically fail the course and are required to take an ethics course the
next semester and retake the course regardless if it was core or an elective.

EDIT: I just read where he teaches. I'm still surprised there's no policy or
that the policy isn't enforced.

------
derrida
"I decided that it makes no sense to fight it. The incentive structures simply
do not reward such efforts. The Nash equilibrium is to let the students cheat
and "perform well"; in exchange, I get back great evaluations." (The
Professor) As an honest student this is a cowardly response and makes me loose
faith in the entire system. Who gives a shit about a degree if it's just a
piece of paper. I was never there to tick the box on my way to a middle class
lifestyle anyway.

------
Shenglong
There are a lot of comments, and most of the constructive things I've wanted
to say have already been said.

Panos, I think your conclusion is the correct one - and you should stand by
it. I came to a similar conclusion (different setting) about cheating, and
whether it's worth it to pursue it. In more than just teaching, switching
strategies is often more effective than enforcing the original strategy.

I hear you're a good lecturer - take pride in that. There aren't many, really.

------
matmann2001
Even as a student, I sympathize with this professor. I've seen how pervasive
cheating can be in an academic environment. It's frustrating to know that
while one classmate (or myself) is spending hours perfecting an assignment,
another is copying/plagiarizing their assignment. It makes the learning
experience very stressful. And it's self-perpetuating, as this frustration
become the factor that leads more students to cheat. By graduation, you end up
with a bunch of students who have just copy and pasted their way through
school, who have forgotten how to learn, and who are not prepared.

This article really shines light on why cheating is still so pervasive despite
how it damages the learning process. For students, the risk tends to be low
while the reward is high. For teachers, the process of eliminating cheating is
draining and is often met with negative feedback.

This only leads me to think that cheating will continue to infect our
education, until there is a fundamental change in the rewards/feedback system
(for students and teachers) in our academic system.

------
dschoon
The original post has disappeared. Here's the google cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zlciYW0...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zlciYW0MwtIJ:behind-
the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-will-never-pursue-cheating-
again.html+http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-will-
never-pursue-cheating-again.html)

------
dkokelley
How about making a game out of it. A game where cheating is permitted but
punishment is administered with more granularity. Let the students know that
all assignments are submitted to TurnItIn. Let them also have a look at what
you see on TII. Whenever a student's plagiarism threshold is above 50%, their
actual score gets docked by 1-(percentage plagiarized). So if a student
submits an A paper (say, 93%), but it turns out it was 70% plagiarized, the
new grade with cheating penalty becomes .93*(1-.7) = 28%. Smart students will
quickly realize that any cheating will at least cut their possible grade in
half.

I'm not sure this will work, but people have strange behavioral motivations
and incentives. It reminds me of the daycare that wanted parents to not pick
up their kids late (as employees had to remain to watch the children). Their
solution was to impose a penalty for any extra time over the scheduled pickup
time. On the surface, you would think this helped, but instead it had the
opposite effect. Parents now understood that it was OK to leave their kids
longer because they were being charged for it, whereas before there was a
social stigma of arriving late and inconveniencing the daycare center.

With students, it's possible that making plagiarism acceptable on the surface
with well-defined penalties may have the desired (and opposite) effect of
reducing total cheating.

Also, couldn't the grading structure be established in such a way that it is
impossible to pass the class without knowing the material demonstrated through
exams? If the only (or most significant) portion of the grade comes through
reports and take-home, cheater-friendly exercises, then the grade structure
would seem to be broken. Cheating on the homework should only hurt the
students, since they won't be able to cheat on the tests, and obviously
haven't learned the material enough to do the homework on their own.

------
extension
Jeez, 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?

------
nohat
The post seems to be down. Here's the google cache:

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zlciYW...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zlciYW0MwtIJ:behind-
the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-will-never-pursue-cheating-
again.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=encrypted.google.com)

------
gommm
" Suggestions to change completely the assignments from year to year are
appealing on the first sight but they cause others types of problems: It is
very difficult to know in advance if an assignment is going to be too easy,
too hard, or too ambiguous. Even small-scale testing with TA's and other
faculty does not help. You need to "test" the new assignment by giving it to
students. If it is a good one, you want to keep it. "

I've often heard that from professors in the US, but in my university in
France we had a rule forbidding professors from reusing exams and things were
fine... Now one thing though, exams were made so that the average is around 10
or 12 out of 20... In cases where the gaussian curve was centered too low, the
teachers would decide to grade out of 22 or 24 points...

I have to say though that the idea of using public project, competitions and
peer reviewed projects is a very good idea and worked well when I was a
student...

~~~
roel_v
And in other news, I have first-hand reports from a professor in France using
the same exam since the 1980's, each year using copies of the original version
formatted with a typewriter.

My university has a lot of rules too, and the majority are worthless.

~~~
gommm
Well it also depends of the university... École d'Ingénieurs (Engineering
Schools, it's a bit different from the american system) tend to be stricter
about that while universities in France are less strict.

I know for a fact that no exam were reused because the previous years exams
were available at the library for students who wanted to study... Since most
of the exams were open book, with a world problem to solve in about 3 hours,
they were actually fun to study from.

