
NYU Prof Vows Never to Probe Cheating Again—and Faces a Backlash - ilamont
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/nyu-prof-vows-never-to-probe-cheating-again%E2%80%94and-faces-a-backlash/32351
======
uvdiv
This reminds me of a case in Europe, where a PhD chemist was found to have
faked/fabricated large parts of his graduate work, including his thesis. (It
was on Derek Lowe's blog, pipeline.corante.com, and other places). He used
Switzerland's ridiculous privacy laws to C&D journals, papers not to disclose
his name in connection with the university investigation. (Or something like
that, I'm not a lawyer). So he got off scot-free, and now he works in
investment banking.

edit: Here's the story

[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/09/25/faked_data_a...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/09/25/faked_data_at_the_eth.php)

primaries,

<http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/87/i39/8739news4.html>

[http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/09/fake-
data-...](http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/09/fake-data-
alleg.html)

~~~
rickmb
"Switzerland's ridiculous privacy laws"

You mean those "ridiculous" kind of laws where peoples privacy is protected
against media-exploitation during that equally ridiculous "presumption of
innocence" bit that is part of due process?

Those silly Swiss, not to allow mere allegations to destroy peoples lives. Way
better to humiliate people by parading them in front of the world press, and
make sure their careers are destroyed without having to bother with silly
stuff like facts and evidence, the way they do things in the US.

~~~
nate_meurer
This has nothing to due with due process if the the fraudster is forever
permitted to C&D anyone who mentions his name.

------
hncommenter13
This is ridiculous.

1\. The C&D letter came from "a faculty member at another institution." It
could have come from me, or from a guy at the coffee shop down the block. A
letter from a faculty member at another institution has about as much weight--
considering that he has no claim in the supposed privacy of the material--as
the paper it's printed on. NYU should grow a backbone and tell him to pound
sand. If that's all it takes for them to turn tail, I wouldn't take their
policies on academic freedom very seriously.

2\. I'm guessing that the ever-so-helpful faculty member from another
institution sent some sort of warning regarding FERPA, the Family Education
Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, which generally governs how academic
institutions must handle student records. This act has been interpreted in
such odd ways that there was a Supreme Court case over whether allowing
students in elementary school to grade each other's homework was a violation
of federal law (Owasso v. Falvo).

My understanding is that FERPA generally applies only to student records with
some sort of personally identifiable information on them (i.e., posting grades
with ID numbers, publishing contact info on the internet without permission,
etc.). If I couldn't possibly identify the student from the portion of the
email quoted, it's hard to understand how FERPA could rationally apply. If it
were applicable, then any single quotation of any size from any communication
with a student would be potentially banned from being repeated. Otherwse, it
would be a violation of federal law for a professor to post a sentence of the
sort: "A student asked me a very intriguing question today, which went as
follows..."

3\. If NYU or the professor just don't want the hassle of being at the center
of a public debate, then fine. They are free to say or to not say whatever
they like. But to scurry away from a debate and blame it on some imagined
violation of a student "right" (see Gonzaga v. Doe for how far that "right"
goes) is just silly.

------
g123g
Again, instead of trying to some how address the genuine issues raised by the
original blog post, people are going to create unnecessary controversy around
it till the issue is forgotten. People can't see the forest for the trees. The
main issue is that there is rampant cheating going on in the educational
institutions. That's where the focus of the universities should be not on
issuing these cease and desist letters.

~~~
darksaga
Agreed. I had the same reaction. The guy outs the problem and the blatant use
of cheating by his students and all he gets in return is a kick in the teeth
by doing so.

I'm glad I never stayed in academia.

------
sgk284
So my question is, what if TurnItIn quoted a student's paper instead of the
teacher quoting an email?

I ask because these university's are effectively giving these student's papers
to TurnItIn to use and make a profit on however they please. The students have
no say in the matter, and that doesn't seem to be very protective of their
privacy.

~~~
jbermudes
Yes! I've been trying to tell people this since high school almost 10 years
ago. Many educators force students to submit their papres to Turnitin or else
take a failing grade on the assignment (which is often a final project which
can cause you to fail the course).

1\. Turnitin cites fair use ("it's educational"), but one of the metrics of
fair use is the extent of use (they use the whole thing), if it's used for
profit (they are), and the affect of merchantability. As shady as it sounds,
paper mills are not illegal, copyright infringement is. If a paper mill
rejects your paper because it's been through turnitin, that hurts me as an
author.

