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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 h

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.

wisty 15y ago
A math majors can just copy the homework. 90% of it is mechanical, and 10% requires a "twist". You can copy the "twist", and the rest is easy. Or copy it all (in a slightly different format), and just claim that it's the same because it's ... well, the same. Unless you both make a mistake. But it's even easier than copying essays. Still, the exam will be a problem. But if lots of students cheat, the lecturers will start making exams easier, because so many students struggle. And in Australia, there's a big belief amongst the education policy mandarins that exams are useless because they don't teach anything. Still, most Math majors know their degree is useless if they don't learn anything, and they chose a brutally hard course with no set career path just to learn, so why bother cheating? But Engineering majors is another story.
- justin_vanw 15y ago
  I don't believe that 90% of majors copy homework. I can say I never saw any cheating at all on 400 level math homework at my university. I graded assignments for Number Theory for several semesters, and I can say I didn't see any cheating there either. Generally the homework is just meant to give you a good bit of practice, there is no way to pass the class without passing the exams.
  - abduhl 15y ago
    There are varying degrees of cheating. There is flat out copying, which this article addresses, and then there are the lesser degrees of cheating. Having experienced upper, lower, and graduate level courses in math and engineering (as well as taught at the lower level) I can honestly say that the amount of people that directly copy another student's assignments is much higher than most people think. This type of cheating tapers off as you enter the higher levels. On the other hand, I find that the "helping another student out" or "group study" type of cheating probably occurs with a 75%+ frequency among all levels of academics. The first type (plagiarism) is definitely cheating while the second type (group think) is most likely classified as cheating but never acted against. The fact that you didn't see any cheating in your Number Theory course could simply be due to the fact that the second type of cheating is much more difficult to spot unless you are intimately familiar with the subject material and solution methods.
    - justin_vanw 15y ago
      The 'group study' thing is true, but often explicitly allowed by the professor. In the end the exams should sort it out, since homework is rarely worth more than a token amount of the total grade.
      - wisty 15y ago
        It's only "token" if you score the same amount on all the assessment items. If you pick up a large portion of your marks on a homework component, it's not token for you. A student gets 80% on a 25% weighted "token" homework component, 60% on a 25% "lab" component (due to copying large portions of someone else's report), and 30% on the 50% exam (there's always a few low apples). They pass with 50%. The lecturer sees that the exam is too hard, and makes it easier the next year.
hrabago 15y ago
I don't know where in the article there was mention of the number of hours he worked in a week. I've conducted several training sessions in the course of my career, and I can tell you that the time consumed by the actual class/training is a very small portion of the time spent by the one giving it. Preparation time can be 5-20 times as long, depending on the complexity. Now it is true that professors would reuse past materials, however, there is also time going through submissions of attendees, understanding them, and determining a fair grade. I'm not familiar with the US university system, except for what I see in movies/tv programs, so the professor likely had help. That said, 44 hours spent on overhead that also degrades the experience of everyone involved, and as a result can interfere with the actual learning experience, is indeed worth finding alternative approaches for. Instituting a system that by its nature is difficult to cheat is a much better approach.
- justin_vanw 15y ago
  Q: What interferes with learning? A: When the student's don't pay attention to anything going on and do all the assignments by turning in someone else's work.
techiferous 15y ago
"What a lazy coward." Ouch! This professor is caught between students who don't want to learn and an administration who does not know how to properly measure teacher performance. Give the guy a break; he's in a tough situation. By the way, insults and personal attacks are not welcome here at Hacker News.
- wisty 15y ago
  Insults and personal attacks against (external) article authors seem to be treated as less taboo, as they are on topic, and less likely to cause a flame war. Still, it's a bit rude. It's hardly fair to call the one guy trying to fix the system a coward, just because he decided he had better things to do. Besides, "No tolerance" is a bad way to beat corruption, as an individual. The best way is to occasionally bring it up. You won't lose as many friends, but some people people will still think that a crackdown might be underway. You might feel stupid, only catching one or two cheats, but it's more effective in the long run than being too hard. He's not a lazy coward. He's just not a great political player. His boss is a lazy coward, for putting him in a position where he has to know how to be positively Machiavellian in order to improve things.
kmm 15y ago
I can sympathize with him, as it seems he actually loses money if his student evaluations aren't high enough. The fault would then lie with the institution that doesn't properly asses the teaching prowess of a professor.
- justin_vanw 15y ago
  Perhaps next semester he should teach 'business ethics' in which he can explain to his students that when confronted with the choice of 'do what you think is right' and 'maximize your income', he went with the latter.
- sorbus 15y ago
  He doesn't lose money, he gets a smaller raise.
  - bendmorris 15y ago
    Semantics. He didn't get money that he would have received otherwise. I think it's fair to say he lost money.
  - lyudmil 15y ago
    Getting a raise less than the rate of inflation is losing money. His purchasing power declined.
    - sorbus 15y ago
      The article does not make the claim that his raise was lower than the rate of inflation. If it was, then yes, it was effectively losing money.
      - lyudmil 15y ago
