Comment by Panos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Panos | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you for a constructive disagreement. Perhaps car theft and bicycle theft would have been a better analogy, when talking about the offence (but I could not find a good analogy for the underlying problem).

"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.

I like the analogy to car theft. It communicates how shocking plagiarism should be within a healthy academic community. And stealing cars will normally attract serious attention from the police.

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?

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