NYU Prof Vows Never to Probe Cheating Again—and Faces a Backlash

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/nyu-prof-vows-never-to-probe-cheating-again%E2%80%94and-faces-a-backlash/32351

by ilamont • 15 years ago

195 110 15 years ago

chronicle.com

ilamont• 15 years ago

Earlier HN discussion, before the blog post was deleted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254

timf• 15 years ago

And previous discussion of the post removal: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2784002

jdp233• 15 years ago

I can certainly see why NYU wouldn't want to defend a professor who quoted a student's email without permission.

culled• 15 years ago

Since when can you not anonymously quote part of an email that was sent to you?

jdp233• 15 years ago

When you've got some kind of duty [in the legal sense] towards the person sending the mail. For example a doctor quoting a patient's email would be problematic. Just to be clear, I don't know the law in this area and I'm not saying what he did was illegal (I have no idea), I'm just saying that I can certainly see why NYU wouldn't want to step up to defend him on this issue if something came up.

Panos2• 15 years ago

The student admitted that the whole email was total BS. I took excerpts of the email and posted them here, not the full message.

Come on, could you really believe that this email contained a single element of truth?

specialist• 15 years ago

Aside: I saw a geek news bit about you withdrawing (removing) your post and the heat you're getting.

Dude, I'm so sorry.

For future, I have two bits of advice.

#1 Don't bury the lead. Like myself, the geek news bit also didn't get the point of your post.

#2 Focus on the positive. Meaning that all negatives can be stated as a positive.

So, were I to have written your blog post, I would have lead with your "future" section (peer reviews, competitions, contemporary projects), enthused about all the positives, and underplayed (or flat out omitted) the back story, the bullshit plagiarism software, the complicity of the administration (shocker!), the cheating students, etc.

I definitely would not have responded directly to any personal criticism, especially not in public. That's always a trap.

In conclusion, I think you did the right thing, are on the right track, and got burned by being the internet's chew toy of the moment. Lesson learned, move on.

Sukotto• 15 years ago

Comments from someone claiming to be Prof. Panos Ipeirotis and attempting to clarify some points.

http://www.businessinsider.com/nyu-professor-class-cheating-...

jrockway2• 15 years ago

This prevents them from effectively getting into a law school, or being hired by an investment bank.

My guess is that this is bullshit. I work at an investment bank and I've never given anyone any official transcripts.

yummyfajitas• 15 years ago

Some banks do demand transcripts for fresh grads, as do a number of consulting firms.

roel_v2• 15 years ago

But are you a trader or a quant? I think they were only talking about traders/analysts.

sgk284• 15 years ago

So my question is, what if TurnItIn quoted a student's paper instead of the teacher quoting an email?

I ask because these university's are effectively giving these student's papers to TurnItIn to use and make a profit on however they please. The students have no say in the matter, and that doesn't seem to be very protective of their privacy.

JoachimSchipper2• 15 years ago

Universities typically have all rights to their students' papers. I'm not sure that I'd expect privacy for college essays either, although it's a bit odd that you are technically not usually allowed to, say, post them to your blog.

wisesage5001• 15 years ago

Do you have any sources for the claim that universities typically have all rights to a student's papers? I can say for certain that I never signed any intellectual property agreement with the university I attended and would expect to retain all rights to any work I completed there as a student. The work I created did have an implied license allowing for grading the papers and such, but any use beyond that would upset me unless I the university had obtained my permission.

bobbles• 15 years ago

There was a bit of backlash when the Australian university I attended started using TurnItIn for this very reason.

There was also a dubious clause in the T&C that stated something along the lines of "Copyright protection for Australian documents does not apply as TurnItIn stores all of the documents on servers in the U.S"

jbermudes3• 15 years ago

Yes! I've been trying to tell people this since high school almost 10 years ago. Many educators force students to submit their papres to Turnitin or else take a failing grade on the assignment (which is often a final project which can cause you to fail the course).

1. Turnitin cites fair use ("it's educational"), but one of the metrics of fair use is the extent of use (they use the whole thing), if it's used for profit (they are), and the affect of merchantability. As shady as it sounds, paper mills are not illegal, copyright infringement is. If a paper mill rejects your paper because it's been through turnitin, that hurts me as an author.

2. Another aspect of the monetization that really grinds my gears is that every paper I am forced to submit benefits turnitin by making their database larger and thus helping grant them a monopoly in this market. I am being forced to write articles for the monetary benefit of a company. If they're making money off my paper I want a cut.

