“Don’t Make Me Be a Jerk!”

The following statement is based on an idea that I find extremely repugnant:

Students have an ethical obligation not to cheat, of course. But faculty also have an obligation not to create situations in which cheating is likely to occur.

If we follow the logic of the quoted statement, it must be acceptable to say things like:

– Of course, rape is a crime. But potential rape victims have an obligation not to create situations in which rape is likely to occur. They should not wear provocative clothing, for example.

– Of course, stealing is a crime. But potential crime victims have an obligation not to create situations in which stealing is likely to occur. Don’t leave your bag unattended or somebody might be provoked into stealing your wallet.

– Of course, beating people is wrong. But they shouldn’t have provoked me into hitting them by saying things that annoy me.

If you think that faculty members have “an obligation” to save you from your cheating nature by removing every temptation to be dishonest, this means that, on top of being extremely immature, you are devoid of any sense of morality whatsoever. There are tragic life-and-death situations where people feel forced to do things they would never consider doing otherwise. But if something as insignificant as the format of an assignment you receive in college makes your integrity crumble, then you, not your professor, are at fault.

Question: when will we finally start treating students as the adults that they are?

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31 responses to ““Don’t Make Me Be a Jerk!””

Angus Johnston

August 31, 2012

That was my post, and my decision to frame the student’s obligation — but not the professor’s — as an ethical one was deliberate.

I was writing as a professor, and writing as a professor who was appalled at the apparent shoddy test design and setup on display here. And in portions of the post that you chose not to quote, I explained my position further:

“When you declare behavior that you can’t police, behavior that may be entirely benign, to be cheating, you erase the bright-line distinction between proper and improper behavior that is essential to academic integrity. And when you craft a take-home test that’s potentially confusing and deny students any licit mechanism for resolving their confusion, you place students in an entirely untenable position.”

The problem here wasn’t merely, or even primarily, that the professor made cheating easy. Indeed, making it easy to cheat doesn’t necessarily make cheating likely — the adoption of a strong honor code can make cheating rare even where there are few practical barriers to cheating.

No, the core problem, as I said, was that the professor in question appears to have sloppily blurred the line between proper and improper behavior, and to have created unintended confusion that he gave students insufficient mechanisms to resolve without acting collectively in violation of his rules. Even if no student had cheated, I’d still regard those failures as failures.

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bloggerclarissa

August 31, 2012

““When you declare behavior that you can’t police, behavior that may be entirely benign, to be cheating, you erase the bright-line distinction between proper and improper behavior that is essential to academic integrity. And when you craft a take-home test that’s potentially confusing and deny students any licit mechanism for resolving their confusion, you place students in an entirely untenable position.”

– I disagree with this statement, too, so quoting it changes nothing. 🙂

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bloggerclarissa

August 31, 2012

“No, the core problem, as I said, was that the professor in question appears to have sloppily blurred the line between proper and improper behavior, and to have created unintended confusion that he gave students insufficient mechanisms to resolve without acting collectively in violation of his rules. Even if no student had cheated, I’d still regard those failures as failures.”

– And now imagine how easy it would be to take absolutely any policy or activity you use in class and second-guess it to death in online discussions. As if an educator’s job wasn’t hard enough as it is. As if the image of irresponsible lazy professor wasn’t promoted everywhere already. Why should we, the academics, join the assault on academia? Why not give our colleague the benefit of the doubt? Isn’t there a slight possibility that a prof might actually know what he’s doing and why in a way we can’t know because we are not in that classroom?

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1. Angus Johnston
  
  August 31, 2012
  
  I don’t regard criticism of faculty practices that are inimical to students’ interests as joining an “assault on academia.” If this particular prof hasn’t engaged in those practices, good for him. But I wrote based on the info I have, and the practices themselves are certainly worth criticizing.
  
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  1. bloggerclarissa
    
    August 31, 2012
    
    What makes you think you know better what is helpful or damaging to the students you never met than the professor who teaches them?
    
    No other profession in the world is scrutinized and second-guessed to the degree ours is.
    
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2. Angus Johnston
  
  August 31, 2012
  
  I’m a historian of higher education. I’m a college teacher with something like a decade of classroom experience. I’m a longtime advocate of students’ rights in the classroom. I may be right or wrong in this instance, but I’m not unqualified to address these issues.
  
