This reminds me of a case in Europe, where a PhD chemist was found to have faked/fabricated large parts of his graduate work, including his thesis. (It was on Derek Lowe's blog, pipeline.corante.com, and other places). He used Switzerland's ridiculous privacy laws to C&D journals, papers not to disclose his name in connection with the university investigation. (Or something like that, I'm not a lawyer). So he got off scot-free, and now he works in investment banking.
You mean those "ridiculous" kind of laws where peoples privacy is protected against media-exploitation during that equally ridiculous "presumption of innocence" bit that is part of due process?
Those silly Swiss, not to allow mere allegations to destroy peoples lives. Way better to humiliate people by parading them in front of the world press, and make sure their careers are destroyed without having to bother with silly stuff like facts and evidence, the way they do things in the US.
So no one knows his name? What about newspapers outside Switzerland?
> this person's lab notebooks have turned up missing, and are the only primary sources for the whole affair that can't be found
Not to condone what he did, but this is one of the reasons I don't keep any physical lab notebooks (scan, encrypt, and shred). Don't want people accessing/confiscating them without my consent.
1. The C&D letter came from "a faculty member at another institution." It could have come from me, or from a guy at the coffee shop down the block. A letter from a faculty member at another institution has about as much weight--considering that he has no claim in the supposed privacy of the material--as the paper it's printed on. NYU should grow a backbone and tell him to pound sand. If that's all it takes for them to turn tail, I wouldn't take their policies on academic freedom very seriously.
2. I'm guessing that the ever-so-helpful faculty member from another institution sent some sort of warning regarding FERPA, the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, which generally governs how academic institutions must handle student records. This act has been interpreted in such odd ways that there was a Supreme Court case over whether allowing students in elementary school to grade each other's homework was a violation of federal law (Owasso v. Falvo).
My understanding is that FERPA generally applies only to student records with some sort of personally identifiable information on them (i.e., posting grades with ID numbers, publishing contact info on the internet without permission, etc.). If I couldn't possibly identify the student from the portion of the email quoted, it's hard to understand how FERPA could rationally apply. If it were applicable, then any single quotation of any size from any communication with a student would be potentially banned from being repeated. Otherwse, it would be a violation of federal law for a professor to post a sentence of the sort: "A student asked me a very intriguing question today, which went as follows..."
3. If NYU or the professor just don't want the hassle of being at the center of a public debate, then fine. They are free to say or to not say whatever they like. But to scurry away from a debate and blame it on some imagined violation of a student "right" (see Gonzaga v. Doe for how far that "right" goes) is just silly.
Again, instead of trying to some how address the genuine issues raised by the original blog post, people are going to create unnecessary controversy around it till the issue is forgotten. People can't see the forest for the trees.
The main issue is that there is rampant cheating going on in the educational institutions. That's where the focus of the universities should be not on issuing these cease and desist letters.
Agreed. I had the same reaction. The guy outs the problem and the blatant use of cheating by his students and all he gets in return is a kick in the teeth by doing so.
So my question is, what if TurnItIn quoted a student's paper instead of the teacher quoting an email?
I ask because these university's are effectively giving these student's papers to TurnItIn to use and make a profit on however they please. The students have no say in the matter, and that doesn't seem to be very protective of their privacy.
Yes! I've been trying to tell people this since high school almost 10 years ago. Many educators force students to submit their papres to Turnitin or else take a failing grade on the assignment (which is often a final project which can cause you to fail the course).
1. Turnitin cites fair use ("it's educational"), but one of the metrics of fair use is the extent of use (they use the whole thing), if it's used for profit (they are), and the affect of merchantability. As shady as it sounds, paper mills are not illegal, copyright infringement is. If a paper mill rejects your paper because it's been through turnitin, that hurts me as an author.
2. Another aspect of the monetization that really grinds my gears is that every paper I am forced to submit benefits turnitin by making their database larger and thus helping grant them a monopoly in this market. I am being forced to write articles for the monetary benefit of a company. If they're making money off my paper I want a cut.
3. Turnitin does not offer any way to remove one's documents from their database. If it was merely being used temporarily to compare for plagiarism against internet or book sources then that'd be reasonable. But they keep my papers forever and will continue to monetize them for years after the fact.
I understand the plight of educators that want to stop plagiarism, but forcing me to irrevocably offer royalty-free licenses for my work to a for-profit company that is then charging the school (which if it is public is being funded by my tax dollars) is just insane any way you slice it.