3. Turnitin does not offer any way to remove one's documents from their database. If it was merely being used temporarily to compare for plagiarism against internet or book sources then that'd be reasonable. But they keep my papers forever and will continue to monetize them for years after the fact.

I understand the plight of educators that want to stop plagiarism, but forcing me to irrevocably offer royalty-free licenses for my work to a for-profit company that is then charging the school (which if it is public is being funded by my tax dollars) is just insane any way you slice it.

Unfortunately the courts sided with Turnitin on this issue back in 2007 and 2009 and somehow ruled that their for-profit use was fair use.

Wingman4l7• 15 years ago

More information on this unfortunate precedent-setting litigation is available on Turnitin's Wikipedia entry. I was very much dismayed but not entirely surprised by the rulings.

syllogism• 15 years ago

Oh get real.

The university has the right to ask you to submit your work however they want as a condition to course completion. If you don't want to submit your work to turnitin you don't have to complete the course. Nobody's forcing you to.

If the extent of your objection is that turnitin robs you of potential financial benefit of selling your work, then that's by design: that's exactly what the educational institution wants to do! It doesn't matter that selling your work to a paper mill is legal. It's against the interests of the institution, so they're not going to let you go through their programme and keep that right.

starwed4• 15 years ago

If they're making money off my paper I want a cut.

They don't make any money by distributing your work. Nor does the quality of your work in any way affect how they make money off of it. I can't know if this is technically a violation of copyright, but -- it doesn't seem like it is against the spirit of copyright. Anymore than the requirement that you give a copy to your professor to grade.

I could be misunderstanding the situation, but from your own post you are granting no such license -- they are legally allowed to archive these. Copyright applies when you make and distribute a copy of the work, and they aren't (that I know of) doing any such thing.

(Disclaimer: I don't know anything about turnitin, so I'm not defending them in particular -- just responding to the objections of their model raised by OP.)

DanielStraight• 15 years ago

I would add:

4. Privacy. Submitting a paper to Turnitin makes the student's work vulnerable to a breach of Turnitin's servers. Data breaches have become so common that it is probably more accurate to say when Turnitin's servers are breached rather than if they are breached, the student's work could be made public contrary to their wishes.

I am grateful that my professors did not use Turnitin. Some at my school did, but I simply didn't take their classes. Had one of my professors announced they were using Turnitin, I would have dropped the class.

If you suspect me of cheating, talk to me. Put me to any test you like. Have me write my papers in front of you and defend them in an in-person interview. I don't care, just don't ask me to give my papers to Turnitin, because I won't. I don't like them, I don't agree with what they're doing, and I don't trust their ability to secure their servers. Further, I find the idea offensive that I need to prove my innocence when there is no evidence to indicate my guilt.

tedunangst• 15 years ago

Well, since the students wouldn't provide their papers at a price TurnItIn found reasonable, TurnItIn is within their rights to just take them. Or something like that. I'm not sure if papers and movies are directly comparable.

Confusion6• 15 years ago

The work of a student is the property of the university, like the work of an employee is the property of the employer. It's the university that (temporarily, before transferring it) owns the copyright on the paper the Ph.D. submitted. Not the Ph.D.

akavlie• 15 years ago

An employee's labor is purchased by the employer. A student in a university is not paid to attend a university however; the contrary is true. A student has far more claim on the works of professors than vice-versa.

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

Disappointing, it's mostly a recap of the original post. I can understand NYU being worried about the unauthorized quoting of a student's email, but the entire blog post? Surely, I/we are not the only ones finding it ironic, not just that he was negatively impacted (intentionally or not) by doing his job and pursuing the cheaters... but is now at some sort of risk for talking about the problem? Are we going to get into trouble for discussing this case. Jeesh.

uvdiv2• 15 years ago

This reminds me of a case in Europe, where a PhD chemist was found to have faked/fabricated large parts of his graduate work, including his thesis. (It was on Derek Lowe's blog, pipeline.corante.com, and other places). He used Switzerland's ridiculous privacy laws to C&D journals, papers not to disclose his name in connection with the university investigation. (Or something like that, I'm not a lawyer). So he got off scot-free, and now he works in investment banking.

edit: Here's the story

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/09/25/faked_data_a...

primaries,

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/87/i39/8739news4.html

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/09/fake-data-...

sedev• 15 years ago

"and now he works in investment banking."

That's one hell of a punchline. Is that serious, or is that just a grim joke? Because sadly it's right smack in the middle of Poe's Law territory.

uvdiv2• 15 years ago

No, it's extremely funny but it's true.