        From the article: "my yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, and significantly lower than inflation"
reinhardt 15y ago
You have to put this into perspective. It's easy to condemn someone as "a lazy coward" if he was the exception in an environment where most professors "work hard to protect the reputation of the institution they work for" and "ensure that students that graduate have learned something along the way". From the tone and from personal experience, I'd guess he has been the exception - in the other direction. Seasoned professors have already learned their lesson and reached the same conclusion he did eventually: doing "the right thing" by going after the cheaters is a losing proposition because (a) it steals resources that could be better spent on non-cheaters and (b) makes all involved parties (students, teachers and administrators) look bad. It may still be a problem for future employers and society at large but demanding from someone to sacrifice his personal well-being for the greater good (when most others don't) is unrealistic.
- justin_vanw 15y ago
  There are at least two aspects of 'personal well being' to consider here. One is 'income', the other is 'fulfilling societies expectations'. Nobody want's to be seen as being unethical or not fulfilling their duty. By automatically explaining away their actions and taking a fatalistic viewpoint you give away one of these two pressures, and probably the greater of the two.
reduxredacted 15y ago
It hurts me to have to disagree with you because you invoked the He's a tenured professor statement (I have a general bias against tenured professors) and the rest of your argument was right on. I was spitting at my screen until the last few paragraphs of the blog. I don't trust a college degree from anywhere to prove anything other than that the student was able to finance his/her purchase, regardless of school. I know this will not be taken well by several folks, but it's not a complete disregarding of higher education (take me on my word or call me an idiot, you'll probably be right). Cheating is a fact of life. When I was in college, the punishment was expulsion. This rarely happened. It was the old "make the punishment so awful that nobody would want to commit the crime", and it fell flat as soon as human beings were put in the picture. Those who knew how to get away with it almost always got away with it. And even when caught, the book was rarely thrown at them. This "tenured" professor is trying to find a way to separate cheating from passing. I don't know that he'll be successful. But the traditional "Turnitin" approach is working as well as anti-malware software/devices work. It's an arms race. The solution isn't to build better detection or encourage better behavior from users ... it's to make the attack irrelevant. I'm skeptical that it can be done, but I like the approach. I don't believe this is a Lazy Coward operation (good to edit it out, but I didn't downmod you, I thought your comments were fair). It's a creative, and possibly disruptive, method to teaching. Edit: Sorry, it's really difficult to write out a reasonable reply without reading it over a few times and making changes.
ohashi 15y ago
It amazes me that you cannot see it from his perspective. He tried to catch cheaters and was punished by the school system for it. He earned less money for trying to enforce a no cheating policy. Would you work twice the amount of time for less pay? Most of us probably wouldn't. It seems like a prudent financial decision for him. The problem seems systemic, he throws his hands in the air and gives up because he cannot do anything alone and is punished. Others either came to the same conclusion or don't know/care cheating is happening to begin with. I don't think I can simply blame him for the calculations he went through in making his decision.
- justin_vanw 15y ago
  Since you asked, I would refuse to work anywhere that I was expected to stand aside and ignore fraud, or where I was punished for doing what everyone would agree is the right thing, in this case trying to catch and identify cheaters in compliance with the rules of the institution. I would rail against it every day and try to change the system by doing the right thing and calling out other faculty for not doing so, publicly. It is likely that I would fail, but as I will sometimes announce loudly in the Milo office "I've got something to say! It's better to burn out than fade away!'
  - ohashi 15y ago
    That's nice. But you're not him. Even you recognize a high likelihood of failure. He doesn't want to fight that losing battle, I cannot blame him.
  - neworder 15y ago
    >I would refuse to work anywhere that I was expected to stand aside and ignore fraud, or where I was punished for doing what everyone would agree is the right thing (...) You don't always have that much choice, do you? >I would rail against it every day and try to change the system by doing the right thing and calling out other faculty for not doing so, publicly. Yeah. You will not simply fail, you'll get screwed by the system at the first opportunity. If you really want to "buck the system", cool down and watch some episodes of "The Wire". This series portays exactly and reallisticaly the inner workings of corrupt institutions and what happens to "lone wolves" trying to beat or change the system (spoiler - they get screwed by superiors and peers alike and achieve absolutely nothing). I'm not saying it's impossible to transform the system from within. But trying to do it single-handedly is fighting a losing battle that is doomed to alienate your coworkers.
MisterMerkin 15y ago
Look if you want to level attacks at someone, level them at the administration. They gave this guy the catch-22 that led him to give up.
Panos 15y ago
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.
- derrida 15y ago
  I am an honest student. How would you feel about me being in your class? Not every student is at university in order to tick a box on the way to a middle class lifestyle. Some are there to learn for the sake of learning.
  - Panos 15y ago
    Derrida, most of the professors teach because of students like you. Nobody that I know enjoys teaching disinterested or bored students. Of course, there are professors that fail to teach well, the students get disinterested, then the professor gets even more disinterested and teaches worse etc etc.
- abduhl 15y ago