------
jshort
I am currently a university student, and last semester I took an international
economics course. As most first lectures go I expected to sit down and listen
to the professor tell us what we would be learning throughout the year and
what books to buy. But this was quite different, I and many other students in
the class experienced a wide range of emotions from panic to excitement. This
was a peer based learning course (Myself and the majority of the class did not
know this and several people went on their computers and changed courses), for
those of you who do not know peer based learning involves students basically
teaching themselves the material and then teaching their peers their findings.
This was the best course I have yet to take, I learned not only a lot about
international economics but how to better my ability at teaching myself what I
need to know. In this course we were given three problems throughout the term
that we were to be solved in groups, the problems themselves were very vague
and indirect yet through researching and presenting our findings in small
groups and then in individually completed essays we became knowledgeable in
international economics. A bit more on topic was the fact that our essays were
to be written individually (and submitted through turnitin) yet all of our
research was done in a group setting. This furthered my ability to take
information from various sources (mainly the internet) and formulate my own
opinion and use proper citation where needed. For me this style of learning
was very awkward at first but the reward for sticking with it was great.

Another course I took that term was statistics for economics, for some of the
assignments the data used for the questions were chosen by the students
themselves (limited to a specific time frame to prevent plagiarism). In the
end I think the professor and TAs only checked our formulas rather than our
answers because of the time it would have taken to find the correct solution
for each problem but this is an interesting way to combat plagiarism.

------
bane
I would love to see a "citation graph" of the papers in turnitin's database.

I had a professor in college who had used the exact same test for 10 years. It
was so well known that a "key" had been cobbled together over the years with
all of the correct answers and you could readily get n-generation photocopies
of this "key".

Only a few of us declined this tempting document, wanting to actually learn
the material. It eventually became known that the test _itself_ was a copy of
a test from another professor at another school.

Later in my grad program, we received quite a bit of instruction from
professors who were clearly just using the slides that came with the textbook
as their lecture material.

I've always wondered if one could trace assignments and exams and answers
through some very large citation graph...even better over time, seeing how one
ancient paper has provided passing grades for generations of students.

------
jfb
I worked at Turnitin for a good while, and the numbers we were seeing were
eye-popping. I make no attestations w/r/t this particular story, but we'd see
40% or more clearly plagiarized content at every institution we'd demo for. I
was shocked, but then, I'm old and my education predates much of the Internet.

------
chernevik
I have mixed feelings here. On the one hand, I congratulate the effort you
spent tackling the problem.

On the other, I'm really disappointed you aren't sticking with it. Never mind
anything else, isn't it your obligation to protect your honest students? I
appreciate that your colleagues aren't supportive, but that doesn't change
your obligations.

And I suspect it's a short-sighted view. Word gets around, in a couple of
semesters you'll drive the cheaters out, and probably attract more honest
students who are tired of them.

Finally, I question the value of a course that doesn't generate core skills
susceptible of demonstration. I've got an MBA, and I learned a lot getting it.
But most of my courses were finance and accounting. I took only a couple of
strategy and accounting courses, when I was sure that the qualitative material
would be handled with rigor, and in some framework that prevented the vague
concepts and buzzwords from dominating the conversation. Every time I probed
the "soft" courses by less rigorous teachers, I came away convinced they
really weren't teaching much that would last. And I'm afraid it's my opinion
that most MBA coursework is of this limited value. It is _possible_ to
rigorously study qualitative subjects, but it requires considerable
discipline.

If your students aren't distinguishably improved by the end of the course,
just what was the point of the course? If you aren't enforcing the discipline
of the honor code, why would you be expected to enforce the discipline of
field? By all means, go after the cheaters -- and go after the fundamental
questions of why it's even possible to cheat in your course.

For all those misgivings, I have to credit you for bringing up the issue.
There is a lot of rot in our academies, and they urgently need people to
demand more of the students. You've already tolerated a lot of controversy to
come to this point. But don't stop now, and don't stop with students. Demand
more of yourself until your course is something that changes your students in
ways that can't be faked.

------
perlgeek
That was an interesting read, and from my experience (both as a student and
from teaching a class) is that plagiarism is a big problem.

Thinking a bit more about it, I think that plagiarism is in big parts a
symptom of another, bigger problem: making education a competition.

Think about it: would stundents cheat so much if it wasn't for the pressure of
getting good grades?

The pressure comes from parents, peers, from the students themselves and from
the fear that they won't get a job with bad grades.

Grades serve multiple purposes as well: they give the students a feedback how
well they performed, they determine pass/fail, and they tell a possible
employer how well the student performed.

Maybe detangling these purposes in some way (though I don't have a good idea
how) might be a good way at reducing some of the pressure, and alleviate the
pressure for good grades and thus cheating somehow?

------
rkalla
Fascinating read... sort of rings bells in my head along the lines of
DRM/piracy cold war.

Reading the article and see the greater and greater extents the students were
going through to cheat and the arms-race occurring between the teacher and the
students, he leads you to his ultimate conclusion: the game has to change.

You can see the writing on the wall as you read through. Written "brain dump"
style assignments, unless changed every year, aren't going to yield great
results. Interactive, group-driven projects, competitions and discussions are
all things that are much harder to plagiarize, are more fun and will
(hopefully) teach the students more.