The Ph.D. student at the time left research after receiving his degree and now works as an analyst for an international bank.

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/09/fake-data-...

The Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger reports that the doctoral student has left chemical research to become a financial analyst with the bank UBS. C&EN was unable to reach the former student at press time.

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/87/i39/8739news4.html

w1ntermute• 15 years ago

So no one knows his name? What about newspapers outside Switzerland?

> this person's lab notebooks have turned up missing, and are the only primary sources for the whole affair that can't be found

Not to condone what he did, but this is one of the reasons I don't keep any physical lab notebooks (scan, encrypt, and shred). Don't want people accessing/confiscating them without my consent.

yaix• 15 years ago

> So he got off scot-free, and now he works in investment banking.

That makes absolutely sense.

rickmb• 15 years ago

"Switzerland's ridiculous privacy laws"

You mean those "ridiculous" kind of laws where peoples privacy is protected against media-exploitation during that equally ridiculous "presumption of innocence" bit that is part of due process?

Those silly Swiss, not to allow mere allegations to destroy peoples lives. Way better to humiliate people by parading them in front of the world press, and make sure their careers are destroyed without having to bother with silly stuff like facts and evidence, the way they do things in the US.

JoelMcCracken• 15 years ago

+1 to parent.

Grandparent needs to read more.

nate_meurer• 15 years ago

This has nothing to due with due process if the the fraudster is forever permitted to C&D anyone who mentions his name.

g123g• 15 years ago

Again, instead of trying to some how address the genuine issues raised by the original blog post, people are going to create unnecessary controversy around it till the issue is forgotten. People can't see the forest for the trees. The main issue is that there is rampant cheating going on in the educational institutions. That's where the focus of the universities should be not on issuing these cease and desist letters.

darksaga• 15 years ago

Agreed. I had the same reaction. The guy outs the problem and the blatant use of cheating by his students and all he gets in return is a kick in the teeth by doing so.

I'm glad I never stayed in academia.

Vivtek• 15 years ago

Oh, this so reminds me of all the ass coverage at my wife's last place of work (also in academia).

jcc802• 15 years ago

yes, so pathetic

kylemaxwell• 15 years ago

I need to check my web cache. I have no problems hosting a copy of the essay.

marshray• 15 years ago

I guess the only logical policy for a professor is "don't ask, don't tell, don't talk about it".

You there, academic! Back into the closet!

Caballera• 15 years ago

That's pretty much how it is. My wife teaches in a NYC public school and has a big issue with plagiarism, although there she can report it all she wants and no one would do anything. Additionally if she tried to assign homework like this professor suggest they would not do it. They would simply take a zero then to have to do a presentation. And then it becomes an issue where the students fail and the teachers passing average drops severely.

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

I wonder why Marc Parry chose to call him "Mr." instead of the correct "Dr."... a total of 12 whole times.

williamdix• 15 years ago

People with Ph.D.s are not that frequently called Dr. Also, if there is one source that I am pretty sure would know how to refer to professors and Ph.D.s, it would be the Chronicle of Higher Education.

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Doctor_%28tit...

This wikipedia entry seems to indicate that it is common to address someone of his stature as "Dr.", with the possible exception of perhaps in social settings where doing so might cause confusion (with MD).

vacri• 15 years ago

That being said, it's also uncommon to specifically use Mr. (except for male surgeons, of course) - not unknown, but uncommon. I'd have less of a problem if the article was about, say, his dog having a funny coat pattern or him complaining about parking restrictions at the local council, but it is weird that in an article about his professional conduct and capacity, that the lesser title should be used.

mbreese• 15 years ago

Mr. is still not the correct formal title for someone with a PhD, Dr. is. The only exception of this is when dealing with patients in a medical setting where the degree could be confused with an MD. (I'm still having flashbacks to addressing wedding invitations 7 years after the fact).

Chronicles of higher education might have a different publishing standard, but I'm not sure why they would.

Estragon• 15 years ago

Funny, people call me and my colleagues "doctor" all the time...

suprgeek• 15 years ago

Funny story - during my stint in Grad School there was some sensitivity to how each person wanted to be referred to.

All Post-Docs insisted on being called "Dr." rather than "Mr."and all tenured Profs on being called "Prof." rather than "Dr."

Non-tenured Assistant Profs had the worst choice get called Dr. and upset themselves or get called "Prof." and potentially upset the people who could grant them tenure :) Guess which one they choose?

roel_v2• 15 years ago

In certain geographic and/or certain academic circles leaving out the 'dr' is, depending on how you look at it, a newish kind of snobbery or a recognition that getting the PhD isn't all that much of an accomplishment. Not putting emphasis on the 'dr' part is like saying 'of course everybody who matters has a PhD, no need to mention it every time'.