  I think it would help if more people understood the time demands of teaching a course (neglecting other faculty duties, just looking at the teaching component). Many people have seen it only from the student side and not the instructor side. From my experience, teaching a 3 credit course (meeting MWF for one hour each with no labs/recitation) requires the three hours for the course plus the following: 1. an additional 1 to 2 hours per class of prep. time to get yourself situated for that paricular class 2. 0.5 to 1 hours of meeting with your TA regarding grading and what is being covered in the course this week (more if the TA has a recitation session) 3. 3 to 5 office hours for students (of which a majority is not used, but still must be set aside) All together, teaching a three hour course takes about 10 hours a week on the low end. Dealing with cheating students takes time from every portion of this 10 hours. You must waste time in class addressing the cheating. You must waste time in preparation thinking of ways to stop the cheating. You must waste time talking with your TA about the cheating. You must waste time dealing with students who will admit to "working together" but never "cheating" during your office hours. The most important part of this, and the part that gets eaten up the most, is the office hours. This is where students should come to delve deeper into a subject or clarify material. Dealing with students during this time sets back students who truly have an interest in the subject and cripples students who have fallen behind (which will most likely lead to more cheating!). While 44 hours over a semester sounds like nothing to most people, it is actually a significant amount of time wasted for the class. As an aside, many students think that teaching is a faculty member's first and foremost duty. Depending on the school, this can range from absolutely true to downright false. Most schools have a layout on what they expect from their faculty regarding research, teaching, and service. Most schools weight that in decreasing priority as listed. If a school is well-known for its research, chances are it follows this pattern and teaching is not a priority for the faculty outside of good student evaluations. Edit: A course at my school lasts for approximately 15 weeks which comes to ~150 hours per semester at 10 hours per week. At 44 hours, dealing with cheating would take 30% of my time spent on the course during the semester.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
He is complaining about 44 hours extra work. This is in addition to 32 hours of lecture time and however much time he spends on research. (Based on his research output, I'd suggest he spends a lot of time on research.) Further, his complaint seems to be that putting in this extra work resulted in a smaller pay increase (as a result of poor student evaluations), not that it cut into leisure. Most people complain when they do the right thing and get punished for it.
ary 15y ago
I saw your comment before it was edited and calling someone to the carpet (in your case by calling him a coward) isn't the kind of name-calling that should be frowned upon here. He is a coward. He comes out and plainly says that it's in his best interest to go along with the incentive structure in front of him instead of standing up for academic integrity. Let's not let the cultural politeness here get in the way of calling it like it is. "Coward" may be a strong word, but it sometimes does apply.
- jamieb 15y ago
  The man has a job. The job states that he will be rewarded based upon customer feedback. If you have a problem with universities who measure their professors by popularity, then take it up with them.
- Caballera 15y ago
  I don't see how he's a coward, he's coming up with new ways to teach his students that make it so they are not able or less able to cheat. If he was a coward he would just continue to teach in a way that was still easy to cheat. He's even asking for ideas on other ways to prevent cheating.
  - ary 15y ago
    Perhaps he's come up with some novel ways to deal with the dishonesty of his students. Time will tell. Preventing cheating ultimately comes down to changing the incentive structures in the university system in America. Allowing students to take revenge on their professors by basing financial rewards and promotions on student evaluations is clearly wrong. The metric by which professors are rewarded should be as independent from what their students think of them as possible. Outside exams by an unbiased third party is one idea, but I'm sure there are others. What surprised me more than anything was the lack of mention of any sort of organized protest on the part of the professors. The faculty at many colleges throughout the U.S. has protested a number of issues very successfully. You'd think there would be a more unified voice on this matter, but perhaps I'm overlooking an incentive that guides most professors to just not care.
natural219 15y ago
This comment is complete flamebait. The fact that there isn't an outrage against this poster makes me lose a LOT of faith in the Hacker News community. If you want to be an ass, there are plenty of other places on the internet you can go. On HN, please try to treat everybody with at least a modicum of respect.
delluminatus 15y ago
I'm a little late to the party, but as a Math major myself I wanted to say that I find your tone disappointing and, at the risk of being hypocritical, more than a little judgemental. Discussion regarding your first point has already begun, so I shall focus on the latter half of your post. > If he can't tell his students are cheating without globally searching everything with this software, what are they supposedly learning? I can't parse an argument from this sentence or the remainder of the paragraph. I would like to point out that the learning experience is being quantified in the form of a percentage-based grading system so I am uncertain of your point. Globally searching the papers is an attempt to discover plagarism -- are you suggesting that he should somehow recognize plagarism without attempting to actually compare his students' essays with each other and outside sources? Edit: I mean, I'm honestly curious. Please try to elaborate. Secondly, Many classes don't have in-class exams, including most English classes, some social studies classes, and indeed a certain percentage of classes in almost any field besides mathematics and engineering. Exams are, in my humble opinion, a relatively ineffective way of determining learning in many situations. For a business school class to not have exams is perfectly reasonable.