Not to mention more fun to teach.

I have a lot of teachers in my family (midwest) and none of them glow when
they talk about teaching... they describe it like a war of attrition between
the teachers, the students and the administration... like there is some clock
ticking away slowly in the background and everyone is going through the
motions just trying to outlast everyone else. I am talking about 2 separate
generations here, like 40 years apart saying the same thing.

I can't imagine a shittier experience.

On the other hand, I am friends with a few (younger) teachers out here in the
west that are rabid about how exciting their class is and how much fun they
have.

The common denominator here is that the ones having a blast frequently do
highly engaging and custom events in the classroom like re-enacting scenes
from a play in drama on-the-fly or the poly-sci teacher segregated his class
for a week while teaching about separate-but-equal.

Those are micro-examples, but what I'm getting at is that the teachers that
recognize that the game has changed are still having a great time teaching.

Just like /cgi-bin shopping carts and "DO NOT HIT 'Purchase' TWICE!" buttons
are dead on the web, so is the schooling experience of yester-year. If school
wants to stay relevant, it has to compete with the allure of these extremely
fast lives we live now. People cashing in $100,000,000 companies at 22 makes
it tough to argue why your kid should stay in school until he's 73 so he can
make $80k as an architect.

I wouldn't want to go to school now, a lot of things seem in flux. Notice how
popular the "Why go to college?!" conversation is now adays?

I think in 10-15 years it will be much different/more effective with a
different outlook though; that'll be a more engaging and compelling experience
I hope.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
_Notice how popular the "Why go to college?!" conversation is now adays?_

I can assure you that conversation (in the context you mean) is not happening
all over, but rather limited to a small subset of Internet echo chambers.

My kids still get the same rhetoric from all directions. Unfortunately, that
rhetoric doesn't include a cost/value justification. Education is an
investment and a means to an end, but most people don't see it that way.

------
athst
I know this is an indirect solution, but why even have papers in a business
course anyway? I was a business undergrad, and after all of the lower-level BS
classes, it was all about projects and discussions in class, not paper
writing. Any long-form writing I had to do was in-class writing essays and
stuff on exams, where you can't copy paste.

I know a lot of the CS people on here look down on business education, but the
real value in it is not learning specific facts like "what is WiMax" but
instead being able to work on a team to create something and being able to
communicate and discuss business problems intelligently.

The team projects and case study discussions is really where I learned things.
Traditional assignments in a business course don't really make a lot of sense.

~~~
Panos
The essay was about doing a Porter's Five Forces analysis of the wireless
industry, as the new 4G technologies enter the market. The WiMax question was
just a "warm up" easy question, so that students that do not know what WiMax
is can start learning about the concept, before doing the 5-forces analysis.

This was the reason that, initially, I did not bother penalizing the copy &
paste behavior for these questions. But, unfortunately, this was just a signal
of a deeper problem with the student. After going through unharmed in the
first assignment, the student cheated again in the second, Excel-based
assignment.

------
0wnr
I think that it would be productive to reframe the usage of plagiarism-
detection services such as Turnitin away from a "gotcha" on cheating towards
teaching students to properly cite their academic work. For example, I have
heard of professors requiring their students to print out the originality
reports themselves and turn them in with the assignment in order to promote
accountability.

In addition, the turnitin service itself has its own quirks. I remember when
we used it back in high school, it would pick up direct quotes even if they
were in quotation marks and use those matching strings to contribute to the
total "originality score."

------
phamilton
I have had many courses in which the answers to the homework are given prior
to the homework assignment. The assignment is large enough that copying the
answers would take about an hour. Most students feel that if they are going to
spend that much time faking it, they might as well do the assignment.
Furthermore, biweekly quizzes clearly highlight a lack of understanding. Not
doing the homework (or just copying the answers) is a rough road to go down,
when averages midterm scores are in the low 60s (and yet some kids ace the
midterm). Those who copy the homework do badly in the course. It's just that
simple.

~~~
Xlythe
As a student, I have no complaints about weekly quizzes. I attend university
because it gives a structured environment to learn new material and quizzes
help keep me focused on what I know and what I only think I know. But
extending the time it takes to finish graded homework assignments? It's a
waste of my time. I'd rather relax, work at a part-time job, learn a new
programming language, or work on some project. Busywork is not why I decided
to go to university; the internet provides a free avenue to learn everything I
would in university (undergraduate). I pay for the classes, the structure.

(Clarifications. To stay enrolled, I have to maintain high grades, which means
homework is an obligation. And yes, I have other motives for attending uni
beyond someone telling me what I should learn next. There's the value of a
degree outshining being self-taught and how close to 99% of students from my
highschool take higher education. University is part of the culture here.)

~~~
phamilton
These are weekly homework assignments. 5 hours on average. It's not too bad.

------
soundsop
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.

------
haberman
Having to write an essay for which copy/paste from the internet could be
construed as a valid answer sounds mind-numbingly boring. Your job is to
express the same information as your sources, but with different wording.

~~~
lutorm
What do you mean? Copy/paste from the internet was _not_ a valid answer.