Unfortunately the courts sided with Turnitin on this issue back in 2007 and 2009 and somehow ruled that their for-profit use was fair use.
Universities typically have all rights to their students' papers. I'm not sure that I'd expect privacy for college essays either, although it's a bit odd that you are technically not usually allowed to, say, post them to your blog.
There was a bit of backlash when the Australian university I attended started using TurnItIn for this very reason.
There was also a dubious clause in the T&C that stated something along the lines of "Copyright protection for Australian documents does not apply as TurnItIn stores all of the documents on servers in the U.S"
Well, since the students wouldn't provide their papers at a price TurnItIn found reasonable, TurnItIn is within their rights to just take them. Or something like that. I'm not sure if papers and movies are directly comparable.
The work of a student is the property of the university, like the work of an employee is the property of the employer. It's the university that (temporarily, before transferring it) owns the copyright on the paper the Ph.D. submitted. Not the Ph.D.
From the vice dean of faculty, quoted in the article:
> Stern faculty members are obligated to support the University and Stern honor codes and are never sanctioned in any way for doing so.
Ha! Nothing wrong with that, except that I thought he meant "faculty members who are stern". Here's the interesting bit:
> Moreover, the course evaluation input of any student who has an honor code infraction is removed from consideration when evaluating teaching performance.
How in the world can you do that, when student evaluations are anonymous? (Maybe they've switched to online evaluations, which would allow this while preserving anonymity.)
It seems to me the best solution would be to have a few student workers at the university that are the plagiarism "police". They would review the TurnItIn reports for all student papers and refer offenders to honor boards for punishment.
This would leave the professor free to teach and not have to a) spend time policing the student and b) be seen as the bad guy when students get caught and punished.
There should be an automatic filter, with manual review of violations, that all papers are submitted through. If it fails the filter, it's returned to the student, and the professor hasn't even seen it. The student can redo it, or protest the automated decision, and a human reviewer (an anonymous TA on-campuse) can consider the case (and see the offending text). The reviewer would then pass it on to the professor, who can grade it, or return it to the student to improve.
This removes the burden and the penalty from the professor, whose job isn't supposed to be policing plagiarism infractions.
I think we all saw this coming. Reading his blog post I had that weird feeling of, "How is he actually writing this?" I guess it was cathartic for him but of course NYU would want it taken down.
Shocking, absolutely shocking to read that MBA students would engage in such behavior. One might imagine, with great difficulty of course, that their sole purpose in entering business school was the pursuit of personal and financial gain by any means.
“We are also trying to satisfy ourselves that Stern graduates know what they are talking about when they represent themselves to practitioners and in the world of stiff competition with graduates of other top schools.”
Wait... is he actually admitting here that NYU wants the post removed because it reveals that >1/5 of its grads are cheaters?
I take it your school did not have a critical reasoning requirement and/or you cheated in class. The post stated that in one class 1/5 of the students had cheated.
Even if we pretend that one introductory class is a representative sample of the current enrolled student body you still can not jump from enrolled to graduated. It is entirely possible that a lot of the people who cheat in a 101 level class do not make it to graduation.
Please refrain from making silly posts in the future.
To me, the stance that this professor is taking is absurd. He's not helping anyone but himself giving up on efforts to prevent cheating.
I really thought he would have made a compelling argument to resolve this, but it seems more like he's become so frustrated with cheating that he's resigned himself from that aspect of education.
With that said, I do disagree with the stance that universities take on cheating. The system of punishment is too focused on catching cheaters and punishing them so harshly as scare others to never consider it. I think this prevents many students from being more creative or exploring their own ideas based on previous work.
I believe cheating is not something a student commits because of inability, cheating is a crime of laziness. Therefore, rather than trying to catch cheating, schools should just making cheating pointless. Papers and assigments should be completely open and encourage students to look at any previous work and allow them to include it in their own work simply with a citation.
To add, professors seem to focused on their students finding credible sources to cite rather than allowing students to form their own ideas. Credible ideas can be founded from less credible sources and that is what should really matter.
"We are teaching the next generation of business leaders, and it is important that they think about the consequences of their actions,"
Exactly. You're not just there to learn the course material. Maybe cheaters don't even know what they're doing is wrong, and by ignoring it you're doing them a disservice.
