5 ms·

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 conclu

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.

scott_s 15y ago
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. I don't think this is necessarily true. I can construct arguments either way, but they depend on big ifs. I think it's unreasonable to ask someone to go through a professional grinder for two years because things might get better.
pbh 15y ago
Your claim that the author has drawn the wrong conclusion relies on a major assertion for which you have failed to provide support. Specifically: why do you think a 22/108 cheating rate is non-standard for a large US research university's business school? Are there institutions that check such things in any sort of systematic fashion (e.g., TurnItIn run on a substantial portion of the classwork)? It seems to me that the incentives that Panos describes, such as poor evaluations, funding/salary, disinterested administrators, and awkward one-on-one confrontations are common to many top institutions.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- onan_barbarian 15y ago
  Ah, the starchy HN argument style, lacking only a demand that I provide citations. Unfortunately, you're deploying your pomposity in the service of refuting something I didn't actually write. I didn't say that 22/108 was "non-standard for a large US research university's business school". I said it was "big". It is big. This doesn't change if the norm at every other business school is 32/108. The OP also thought it was big and was unhappily surprised by it.
  - abduhl 15y ago
    pbh brings up solid points. Stating that something is big will always lead to the question "relative to what?" Your post indicates that you think 28/108 is big relative to what a normal cheating rate would be (as can be seen by your statement "he'd have gone back to 'normal' cheating rates"). How can you establish whether or not something is big relative to a norm when you haven't even established what the norm is?
    - alex_c 15y ago
      From the rest of his comment, it seemed reasonable to assume he meant "big" relative to most people's sense of fair play. I'm having trouble picturing an argument for how a 25% cheating rate would be "small".
JesseAldridge 15y ago
> However, all this wasted time, and all this aggravation, wouldn't be necessary if all the other professors were doing it too. This is exactly why the author stated, 'The Nash equilibrium is to let the students cheat and "perform well"' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhrnFGP4zks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhrnFGP4zks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
jamesaguilar 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
jseliger 15y ago
"However, all this wasted time, and all this aggravation, wouldn't be necessary if all the other professors were doing it too." This is a classic problem in economics: what to do if an entire group of people would be better off doing something, but you doing it alone makes you worse off? In his case, working on cheating on his own results in lower evals and a more contentious class environment. The incentive, as he points out, is not to bother. I wrote about incentives in a longish post about grade inflation (http://jseliger.com/2011/04/02/grade-inflation-what-grade-inflation http://jseliger.com/2011/04/02/grade-inflation-what-grade-in...) that comes to a similar conclusion: instructors are rewarded more for good evals than they are for grading harshly (or, for that matter, pursuing cheating). So we get situations like the one described in this post.
jmonegro 15y ago
> 22 cheats out of 108 is big Looks like standard 80/20 to me, nothing surprising.
- gammarator 15y ago
  The 80/20 "rule" arises when quantities are distributed as a power-law with typical indicies [1]. "Incidences of cheating" is not such a quantity. [1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pareto_principle https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pareto_princi...
- jongraehl 15y ago
  Please learn what's actually meant by 80/20 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle - "roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes".

scott_s 15y ago

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. I don't think this is necessarily true. I can construct arguments either way, but they depend on big ifs. I think it's unreasonable to ask someone to go through a professional grinder for two years because things might get better.

pbh 15y ago

Your claim that the author has drawn the wrong conclusion relies on a major assertion for which you have failed to provide support. Specifically: why do you think a 22/108 cheating rate is non-standard for a large US research university's business school? Are there institutions that check such things in any sort of systematic fashion (e.g., TurnItIn run on a substantial portion of the classwork)? It seems to me that the incentives that Panos describes, such as poor evaluations, funding/salary, disinterested administrators, and awkward one-on-one confrontations are common to many top institutions.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
onan_barbarian 15y ago
Ah, the starchy HN argument style, lacking only a demand that I provide citations. Unfortunately, you're deploying your pomposity in the service of refuting something I didn't actually write. I didn't say that 22/108 was "non-standard for a large US research university's business school". I said it was "big". It is big. This doesn't change if the norm at every other business school is 32/108. The OP also thought it was big and was unhappily surprised by it.
- abduhl 15y ago
  pbh brings up solid points. Stating that something is big will always lead to the question "relative to what?" Your post indicates that you think 28/108 is big relative to what a normal cheating rate would be (as can be seen by your statement "he'd have gone back to 'normal' cheating rates"). How can you establish whether or not something is big relative to a norm when you haven't even established what the norm is?
  - alex_c 15y ago
    From the rest of his comment, it seemed reasonable to assume he meant "big" relative to most people's sense of fair play. I'm having trouble picturing an argument for how a 25% cheating rate would be "small".

JesseAldridge 15y ago

> However, all this wasted time, and all this aggravation, wouldn't be necessary if all the other professors were doing it too. This is exactly why the author stated, 'The Nash equilibrium is to let the students cheat and "perform well"' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhrnFGP4zks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhrnFGP4zks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

jamesaguilar 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.

jseliger 15y ago

"However, all this wasted time, and all this aggravation, wouldn't be necessary if all the other professors were doing it too." This is a classic problem in economics: what to do if an entire group of people would be better off doing something, but you doing it alone makes you worse off? In his case, working on cheating on his own results in lower evals and a more contentious class environment. The incentive, as he points out, is not to bother. I wrote about incentives in a longish post about grade inflation (http://jseliger.com/2011/04/02/grade-inflation-what-grade-inflation http://jseliger.com/2011/04/02/grade-inflation-what-grade-in...) that comes to a similar conclusion: instructors are rewarded more for good evals than they are for grading harshly (or, for that matter, pursuing cheating). So we get situations like the one described in this post.

jmonegro 15y ago

> 22 cheats out of 108 is big Looks like standard 80/20 to me, nothing surprising.

gammarator 15y ago
The 80/20 "rule" arises when quantities are distributed as a power-law with typical indicies [1]. "Incidences of cheating" is not such a quantity. [1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pareto_principle https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pareto_princi...
jongraehl 15y ago
Please learn what's actually meant by 80/20 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle - "roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes".