alt Hacker NewsMy “power trip professor” alarm went off reading:
> If we find reason to believe that a student or team has cheated on any assignment, we may inform the student or team promptly, or we may decide to silently accumulate evidence against the student or team on later assignments.
Why role play what you may or may not do if you encounter cheating.
The university has rules about how academic integrity is handled independent of the syllabus.
Including this line in the syllabus, and again at the top of the blog post is weird
Replies
jubilanti • yesterday at 11:29 PM
edit: HN seems to loves people who steal, lie, and cheat. my bad
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That's not roleplaying, that's the basics of how you handle stuff like this. For lower-division level technical assignments, there's only so much free expression to extract signal from with regards to copying per assignment. Any individual assignment could likely be appealed as coincidence. If the same students turn in 2 more assignments that are suspiciously similar to the same other students, then you can have a pretty iron-clad argument for cheating.
Students cheating at lower-division university level courses is almost entirely a symptom of the students being poorly suited for the course material. Students who are interested and capable, but overwhelmed with the amount of work tend to just turn in incomplete assignments, or not turn in work at all. Encouraging the cheaters to drop while they can still get "dropped" rather than an "incomplete" or "F" is in everyone's best interest, as it provides an opportunity to consider a pivot to something that interests them more.
IMO, the overreaction by the professor was seeking further penalty for students who already dropped the course, or who would do so when confronted with their misbehavior. A student who cheats in CS is not necessarily a student who will cheat at chemistry, or business, or journalism. If they've already dropped out of CS, there's little benefit to be gained by pursuing the matter further.