Regarding the "poisoned class environment" issue, it seems like there's a better way to go about it discretely.
1. Include your plagiarism policy clearly on the course syllabus. Be clear about what constitutes plagiarism, how they should cite passages taken from other material, etc.
2. Don't tell students you're using Turnitin, just have them submit papers electronically somehow and run the papers through Turnitin yourself.
3. The first time you catch someone plagiarizing give them a zero on the paper (depending on the severity) and tell them if it happens again they'll be kicked out of the class (or whatever your university's policy is)
The problem this particular teacher ran into was that kicking someone out of a class for plagarism / reporting to the university (as per the policy) is a big process, not just a print screen of Turnitin's report...
That means that the teacher is spending hours and hours and hours on cheating...
Funny story - during my stint in Grad School there was some sensitivity to how each person wanted to be referred to.
All Post-Docs insisted on being called "Dr." rather than "Mr."and all tenured Profs on being called "Prof." rather than "Dr."
Non-tenured Assistant Profs had the worst choice get called Dr. and upset themselves or get called "Prof." and potentially upset the people who could grant them tenure :)
Guess which one they choose?
In certain geographic and/or certain academic circles leaving out the 'dr' is, depending on how you look at it, a newish kind of snobbery or a recognition that getting the PhD isn't all that much of an accomplishment. Not putting emphasis on the 'dr' part is like saying 'of course everybody who matters has a PhD, no need to mention it every time'.
It's the same reasoning as why one wouldn't list a driving license as an accomplishment when one is a professional race car driver - 'of course' everybody who is somebody in racing has passed their driving exam a long time ago.
(the same comment was mentioned in the comments to the OP - I was quite surprised nobody mentioned my above reasoning, I thought it was common knowledge by now).
"Mister" is correct for any adult male. They may prefer the more exclusive title, but that's no more obligatory than my preference to be addressed as "Captain Awesome." And some style manuals (including the Associated Press Stylebook) actually forbid "Dr." unless the story is about medicine and the person in question is an MD.
People with Ph.D.s are not that frequently called Dr. Also, if there is one source that I am pretty sure would know how to refer to professors and Ph.D.s, it would be the Chronicle of Higher Education.
That's pretty much how it is. My wife teaches in a NYC public school and has a big issue with plagiarism, although there she can report it all she wants and no one would do anything. Additionally if she tried to assign homework like this professor suggest they would not do it. They would simply take a zero then to have to do a presentation. And then it becomes an issue where the students fail and the teachers passing average drops severely.
I had the experience of getting my graduate degree from an undergraduate institution with a strict honor code, and my graduate degree from a school without an honor code.
Under the honor code, a student caught cheating would, at minimum, fail the course, and at maximum, be expelled.
At the other school (theoretically more prestigious), the typical sanction for cheating was to receive an "F" on the suspect assignment.
Not surprisingly, in my experience, cheating was far, far more common at the second university than at the first ...
And of course NYU does nothing to back him up. The spirit of openness and intellectual honesty that universities should be promoting falls by the wayside when it involves a little risk and a little conflict. He did some real research into an interesting and relevant topic, and got the shaft from the university because it uncovered uncomfortable truths.
I'd put this on with the sex class incident a few months ago at Northwestern as far as disappointing moves by institutions I'd like to respect.
If cheating one's way out of doing real work is so pervasive in the institutions training our political and business leaders, i guess the current cirsis situation is not very surprising. What kind of people would you expect at the top of a system that encourages cheating vs doing your homework ?
[+] [-] uvdiv|14 years ago|reply
edit: Here's the story
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/09/25/faked_data_a...
primaries,
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/87/i39/8739news4.html
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/09/fake-data-...
[+] [-] rickmb|14 years ago|reply
You mean those "ridiculous" kind of laws where peoples privacy is protected against media-exploitation during that equally ridiculous "presumption of innocence" bit that is part of due process?
Those silly Swiss, not to allow mere allegations to destroy peoples lives. Way better to humiliate people by parading them in front of the world press, and make sure their careers are destroyed without having to bother with silly stuff like facts and evidence, the way they do things in the US.
[+] [-] sedev|14 years ago|reply
That's one hell of a punchline. Is that serious, or is that just a grim joke? Because sadly it's right smack in the middle of Poe's Law territory.
[+] [-] yaix|14 years ago|reply
That makes absolutely sense.
