Panos Ipeirotis: A tale about parking

http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/07/tale-about-parking.html

by timf • 15 years ago

74 39 15 years ago

behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com

mirkules• 15 years ago

"In fact, the blog post was in my folder of draft posts for a few months now, long before receiving my annual evaluation."

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.

Panos10• 15 years ago

No, I could not really think of that. I do not filter my blog posts through any PR department, and I have written plenty of stories that received wide attention. And going through a PR department typically means that the resulting document lacks any punch and originality. (Been there, done that, for other types of communication.)

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.

epochwolf• 15 years ago

This may not be the best place to say this but, I found both your cheating article and this one interesting. Please continue posting.

Matt_Cutts• 15 years ago

I just wanted to say thanks for a great post. It helps focus the conversation on some of the most important themes of your earlier post. Nice job defending your point of view in the HN comments on your earlier post, too.

techiferous4• 15 years ago

"...was because some assignments were designed to withstand cheating. And that was a point worth talking about."

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.

sorbus3• 15 years ago

> I hope NYU's reputation was not damaged as a result.

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.

Panos10• 15 years ago

If you attribute the 20% rate to NYU, and not to my increased vigilance, then you may want to read again the latest blog post.

badclient• 15 years ago

Well I read a quote on HN that went something like "if you want people to see something, show them one thing."

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).

jdp23• 15 years ago

Well said. That was my reaction to the post too.

CodeMage• 15 years ago

If your intention really was to just focus on the evals, why mention their impact on your salary at all, especially in the conclusion?

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 ;)

Panos10• 15 years ago

:-)

Admittedly, I got the impression that most people do not bother to read anything longer than 140 characters.

Panos10• 15 years ago

Mea culpa. I just wanted to close the loop and identify a point that people would relate to. (I was not sure that people would relate to the fact that the student evaluations dropped. Apparently most people do not even know that student evaluations are used to determine salary increases.)

In retrospect? One of my biggest mistakes to even mention it.

zb• 15 years ago

I think one of your biggest mistakes was to only mention your ideas about how to reduce double parking, I mean cheating, right at the end of a very long essay with a linkbait title that was basically the equivalent of "Why I'll never write another parking ticket" in this analogy.

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.

techiferous4• 15 years ago

I agree with Panos that the problem is systemic and needs to be treated on a system-wide level. However, I think that parking violations are not the best analogy and obscure the dynamics a little.

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.

Panos10• 15 years ago

Well, there was a point in that analogy. In the past, I was catching cheaters who put no effort in the assignment.

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.

pbh2• 15 years ago

It has been fascinating to watch the reaction to Panos' blog post on cheating. I agree and disagree with this follow-up post, however. On one hand, I agree that most reactions have generally been shallow and poorly thought out. On the other hand, I think that what made Panos' original post so compelling was his comprehensive listing of the many disincentives to fighting cheating at the university, including the impact on his salary.

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.)

techiferous4• 15 years ago

"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...

pbh2• 15 years ago

I think that you make an important point. Not counting detected cheaters in course evaluations seems like a good policy. This is especially true because student evaluations have been shown in a number of cases to be very highly correlated with the student's expected grade.

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.

inuhj• 15 years ago

People who cheated were counted. The evaluation of students who had honor code violations were not reported.

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.

tlrobinson• 15 years ago

I think by coming up with "cheating-proof" assignments you'd be ignoring the real issue, which is that students think it's ok to cheat. Lacking some global solution, I think it's possible to deal with cheaters without "poisoning" the classroom. Here's my suggestion, based only on my experience in college and common sense:

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]

Panos10• 15 years ago

[and the reply that I also posted on my 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.

quanticle• 15 years ago

I think by coming up with "cheating-proof" assignments you'd be ignoring the real issue, which is that students think it's ok to cheat.

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.

_delirium• 15 years ago

> I think by coming up with "cheating-proof" assignments you'd be ignoring the real issue, which is that students think it's ok to cheat.

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.

wairagu• 15 years ago

I'm beginning to like this guy,

ekidd2• 15 years ago

I dislike the analogy between parking tickets and plagiarism. In most US jurisdictions, parking violations aren't even a misdemeanor, but merely a "summary offense". Of course the police can ignore them.

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.

ez77• 15 years ago

At the risk of sounding naive, I think grades are overrated, to the point that they may indeed kill the spirit of learning. To make matters worse, the US system has way too many grades: quizzes, exams, assignments, extra-credit (!) assignments, finals, etc. That's a lot, particularly for a college system.

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.)

bartonfink2• 15 years ago

My understanding is that top law schools do something like that already - limiting themselves to pass/fail grading across the board. The 50th percentile at, e.g., Harvard Law, is almost certainly going to be a very capable attorney, and it does Harvard Law no good to create artificial distinctions between students solely for the benefit of the outside world.

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).

Panos10• 15 years ago

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.

ekidd2• 15 years ago

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?

barry-cotter2• 15 years ago

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.

Panos Ipeirotis: A tale about parking

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