It's the same reasoning as why one wouldn't list a driving license as an accomplishment when one is a professional race car driver - 'of course' everybody who is somebody in racing has passed their driving exam a long time ago.

(the same comment was mentioned in the comments to the OP - I was quite surprised nobody mentioned my above reasoning, I thought it was common knowledge by now).

chc2• 15 years ago

"Mister" is correct for any adult male. They may prefer the more exclusive title, but that's no more obligatory than my preference to be addressed as "Captain Awesome." And some style manuals (including the Associated Press Stylebook) actually forbid "Dr." unless the story is about medicine and the person in question is an MD.

jcc802• 15 years ago

I think we all saw this coming. Reading his blog post I had that weird feeling of, "How is he actually writing this?" I guess it was cathartic for him but of course NYU would want it taken down.

JadeNB3• 15 years ago

From the vice dean of faculty, quoted in the article:

> Stern faculty members are obligated to support the University and Stern honor codes and are never sanctioned in any way for doing so.

Ha! Nothing wrong with that, except that I thought he meant "faculty members who are stern". Here's the interesting bit:

> Moreover, the course evaluation input of any student who has an honor code infraction is removed from consideration when evaluating teaching performance.

How in the world can you do that, when student evaluations are anonymous? (Maybe they've switched to online evaluations, which would allow this while preserving anonymity.)

lwat• 15 years ago

> How in the world can you do that, when student evaluations are anonymous?

I understand that those students simply don't get to fill in evaluations.

nigelsampson• 15 years ago

This also doesn't take into account the impact that being stricter on cheating had on the non-cheating members of the class.

sunspeck• 15 years ago

“We are also trying to satisfy ourselves that Stern graduates know what they are talking about when they represent themselves to practitioners and in the world of stiff competition with graduates of other top schools.”

Wait... is he actually admitting here that NYU wants the post removed because it reveals that >1/5 of its grads are cheaters?

dfc• 15 years ago

I take it your school did not have a critical reasoning requirement and/or you cheated in class. The post stated that in one class 1/5 of the students had cheated.

Even if we pretend that one introductory class is a representative sample of the current enrolled student body you still can not jump from enrolled to graduated. It is entirely possible that a lot of the people who cheat in a 101 level class do not make it to graduation.

Please refrain from making silly posts in the future.

badclient• 15 years ago

Wow, I think the professor may be the winner here. I felt that post hurt him more than help him.

AndrewHampton• 15 years ago

It seems to me the best solution would be to have a few student workers at the university that are the plagiarism "police". They would review the TurnItIn reports for all student papers and refer offenders to honor boards for punishment.

This would leave the professor free to teach and not have to a) spend time policing the student and b) be seen as the bad guy when students get caught and punished.

charliepark• 15 years ago

This.

There should be an automatic filter, with manual review of violations, that all papers are submitted through. If it fails the filter, it's returned to the student, and the professor hasn't even seen it. The student can redo it, or protest the automated decision, and a human reviewer (an anonymous TA on-campuse) can consider the case (and see the offending text). The reviewer would then pass it on to the professor, who can grade it, or return it to the student to improve.

This removes the burden and the penalty from the professor, whose job isn't supposed to be policing plagiarism infractions.

hncommenter13• 15 years ago

This is ridiculous.

1. The C&D letter came from "a faculty member at another institution." It could have come from me, or from a guy at the coffee shop down the block. A letter from a faculty member at another institution has about as much weight--considering that he has no claim in the supposed privacy of the material--as the paper it's printed on. NYU should grow a backbone and tell him to pound sand. If that's all it takes for them to turn tail, I wouldn't take their policies on academic freedom very seriously.

2. I'm guessing that the ever-so-helpful faculty member from another institution sent some sort of warning regarding FERPA, the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, which generally governs how academic institutions must handle student records. This act has been interpreted in such odd ways that there was a Supreme Court case over whether allowing students in elementary school to grade each other's homework was a violation of federal law (Owasso v. Falvo).

My understanding is that FERPA generally applies only to student records with some sort of personally identifiable information on them (i.e., posting grades with ID numbers, publishing contact info on the internet without permission, etc.). If I couldn't possibly identify the student from the portion of the email quoted, it's hard to understand how FERPA could rationally apply. If it were applicable, then any single quotation of any size from any communication with a student would be potentially banned from being repeated. Otherwse, it would be a violation of federal law for a professor to post a sentence of the sort: "A student asked me a very intriguing question today, which went as follows..."