wisty 15y ago

A math majors can just copy the homework. 90% of it is mechanical, and 10% requires a "twist". You can copy the "twist", and the rest is easy. Or copy it all (in a slightly different format), and just claim that it's the same because it's ... well, the same. Unless you both make a mistake. But it's even easier than copying essays. Still, the exam will be a problem. But if lots of students cheat, the lecturers will start making exams easier, because so many students struggle. And in Australia, there's a big belief amongst the education policy mandarins that exams are useless because they don't teach anything. Still, most Math majors know their degree is useless if they don't learn anything, and they chose a brutally hard course with no set career path just to learn, so why bother cheating? But Engineering majors is another story.

justin_vanw 15y ago
I don't believe that 90% of majors copy homework. I can say I never saw any cheating at all on 400 level math homework at my university. I graded assignments for Number Theory for several semesters, and I can say I didn't see any cheating there either. Generally the homework is just meant to give you a good bit of practice, there is no way to pass the class without passing the exams.
- abduhl 15y ago
  There are varying degrees of cheating. There is flat out copying, which this article addresses, and then there are the lesser degrees of cheating. Having experienced upper, lower, and graduate level courses in math and engineering (as well as taught at the lower level) I can honestly say that the amount of people that directly copy another student's assignments is much higher than most people think. This type of cheating tapers off as you enter the higher levels. On the other hand, I find that the "helping another student out" or "group study" type of cheating probably occurs with a 75%+ frequency among all levels of academics. The first type (plagiarism) is definitely cheating while the second type (group think) is most likely classified as cheating but never acted against. The fact that you didn't see any cheating in your Number Theory course could simply be due to the fact that the second type of cheating is much more difficult to spot unless you are intimately familiar with the subject material and solution methods.
  - justin_vanw 15y ago
    The 'group study' thing is true, but often explicitly allowed by the professor. In the end the exams should sort it out, since homework is rarely worth more than a token amount of the total grade.
    - wisty 15y ago
      It's only "token" if you score the same amount on all the assessment items. If you pick up a large portion of your marks on a homework component, it's not token for you. A student gets 80% on a 25% weighted "token" homework component, 60% on a 25% "lab" component (due to copying large portions of someone else's report), and 30% on the 50% exam (there's always a few low apples). They pass with 50%. The lecturer sees that the exam is too hard, and makes it easier the next year.

