Panos Ipeirotis: A tale about parking
behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com
behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com
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.
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.
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.)
By the way, the evaluations of students who cheated were not counted, which mitigates things a little.
EDIT: "Moreover, the course evaluation input of any student who has an honor code infraction is removed from consideration when evaluating teaching performance." -- http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/nyu-prof-vows-never-t...
However, I still agree with Panos' diagnosis that his student evaluations went down in response to detecting cheating. He presumably has data from hundreds of students over years of classes. The primary difference between this year and past years was almost certainly his detection of cheaters. While removing cheaters from the evaluation pool may mitigate the problem a little, I find it pretty plausible that evaluations went down because of some cheating-detection related phenomenon, like the more adversarial atmosphere, his own feelings about the cheaters, or students feeling attacked or accused.
From his original blog post he mentioned that he did not refer all his students to the university's "honor council". He even gave the student who copy/pasted another student's work a chance to redo the paper without referring it to the administration.
It's a very reasonable thing for him to do given the consequences of being referred to the honor council. Having cheating on your college transcript is a scarlet letter if you're thinking about graduate school. You get an 'F' in the course and will not be granted admission to any medical, law, dentistry, or pharmacy school. The consequences are disproportionately severe given how pervasive cheating is.
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.
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 not 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).
So I really am 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.
As a start, I would dare the top US universities to do away with grades and let prospective employers segregate the fine from the best without the beaten GPAs. I bet they would produce even better graduates. (The new requirement(s) for graduation would, of course, demand some creativity.)
If a student wants to show some sort of distinction, he has to find some out-of-band way to do that (research for a prof, publications, exceptional internships, etc).
"In practice, there were apparently edge cases (students with ambiguous evidence..."
These where exactly the cases that I focused on. I honestly thought I was playing in a "Numb3rs" episode. Constructing models for detecting the probability that an individual student would structure an Excel spreadsheet in a specific way, measuring likelihood of sentences using Google N-grams, and other things that are not the obvious things that the honor council would immediately understand. At the end, the students were admitting guilt but at a great personal cost for me.
When nobody else is fighting like that what is the incentive for me to continue? Not all students go through my classes, so that all have equal chance of being caught. In a (very) perverse way, it is a matter of fairness to the students for me to be as vigilant as everyone else.
Of course, if you impose draconian punishments for a first offense, then you also increase the burden of proof. It's not enough to say that "student X cheated with 60% probability," any more than you could say, "It's reasonably likely that the defendant stole the car." You need to have clear-cut evidence.
One of my friends was a lecturer in the computer science department (at the honors 200 level), and he made it clear that he took cheating as a personal affront. Every year, he'd catch 2 or 3 students cheating, and he'd devote considerable time to educating the student judiciary about CS and getting the cheaters suspended. Despite this, he was an enormously popular lecturer. But he was operating within a culture where plagiarism really was a serious offense against community norms.
In a (very) perverse way, it is a matter of fairness to the students for me to be as vigilant as everyone else.
Ultimately, this fight can't be won by a single professor. It's a matter for your colleagues, your administration and even your student body: Does NYU want to be a university where cheating is shockingly unacceptable, or one where cheating is on par with a parking ticket?
I agree with all of that but these are undergraduates not academics. If you're not doing research you're not part of any academic community. Besides, they're business students, the proportion of people who don't give a dman about the hoops they have to get through to get the piece of paper to get the good job will be even higher than average.
tl;dr Non researchers are not part of any academic community, they are not bound by its moral code.
With traffic congestion, the problem is not cars on the road, the problem is too many cars on the road. So if someone is double-parked and is not actually blocking anyone, there really is no fundamental problem.
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 too much cheating, but the presence of cheating at all. An academic institution does not plan for a cheating capacity of 20%, for example.
So I would suggest that the analogy works better if parking violations were replaced with bicycle thefts, since every bicycle theft is a problem.
This time, I had a zero-tolerance policy. No matter if you plagiarized the whole assignment or a paragraph, no matter if you copied the spreadsheet, or if you just had the solution as a backup to ensure correctness, it was the same penalty: A -30 for an assignment that had a +30 maximum points and report to the Dean's office and the honor council.
The key thing is not to make such a big deal about about cheating publicly. No public witchhunts, no Turnitin submissions, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But by ignoring the cheaters you're doing both them and their non-cheating peers, and the university as a whole, a disservice.
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.
Of course it's also unfair to the non-cheaters who work harder and receive the same grades, and ultimately the same degree.
On a larger scale, if a university tolerates widespread cheating the quality of their graduates will decline, which obviously isn't good for anyone.
[This is a repost of my comment on the blog]
What you describe was my policy in all prior years. I just stupidly felt last year that I need to hunt further.
Nope. Big mistake.
Just FYI, I could always locate 1-2 cases of cheating in every semester. But I treated treated as isolated cases.
Why would that be the case? I mean, if the assignment naturally disfavors cheating (by making it more trouble than doing the assignment honestly), doesn't that send a pretty powerful message to the students? "You might have gotten away with cheating in other classes, but in this one, you'll really have to work." It seems like it would be the same message as a strict anti-cheating policy, but without the acrimony.
