The 44 hours is not a number to show how much extra I had to work. Believe me, a 14-hour day is a pretty common thing for me. Teaching is only part of my overall job (I also have to do research, supervise PhD students, review papers, serve on committees and many other things).

The 44 hours figure is given just as a contrast to the actual time that I spent in class. I would much rather spend these 44 hours on helping students, on creating new assignments, on finding things in the news that are relevant to tomorrow's class and so on. Instead, these 44 hours were literally wasted on the students that should have been the least deserving. (When I had the student crying in my office, I had actually lines of students waiting outside to ask me questions about the material in the class. Most of them ended up leaving, as they could not wait for so long.)

Also blaming NYU/Stern for this is a rather shortsighted approach. I would not be surprised if the situation is identical in many other schools but just nobody has the incentives to fight cheating.

Just a note: My PhD is in computer science. I have a technical background. I code for fun, and I detected cheating in the Excel assignments using my own code.

From my experience, teaching a 3 credit course (meeting MWF for one hour each with no labs/recitation) requires the three hours for the course plus the following: 1. an additional 1 to 2 hours per class of prep. time to get yourself situated for that paricular class 2. 0.5 to 1 hours of meeting with your TA regarding grading and what is being covered in the course this week (more if the TA has a recitation session) 3. 3 to 5 office hours for students (of which a majority is not used, but still must be set aside)

All together, teaching a three hour course takes about 10 hours a week on the low end. Dealing with cheating students takes time from every portion of this 10 hours. You must waste time in class addressing the cheating. You must waste time in preparation thinking of ways to stop the cheating. You must waste time talking with your TA about the cheating. You must waste time dealing with students who will admit to "working together" but never "cheating" during your office hours.

The most important part of this, and the part that gets eaten up the most, is the office hours. This is where students should come to delve deeper into a subject or clarify material. Dealing with students during this time sets back students who truly have an interest in the subject and cripples students who have fallen behind (which will most likely lead to more cheating!).

While 44 hours over a semester sounds like nothing to most people, it is actually a significant amount of time wasted for the class.

As an aside, many students think that teaching is a faculty member's first and foremost duty. Depending on the school, this can range from absolutely true to downright false. Most schools have a layout on what they expect from their faculty regarding research, teaching, and service. Most schools weight that in decreasing priority as listed. If a school is well-known for its research, chances are it follows this pattern and teaching is not a priority for the faculty outside of good student evaluations.

Edit: A course at my school lasts for approximately 15 weeks which comes to ~150 hours per semester at 10 hours per week. At 44 hours, dealing with cheating would take 30% of my time spent on the course during the semester.

A pair of my friends work for online colleges; one for a state college with a pretty good reputation, and another for a for-profit school with a decent reputation. Neither are tenured.

Both of them have had serious issues with student cheating. The one at the state college got support from one of her superiors, and was not penalized for fighting plagiarism, but it was still very time consuming. Another one of her superiors (in previous years) did not support her in any way, and she had to cut back on enforcing academic honesty to help protect her job, save for the most blatant cases.

The other one (at the for-profit college) stopped crusading against cheating when she found out that she'd (effectively) be fired if she continued. Pass rates are a sizable portion of what's used to determine which teachers are given which classes. In one class, more than half of her students should have been failed for academic honesty violations by the halfway point of the year. However, if she did that, her pass rates would have been low enough that it was extremely likely that she would not be given any classes next semester. (Not technically fired, but functionally so.)

So, you are not the only person encountering this, and you're not alone in realizing that fighting cheating can be hazardous to your career. It's a damn shame.

As a whole, this seems like an administrative issue, rather than an issue with a single professor. In an environment where departmental heads and academic deans expected, and encouraged professors to report plagiarism - then dealt with it in a fair, consistant manner, this would be a non-issue.

Another big part of what this story illustrates is that individual professors shouldn't be responsible for both detecting and punishing academic dishonesty.

Kind of stupid, I know. But it is really impossible to violate the mandate that my teaching should not be "wasted" on doing assignments in class etc.