hrabago 15y ago

I don't know where in the article there was mention of the number of hours he worked in a week. I've conducted several training sessions in the course of my career, and I can tell you that the time consumed by the actual class/training is a very small portion of the time spent by the one giving it. Preparation time can be 5-20 times as long, depending on the complexity. Now it is true that professors would reuse past materials, however, there is also time going through submissions of attendees, understanding them, and determining a fair grade. I'm not familiar with the US university system, except for what I see in movies/tv programs, so the professor likely had help. That said, 44 hours spent on overhead that also degrades the experience of everyone involved, and as a result can interfere with the actual learning experience, is indeed worth finding alternative approaches for. Instituting a system that by its nature is difficult to cheat is a much better approach.

justin_vanw 15y ago
Q: What interferes with learning? A: When the student's don't pay attention to anything going on and do all the assignments by turning in someone else's work.

techiferous 15y ago

"What a lazy coward." Ouch! This professor is caught between students who don't want to learn and an administration who does not know how to properly measure teacher performance. Give the guy a break; he's in a tough situation. By the way, insults and personal attacks are not welcome here at Hacker News.

wisty 15y ago
Insults and personal attacks against (external) article authors seem to be treated as less taboo, as they are on topic, and less likely to cause a flame war. Still, it's a bit rude. It's hardly fair to call the one guy trying to fix the system a coward, just because he decided he had better things to do. Besides, "No tolerance" is a bad way to beat corruption, as an individual. The best way is to occasionally bring it up. You won't lose as many friends, but some people people will still think that a crackdown might be underway. You might feel stupid, only catching one or two cheats, but it's more effective in the long run than being too hard. He's not a lazy coward. He's just not a great political player. His boss is a lazy coward, for putting him in a position where he has to know how to be positively Machiavellian in order to improve things.

kmm 15y ago

I can sympathize with him, as it seems he actually loses money if his student evaluations aren't high enough. The fault would then lie with the institution that doesn't properly asses the teaching prowess of a professor.

justin_vanw 15y ago
Perhaps next semester he should teach 'business ethics' in which he can explain to his students that when confronted with the choice of 'do what you think is right' and 'maximize your income', he went with the latter.
sorbus 15y ago
He doesn't lose money, he gets a smaller raise.
- bendmorris 15y ago
  Semantics. He didn't get money that he would have received otherwise. I think it's fair to say he lost money.
- lyudmil 15y ago
  Getting a raise less than the rate of inflation is losing money. His purchasing power declined.
  - sorbus 15y ago
    The article does not make the claim that his raise was lower than the rate of inflation. If it was, then yes, it was effectively losing money.
    - lyudmil 15y ago
      From the article: "my yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, and significantly lower than inflation"

reinhardt 15y ago

You have to put this into perspective. It's easy to condemn someone as "a lazy coward" if he was the exception in an environment where most professors "work hard to protect the reputation of the institution they work for" and "ensure that students that graduate have learned something along the way". From the tone and from personal experience, I'd guess he has been the exception - in the other direction. Seasoned professors have already learned their lesson and reached the same conclusion he did eventually: doing "the right thing" by going after the cheaters is a losing proposition because (a) it steals resources that could be better spent on non-cheaters and (b) makes all involved parties (students, teachers and administrators) look bad. It may still be a problem for future employers and society at large but demanding from someone to sacrifice his personal well-being for the greater good (when most others don't) is unrealistic.

justin_vanw 15y ago
There are at least two aspects of 'personal well being' to consider here. One is 'income', the other is 'fulfilling societies expectations'. Nobody want's to be seen as being unethical or not fulfilling their duty. By automatically explaining away their actions and taking a fatalistic viewpoint you give away one of these two pressures, and probably the greater of the two.