3. If NYU or the professor just don't want the hassle of being at the center of a public debate, then fine. They are free to say or to not say whatever they like. But to scurry away from a debate and blame it on some imagined violation of a student "right" (see Gonzaga v. Doe for how far that "right" goes) is just silly.

dougws• 15 years ago

And of course NYU does nothing to back him up. The spirit of openness and intellectual honesty that universities should be promoting falls by the wayside when it involves a little risk and a little conflict. He did some real research into an interesting and relevant topic, and got the shaft from the university because it uncovered uncomfortable truths.

I'd put this on with the sex class incident a few months ago at Northwestern as far as disappointing moves by institutions I'd like to respect.

URSpider94• 15 years ago

I had the experience of getting my graduate degree from an undergraduate institution with a strict honor code, and my graduate degree from a school without an honor code.

Under the honor code, a student caught cheating would, at minimum, fail the course, and at maximum, be expelled.

At the other school (theoretically more prestigious), the typical sanction for cheating was to receive an "F" on the suspect assignment.

Not surprisingly, in my experience, cheating was far, far more common at the second university than at the first ...

billmcneale• 15 years ago

tl;dr: He faces a backlash because his post violated a federal law protecting student privacy. The takedown had nothing to do with cheating.

politician• 15 years ago

> He faces a backlash because his post allegedly violated a federal law protecting student privacy.

ftfy

to_jon• 15 years ago

Shocking, absolutely shocking to read that MBA students would engage in such behavior. One might imagine, with great difficulty of course, that their sole purpose in entering business school was the pursuit of personal and financial gain by any means.

tlrobinson• 15 years ago

"We are teaching the next generation of business leaders, and it is important that they think about the consequences of their actions,"

Exactly. You're not just there to learn the course material. Maybe cheaters don't even know what they're doing is wrong, and by ignoring it you're doing them a disservice.

Regarding the "poisoned class environment" issue, it seems like there's a better way to go about it discretely.

1. Include your plagiarism policy clearly on the course syllabus. Be clear about what constitutes plagiarism, how they should cite passages taken from other material, etc.

2. Don't tell students you're using Turnitin, just have them submit papers electronically somehow and run the papers through Turnitin yourself.

3. The first time you catch someone plagiarizing give them a zero on the paper (depending on the severity) and tell them if it happens again they'll be kicked out of the class (or whatever your university's policy is)

furyg3• 15 years ago

The problem this particular teacher ran into was that kicking someone out of a class for plagarism / reporting to the university (as per the policy) is a big process, not just a print screen of Turnitin's report...

That means that the teacher is spending hours and hours and hours on cheating...

nickolai• 15 years ago

If cheating one's way out of doing real work is so pervasive in the institutions training our political and business leaders, i guess the current cirsis situation is not very surprising. What kind of people would you expect at the top of a system that encourages cheating vs doing your homework ?

vash_stampy• 15 years ago

To me, the stance that this professor is taking is absurd. He's not helping anyone but himself giving up on efforts to prevent cheating.

I really thought he would have made a compelling argument to resolve this, but it seems more like he's become so frustrated with cheating that he's resigned himself from that aspect of education.

With that said, I do disagree with the stance that universities take on cheating. The system of punishment is too focused on catching cheaters and punishing them so harshly as scare others to never consider it. I think this prevents many students from being more creative or exploring their own ideas based on previous work.

I believe cheating is not something a student commits because of inability, cheating is a crime of laziness. Therefore, rather than trying to catch cheating, schools should just making cheating pointless. Papers and assigments should be completely open and encourage students to look at any previous work and allow them to include it in their own work simply with a citation.

To add, professors seem to focused on their students finding credible sources to cite rather than allowing students to form their own ideas. Credible ideas can be founded from less credible sources and that is what should really matter.

xom• 15 years ago

As stated, the professor is preventing cheating by modifying the nature of the assignments.

maeon3• 15 years ago

He removed his content from his blog, I don't blame him at all, I would have deleted it too, lucky the internet has an un-delete button.

"Why I will never pursue cheating again" mirror:

https://plus.google.com/106021114396508944027/posts/jgQmKTsW...

""Why I will never pursue cheating again" word doc copy paste of content:

http://machinesentience.com/miscvideos/nyu_professor__why_i_...

NYU Prof Vows Never to Probe Cheating Again—and Faces a Backlash

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