2\. Another aspect of the monetization that really grinds my gears is that
every paper I am forced to submit benefits turnitin by making their database
larger and thus helping grant them a monopoly in this market. I am being
forced to write articles for the monetary benefit of a company. If they're
making money off my paper I want a cut.

3\. Turnitin does not offer any way to remove one's documents from their
database. If it was merely being used temporarily to compare for plagiarism
against internet or book sources then that'd be reasonable. But they keep my
papers forever and will continue to monetize them for years after the fact.

I understand the plight of educators that want to stop plagiarism, but forcing
me to irrevocably offer royalty-free licenses for my work to a for-profit
company that is then charging the school (which if it is public is being
funded by my tax dollars) is just insane any way you slice it.

Unfortunately the courts sided with Turnitin on this issue back in 2007 and
2009 and somehow ruled that their for-profit use was fair use.

~~~
syllogism
Oh get real.

The university has the right to ask you to submit your work however they want
as a condition to course completion. If you don't want to submit your work to
turnitin you don't have to complete the course. Nobody's forcing you to.

If the extent of your objection is that turnitin robs you of potential
financial benefit of selling your work, then that's by design: that's exactly
what the educational institution wants to do! It doesn't matter that selling
your work to a paper mill is legal. It's against the interests of the
institution, so they're not going to let you go through their programme and
keep that right.

~~~
JadeNB
> If the extent of your objection is that turnitin robs you of potential
> financial benefit of selling your work, then that's by design: that's
> exactly what the educational institution wants to do!

I know of no university that explicitly prohibits students from selling papers
to paper mills (although I haven't checked). Prohibiting students from _using_
papers from paper mills is a different thing entirely.

~~~
eli
Seriously? I am 100% certain that selling papers for other students to use
would have violated my university honor code. I would be surprised if there
are any schools where that isn't the case.

~~~
true_religion
Aiding cheating is against the honor code, however no one is going to say
"sell me your paper so I may turn it in for a grade against the code".

Rather they'd say they want your paper so they can see your thoughts. That's
fair because they could get the same effect from merely talking to you about
your paper.

Or they'd say that its okay to use outside sources (such as your paper) so
long as they cite it. This is also true in many cases.

~~~
Robin_Message
And if they want your paper so they can "see your thoughts" (and pay you for
the privilege!?), what's wrong with that paper also being entered into Turn It
In? After all, you surely don't think they were lying about their intentions.
Because if you suspect they are lying about their intentions, then aren't you
aiding cheating?

~~~
true_religion
Because in the future, you _may_ want to sell that same paper to students
_after_ you've graduated.

In that case, you're not breaking any honor code although you're aiding others
in being dishonorable to their own codes.

~~~
eli
Well, actually you _are_ still breaking the honor code even after you're
graduated. Though the school would probably have little recourse against you
in practice.

------
JadeNB
From the vice dean of faculty, quoted in the article:

> Stern faculty members are obligated to support the University and Stern
> honor codes and are never sanctioned in any way for doing so.

Ha! Nothing wrong with that, except that I thought he meant "faculty members
who are stern". Here's the interesting bit:

> Moreover, the course evaluation input of any student who has an honor code
> infraction is removed from consideration when evaluating teaching
> performance.

How in the world can you do that, when student evaluations are anonymous?
(Maybe they've switched to online evaluations, which would allow this while
preserving anonymity.)

~~~
nigelsampson
This also doesn't take into account the impact that being stricter on cheating
had on the non-cheating members of the class.

------
Sukotto
Comments from someone claiming to be Prof. Panos Ipeirotis and attempting to
clarify some points.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/nyu-professor-class-
cheating-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/nyu-professor-class-
cheating-2011-7#comment-4e273a85cadcbb434e020000)

~~~
jrockway
_This prevents them from effectively getting into a law school, or being hired
by an investment bank._

My guess is that this is bullshit. I work at an investment bank and I've never
given anyone any official transcripts.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Some banks do demand transcripts for fresh grads, as do a number of consulting
firms.

------
AndrewHampton
It seems to me the best solution would be to have a few student workers at the
university that are the plagiarism "police". They would review the TurnItIn
reports for all student papers and refer offenders to honor boards for
punishment.

This would leave the professor free to teach and not have to a) spend time
policing the student and b) be seen as the bad guy when students get caught
and punished.