I think these are related, though. Cheating tends to be lowest when students feel they're doing valuable, real work, and that also tends to be the hardest to cheat on; whereas it tends to be highest when students feel they're doing regurgitation or pointless busywork, and that also tends to be the easiest to cheat on.
It's not a perfect correlation, but I think it's one factor. I certainly noticed in my own undergraduate education that cheating was highest in courses that were more boring and cookie-cutter, and lower when the professor was particularly motivating, and had creative, interesting assignments. As a prof now, I don't have enough semesters under my belt for good data, but my impression so far is that how I teach the course and frame the assignments can make a huge difference in how likely cheating is.
Put differently, I don't think most people have completely fixed ethics; there are some proportion of people who would never cheat, and others who will cheat whenever possible, but a large portion in the middle whose ethics are strongly influenced by the situation. As in many situations (not only in university), people are more likely to feel it's okay to do "unethical" things if they feel that the situation is bullshit, and less likely if they feel motivated/responsible/engaged with something.
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?
That was poor judgement on your part. As a reader, it is natural to conclude from your post that you are most 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).
Maybe his intentions were not to "just focus on the evals". Maybe he wanted to, oh, I don't know:
1) show that cheating is a lot more widespread than we think
2) describe several reasons why simply pursuing and punishing cheaters is a bad strategy
3) use that to point out that we need a better solution (such as designing better evals, perhaps, but it's not the only option)
I mean, he know best what his intentions were, but that's my interpretation of his posts, both of them, taken together.
But I agree with you, it was evidently poor judgment on his part to "mix up too many issues", since most of his readers can't be bothered to try to separate them ;)
Admittedly, I got the impression that most people do not bother to read anything longer than 140 characters.
In retrospect? One of my biggest mistakes to even mention it.
Don't get me wrong, I read the whole thing and I thought it was a great article. But while I don't believe for a second that you did it on purpose, if you had wanted to create a media firestorm focussing on the wrong issues you couldn't have found a much more effective way to go about it.
Personally, I would hate to see the essay form get replaced by something more like a newspaper story, with the conclusions at the start and the exposition after. But maybe that's going to become essential on controversial topics like this, I don't know. The lesson I'll be taking away is to ensure that the key point makes up the bulk of the writing, and if it doesn't then keep cutting other stuff until it does.
I imagine it's been rather an unpleasant ride, but thanks for giving us all the opportunity to learn something.
I kind of felt this a few hours after the post went out, so I added two clarification points early on in the article: 1. I am not giving up the fight, I will just fight differently, please see the conclusions (link), 2. This was not about NYU and people cheating in business schools; people cheat everywhere: the story gives an explanation why they remain undetected.
Oh well, people could not even read these two points.
But I want to write stories in my blog, not papers with an abstract, executive summary and table of contents.
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.
Lesson learned, I guess, and I hope NYU's reputation was not damaged as a result.
If I could think that people could leverage the post to post their negative preconceptions about business schools, NYU, Turnitin, academic, US, or whatever else they hate, I would have not posted the blog post to start with.
In most of my blog posts I try to propose and describe solutions, even when I "whine". (See, for example, http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/10/plea-to-a... and http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/12/mechanica...). The blog post about cheating was not an exception.
The reason that it was in my draft folder was because I did not want to put it out just to talk about cheating. The post felt incomplete. Yes, I could complain. But after that, what?
It took me a while to realize that people did not cheat in some of the assignments, but tried in others, was because some assignments were designed to withstand cheating. And that was a point worth talking about.
Don't stop writing, please.
Absolutely. And thank you for talking about it.
Do you think you can also come at it from another angle and teach the students why it's not a good idea to plagiarize or be dishonest in general? It's a good teaching moment. We need less Bernie Madoffs in the world, and part of the education system is not just teaching hard skills but how to use them in constructive and helpful ways in society.
But I can understand if that's not your passion or that sounds overwhelming. I've been a teacher myself and I know how difficult or overwhelming it can be.
* ArsTechnica, Oct 8, 2010, Copied pleadings show there's no honor among antipiracy lawyers http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/10/copied-plead...
* Associated Press, Sep 30, 2010, Arizona US Senate candidate denies plagiarismhttp://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jCoMCrHFbR...
Well, some students got the (subtle) point that cheating is often undetected but when detected is lethal for your career. But I believe these students would not cheat in any case.
If 20% of students at NYU cheat (I can't access the original post to check the numbers it mentions, obviously, but I remember it being something like that), then NYU's reputation should be very damaged by that fact.
Regarding the parable, I see the point and how what I wrote could be interpreted in the way that you describe. My intention was to refer to the city as the whole academic system. The "Redwich Village" is a reference to Greenwich Village, the neighborhood in NYC where NYU is located.
So, Redwich Village stands for my institution, which was attacked ferociously as being the harbor of cheaters over the last few days, while people fail to recognize that this is most probably a more generic problem. You may claim that I overgeneralize without proof, but I have sufficient evidence from other people that this is the case. Especially after all the emails that I received within the last few days where people described their own experiences with cheating that were very similar (most did so anonymously, but with specific names of top universities around the world).