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Comment by twrensch | Hacker News Reader

I spent five years teaching at the University level. The beginning of the end of my academic career was receiving an e-mail from a student explaining one of my (programming) assignments and asking if they could write this one too. To me this was an obvious case of VERY incorrectly choosing the "to" address for an e-mail.

I immediately contacted my department head and was ready to apply the school's academic dishonesty policy, which would lead to--at least--failure of the course. It didn't happen. The student came up with a lame excuse, I was chided for harassing the student, and it was all swept under the rug. I was tempted to resign in protest, but kept with it for two more years before quietly leaving academics.

I enjoy teaching, I think I'm good at it and my students tended to agree. Unfortunately, I can't make myself teach in the current educational system here in the US.

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A resounding upvote.

I only taught for 2 years as a graduate teaching assistant, but we were told in training to never accuse anyone of cheating ever. It opened the university up to being sued, and made everyone's life more complicated.

I guess this particular part has never greatly bothered me about academia, though plenty of things are quite broken and bother me.

I mainly value whatever education takes place, not the formalities, so if someone who doesn't deserve it gets a degree, who cares? I can see that for people who care about the value of the pieces of paper, it's important to keep unqualified people from getting them. I just can't bring myself to care that much about that, though. To me the important question is whether people who want to learn are able to; not whether people who don't want to learn slip through or don't slip through.

The much bigger failing in my mind isn't that cheaters aren't sufficiently punished, but that motivated students who want to learn things other than exactly what they're assigned are given virtually no assistance, and often actively discouraged (the side-projects-are-bad, keep-your-head-down-and-do-what-you're-told mentality).

Different perspective though, from an academics point of view that does make an effort to reach out to students and teach them well this cheating would be disheartening.

I can see that, but I'm an academic myself, and somehow it doesn't bother me much (it does bother many of my colleagues).

I guess I'm most strongly motivated by providing assistance and resources to people who want to learn, so whatever happens with the people who don't want to learn doesn't bother me that much. I'll enforce whatever rules I have to, to the extent the institution provides me a means to do so (and requires me to), but it just isn't a big motivator for me.

I would prefer the proportion of students who are there to learn to be higher (it'd be a more enjoyable and motivating environment), but I don't think being more of a hardass on cheating is going to solve that problem. It's probably true that there are students who, while tempted to cheat, would be great students if they were scared away from that temptation by vigorous enforcement. My guess is that number is fairly small, though.

I think most of the people who cheat are the kind of student who doesn't really want to be in this major at all, but feels they need to get this degree to get a job. I think vigorous enforcement with those students, even if it successfully stamps out cheating, will just result in a bunch of students grudgingly doing the work because they now have no choice. But that kind of student still isn't that fun to teach, so my motivation to expend more effort than I have to on converting "cheaters" into "grudging teeth-gritters" is pretty low.

I'm sorry to be a pain, but by not punishing the cheating 'free riders', you are pushing the cost of those free riders onto the good students.

The value of of the good students' education is eroded by poor quality of the cheaters.

It matters more when the credential is used in licensing a difficult and socially important function like medical care, though. I think people were undestandably up in arms a while back about the institutions which were giving out fake degrees.

Sounds similar the story about a week ago where are professor is being disciplined for recommending that a grad student's degree be revoked, because the student did not meet the requirements.

Robin Hanson from OvercomingBias says it best: School isn't about learning:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/politics-isnt-a.html

I was a lab instructor for one of my favorite professors after excelling in his class. I caught one of his students cheating blatantly (assembly code was nearly identical to another students, just shifted around a bit)

The professor is a good man, and was very upset. It was almost kind of sad, he was angry but it was almost like he could've alternatively started tearing up at any moment. Damn administration didn't do anything about it though, and that very student I caught cheating has since been in several classes with me. Burns me up.

Guess it shouldn't surprise me that the prof. hasn't had any courses for several quarters now. I swear, the good ones don't seem to last. The only one we've got left in the department that cares about the students, I'm not even sure how he manages.

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