reduxredacted 15y ago

It hurts me to have to disagree with you because you invoked the He's a tenured professor statement (I have a general bias against tenured professors) and the rest of your argument was right on. I was spitting at my screen until the last few paragraphs of the blog. I don't trust a college degree from anywhere to prove anything other than that the student was able to finance his/her purchase, regardless of school. I know this will not be taken well by several folks, but it's not a complete disregarding of higher education (take me on my word or call me an idiot, you'll probably be right). Cheating is a fact of life. When I was in college, the punishment was expulsion. This rarely happened. It was the old "make the punishment so awful that nobody would want to commit the crime", and it fell flat as soon as human beings were put in the picture. Those who knew how to get away with it almost always got away with it. And even when caught, the book was rarely thrown at them. This "tenured" professor is trying to find a way to separate cheating from passing. I don't know that he'll be successful. But the traditional "Turnitin" approach is working as well as anti-malware software/devices work. It's an arms race. The solution isn't to build better detection or encourage better behavior from users ... it's to make the attack irrelevant. I'm skeptical that it can be done, but I like the approach. I don't believe this is a Lazy Coward operation (good to edit it out, but I didn't downmod you, I thought your comments were fair). It's a creative, and possibly disruptive, method to teaching. Edit: Sorry, it's really difficult to write out a reasonable reply without reading it over a few times and making changes.

ohashi 15y ago

It amazes me that you cannot see it from his perspective. He tried to catch cheaters and was punished by the school system for it. He earned less money for trying to enforce a no cheating policy. Would you work twice the amount of time for less pay? Most of us probably wouldn't. It seems like a prudent financial decision for him. The problem seems systemic, he throws his hands in the air and gives up because he cannot do anything alone and is punished. Others either came to the same conclusion or don't know/care cheating is happening to begin with. I don't think I can simply blame him for the calculations he went through in making his decision.

justin_vanw 15y ago
Since you asked, I would refuse to work anywhere that I was expected to stand aside and ignore fraud, or where I was punished for doing what everyone would agree is the right thing, in this case trying to catch and identify cheaters in compliance with the rules of the institution. I would rail against it every day and try to change the system by doing the right thing and calling out other faculty for not doing so, publicly. It is likely that I would fail, but as I will sometimes announce loudly in the Milo office "I've got something to say! It's better to burn out than fade away!'
- ohashi 15y ago
  That's nice. But you're not him. Even you recognize a high likelihood of failure. He doesn't want to fight that losing battle, I cannot blame him.
- neworder 15y ago
  >I would refuse to work anywhere that I was expected to stand aside and ignore fraud, or where I was punished for doing what everyone would agree is the right thing (...) You don't always have that much choice, do you? >I would rail against it every day and try to change the system by doing the right thing and calling out other faculty for not doing so, publicly. Yeah. You will not simply fail, you'll get screwed by the system at the first opportunity. If you really want to "buck the system", cool down and watch some episodes of "The Wire". This series portays exactly and reallisticaly the inner workings of corrupt institutions and what happens to "lone wolves" trying to beat or change the system (spoiler - they get screwed by superiors and peers alike and achieve absolutely nothing). I'm not saying it's impossible to transform the system from within. But trying to do it single-handedly is fighting a losing battle that is doomed to alienate your coworkers.

MisterMerkin 15y ago

Look if you want to level attacks at someone, level them at the administration. They gave this guy the catch-22 that led him to give up.

Panos 15y ago

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.

derrida 15y ago
I am an honest student. How would you feel about me being in your class? Not every student is at university in order to tick a box on the way to a middle class lifestyle. Some are there to learn for the sake of learning.
- Panos 15y ago
  Derrida, most of the professors teach because of students like you. Nobody that I know enjoys teaching disinterested or bored students. Of course, there are professors that fail to teach well, the students get disinterested, then the professor gets even more disinterested and teaches worse etc etc.
abduhl 15y ago
I think it would help if more people understood the time demands of teaching a course (neglecting other faculty duties, just looking at the teaching component). Many people have seen it only from the student side and not the instructor side. From my experience, teaching a 3 credit course (meeting MWF for one hour each with no labs/recitation) requires the three hours for the course plus the following: 1. an additional 1 to 2 hours per class of prep. time to get yourself situated for that paricular class 2. 0.5 to 1 hours of meeting with your TA regarding grading and what is being covered in the course this week (more if the TA has a recitation session) 3. 3 to 5 office hours for students (of which a majority is not used, but still must be set aside) All together, teaching a three hour course takes about 10 hours a week on the low end. Dealing with cheating students takes time from every portion of this 10 hours. You must waste time in class addressing the cheating. You must waste time in preparation thinking of ways to stop the cheating. You must waste time talking with your TA about the cheating. You must waste time dealing with students who will admit to "working together" but never "cheating" during your office hours. The most important part of this, and the part that gets eaten up the most, is the office hours. This is where students should come to delve deeper into a subject or clarify material. Dealing with students during this time sets back students who truly have an interest in the subject and cripples students who have fallen behind (which will most likely lead to more cheating!). While 44 hours over a semester sounds like nothing to most people, it is actually a significant amount of time wasted for the class. As an aside, many students think that teaching is a faculty member's first and foremost duty. Depending on the school, this can range from absolutely true to downright false. Most schools have a layout on what they expect from their faculty regarding research, teaching, and service. Most schools weight that in decreasing priority as listed. If a school is well-known for its research, chances are it follows this pattern and teaching is not a priority for the faculty outside of good student evaluations. Edit: A course at my school lasts for approximately 15 weeks which comes to ~150 hours per semester at 10 hours per week. At 44 hours, dealing with cheating would take 30% of my time spent on the course during the semester.