Pretty much any question can be answered by copy/paste from the internet. That
doesn't mean it would be a good or acceptable answer.

~~~
pseingatl
This wasn't a class in Rhetorica ad Herennium, it was a business school class.
Copy/paste is a combination of two actions and not an answer to any question
(except maybe, how do you precisely move text from one file to another?). If
you think that the Internet contains to answer to all questions, that's
amazing. However, it may contain answers to the questions Professor Panos
asked. If it does, what is wrong with properly presenting those answers? I
might point out that my profession is perhaps the only one for which
plagiarism is a virtue, and failure to use precedents is usually foolhardy--it
ain't called boilerplate for nothing. But I didn't want to hijack the thread.

~~~
lutorm
_If you think that the Internet contains to answer to all questions, that's
amazing._

I don't. I think that the internet contains information that can be used to
_assemble_ an answer, for pretty much any undergraduate question you can think
of. (That assembly can be done using copy/paste, if you are lazy, and that
will generally result in the answer being in substandard language. But it
would still have all the relevant information and it would be hard to
disentangle a copy/pasted answer from whether someone is just a poor writer.)

------
aik
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 given field.
This would include cheating. Ignoring cheaters is contrary to this purpose.

~~~
hpguy
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.

~~~
aik
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.

------
dlokshin
A little tangential, but I think this post outlines another argument for the
"higher education bubble." Is 40k a year worth learning how to effectively
plagiarize?

------
crux_
As a very random anecdote, I attended NYU myself ages ago and while I was not
a business student, I did take classes at Stern.

Unless things have changed, the amount of cheating in Stern is astronomical
compared to courses from the other schools within NYU: Of course there were
cheating problems elsewhere, but nowhere else was it done as brazenly or as
part of the shared culture of the student body.

------
ja27
In grad school, a couple of times I proctored exams for my major professor.
Every time I caught students cheating (copying off of note sheets or old exams
from other students), collected the "cheat sheets" and explained the situation
to my major professor. Not once were those pursued and I think all the
students passed the classes. Pretty frustrating.

------
wnoise
So what can be done to change the incentives so a different Nash equilibrium
is selected? Would it be possible to change the professor ranking rules so
that the reviews of cheaters do not count for the average rating? A bounty per
cheater caught? These both have their own poor incentives, of course, but
brainstorming has to start somewhere.

------
pullo
one of the real problems in current testing is that it requires very little of
the students creativity or originality. right from school you are told there
is one answer to a question and one explanation that is better than others.
your job as a student ( you are told) is to know that answer or to
remember/understand that explanation. how different do you think students
answers will be from each other?

Asking students not to open a browser to hunt for information is akin to not
opening text books. not going to happen. when you are asking for an proven
explanation the best you can expect is modified regurgitation of a know
existing explanation. there are times when this is not as straightforward as
it seems and there is effort required to do so.

the person really getting the short straw is the student. after paying a
hundred grand, to sit in a class, they spend time understanding others
opinions, instead of coming up with an original/fresh understanding of the
problem.

'studying' or working on problems as a group is not going to go away. working
as a group is the best way to stay motivated and focused when you are have 20
+ course credits a semester. the best classes i have been in are those where
the instructor divides the class into work groups and them adjusts the score
by the individual members scores based on their contribution to a group ( much
more real word scenario)

the authors efforts to creatively test the students and his success in dong so
underscores my point. the system has the wrong incentives. more so for the
students by not testing for their ability ,creativity, skills and
understanding.

i really do feel for the author. i feel his pain and dissapointment and i hope
things get better for him and his class. there are more uncaring/misguided
teachers than bad/hopeless students.and i hope this teacher does not turn that
dark corner. and we all know , there needs to be just one great teacher to set
a student in the right path. good luck .

------
adamdecaf
Hopefully this is a similar view to other students here, but I would drop the
class/change professors (even if that meant going into a larger class). Being
in an environment where cheating is allowed is not somewhere that I want to
be, much less learn in. I would feel like my honest work was just seen as
equal to the cheaters'.

------
desaiguddu
Blogger:Page Not Found..! Have you removed article? I was curious that the
article drew so much of attention..!

~~~
Panos
Yes, I had to remove the article from my own blog.

------
clavalle
Sounds like colleges, especially with this type of software doing most of the
work, should implement a 'Cheating Officer', perhaps one for each department.
It could be a grad student and it would save the regular teaching staff from
bad reviews and would keep students on their toes.

------
maurycy
It makes sense as long as he not published it.

Why? The university should not pursue cheating. It hurts the credibility. All
the teachers do so. On your own, it makes no sense to waste your time, others
will take care of. Once announced, the news spreads and everyone losses.

------
antihero
Crikey. I failed my degree because I'm lazy and hate lectures and exams (and
see them as a perverse way to test someone's ability to actually do
something), but I feel less bad knowing that so many people who passed were
cheats. Fuck dishonesty man.

------
akronim
isn't this why you have closed book exams?

~~~
pjscott
Open-book, open-notes exams are harder to cheat on. There's no point to
smuggling in notes when you can carry them in openly.