~~~
charliepark
This.

There should be an automatic filter, with manual review of violations, that
all papers are submitted through. If it fails the filter, it's returned to the
student, and the professor hasn't even seen it. The student can redo it, or
protest the automated decision, and a human reviewer (an anonymous TA on-
campuse) can consider the case (and see the offending text). The reviewer
would then pass it on to the professor, who can grade it, or return it to the
student to improve.

This removes the burden and the penalty from the professor, whose job isn't
supposed to be policing plagiarism infractions.

------
ilamont
Earlier HN discussion, before the blog post was deleted:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254>

~~~
timf
And previous discussion of the post removal:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2784002>

------
jcc80
I think we all saw this coming. Reading his blog post I had that weird feeling
of, "How is he actually writing this?" I guess it was cathartic for him but of
course NYU would want it taken down.

------
to_jon
Shocking, absolutely shocking to read that MBA students would engage in such
behavior. One might imagine, with great difficulty of course, that their sole
purpose in entering business school was the pursuit of personal and financial
gain by any means.

------
sunspeck
“We are also trying to satisfy ourselves that Stern graduates know what they
are talking about when they represent themselves to practitioners and in the
world of stiff competition with graduates of other top schools.”

Wait... is he actually admitting here that NYU wants the post removed because
it reveals that >1/5 of its grads are cheaters?

~~~
dfc
I take it your school did not have a critical reasoning requirement and/or you
cheated in class. The post stated that in one class 1/5 of the students had
cheated.

Even if we pretend that one introductory class is a representative sample of
the current enrolled student body you still can not jump from enrolled to
graduated. It is entirely possible that a lot of the people who cheat in a 101
level class do not make it to graduation.

Please refrain from making silly posts in the future.

------
vash_stampy
To me, the stance that this professor is taking is absurd. He's not helping
anyone but himself giving up on efforts to prevent cheating.

I really thought he would have made a compelling argument to resolve this, but
it seems more like he's become so frustrated with cheating that he's resigned
himself from that aspect of education.

With that said, I do disagree with the stance that universities take on
cheating. The system of punishment is too focused on catching cheaters and
punishing them so harshly as scare others to never consider it. I think this
prevents many students from being more creative or exploring their own ideas
based on previous work.

I believe cheating is not something a student commits because of inability,
cheating is a crime of laziness. Therefore, rather than trying to catch
cheating, schools should just making cheating pointless. Papers and assigments
should be completely open and encourage students to look at any previous work
and allow them to include it in their own work simply with a citation.

To add, professors seem to focused on their students finding credible sources
to cite rather than allowing students to form their own ideas. Credible ideas
can be founded from less credible sources and that is what should really
matter.

~~~
xom
As stated, the professor is preventing cheating by modifying the nature of the
assignments.

------
tlrobinson
_"We are teaching the next generation of business leaders, and it is important
that they think about the consequences of their actions,"_

Exactly. You're not just there to learn the course material. Maybe cheaters
don't even know what they're doing is wrong, and by ignoring it you're doing
them a disservice.

Regarding the "poisoned class environment" issue, it seems like there's a
better way to go about it discretely.

1\. Include your plagiarism policy clearly on the course syllabus. Be clear
about what constitutes plagiarism, how they should cite passages taken from
other material, etc.

2\. Don't tell students you're using Turnitin, just have them submit papers
electronically somehow and run the papers through Turnitin yourself.

3\. The first time you catch someone plagiarizing give them a zero on the
paper (depending on the severity) and tell them if it happens again they'll be
kicked out of the class (or whatever your university's policy is)

~~~
furyg3
The problem this particular teacher ran into was that kicking someone out of a
class for plagarism / reporting to the university (as per the policy) is a big
process, not just a print screen of Turnitin's report...

That means that the teacher is spending hours and hours and hours on
cheating...

------
burgerbrain
I wonder why Marc Parry chose to call him "Mr." instead of the _correct_
"Dr."... a total of 12 whole times.

~~~
williamdix
People with Ph.D.s are not that frequently called Dr. Also, if there is one
source that I am pretty sure would know how to refer to professors and Ph.D.s,
it would be the Chronicle of Higher Education.