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Thoreau

August 31, 2012

I’m kind of torn about this construction. I’ll offer two contradictory takes. The professor isn’t really the victim, or at least is not the person suffering the most harm here. One take is that the professor is a person with responsibility for upholding standards, and one aspect of that is producing an environment with adequate security measures. In that case, the professor’s lax measures do not mitigate the cheaters’ guilt in any way, but they do mean that the professor must also take some responsibility. It doesn’t mean that the cheaters should get off lightly, just that the professor must also bear responsibility in some way. It isn’t zero sum.

The opposite take, one adopted successfully by schools with honor codes, is that students are solely responsible for cheating, and any security measures above some minimal level actually demonstrate disrespect for students and their integrity. This is a minority stance, but it’s one that’s been adopted successfully by a number of schools with very high standards. The key at those places is internal culture.

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Z

August 31, 2012

I find honor codes work in honors courses, or advanced courses, or courses in subjects students in them really want to study. In required courses I have not found them to work. I hear they do not work in courses that are graded on a competitive curve (e.g. only the top 10% may get A- and above, etc.) or that are required for entrance to professional schools (e.g. medical schools), where people will do anything — not just cheat, but also sabotage other peoples’ lab work, etc. — to get higher scores themselves.

I have heard of people whose work was sabotaged by others, including having reading put on reserve in the library defaced so others could not read it, complaining to the professor, and having the professor say it was not his problem. So that makes the professor complicit with the cheating and sabotage; implicitly he is saying that that is, in fact, the way to get ahead.

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bloggerclarissa

August 31, 2012

“The professor isn’t really the victim, or at least is not the person suffering the most harm here.”

– I think the prof is absolutely victimized by the people who cheat. As a professor, I suffer enormously when I discover that students disrespect me by cheating. It’s the same feeling you have as when somebody approaches you and spits in your face.

” In that case, the professor’s lax measures do not mitigate the cheaters’ guilt in any way, but they do mean that the professor must also take some responsibility.”

– I can’t think of a single situation where I would be willing to take responsibility for the actions of other adults. Does anybody have any examples?

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1. Z
  
  August 31, 2012
  
  Yes, cheating. It is insulting to the professor, but also to the students who are not cheating. And the professor is the authority in the room, so they are responsible for the situation, yes.
  
  Completely different: if you have an accident going up my porch stairs, I’m responsible and it is me or my insurance company that has to pay for your injuries … regardless of whether I think my stairs were safe, you were using them safely, etc. The deal is: I own the place, I am responsible for handling what happens in it.
  
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2. Thoreau
  
  August 31, 2012
  
  “- I can’t think of a single situation where I would be willing to take responsibility for the actions of other adults. Does anybody have any examples?”
  
  If you were in a role where you are responsible for security, and due to your lax measures somebody committed a crime, would that be your responsibility?
  
  The part I’m torn about is whether the professor is responsible for security, or whether the students bear sole responsibility for the integrity of test-taking. I don’t like being responsible for security, and I respect schools that have honor codes, but I wonder if I’m in denial about my role.
  
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  1. bloggerclarissa
    
    August 31, 2012
    
    I will be responsible for not doing my job but, of course, not for the crime. Imagine what such an approach would do to the criminal justice system!
    
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3. Kellen
  
  August 31, 2012
  
  When I studied abroad, there were professors who would give high marks to students who handed in essays that were clearly not written in the students’ own words. (There were some classes taught in English, and as a native speaker, maybe it was more obvious to me than the professors.) Isn’t there SOME obligation on the professor’s part to at least not reward this cheating?
  
  Although, I understand your point, because the professor cannot be expected to always pick up on plagiarism, of course…
  
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  1. bloggerclarissa
    
    August 31, 2012
    
    It’s so hard to punish cheaters precisely because nobody trusts a professor’s judgment and there is always an outcry in defense of the poor innocent victims who were forced to cheat by some action on the part of an evil prof.
    
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Jonathan

August 31, 2012

The professor said they couldn’t discuss the exam among themselves. They did. There was nothing ambiguous about that. That the test was not well-written is irrelevant.

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bloggerclarissa

August 31, 2012

Exactly.

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Z

August 31, 2012

That might work if you had really created a classroom atmosphere where, after a whole semester of discussion and so on, they were now willing to play this game. The professor would also have had to have office hours, not cancel them … they didn’t understand the question and he had decamped, do you really expect them not to ask each other or someone in this situation? It sounds to me like a situation where obedience might be self destructive (and of little academic interest).

