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Comment by nyustern | Hacker News Reader

First off, many of the details you cited are inaccurate. However, its pointless to argue over such things. I was not aware of your health condition, but given the pattern of treatment given to me and a handful of others, I was left to assume you were acting as usual. Anyway, my post was to make you aware of a few other reasons as to why you received a low evaluation score. Blaming the students wholly is unjust and there are a plethora of other reasons as to why they may have viewed you in a bad light, as I've elucidated a few already. Thanks for your response and best of luck handling this issue in the coming terms.

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Again: read the article until the end. I do not blame the students.

Students respond to incentives. If I give them opportunities to cheat and remain undetected, they will cheat. I do the same as a human. If I were getting a 50% increase in my salary for detecting cheating so aggressively, next year I would have tried to detect cheating even when there is none.

What I truly blame in the article is the structure of the homeworks and the overall student evaluation approach. Which is something that I use. And I criticize my approach of trying to detect cheating post factum, instead of building projects and homeworks in which cheating is just meaningless.

Just tell me: Could anyone cheat and copy the presentation on augmented reality by your fellow classmates? It was simply stunning and they fully deserved the 10 points extra that you and your fellow classmates assigned to them. That is an evaluation strategy, where nobody could cheat because nobody could cheat your own instincts for detecting and recognizing quality.

People do respond to incentives. That is an intellectual fact, and should be taken into account when designing systems. But to say that a given individual always should or always will is a moral absurdity. It is tantamount to justifying all criminal action.

If your moral axiom is "I am most important", selfishness is rational behavior. But that is only if that is your axiom. If it's "everyone is equally important" or even "other people are most important" things will look quite different.

It comes down to how you relate to the rest of humanity -- as an enemy, an equal, or a friend.

You've mentioned incentives a number of times -- I'm glad you bring them up and would like a better understanding here. I fully believe incentives affect us much more than most people appear to think.

However -- So I understand that when the system encourages certain behavior, that certain behavior is very likely to arise regardless of how logical, ethical, or correct the behavior seems. For example, many students have a very unhealthy focus on grades and living up to expectations, teachers on evaluations, and administrators on high enrollment numbers, etc.

However, this doesn't mean that the incentives can't and shouldn't be circumvented. For example, if one is put in a place where performance-goals are encouraged (a focus on grades), I sincerely believe part of the teacher's role is to do their best to encourage a learning-focus and discourage performance-goals.

So this applies equally to a teacher's behaviors -- when a teacher is encouraged one way or another based on evaluations, it is the job of the administrators to either destroy whatever causes that encouragement, or in some way encourage a learning-outcome focus instead. I wonder, do you feel anything is in place to do that? And what could be?

> If I were getting a 50% increase in my salary for detecting cheating so aggressively, next year I would have tried to detect cheating even when there is none.

Wow. While a 50% salary increase is quite substantial, admitting that you'd hypothetically frame your students in order to get it is ... well it's definitely below cheating in my book.

He's not saying he would frame students - he's acknowledging that he would respond to the incentive by following it aggressively. This is how humans act. You're just reading into this because you have a negative opinion of the guy.

This is a much better attitude than the one I read from your other posts. Changing the homework structure, as described in the article, I think is also a reasonable solution. Congrats.

OK, here's something that I don't get. Why do you care that students are cheating? In the end, the only people they are harming is themselves - leave them to it, I say... You are there to teach them, if they decline to learn, hey it's not your problem.

"In the end, the only people they are harming is themselves "

No they're not. Grades are important in moving on in academia and moving on one's career ultimately. Cheaters are hurting other students by out-competing them on graduate entry exams and job applications. They hurt their prospective employers by not learning and out-competing competent students for jobs, (possibly becoming one of those jerks you read about on TDWTF.) And, they hurt their school's reputation by lowering the average quality of the graduate. Cheater's hurt everyone else in the system.

This is only true if you think that good employers are hiring on the basis of grades. You know what, I've hired a half dozen or so programmers, and I've done interviews with about 100, and not once have I ever looked at their grades or their faculty. I don't think I'm unusual in that respect.

I think employers using grades as a basis for a hiring decision is every bit as silly as professors worrying about their students cheating, precisely because you can cheat for grades. Don't do that.

You're failing to think things through. Employers only base their hiring decisions on grades for recent graduates, but nearly all employers base their hiring decision on the student's degree and the institution it comes from. Good grades help with that. There is also the issue of graduate school which certainly does take grades into account.