------
paganel
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but what's wrong with cheating? Isn't using
other people's code, as in open-source, "cheating"? Isn't Google cheating just
because it created a fancy clone of FB + Twitter? Wasn't Plotinus cheating
because he borrowed one of Plato's main ideas and just fancied it up a little?
Wasn't all Western Medieval philosophy cheating because it was barely a
commentary to Aristotle and then later to Plato and Plotinus?

I know I'm exaggerating, a little, I'm just trying to make a point. Schooling
other people and forcing them not to "cheat" just for the sake of, well,
schooling, doesn't have any benefits and it's nothing like what happens in
real life. We're all trying to build things on the shoulders of giants.

~~~
roel_v
The point of these assignments, in case you don't realize, is not to write
something new or groundbreaking, it's to give students experience in doing
research and writing. _What_ they write about exactly isn't that relevant,
it's the process of going through it. And by skipping that, the whole point is
lost.

Not sure if I'm feeding a troll here, but the amount of 'why do I have to read
this book, I will never need what's in it anyway'-style failure to understand
the purpose of deliberate practice is high so you may actually believe
yourself that your argument makes sense.

~~~
pseingatl
That was my point: the class isn't about writing. The class isn't about
getting experience in writing. If you want to do that, there are much better
alternatives. This class was about content (I used the term "Answers" in my
posts). When it comes to content, the required skill set is finding the
answer, compiling the answer, assembling the answer, putting a team together
to collaborate to find the answer, etc. Learn writing somewhere else. The
fault is thinking that writing is the only way to express these skills.
Writing has certain formal conventions, such as citing sources. A failure to
cite sources is considered plagiarism. Content is different. Facts cannot be
copyrighted, and this class was about content and those facts. With respect to
facts, the conventions are different. It makes no sense to pretend to teach
students to write when you are trying to teach them content. We do it in
academia because except for medical school, law school--where writing papers
is relatively uncommon, compared to other disciplines--we don't know another
way to do it. But don't call this cheating. Failure to document sources, OK.
Academic dishonesty if there's a misrepresentation, OK. Providing the
professor with the content he asked for in business school? That's not OK??

------
skeltoac
Students, this is why many great employers don't put much weight on the
Education section of your CV.

(Cheaters, you should be figuring out how to crib a nice github account, not
how to pass exams.)

------
teyc
Make the papers public and have a dob in the cheaters hotline. Perhaps even
offer tools and software. The game then changes because the school will be
forced to be transparent.

------
smathews
This was my dissertation back in '92. Thought you'd get a kick out of it. It
was fun ... dice/red cups/randomization. I totally agree with your position
and loved your New assignments. Good luck and congratulations on your tenured
position. Sunny Mathews Title: ASSESSMENT OF ACADEMIC DISHONESTY IN A
COMMUNITY COLLEGE: AN APPLICATION OF THE RANDOMIZED RESPONSE TECHNIQUE
Author(s): MATHEWS, SARAE SUSAN Degree: ED.D. Year: 1992 Pages: 00088
Institution: UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI; 0125 Advisor: Supervisor: GILBERT CUEVAS
Source: DAI, 54, no. 01A, (1992): 0067 Abstract: The purpose of this study was
to estimate the extent to which cheating behaviors occur among mathematic
students at a community college. The study was conducted at the Kendall Campus
of Miami-Dade Community College, during the Winter term, 1992.

A pilot study compared the reported rate of cheating among 47 upper-level
mathematics students and 46 mathematically underprepared students using direct
questioning and the randomized response technique. The forced alternative
randomized response technique was employed to assess attitudes held about
cheating and to estimate reported rates of cheating among 298 community
college mathematics students. Factors related to cheating such as age, gender,
birthplace, religiosity, membership in a religious organization, involvement
in extracurricular activities, and self-perception of honesty were also
explored. Hypotheses were tested using chi square tests of independence,
frequency distributions, z-tests for significance, and a randomized response
formula.

The estimated percent of mathematics students who report that they cheated
while attending M-DCC was 31%. The forced alternative randomized response
technique was found to have utility in a group setting. Direct questioning
underestimated the reported rate of cheating; however, differences were not
statistically significant.

Upper-level mathematics students reported they cheated at the same rate as
mathematically underprepared students. Calculus students were less likely to
report someone for cheating. Males, students under 25 years old, and students
born abroad also agreed that reporting cheating was worse than actually
cheating. Students who reported they had cheated were more likely to be
formally affiliated with a religious organization. Reported rate of cheating
was inversely related to self-perception of honesty. Students over 25 years of
age were the least likely to cheat.

Recommendations included: further investigation of the randomized response
technique, particularly where the actual incidence of the sensitive behavior
can be determined and compared with the estimated proportions; a comparison of
cheating behaviors and attitudes among younger students and older students;
and research to clarify the relationship between cheating and religiosity.

------
grandalf
Why not just use impromptu in-class essays/tests for 100% of the grade?
Anything that allows students to paraphrase references, etc., is not really a
test of understanding.

------
Zarathust
The weirdest thing in all of this is the relation between artificially boosted
grades and increased pay for the teacher. This also appears to be the root of
the problem.

------
modokode
It would be interesting to know the reason for the article having been
removed, as I would've liked to re-read it, having only more or less skimmed
it yesterday.

------
Dove
I am completely aghast.

This professor is considering only what path will avoid the most hassle and
difficulty for himself. Any duty he might owe honest students, fellow faculty,
or even society at large doesn't seem to figure into it. He seems to see no
problem at all with effectively selling high grades to cheaters, so long as
there's no risk or hassle involved for _him_.

And because he gets to use a term like Nash Equilibrium to describe it, he's
not even ashamed.

Profoundly dishonorable.

~~~
lutorm
He works for the University. If the employer is not interested in rewarding
him (or even penalizing him) for doing something that not only is stressful
but that takes tons of time away from his useful work, why should he?

An example of what _you_ are doing in _your_ job for coworkers and society at
large while being penalized for it by your employer would be appropriate here.

~~~
Dove
_If the employer is not interested in rewarding him (or even penalizing him)
for doing something that not only is stressful but that takes tons of time
away from his useful work, why should he?_

Because it is the right and honorable thing to do in his position. If doing
the right thing were always easy and profitable, we'd have no need for morals.

There are lots of situations where people are encouraged and rewarded for
doing the wrong thing in their line of work.

There are state prosecutors whose compensation depends on how many criminals
they successfully prosecute, so they take cases where the law is obviously
unjust but they can win (when using their discretion to safeguard justice is
supposed to be part of the job).

There are salesmen whose compensation depends entirely on how many units they
are able to sell, so they lie to customers.

There are soldiers who are ordered to engage in immoral acts. It is an
essential part of their duty to refuse those orders, but that decision
certainly does not come without stress and cost.

I worked in defense contracting, and sometimes served as an engineering liason
to various national defense organizations. There was occasionally immense
social pressure on me to make our products look better than they were . . .
but--and never mind that it would have been in my employer's interest--that
would have been wrong.

I could go on. The point is this: in _most_ circumstances in life, there are
ways to make money or make life less stressful by doing the wrong thing. You
can argue that that's the fault of the people at the top of the system --
they've set up the incentives wrong. I agree; having a just society literally
means that the incentives point toward right behavior. But that is their
problem, not yours. _Your_ duty is to do the right thing, regardless of the
circumstances.

Academia has a role in both teaching and certifying knowledge, and is paid by
students for the certification, not by industry for its accuracy. There is
certainly moral hazard in that, and it deserves a systemic fix. That is no
excuse for succumbing to it, for throwing up one's hands, blaming the system,
and unleashing remorseless cheaters on fellow faculty and society.

~~~
hackinthebochs
This is a common misconception. The professor is there to perform research,
only incidentally to teach. It's not _his_ responsibility to police students.
It's the responsibility of the entire system to have policies in place that
effectively prosecute cheating. When that system fails it is not his moral
obligation to carry that burden himself.

~~~
Dove
I disagree. The incidentiality of the teaching doesn't enter into it. As long
as he is giving grades, he has a responsibility to make a reasonable effort to
detect and deter cheating.

(I do think the strategy he described -- spending two hours per student trying
to force a confession -- is unreasonable. Detection, notification, and
escalation to school enforcement is a reasonable approach. Giving up and
blaming the system is not.)

I agree that it is the responsibility of the school to have systems in place
that provide the right incentives. But it is _also_ the responsibility of the
professors to defend the academic integrity of the school as much as they are
involved with it.

Moral responsibility does not always add up to 100%.

~~~
hackinthebochs
>he has a responsibility to make a reasonable effort to detect and deter
cheating. I can agree with this. But in the face of an administration that is
bent on turning a blind eye, or even punishing the teacher, he has no
obligation to carry the burden of defending the integrity of the institution
himself. Putting a reasonable effort into detecting cheating is his
responsibility. It is not his responsibility to ensure that the students are
properly prosecuted.

~~~
Dove
I don't know about that. There's still the rest of society to consider. Which
is to say, there's still his personal professional integrity.

I guess it depends on the circumstance. If the school knowingly encourages
cheating for profit, I would think integrity demands playing whistleblower. In
fact, I'd apply that to _any_ organization knowningly doing something shady --
bring it to light or accept guilt as an accomplice.

If the school believes in academic integrity, but the compensation for
teachers results in perverse incentives, it is important to do the right thing
anyway--defend the academic integrity of the school, work on fixing the
system, and in the mean time put social pressure on other teachers to do the
right thing until the system is fixed.

I agree that it's not the professor's responsibility to pursue the matter
beyond his influence at the school. If there's an office of academic honesty,
but it's lax, the best he can do is lobby to improve it. But inasmuch as
professors have absolute control over the grades they distribute, I do think
they have a responsibility to be fair with them.

I can see leaving an institution over a lack of academic honesty. I can see
working to reform or improve one. I can see failing a student for cheating,
but washing your hands of it when the school does nothing further. What I
cannot see is saying to society at large, "On my reputation as an expert, this
student can do calculus," when you aren't sure it's true, for the sake of a
less stressful workplace and a higher salary.

~~~
hackinthebochs
I'm finding it hard to find fault with your argument. I think where our
differences lie is that I don't believe its a moral imperative for someone to
risk their livelihood to whistle-blow against something that is fundamentally
someone else's responsibility. If the janitor at an investment bank overhears
fraud being discussed, I don't believe the janitor has a moral responsibility
to expose that fraud if it risks his own livelihood.

Similarly for a teacher who puts in a commendable effort to weed out cheaters
only to be essentially punished for it by the administration. It's his job to
make note of cheaters, but the responsibility for doling out consequences is a
cooperative effort between the professor and the administration. If the
administration isn't doing their job, and exposing this risks his own career
and livelihood (for a professor publicly going against his administrations
this might actually be the case), I don't think he has this responsibility.