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Thoreau

August 31, 2012

So, anyway, in my analysis, the professor is not analogous to the victim of theft or rape, but rather the owner or security director of the venue in which the theft or rape occurred. The victims are the honest students, since the value of their work has been diluted.

The key issue is whether responsibility lies solely with the cheaters, or also with the faculty. That comes down to the question of whether you have an honor code.

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bloggerclarissa

August 31, 2012

“So, anyway, in my analysis, the professor is not analogous to the victim of theft or rape, but rather the owner or security director of the venue in which the theft or rape occurred. The victims are the honest students, since the value of their work has been diluted.”

– I’ve never even heard of such an approach, so now I’m a little baffled. Students who cheat, cheat the professor. They direct their lies to the professor. Honest students might be accidental victims but if you lie to me, then I am the central victim of your lies. (I don;t mean you personally here, of course.)

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1. Angus Johnston
  
  August 31, 2012
  
  If one of my students cheats, I’m materially harmed only minimally, if at all. But in a class where the students are graded on a curve, the harm to non-cheating students is clear and obvious — their grades go down as the cheaters’ grades go up.
  
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  1. bloggerclarissa
    
    August 31, 2012
    
    I am completely opposed to curve grading.
    
    It is your right to decide that cheating doesn’t damage you. But other people might feel differently and that is their right.
    
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2. Z
  
  August 31, 2012
  
  It is true, although it can be the honest students who actually pay the price. If I don’t catch cheaters, and I am grading on a competitive curve as they do in biology and such fields, and the cheaters get ahead of those who did not cheat, then the whole thing costs me nothing personally but can cost the honest students things like admission to medical school (in a worst case kind of scenario).
  
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  1. bloggerclarissa
    
    August 31, 2012
    
    I’d much rather abstain from discussing the idiotic practice which is curve grading in this thread. What can one say about it rather than that it is as stupid and pernicious as multiple-choice testing?
    
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3. Angus Johnston
  
  August 31, 2012
  
  I thought we weren’t supposed to criticize other professors’ teaching practices.
  
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  1. bloggerclarissa
    
    August 31, 2012
    
    “I thought we weren’t supposed to criticize other professors’ teaching practices.”
    
    – OK, let’s pretend that professors freely choose this idiocy instead of being coerced into it by administrators. That must be because professors are irrational idiots, I guess.
    
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August 31, 2012

Hard to expect them not to talk to each other in this situation.

And I do actually try to create situations not conducive to cheating — not because it’s my job to be the conscience of cheaters or anything like that, but because I want to treat those who aren’t cheating as fairly as possible. If cheating ends up paying, it is kind of an insult to those who don’t.

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David Bellamy

August 31, 2012

This happened to me once while I was an undergraduate in 1962. I was taking a quiz and could not recall immediately the formula for cos(u – v) in terms of cos(u), cos(v), sin(u), and sin(v). I looked up from my paper at the ceiling to try to remember it, but in the process of moving my eyes, I saw the formula written on the paper of the student next to me on the right. Whether I would have remembered it myself, I will never know, but it was too late to take the quiz honestly. A less crowded classroom would have prevented such an occurrence.

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September 2, 2012

Now, though, I have actually seen a copy of the exam and the instructions, and they’re air tight.

I give take-home exams like this and a problem I have seen is, people who look everywhere BUT the course materials for the answers. When I ask about creacionismo and Vicente Huidobro, and they answer about creationism and evolution, they *really* give themselves away as to not having understood at the most basic level what the course was about.

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bloggerclarissa

September 2, 2012

“When I ask about creacionismo and Vicente Huidobro, and they answer about creationism and evolution”

– Laughing and beating myself over the head with my Kindle. 🙂 🙂 This is too good. 🙂

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1. Z
  
  September 2, 2012
  
  I have a sister with very bad grades and she was always convinced you had to give the teacher “what they wanted.”
  
  I never was. I *would* give them what they SAID they wanted: the right length, MLA format or whatever, etc., i.e. I did in fact follow instructions to the letter, but beyond that I’d say whatever I wanted. I always got good grades, but my sister was constantly telling me that if I gave that paper to that teacher they would fail it because they would disagree with my attitude. This never, ever happened and I am Phi Beta Kappa and so on.
  
  Why is it that the bad students are the ones so fervently convinced that everything is a game, you have to guess what the teacher secretly wants you to say and say it?
  
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Z

September 2, 2012

P.S. Commenter at LP says exam is jargony and incomprehensible, though, a clear example of how not to write. I think it’s just technical.

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