yummyfajitas 15y ago

He is complaining about 44 hours extra work. This is in addition to 32 hours of lecture time and however much time he spends on research. (Based on his research output, I'd suggest he spends a lot of time on research.) Further, his complaint seems to be that putting in this extra work resulted in a smaller pay increase (as a result of poor student evaluations), not that it cut into leisure. Most people complain when they do the right thing and get punished for it.

ary 15y ago

I saw your comment before it was edited and calling someone to the carpet (in your case by calling him a coward) isn't the kind of name-calling that should be frowned upon here. He is a coward. He comes out and plainly says that it's in his best interest to go along with the incentive structure in front of him instead of standing up for academic integrity. Let's not let the cultural politeness here get in the way of calling it like it is. "Coward" may be a strong word, but it sometimes does apply.

jamieb 15y ago
The man has a job. The job states that he will be rewarded based upon customer feedback. If you have a problem with universities who measure their professors by popularity, then take it up with them.
Caballera 15y ago
I don't see how he's a coward, he's coming up with new ways to teach his students that make it so they are not able or less able to cheat. If he was a coward he would just continue to teach in a way that was still easy to cheat. He's even asking for ideas on other ways to prevent cheating.
- ary 15y ago
  Perhaps he's come up with some novel ways to deal with the dishonesty of his students. Time will tell. Preventing cheating ultimately comes down to changing the incentive structures in the university system in America. Allowing students to take revenge on their professors by basing financial rewards and promotions on student evaluations is clearly wrong. The metric by which professors are rewarded should be as independent from what their students think of them as possible. Outside exams by an unbiased third party is one idea, but I'm sure there are others. What surprised me more than anything was the lack of mention of any sort of organized protest on the part of the professors. The faculty at many colleges throughout the U.S. has protested a number of issues very successfully. You'd think there would be a more unified voice on this matter, but perhaps I'm overlooking an incentive that guides most professors to just not care.

natural219 15y ago

This comment is complete flamebait. The fact that there isn't an outrage against this poster makes me lose a LOT of faith in the Hacker News community. If you want to be an ass, there are plenty of other places on the internet you can go. On HN, please try to treat everybody with at least a modicum of respect.

delluminatus 15y ago

I'm a little late to the party, but as a Math major myself I wanted to say that I find your tone disappointing and, at the risk of being hypocritical, more than a little judgemental. Discussion regarding your first point has already begun, so I shall focus on the latter half of your post. > If he can't tell his students are cheating without globally searching everything with this software, what are they supposedly learning? I can't parse an argument from this sentence or the remainder of the paragraph. I would like to point out that the learning experience is being quantified in the form of a percentage-based grading system so I am uncertain of your point. Globally searching the papers is an attempt to discover plagarism -- are you suggesting that he should somehow recognize plagarism without attempting to actually compare his students' essays with each other and outside sources? Edit: I mean, I'm honestly curious. Please try to elaborate. Secondly, Many classes don't have in-class exams, including most English classes, some social studies classes, and indeed a certain percentage of classes in almost any field besides mathematics and engineering. Exams are, in my humble opinion, a relatively ineffective way of determining learning in many situations. For a business school class to not have exams is perfectly reasonable.