It has been fascinating to watch the reaction to Panos' blog post on cheating. I agree and disagree with this follow-up post, however. On one hand, I agree that most reactions have generally been shallow and poorly thought out. On the other hand, I think that what made Panos' original post so compelling was his comprehensive listing of the many disincentives to fighting cheating at the university, including the impact on his salary.<p>Overall, the result of Panos clicking more or less a single check box (and, admittedly, doing a few Excel tricks) to detect cheating was: (1) 45 hours of students crying in his office, (2) his class took on a powerful negative atmosphere, (3) his best students were turned away during office hours, (4) his student evaluations went down, (5) he arguably made less money than he would have otherwise, (6) he was called a racist in at least one public forum, (7) the reputation of his university and/or program was damaged, and (8) he was sent a cease-and-desist letter.<p>Ultimately, this is a huge set of disincentives. It is not surprising that most would simply choose the more appealing alternative of just deciding that a professor cannot be responsible for making students want to learn.<p>What is most discouraging about the salary information is not the money itself, but the implication that even Panos' department was not willing to give him support when he tried to fix the problem in his own classroom. (Arguably, they must have known that addressing cheating would have a huge impact on course evaluations.)
I dislike the analogy between parking tickets and plagiarism. In most US jurisdictions, parking violations aren't even a misdemeanor, but merely a "summary offense". Of course the police can ignore them.<p>But in the context of academia, plagiarism is not a summary offense. Academics are rewarded primarily for the originality of their work, and plagiarism is an offense against major community norms. The appropriate response to an offense against major community norms is removal from the community.<p>At my university, the punishment for a few copied sentences was a 9-month suspension and a note on your transcript, and professors were specifically instructed <i>not</i> to handle first offenses on their own. Second offenses were handled by permanent expulsion. In practice, there were apparently edge cases (students with ambiguous evidence and very expensive lawyers being the most obvious).<p>So I really <i>am</i> reacting to the first part of Panos' post. I consider cheating vastly more serious than a parking ticket, and I'm appalled that so many institutions consider it a minor offense. Panos' suggested workaround of making cheating more difficult seems strangely irrelevant to the real problem, which is that a huge minority of NYU think cheating is OK. His students, perhaps, would be far better served by a sharp lesson in basic honestly than they would by learning about fleeting technological trends.
I agree with Panos that the problem is systemic and needs to be treated on a system-wide level. However, I think that parking violations are not the best analogy and obscure the dynamics a little.<p>With traffic congestion, the problem is not cars on the road, the problem is <i>too many</i> cars on the road. So if someone is double-parked and is not actually blocking anyone, there really is no fundamental problem.<p>An academic institution wishes to protect the integrity of its grades and degrees and also wishes to encourage honest behavior in its students. In this case, each individual act of cheating is a problem. The problem is not just <i>too much</i> cheating, but the presence of cheating at all. An academic institution does not plan for a cheating capacity of 20%, for example.<p>So I would suggest that the analogy works better if parking violations were replaced with bicycle thefts, since every bicycle theft is a problem.
I think by coming up with "cheating-proof" assignments you'd be ignoring the real issue, which is that students think it's ok to cheat. Lacking some global solution, I think it's possible to deal with cheaters without "poisoning" the classroom. Here's my suggestion, based only on my experience in college and common sense:<p>The key thing is not to make such a big deal about about cheating publicly. No public witchhunts, no Turnitin submissions, etc.<p>Include your plagiarism/citation policy clearly on your course syllabus, and briefly go over it on the first day of class, but that's it. Don't have students submit through Turnitin directly, but use Turnitin yourself discretely.<p>Depending on the severity of the infraction, the first one would result in a stern warning in private, or no credit on the assignment. Subsequent infractions warrant more severe punishment.<p>If you let them off "easy" in their eyes (but not too easy) you're the good guy, but they'll still know you're serious about it.<p>On the other hand, if you announce you're using Turnitin, or otherwise publicly dwell on cheating, then students will feel antagonized and band together against you. If you don't give them a reason to discuss it with each other they won't. As you mentioned before, the social pressure among peers to not cheat is strong.<p>But by ignoring the cheaters you're doing both them and their non-cheating peers, and the university as a whole, a disservice.<p>Kids straight out of high school might not even know what they're doing wrong, and if no one ever tells them they'll grow up to be cheaters in life too.<p>Of course it's also unfair to the non-cheaters who work harder and receive the same grades, and ultimately the same degree.<p>On a larger scale, if a university tolerates widespread cheating the quality of their graduates will decline, which obviously isn't good for anyone.<p>[This is a repost of my comment on the blog]
Well I read a quote on HN that went something like "if you want people to see something, show them one thing."<p>You mixed up too many issues. If your intention really was to just focus on the evals, why mention their impact on your salary at all, especially in the conclusion?<p>That was poor judgement on your part. As a reader, it is natural to conclude from your post that you are <i>most</i> upset about the salary loss resulting from the evals(and thus you've learned a lesson to do better on evals so its negative impact on your salary won't repeat).
"In fact, the blog post was in my folder of draft posts for a few months now, long before receiving my annual evaluation."<p>In a few months, there was plenty of time to reflect on the negative points of that post and how they could be taken out of proportion. There is a reason employers frown upon employees making public statements that involve the company they work for - not because they may say something stupid (that would also mean that they hired the wrong person) - but because the media tends to latch onto the smallest details and blow them WAY out of proportion. PR departments exist so that public statements are filtered, watered down, focused and devoid of any potentially negative connotations about the company.<p>Lesson learned, I guess, and I hope NYU's reputation was not damaged as a result.