Christina Rawls called my attention to this discussion of a computer science professor at NYU frustrated with cheaters. The original post was removed, but here is the professor's follow up reflection. Apparently, the bad evaluations (which may have been a consequence of his efforts to catch cheaters) were cited in justifying the university's low merit raise. To the author's surprise the blogosphere discussion turned into a referendum on overpaid/whiny professors and lazy students. He was also notified by the university that he probably violating federal privacy laws, and he had to take down his post. Thus far my sympathies were entirely with the aggrieved prof (and against the spineless NYU administrators with an eye toward the bottom line).
The Prof was quoted in insidehigher ed: "Apparently the public is not ready for a civil discussion. This was a post to illustrate the futility of fighting cheating by force. I wanted to start a discussion about plagiarism and how we can design our courses and evaluation strategies to make cheating irrelevant. The discussion was derailed into a finger-pointing flame war, that I did not particularly enjoy. My gut feeling right now is that I will never write about my teaching experiences again."
I would have thought that a better conclusion would be to write more smartly (and less narcissisticly) about plagiarism.
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