~~~
Dove
I can understand that, though I certainly disagree.

I can respect a principle of proportionality -- I don't think it makes sense
to risk a life life to stop a petty theft. But I absolutely cannot agree with
the line of thinking that says because something is one person's moral
responsibility, it isn't another's. To my way of thinking, _any_ evil you know
about is your responsibility to fight. Or at least not cooperate with.
Personal cost doesn't enter into it.

I think sometimes life doesn't offer you a middle ground between heroism and
cowardice.

------
awegawef
With prompt given for the assignment, I'm hardly surprised by the amount of
plagiarism.

~~~
jackpirate
Seriously. I hated classes that had stupid assignments. Personally, I opted
not to do them at all because I didn't want to cheat. I was fine accepting a B
in a class to avoid these assignments. Eventually, this bit me in the butt
when applying for grad schools (not severely, but reduced funding), so I
totally understand why people would copy them to keep their grades from
falling.

------
omouse
He used TurnItIn? That website that commits copyright infringement? Yeah,
stopped reading after I saw that.

~~~
Zarathust
Do you have some sources for this?

------
pseingatl
What bothers me about this episode is that it highlights what is wrong with
education in America and confirms what many think about academia as being too
insular. What is the “cheating” that Professor Panos complains of? In many of
the cases the cheating was not the mindless copying of math problems from
someone seated nearby. Instead, the professor asked questions which the
students were to research and submit an answer in the form of an essay. The
class was a class in real-world business, not an exercise in rhetoric.
Presumably, essay writing skills, to the extent that they are needed at all,
are taught elsewhere. The job of the students is to perform research and find
the answer or answers to the question. Professor Panos complains that the
“cheating” students’ methodology was, “research, copy, paste.” There is no
comment as to whether the cheating students submitted correct answers. The
failure to document sources is considered plagiarism in academia, journalism
and other fields. Not so much in business. In business, what is important is
the answer. If McKinsey has done a study for company X on an issue and company
Y has now commissioned McKinsey for the same study, does Professor Panos
believe that McKinsey won’t use the earlier study–or any other study done by
someone else which they can get their hands on–to answer the question? I’m not
picking on McKinsey–all consultants work this way. There is nothing wrong with
it, and not having to reinvent the wheel is a clear benefit to the client. If
I have a question to answer and a colleague has already comprehensively
answered it, whether he be Korean, a fraternity brother or a sorority
sister–where is the harm in saying, “I am indebted to my colleague who has
answered this.” The fact that I serendipitously found an answer is not a
negative in the business world. Not giving credit to a colleague is a whole
other issue. The Internet is a research tool and there is nothing wrong with
using it wisely. What’s more–and since this is not about writing essays–is the
goal here to have twenty-something business students give their personal
opinions, opinions that the business world tends to discount greatly; or is
the goal to have them find useful answers and compile the same appropriately?
Having been asked numerous times in real life, “where did you get this from?”
being able to say, “someone has already looked at this and this is the
conclusion they came up with” has always been helpful. On more than one
occasion, it saved the day.

These were not math or language tests. The Spanish word for test is “examen”
but if all I have done is copied the answer from my neighbor during a test I
will not have made any progress in learning the language. Cheating is
penalized because the student is cheating himself out of the opportunity to
learn. I do not see how students who do research on the Internet and compile
that research in answering a question have cheated. If you want to demand more
rigorous citations from your students, demand them. If a fraternity brother
has answered the question, give him credit. Improve on his work if you can.
These are real world skills, and to the extent that business school insists on
archaic essay writing the students are being done a disservice.

~~~
Swannie
There is a skill called "critical thinking", another called "report writing",
and it seems for this course "comprehension of a market, and competing
technologies within this market".

Copy paste demonstrates or develops none of these, other than "report
composition", and possibly "identifying worthwhile sources".

If you think consultants, such as McKinsey, require the later skills only, and
NOT the former, you are rather misguided.

~~~
pseingatl
Copy/paste is not an answer, it's a method; a tool. I've worked a lot with
consultants. I'm not picking on McKinsey, and when I hire them I want them to
check precedents. I want them to look at their (and others) past projects and
see if there's anything relevant to my problem. If they find an answer that
someone else has come up with that solves my problem, and it's not a trade
secret, copyrighted or otherwise off-limits, I'm thrilled. There is all too
much reinvention of the wheel. I still see this as a failure to document
sources, not "cheating." One of my points is that the exercise of writing
papers should not be the only way to learn. Take a macro view of things: some
have written that with respect to Turnitin that they are horrified at 40% of
the papers are plagiarized. Really? These papers for the most part are not
word-for-word copied (though I admit that some are). Do you really think that
hundreds of thousands of high school students have original insights about
Salinger's Catcher in the Rye? Or that there is similar originality in
readings of Aristotle's On the Parts of Animals? In a way it's reassuring that
statistically these papers tend to converge. Of course, whether it is
worthwhile to include Salinger in a curriculum is another story. As far as
original insights, my guess is that Jerry's troubles at summer camp (bed
wetting) might have contributed in some way to his oeuvre. Haven't seen a
college paper about it, though.