~~~
vacri
That being said, it's also uncommon to specifically use Mr. (except for male
surgeons, of course) - not unknown, but uncommon. I'd have less of a problem
if the article was about, say, his dog having a funny coat pattern or him
complaining about parking restrictions at the local council, but it is weird
that in an article about his professional conduct and capacity, that the
lesser title should be used.

------
marshray
I guess the only logical policy for a professor is "don't ask, don't tell,
don't talk about it".

You there, academic! Back into the closet!

~~~
Caballera
That's pretty much how it is. My wife teaches in a NYC public school and has a
big issue with plagiarism, although there she can report it all she wants and
no one would do anything. Additionally if she tried to assign homework like
this professor suggest they would not do it. They would simply take a zero
then to have to do a presentation. And then it becomes an issue where the
students fail and the teachers passing average drops severely.

------
URSpider94
I had the experience of getting my graduate degree from an undergraduate
institution with a strict honor code, and my graduate degree from a school
without an honor code.

Under the honor code, a student caught cheating would, at minimum, fail the
course, and at maximum, be expelled.

At the other school (theoretically more prestigious), the typical sanction for
cheating was to receive an "F" on the suspect assignment.

Not surprisingly, in my experience, cheating was far, far more common at the
second university than at the first ...

------
dougws
And of course NYU does nothing to back him up. The spirit of openness and
intellectual honesty that universities should be promoting falls by the
wayside when it involves a little risk and a little conflict. He did some real
research into an interesting and relevant topic, and got the shaft from the
university because it uncovered uncomfortable truths.

I'd put this on with the sex class incident a few months ago at Northwestern
as far as disappointing moves by institutions I'd like to respect.

------
nickolai
If cheating one's way out of doing real work is so pervasive in the
institutions training our political and business leaders, i guess the current
cirsis situation is not very surprising. What kind of people would you expect
at the top of a system that encourages cheating vs doing your homework ?

------
kylemaxwell
I need to check my web cache. I have no problems hosting a copy of the essay.

------
jdp23
I can certainly see why NYU wouldn't want to defend a professor who quoted a
student's email without permission.

~~~
culled
Since when can you not anonymously quote part of an email that was sent to
you?

~~~
jdp23
When you've got some kind of duty [in the legal sense] towards the person
sending the mail. For example a doctor quoting a patient's email would be
problematic. Just to be clear, I don't know the law in this area and I'm not
saying what he did was illegal (I have no idea), I'm just saying that I can
certainly see why NYU wouldn't want to step up to defend him on this issue if
something came up.

~~~
jrockway
I'm not sure how you can consider doctor/patient and professor/cheating
student the same type of relationship. Hell, this was a 100-level class; it's
surprising it even had a professor.

~~~
jdp23
I'm not saying it's the same kind of relationship. But educational
institutions and professors certainly have some duties to students.

------
Vivtek
Oh, this so reminds me of all the ass coverage at my wife's last place of work
(also in academia).

~~~
jcc80
yes, so pathetic

------
badclient
Wow, I think the professor may be the winner here. I felt that post hurt him
more than help him.

------
billmcneale
tl;dr: He faces a backlash because his post violated a federal law protecting
student privacy. The takedown had nothing to do with cheating.

~~~
politician
> He faces a backlash because his post allegedly violated a federal law
> protecting student privacy.

ftfy

------
drivebyacct2
Disappointing, it's mostly a recap of the original post. I can understand NYU
being worried about the unauthorized quoting of a student's email, but the
entire blog post? Surely, I/we are not the only ones finding it ironic, not
just that he was negatively impacted (intentionally or not) by doing his job
and pursuing the cheaters... but is now at some sort of risk for talking about
the problem? Are we going to get into trouble for discussing this case. Jeesh.

------
maeon3
He removed his content from his blog, I don't blame him at all, I would have
deleted it too, lucky the internet has an un-delete button.

"Why I will never pursue cheating again" mirror:

[https://plus.google.com/106021114396508944027/posts/jgQmKTsW...](https://plus.google.com/106021114396508944027/posts/jgQmKTsWpXP)

""Why I will never pursue cheating again" word doc copy paste of content:

[http://machinesentience.com/miscvideos/nyu_professor__why_i_...](http://machinesentience.com/miscvideos/nyu_professor__why_i_will_never_pursue_cheating_again.doc)

