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Comment by Panos | Hacker News Reader

Ah correct. I should have mentioned that.

I was detecting some cheating in Excel assignments, but I was only pursuing the very obvious cases. At most a couple of cheating cases per semester.

For essays, it was pretty much impossible without the use of Turnitin, which I used for the first time in the Fall 2010 semester.

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Essays are inherently problematic in most fields, because they're effectively always at least partially graded on the quality of writing, which doesn't have any connection with how well something was learned (which should have a connection with grade). Some profs separate it out better than others, but students usually have only vague or zero knowledge about who falls where, so the default approach is that, regardless of what the prof states, writing quality matters. Copying from someone who is a better writer than you is a sure-fire way to sound better, which usually leads to a disproportionately-higher grade than an equivalent amount of copying simply the information.

If I write extremely poorly, the pain of reading through it taints what data exists. The irritation lowers the perception, which lowers the grade. It's a pretty well known phenomenon, lots of studies supporting it, probably most classically known as: sitting in a hard chair makes you more "hard" in your dealings with people.

Note that your example with the presentations only supports the belief that the delivery of the proof-of-learning matters. Not that there's a way to fix it, of course - awesome results are awesome, and should be encouraged. It's simply that I wish more professors were (more acutely?) aware of it, so it would (hopefully) have less impact. I would think that there would be a bit less cheating if delivery didn't matter.

While writing in and of itself is not connected to field knowledge. You really need to be a good writer to be an effective communicator.

One of the university degrees I did (effectively an arts degree) involved doing a lot of essay writing as part of the major. While I don7t really use the field knowledge I studied in the degree I credit my reasonably ok writing ability to all essays I wrote - which I have put to good use in writing technical reports and user documentation that no one else wanted to write because it was seen as beneath them.

Even with the ability to catch copy-pasters with tools such as turn it in, there is always private essay/thesis writers you can hire (there was an article from one of these writers sometime last year).

I just have to trust that despite a fancy degree, the cheaters get caught out in the place where it really matters - the workplace.

I completely agree, it's a skill everyone should have. But it has no relation to any kind of proof that you've learned something, outside of communication courses. Despite this, it still impacts grades everywhere. That's a pretty definite disconnect.

Not that I think "standardized" tests are any better. Just that increased awareness of this kind of effect on perception might decrease its impact.

For reference, the story about the essay writer is here:

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

A bit too meta for a comment maybe, but ah well.

You're getting downvoted quite a bit in the comments in this thread I see, even for this one which seems very factual and without any reason to downvote. I guess it's because the average age of the audience of HN has gravitated downwards over the last year or two, and that many readers are still students who identify much more naturally with your students than with yourself; causing you to start with a disadvantage in the pathos department, so to speak.

I guess it's the same dynamic that is causing the discussion on the business-type articles to be much more, well, anti-business nowadays.

Anyway, just to say that I feel sorry for you for having to work in a system that is set up in such a way (by no individual's fault, btw) that those with the best intentions are destined for failure. It reminds me of my experiences with doctors in a hospital I've been interacting with a lot lately, who share your fate - they all mean very well but the deck is stacked against them in the form of a dysfunctional system they have to work in. My wife is a professor too and I recognize your dilemmas all too well; I've posted about it here in the past, but back in those days I still got upvoted for it ;)

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