And yes, when I tried it, I loved it. The teaching time becomes so much more interesting and stimulating. But I can only practice this a couple of times over the semester, as otherwise I will be seen as "wasting" my time in class.

The system is broken.

Of course, there are professors that fail to teach well, the students get disinterested, then the professor gets even more disinterested and teaches worse etc etc.

There's not an easy solution, obviously. You are taking a risk when you do something that some other members of your faculty are not doing. You must realize, they are threatened by your attempt to prevent cheating, because it will become obvious very quickly when you find such high rates of cheating and deal with them appropriately, that they are not doing so. That will raise difficult questions, deans will notice. I think you might find, to your surprise, that there are many other people in the same position as you, but perhaps not as bold as you are. I would wager that that many, many other faculty members hate cheating as much as you, and are disgusted by the blatant plagiarism, but also like you are pressured by the current state of affairs to bury it.

I would encourage you to stick to your original guns, and keep grinding cheaters out of your class. First of all, your reputation will be established very quickly among students. Students who know they have to cheat will avoid you every semester, saddling other professors who are softer on cheating with worse students, and concentrating the best students into your classes. More to the point, students won't try to cheat in your class nearly as much once your reputation is established, so the amount of time you have to deal with it will, I suspect, go down dramatically.

Edit: This is way more congenial than how I actually feel. It's your responsibility, and every other faculty member's, to identify cheating and run those students out of the university. They are stealing from the students who are trying hard and mastering the material, by graduating uneducated and unprepared. When they go out and embarrass themselves, it reflects on every other student with that same university's name on their diploma.

As for the girl crying for 2 hours, who cares? Let her cheating ass go cry in her dorm, I think you have very weird priorities to let her waste your entire office hours (with honest students waiting) with her obvious, transparent attempt to manipulate you emotionally.

Btw, all students were reported to the administration and have a mark in their transcripts that they cheated. This is communicated to all future employers and is an automatic block to entrance in law schools.

But again: 22 out of 108 is not a problem to be solved by force. It is a deep structural problem that got me thinking about evaluation strategies that are independent of cheating.

Btw, the girl was not crying to manipulate me. She really had a serious nervous breakdown, bringing out all sorts of issues that she had with her life. Apparently her parents kept reprimanding her for not "performing" at the university. There was a long term stress issue and the realization that she was going to fail the class was just the straw that broke the camel's back. But it was a very uncomfortable spectacle: her classmates outside my office looking at her, and other faculty members stopping by and making gestures, trying to figure out what is going on.

Ouch! This professor is caught between students who don't want to learn and an administration who does not know how to properly measure teacher performance. Give the guy a break; he's in a tough situation.

By the way, insults and personal attacks are not welcome here at Hacker News.

It's hardly fair to call the one guy trying to fix the system a coward, just because he decided he had better things to do.

Besides, "No tolerance" is a bad way to beat corruption, as an individual. The best way is to occasionally bring it up. You won't lose as many friends, but some people people will still think that a crackdown might be underway. You might feel stupid, only catching one or two cheats, but it's more effective in the long run than being too hard.

He's not a lazy coward. He's just not a great political player. His boss is a lazy coward, for putting him in a position where he has to know how to be positively Machiavellian in order to improve things.

I don't trust a college degree from anywhere to prove anything other than that the student was able to finance his/her purchase, regardless of school. I know this will not be taken well by several folks, but it's not a complete disregarding of higher education (take me on my word or call me an idiot, you'll probably be right).

Cheating is a fact of life. When I was in college, the punishment was expulsion. This rarely happened. It was the old "make the punishment so awful that nobody would want to commit the crime", and it fell flat as soon as human beings were put in the picture.

Those who knew how to get away with it almost always got away with it. And even when caught, the book was rarely thrown at them. This "tenured" professor is trying to find a way to separate cheating from passing. I don't know that he'll be successful. But the traditional "Turnitin" approach is working as well as anti-malware software/devices work. It's an arms race. The solution isn't to build better detection or encourage better behavior from users ... it's to make the attack irrelevant.