You're failing to think things through

Really?

Employers only base their hiring decisions on grades for recent graduates, but nearly all employers base their hiring decision on the student's degree and the institution it comes from.

False, I am a walking talking counter-example, but it's the same for all of the companies at which I have sat on recruitment interview boards, and also true for every company that has ever hired me. Nobody has ever requested to see my University transcripts (in fact I've only had one employer even verify that I have a degree). Grades just aren't a consideration. Your ability to respond to questions that we ask, your history of code for open source projects, sample code that you present, your overall demeanour/character - these things are looked at very closely.

I'm curious as to how you explain the very best tech employers recruiting before students have even graduated? Whilst I agree that there are employers out there that do care about grades, the people that are actually the most able to honestly obtain good grades are probably not terribly interested in working for them. I know I wasn't.

"I am a walking talking counter-example"

A single counter example is not a trend. Your experience is not the entire industry and the tech industry is just a small portion of jobs available to college graduates across the nation. Many, many industries care about degrees and how well you did. Just try to get a job at a major law firm without one. I've had friends apply for jobs as AAs and their grades came up. The tech industry is the exception, not the norm.

So, grades matter. They just didn't for you.

>Grades just aren't a consideration.

This is just flat out wrong. Not all companies use grades, or care about the institution you graduated from. But there are entire industries where your main ticket for admittance is your pedigree. Cheaters water down the degree affecting everyone who didn't cheat.

Anyone who disagrees isn't thinking? Please. I've been in interview loops for years at different companies. We discuss every candidate's demonstrated problem-solving and design abilities, and culture fit for the ones we don't rule out quickly. Nobody ever brings up the reputation of any school they went to. We just don't care at all. Allegedly somebody out there does, but I have yet to see it happen.

"Anyone who disagrees isn't thinking?"

I didn't say that. But the whole world is not the Bay Area. I've known folks for whom this was an issue.

Edit: (A few examples)

My brother went to West Point and got a degree in CS. At West Point people with higher grades get first pick the corps they go into. People with exceptionally low grades get saddled with chem-corp or transpo.

I have a friend who is a librarian. Librarianship has a huge bias towards degrees and a qualified individual without a degree will be routinely passed over for an unqualified individual with a high level degree, even if that person is antagonistic to the project.

I have another friend who is a school teacher, his academic credentials are checked whenever he has to change jobs and they are the major limiter in his ability work for better schools.

The people on this forum mostly belong to an exceptional segment of an exceptional industry. I agree that academic credentials really shouldn't matter as much as more objective evaluations of ability, but for most of the country, they do and not realizing this implies a certain myopia and failure to think outside of one immediate condition.

Employers in software regularly use grades to do entry level hiring. In some fields (law), your JD grades follow you around for the first 5-7 years of your career.

What you are pointing out is not the major damage from cheating. Yes, there is a serious moral problem going on, and the student is not learning the material that they are supposedly paying for. However, the major problem is that they are making it unfair for those that don't cheat. A lot of grades are based on "a curve" so cheaters can screw everyone else in a short term with immediate consequences.

Also, over time, such cheating leads to a disaster. Assignments start to become harder since obviously students don't have problems with them, those that really try to be honest are finding it is more difficult to do well, while they see cheaters zoom right by them, getting As and Bs.

Not all classes are viewed as core classes that one needs to understand or they'll fail some future test during their interview. There are lots of requirements, and elective classes which end up contributing to the final GPA score. So again, it is not just about students cheating themselves, as much as screwing everyone else.

Yes, in real life, often cheaters, manipulators, and liers do get ahead, but I don't think we should become complacent, and at least try to somewhat push back against dishonesty in the academic world.

but given the pattern of treatment given to me and a handful of others, I was left to assume you were acting as usual

Perhaps much of the "pattern of treatment" that you observed could be equally explained? When we interact with someone in a bad mood, we tend to assume it's because of us, but it's often likely to be external factors. Having taught before, and held office hours, I can tell you how absolutely exhausting it can be. Maintaining a fair demeanor gets increasingly more difficult.

Also consider how a professor feels when meeting students outside of office hours, and the student has not made a prior appointment. How would you feel if the professor showed up at your home and said they had to hold lecture now? It's obviously not the same thing, but it may give you an indication of how it feels.

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