[+] [-] w1ntermute|14 years ago|reply
> this person's lab notebooks have turned up missing, and are the only primary sources for the whole affair that can't be found
Not to condone what he did, but this is one of the reasons I don't keep any physical lab notebooks (scan, encrypt, and shred). Don't want people accessing/confiscating them without my consent.
[+] [-] hncommenter13|14 years ago|reply
1. The C&D letter came from "a faculty member at another institution." It could have come from me, or from a guy at the coffee shop down the block. A letter from a faculty member at another institution has about as much weight--considering that he has no claim in the supposed privacy of the material--as the paper it's printed on. NYU should grow a backbone and tell him to pound sand. If that's all it takes for them to turn tail, I wouldn't take their policies on academic freedom very seriously.
2. I'm guessing that the ever-so-helpful faculty member from another institution sent some sort of warning regarding FERPA, the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, which generally governs how academic institutions must handle student records. This act has been interpreted in such odd ways that there was a Supreme Court case over whether allowing students in elementary school to grade each other's homework was a violation of federal law (Owasso v. Falvo).
My understanding is that FERPA generally applies only to student records with some sort of personally identifiable information on them (i.e., posting grades with ID numbers, publishing contact info on the internet without permission, etc.). If I couldn't possibly identify the student from the portion of the email quoted, it's hard to understand how FERPA could rationally apply. If it were applicable, then any single quotation of any size from any communication with a student would be potentially banned from being repeated. Otherwse, it would be a violation of federal law for a professor to post a sentence of the sort: "A student asked me a very intriguing question today, which went as follows..."
3. If NYU or the professor just don't want the hassle of being at the center of a public debate, then fine. They are free to say or to not say whatever they like. But to scurry away from a debate and blame it on some imagined violation of a student "right" (see Gonzaga v. Doe for how far that "right" goes) is just silly.
[+] [-] g123g|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darksaga|14 years ago|reply
I'm glad I never stayed in academia.
[+] [-] sgk284|14 years ago|reply
I ask because these university's are effectively giving these student's papers to TurnItIn to use and make a profit on however they please. The students have no say in the matter, and that doesn't seem to be very protective of their privacy.
[+] [-] jbermudes|14 years ago|reply
1. Turnitin cites fair use ("it's educational"), but one of the metrics of fair use is the extent of use (they use the whole thing), if it's used for profit (they are), and the affect of merchantability. As shady as it sounds, paper mills are not illegal, copyright infringement is. If a paper mill rejects your paper because it's been through turnitin, that hurts me as an author.
2. Another aspect of the monetization that really grinds my gears is that every paper I am forced to submit benefits turnitin by making their database larger and thus helping grant them a monopoly in this market. I am being forced to write articles for the monetary benefit of a company. If they're making money off my paper I want a cut.
3. Turnitin does not offer any way to remove one's documents from their database. If it was merely being used temporarily to compare for plagiarism against internet or book sources then that'd be reasonable. But they keep my papers forever and will continue to monetize them for years after the fact.
I understand the plight of educators that want to stop plagiarism, but forcing me to irrevocably offer royalty-free licenses for my work to a for-profit company that is then charging the school (which if it is public is being funded by my tax dollars) is just insane any way you slice it.
Unfortunately the courts sided with Turnitin on this issue back in 2007 and 2009 and somehow ruled that their for-profit use was fair use.
[+] [-] JoachimSchipper|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobbles|14 years ago|reply
There was also a dubious clause in the T&C that stated something along the lines of "Copyright protection for Australian documents does not apply as TurnItIn stores all of the documents on servers in the U.S"
[+] [-] tedunangst|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Confusion|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JadeNB|14 years ago|reply
> Stern faculty members are obligated to support the University and Stern honor codes and are never sanctioned in any way for doing so.
Ha! Nothing wrong with that, except that I thought he meant "faculty members who are stern". Here's the interesting bit:
> Moreover, the course evaluation input of any student who has an honor code infraction is removed from consideration when evaluating teaching performance.
How in the world can you do that, when student evaluations are anonymous? (Maybe they've switched to online evaluations, which would allow this while preserving anonymity.)
[+] [-] nigelsampson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lwat|14 years ago|reply
I understand that those students simply don't get to fill in evaluations.
[+] [-] Sukotto|14 years ago|reply
http://www.businessinsider.com/nyu-professor-class-cheating-...
