> Aside from all the ways that I can be empathetic, there was a lot of evidence in the chat that students were blowing off the course and making a mockery of the whole thing. But, the brash language in the chat could also be covering up difficult issues students were facing in their lives that were preventing them from committing to their studies.
This author really does not want to confront some plain truths about his students and academia as it exists today.
> My understanding is that students who collect multiple faculty action reports like baseball cards may cease to be continuing students at my institution.
I suspect the institution doesn't give a good goddamn as long as the students wounds are self-inflected and their checks still clear.
> Even the student who sent 15 emails of lies got a second chance.
In a strange way, this article is really a character study about the author, and not at all about cheating. The author is deeply interested in procedure and drama, which makes for amusing storytelling, like a detective that's trying to find a murderer while constantly trying to convince himself that whoever he was, he didn't really mean it.
It is interesting how often he is attempting to detect cheating and plagiarism, even writing his own R scripts, and then says
> TBH, I’m so over trying to deter my students from cheating. There are so many ways I could lock down my courses. Not interested. If real life was about being monitored by proctoring software that spies on you at home and forces you to test under duress, it would be a sad real life.
But then continues attempting plagiarism detection for the rest of the semester, and the next! Maybe he considers it separate from cheating. Slightly baffled by all his behavior. He is quite kind, and expending extraordinary effort over students who are adamant about expending none at all.
> this article is really a character study about the author, and not at all about cheating
Yeah exactly. Extreme cop energy in the writing those scripts and publicly documenting so much of the chat text verbatim. I started out sympathetic to the author, and still am abstractly, that's a hard spot for a teacher to be in.
But it started to feel like the author expected me to find it... titillating? attractively transgressive? Just a gross secondhand voyeurism type thing I didn't like it at all.
Talk to the students or fail them all and move on. I don't think the impulse to invest so much time and technique in this "investigation" should be encouraged.
> I don't think the impulse to invest so much time and technique in this "investigation" should be encouraged
It resulted in a large amount of the students finally engaging with the material and ultimately caring about the course, though. I don't believe it is healthy to expect that of a professor, but it seemed to work out here.
Maybe that's true only because the author posted this, though. Hopefully the course changes that the author made will encourage future students to actually spend time on the course. If that's true, does it point towards a deeper solution with making courses more engaging? Not that students cheating are the professor's fault, of course. Nonetheless...
This author really does not want to confront some plain truths about his students and academia as it exists today.
> My understanding is that students who collect multiple faculty action reports like baseball cards may cease to be continuing students at my institution.
I suspect the institution doesn't give a good goddamn as long as the students wounds are self-inflected and their checks still clear.
> Even the student who sent 15 emails of lies got a second chance.
In a strange way, this article is really a character study about the author, and not at all about cheating. The author is deeply interested in procedure and drama, which makes for amusing storytelling, like a detective that's trying to find a murderer while constantly trying to convince himself that whoever he was, he didn't really mean it.
It is interesting how often he is attempting to detect cheating and plagiarism, even writing his own R scripts, and then says
> TBH, I’m so over trying to deter my students from cheating. There are so many ways I could lock down my courses. Not interested. If real life was about being monitored by proctoring software that spies on you at home and forces you to test under duress, it would be a sad real life.
But then continues attempting plagiarism detection for the rest of the semester, and the next! Maybe he considers it separate from cheating. Slightly baffled by all his behavior. He is quite kind, and expending extraordinary effort over students who are adamant about expending none at all.