------
drivebyacct2
Good god you people are sure full of yourselves sometimes. You're telling me
that if you put in extra effort in your daily jobs and got kicked in the ribs
for it more than once... that you'd continue to do it and wouldn't be upset
about it? Armchair ivory-towerists. I'm just aghast at the paragraphs of
criticism I'm reading here for people that I can just imagine being upset with
wasted and unappreciated effort.

------
ascendant
"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.

~~~
sliverstorm
_the only person suffering from this behavior is the student_

You really think so?

The more diplomas you give to students who learned nothing, the more the rest
of the world will pick up on it and refuse to hire anyone from your
University.

~~~
michaelochurch
Also, the more unqualified people get through college, the less a college
diploma means. I wouldn't say that cheating is the only reason for the
problems with the college diploma in the U.S., but it's a substantial
contributor. The 20% cheating rate observed by this professor is fairly normal
across the entire country and a lot of unqualified students get through by
cheating.

~~~
wisty
Also, the more unqualified people get through college, the less jobs there are
for non-degree holders. Why would you hire a school leaver, when there's
plenty of degree holders lining up for the job?

So the diploma _is_ worth more, for the students who just scrape by. Unless
diplomas start to lose _all_ credibility.

------
aneth
I did not cheat in school. I wanted to prove things to myself and to learn.
However the basic premise of opposition to cheating here is incorrect:

"habitual plagiarism ... can have very serious consequences in their
professional life"

This is something academics believe because it justifies their policies, but
it isn't true, at least in entrepreneurship. Those who can "cheat" without
violating the trust of those who matter or facing legal consequences are those
who succeed. Those who play by all the rules bitch on HN about "stolen ideas"
and cutthroat business practices instead of synthesizing ideas and looking for
unfair advantages.

Cheat if it suits you, learn what you want to learn, get the credentials you
need, cover your ass, and build the life you want. Life is not a your grade,
but neither is it the opinion of a professor over what you should be doing
with your time - copying or writing.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I disagree with your conclusion. Cheating is about taking the easy way, which
rarely works in the real world, unless you are comfortable riding (and perhaps
crossing) the legal/ethical boundaries we, as a society, have decided on.

I would never hire someone for my startup who came to me and said, "I cheated
through college, so I know how to be cutthroat in business." If you don't have
the personal integrity to manage yourself, why would I ever think you would
manage something of mine?

------
kahawe
I don't know what it is with you US Americans and "cheating"... but it seems
to be a very touchy subject in your culture, almost like violating someone's
honors. I never understood that.

~~~
pnathan
It is totally a question of honor. It is utterly dishonorable to cheat, and
egregiously so at the levels described in the aforementioned blog.

The goal of the scholastic experience is so that you, the student, learns
something.

If the school turns out people who didn't learn, they are producing
worthlessness.

It is a lie to say that you have a degree, when you really have a collection
of credits that you cheated through. The degree is worthless and should be
sent back.

~~~
kahawe
You are exaggerating by 200% and leading it ad absurdum.

"Cheating" for me means getting one or two hints at an exam and with the exam
situation being what it is, those hints typically only really help to jog your
memory if you did study. It does not mean downright plagiarizing your thesis
and 90% of your studies.

But US Americans seem to be offended even at the idea of getting or sharing a
single hint during an exam. Here in Europe you could easily loose "street
cred" and be forever labeled as the worst kind of "nerd" if you did NOT at
least try to help a fellow student on purpose. Again, I am not talking about
writing 100% of homework for you but sharing a hint or a small piece of help
during an exam.

Funnily, we had a few very, very high profile cases of plagiarized doctorates
amongst politicians here in Germany. Their degree was taken away from them of
course.

~~~
pnathan
No.

I assure you, what you describe is considered cheating, but the cheating that
usually takes place is far more comprehensive.

------
vessenes
Panos, I wrote you a long response on your blog.

------
graupel
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 least a lack of cultural
understanding by Panos Ipeirotis, who I'm assuming is of Greek origin based on
his name.

~~~
william42
All of those are ethnic origins.

~~~
graupel
Compared to the others listed, it's out of place - all Greeks originate from
Greece - where do all Jewish people originate from? (and as much as that
sounds like the start of a joke, it's not)

~~~
gyardley
As someone working on converting to Judaism, I can tell you that the situation
is complicated, with ethnicity and religion strongly interrelated. Anyone that
claims Jewishness solely involves religion is just as wrong as anyone that
claims Jewishness solely involves ethnicity. You cannot think about Judaism
the same way you'd think about, say, Christianity.

With that disclaimer in mind, the vast majority of Jews - due to traditional
prohibitions against intermarriage and low numbers of converts - originate
from the general area where the State of Israel is today. Here, both the
founding myths in the Torah and modern genetic testing are in agreement.

