I think it would help if more people understood the time demands of teaching a course (neglecting other faculty duties, just looking at the teaching component). Many people have seen it only from the student side and not the instructor side.

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.

You're absolutely not alone in this experience, Panos.

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.

It's not shocking that a for-profit college was more motivated by getting happy graduates through their program than by enforcing academic honesty. But, this speaks to the larger issue of for-profit education as a whole.

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.

What about shifting to a teaching model where students review material and watch lectures (MIT OCW, Kahn, or even the professor's own recorded lectures) out of class, and do actual assignments (problem sets, essays) in class -- in an atmosphere that encourages working together so nobody feels "stuck" or gets stressed to the point where they feel like they have to cheat, while still preparing solutions separately? That seems to be direction favored by many of the advocates of reform in higher learning... advocates like Dr. Tae.

I thought of that as well. With this approach you hit another structural problem: activities such as solving problems etc are considered appropriate only for "recitations" (i.e., done by TA's) and not for "lectures" (the part where the professor teaches).

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.

By whom?

By the administration, which separates the credits for the courses into "recitations" and "lectures". The TA's get paid for the recitations/activities-based hours, the professors for the lectures.

Can they actually stop you from using your lectures in any way you see fit? This, and saying silly things when you at last slip into senility, would seem to me to be the main perks of tenure.

So the root of the problem is a structural flaw in the implementation of undergraduate education and its conflicting requirements with your other university responsibilities?

The system is broken.

I am an honest student. How would you feel about me being in your class? Not every student is at university in order to tick a box on the way to a middle class lifestyle. Some are there to learn for the sake of learning.

Derrida, most of the professors teach because of students like you. Nobody that I know enjoys teaching disinterested or bored students.

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.

I realize you are trying to maximize the quality of education you are providing. I don't think you can use that as an argument against failing students who blatantly cheat.

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.

I do regret letting the "copy & paste" students go relatively unharmed. I was naive to believe that they will not do it again. They were even more naive to try to cheat again in my own class.

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.