I'm skeptical that it can be done, but I like the approach. I don't believe this is a Lazy Coward operation (good to edit it out, but I didn't downmod you, I thought your comments were fair). It's a creative, and possibly disruptive, method to teaching.

Edit: Sorry, it's really difficult to write out a reasonable reply without reading it over a few times and making changes.

The problem seems systemic, he throws his hands in the air and gives up because he cannot do anything alone and is punished. Others either came to the same conclusion or don't know/care cheating is happening to begin with. I don't think I can simply blame him for the calculations he went through in making his decision.

It is likely that I would fail, but as I will sometimes announce loudly in the Milo office "I've got something to say! It's better to burn out than fade away!'

You don't always have that much choice, do you?

>I would rail against it every day and try to change the system by doing the right thing and calling out other faculty for not doing so, publicly.

Yeah.

You will not simply fail, you'll get screwed by the system at the first opportunity. If you really want to "buck the system", cool down and watch some episodes of "The Wire". This series portays exactly and reallisticaly the inner workings of corrupt institutions and what happens to "lone wolves" trying to beat or change the system (spoiler - they get screwed by superiors and peers alike and achieve absolutely nothing).

I'm not saying it's impossible to transform the system from within. But trying to do it single-handedly is fighting a losing battle that is doomed to alienate your coworkers.

No, his pay was increased by less than in previous years. He didn't actually earn less.

Would you work twice the amount of time for less pay?

He didn't work twice the time. 32 lecture hours is an indicator of the workload - he spends far more on the course than just contact hours.

The problem seems systemic, he throws his hands in the air and gives up because he cannot do anything alone and is punished.

He still got a pay increase. Not as much as he would have liked, but it's not exactly horrible punishment. In one aspect he's just as guilty as his cheaters - he is more concerned for the big bux at the end than in doing his job properly: "If doing things properly means I get paid less, screw that".

EDIT: it's important to note that he also reports on the changed dynamic of the class, not just the dollars. That being said, it's interesting that the dollars come first.

If his pay increase was less than inflation, then many people would say he did actually earn less.

I've conducted several training sessions in the course of my career, and I can tell you that the time consumed by the actual class/training is a very small portion of the time spent by the one giving it. Preparation time can be 5-20 times as long, depending on the complexity. Now it is true that professors would reuse past materials, however, there is also time going through submissions of attendees, understanding them, and determining a fair grade. I'm not familiar with the US university system, except for what I see in movies/tv programs, so the professor likely had help.

That said, 44 hours spent on overhead that also degrades the experience of everyone involved, and as a result can interfere with the actual learning experience, is indeed worth finding alternative approaches for.

Instituting a system that by its nature is difficult to cheat is a much better approach.

(Based on his research output, I'd suggest he spends a lot of time on research.)

Further, his complaint seems to be that putting in this extra work resulted in a smaller pay increase (as a result of poor student evaluations), not that it cut into leisure.

Most people complain when they do the right thing and get punished for it.

From the tone and from personal experience, I'd guess he has been the exception - in the other direction. Seasoned professors have already learned their lesson and reached the same conclusion he did eventually: doing "the right thing" by going after the cheaters is a losing proposition because (a) it steals resources that could be better spent on non-cheaters and (b) makes all involved parties (students, teachers and administrators) look bad. It may still be a problem for future employers and society at large but demanding from someone to sacrifice his personal well-being for the greater good (when most others don't) is unrealistic.

One is 'income', the other is 'fulfilling societies expectations'. Nobody want's to be seen as being unethical or not fulfilling their duty. By automatically explaining away their actions and taking a fatalistic viewpoint you give away one of these two pressures, and probably the greater of the two.

Discussion regarding your first point has already begun, so I shall focus on the latter half of your post.

> If he can't tell his students are cheating without globally searching everything with this software, what are they supposedly learning?