[+] [-] jrockway|14 years ago|reply
My guess is that this is bullshit. I work at an investment bank and I've never given anyone any official transcripts.
[+] [-] AndrewHampton|14 years ago|reply
This would leave the professor free to teach and not have to a) spend time policing the student and b) be seen as the bad guy when students get caught and punished.
[+] [-] charliepark|14 years ago|reply
There should be an automatic filter, with manual review of violations, that all papers are submitted through. If it fails the filter, it's returned to the student, and the professor hasn't even seen it. The student can redo it, or protest the automated decision, and a human reviewer (an anonymous TA on-campuse) can consider the case (and see the offending text). The reviewer would then pass it on to the professor, who can grade it, or return it to the student to improve.
This removes the burden and the penalty from the professor, whose job isn't supposed to be policing plagiarism infractions.
[+] [-] ilamont|14 years ago|reply
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254
[+] [-] timf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcc80|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] to_jon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sunspeck|14 years ago|reply
Wait... is he actually admitting here that NYU wants the post removed because it reveals that >1/5 of its grads are cheaters?
[+] [-] dfc|14 years ago|reply
Even if we pretend that one introductory class is a representative sample of the current enrolled student body you still can not jump from enrolled to graduated. It is entirely possible that a lot of the people who cheat in a 101 level class do not make it to graduation.
Please refrain from making silly posts in the future.
[+] [-] vash_stampy|14 years ago|reply
I really thought he would have made a compelling argument to resolve this, but it seems more like he's become so frustrated with cheating that he's resigned himself from that aspect of education.
With that said, I do disagree with the stance that universities take on cheating. The system of punishment is too focused on catching cheaters and punishing them so harshly as scare others to never consider it. I think this prevents many students from being more creative or exploring their own ideas based on previous work.
I believe cheating is not something a student commits because of inability, cheating is a crime of laziness. Therefore, rather than trying to catch cheating, schools should just making cheating pointless. Papers and assigments should be completely open and encourage students to look at any previous work and allow them to include it in their own work simply with a citation.
To add, professors seem to focused on their students finding credible sources to cite rather than allowing students to form their own ideas. Credible ideas can be founded from less credible sources and that is what should really matter.
[+] [-] xom|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlrobinson|14 years ago|reply
Exactly. You're not just there to learn the course material. Maybe cheaters don't even know what they're doing is wrong, and by ignoring it you're doing them a disservice.
Regarding the "poisoned class environment" issue, it seems like there's a better way to go about it discretely.
1. Include your plagiarism policy clearly on the course syllabus. Be clear about what constitutes plagiarism, how they should cite passages taken from other material, etc.
2. Don't tell students you're using Turnitin, just have them submit papers electronically somehow and run the papers through Turnitin yourself.
3. The first time you catch someone plagiarizing give them a zero on the paper (depending on the severity) and tell them if it happens again they'll be kicked out of the class (or whatever your university's policy is)
[+] [-] furyg3|14 years ago|reply
That means that the teacher is spending hours and hours and hours on cheating...
[+] [-] burgerbrain|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suprgeek|14 years ago|reply
All Post-Docs insisted on being called "Dr." rather than "Mr."and all tenured Profs on being called "Prof." rather than "Dr."
Non-tenured Assistant Profs had the worst choice get called Dr. and upset themselves or get called "Prof." and potentially upset the people who could grant them tenure :) Guess which one they choose?
[+] [-] roel_v|14 years ago|reply
It's the same reasoning as why one wouldn't list a driving license as an accomplishment when one is a professional race car driver - 'of course' everybody who is somebody in racing has passed their driving exam a long time ago.
(the same comment was mentioned in the comments to the OP - I was quite surprised nobody mentioned my above reasoning, I thought it was common knowledge by now).
[+] [-] chc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] williamdix|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marshray|14 years ago|reply
You there, academic! Back into the closet!
[+] [-] Caballera|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] URSpider94|14 years ago|reply
Under the honor code, a student caught cheating would, at minimum, fail the course, and at maximum, be expelled.
At the other school (theoretically more prestigious), the typical sanction for cheating was to receive an "F" on the suspect assignment.
Not surprisingly, in my experience, cheating was far, far more common at the second university than at the first ...
[+] [-] dougws|14 years ago|reply
I'd put this on with the sex class incident a few months ago at Northwestern as far as disappointing moves by institutions I'd like to respect.
[+] [-] nickolai|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kylemaxwell|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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