I can't parse an argument from this sentence or the remainder of the paragraph. I would like to point out that the learning experience is being quantified in the form of a percentage-based grading system so I am uncertain of your point. Globally searching the papers is an attempt to discover plagarism -- are you suggesting that he should somehow recognize plagarism without attempting to actually compare his students' essays with each other and outside sources?

Edit: I mean, I'm honestly curious. Please try to elaborate.

Secondly, Many classes don't have in-class exams, including most English classes, some social studies classes, and indeed a certain percentage of classes in almost any field besides mathematics and engineering. Exams are, in my humble opinion, a relatively ineffective way of determining learning in many situations. For a business school class to not have exams is perfectly reasonable.

Still, the exam will be a problem. But if lots of students cheat, the lecturers will start making exams easier, because so many students struggle. And in Australia, there's a big belief amongst the education policy mandarins that exams are useless because they don't teach anything.

Still, most Math majors know their degree is useless if they don't learn anything, and they chose a brutally hard course with no set career path just to learn, so why bother cheating? But Engineering majors is another story.

That may be true in the lower level courses, but around 400 level, the work switches over entirely from calculations to proofs. Proofs are as widely varied and difficult to copy as essays, and are much harder to edit without screwing up unless you really understand them.

As I've said, many students self-enforce (somewhat - it's a continuum), because a Math degree that you didn't earn is barely worth the paper it's printed on.

With most students self-enforcing, the exams can still be rigorous. The 400-level courses can still be rigorous. And nobody will complain that the exams and 400 levels are too hard, because they still learnt enough to deal with them.

It's not a result of Math being "harder to copy". Math is easier to copy than an essay, because it's just not as unique. The difference is cultural. Most Math students don't want to cheat their way through, and so the professors are under no pressure to be soft.

Generally the homework is just meant to give you a good bit of practice, there is no way to pass the class without passing the exams.

Having experienced upper, lower, and graduate level courses in math and engineering (as well as taught at the lower level) I can honestly say that the amount of people that directly copy another student's assignments is much higher than most people think. This type of cheating tapers off as you enter the higher levels. On the other hand, I find that the "helping another student out" or "group study" type of cheating probably occurs with a 75%+ frequency among all levels of academics.

The first type (plagiarism) is definitely cheating while the second type (group think) is most likely classified as cheating but never acted against. The fact that you didn't see any cheating in your Number Theory course could simply be due to the fact that the second type of cheating is much more difficult to spot unless you are intimately familiar with the subject material and solution methods.

A student gets 80% on a 25% weighted "token" homework component, 60% on a 25% "lab" component (due to copying large portions of someone else's report), and 30% on the 50% exam (there's always a few low apples). They pass with 50%.

The lecturer sees that the exam is too hard, and makes it easier the next year.

if your homework is 1/4 of your grade in the class, that class is a "pass me" class. in some math classes the prof refuses to acknowledge that homework actually has a measurable effect on your grade, but he will use its presence to round up instead of down (i.e. 89.5 becomes a 90 instead of an 89)

Cheating doesn't happen when there's virtually no incentive. I stand by my point that you can cheat in Math homework more easily than equivalent non-Math homework, if you want to.

If 400-level Math coures are really impossible to cheat on, but there are 400-level non-Math courses that are possible to cheat on, I'd just argue that this is because they aren't really equivalent.

Let's not let the cultural politeness here get in the way of calling it like it is. "Coward" may be a strong word, but it sometimes does apply.

Preventing cheating ultimately comes down to changing the incentive structures in the university system in America. Allowing students to take revenge on their professors by basing financial rewards and promotions on student evaluations is clearly wrong. The metric by which professors are rewarded should be as independent from what their students think of them as possible. Outside exams by an unbiased third party is one idea, but I'm sure there are others.

What surprised me more than anything was the lack of mention of any sort of organized protest on the part of the professors. The faculty at many colleges throughout the U.S. has protested a number of issues very successfully. You'd think there would be a more unified voice on this matter, but perhaps I'm overlooking an incentive that guides most professors to just not care.