What to do when the professor does not stand up to cheating? [closed]

Question

I was the teaching assistant (TA) for a very introductory physics course at a large state university. In the course of grading for this class, I came to learn that my university used the same course material as many other universities had for the equivalent course for more than twenty years. The answers to questions, in particular, were readily available online, through various forums. The syllabus explicitly forbade providing disingenuous answers, as well as any plagiarized responses. To be clear, this instructor was a fully tenured professor; not someone in any risk of losing their position.

After noticing patterns in homework assignments, I began to look for them in midterm and final exams as well. What I initially thought was a couple of bad students turned out to be more than 50% of the class regularly citing online sources word-for-word. Once I realized what was happening, I informed the professor, and I started assigning zeros to the offending students, in accordance with University policy, and the professor did not object to my assignment of zeros. However, all of this was still subject to the lead professor's review.

The professor asked for documentation of the offenses, and was in fact the undergraduate director of the department. I spent the better part of a week accumulating evidence, scouring Yahoo answers and other common homework repositories for the sources of the dirty students' answers. I found a veritable source for every single one. I printed copies of the students' responses, alongside their internet sources, and deposited the six-inch-tall stack of documents at the professor's door.

As far as I know, nothing happened to a single student, and word was never made public of the massive cheating scandal that was blatantly obvious in this course. Multiple athletes were in this (1A) course.

Is this just academia?

Answer 1

Beer and Circus calls this the "student-faculty non-aggression pact":

• Faculty provide an easy class and don't look too hard into cheating
• Students happily take the easy grade and leave the professor free to do research

I wouldn't say this is "the rule"; plenty of faculty do an awesome job teaching. But, I'm not surprised to hear your report -- some faculty don't care about teaching generally, while others care about teaching but don't care about grades or catching cheaters. Many feel (for better or worse) that cheaters get what they deserve eventually, and don't want to be personally involved in punishing them.

What to do...

I would carefully check the department and university policies -- often, cheating cases are explicitly prosecuted "at the professor's discretion." I would also speak directly with the professor. Speaking of....

I started assigning zeros to the offending students...[collected evidence]...and deposited the six-inch-tall stack of documents at the professor's door.

I suspect this was not the best way to go about it. I would recommend first speaking with the professor, making them aware of the problem, and asking how to proceed. At a minimum, this could have saved you a week's worth of wasted effort. As it is, you assigned a bunch of zeros, and it sounds like your professor was okay with this -- that is some punishment, at least.

Is this just [the way of] academia?

Well, it's certainly a bit dysfunctional. And it's inevitable as long as prosecuting cheaters is a lot of work for the faculty while providing absolutely no "reward" when done successfully.

Answer 2

Edit: question has changed.

You probably cannot do much now.

Once I realized what was happening, I started assigning zeros to the offending students, in accordance with University policy.

As a TA, you should have spoken to the professor about the situation before taking any action. Student misconduct is squarely in the professor's area of responsibility.

I printed copies of the students' responses, alongside their internet sources, and deposited the six-inch-tall stack of documents at the professor's door.

This sounds like you are trying to provoke the professor, instead of helping. I fear you have done serious damage to a relationship that should be collaborative.

Is this just academia?

Not really; all types of institutions are subject to occasional corruption.

Answer 3

I experienced a related situation when I was supervising a written exam as TA: I caught a student cheating who actually (though probably accidentally) admitted cheating ("I couldn't read anything" - yea but already trying to read other's answers is cheating).

When telling my prof, he decided to nevertheless have the exam graded regularly. His explanation:

• In a legal sense, we'd be in a situation where my word would stand against the student's word - we did not have hard proof. Our claim of the student cheating would therefore be very weak.
  This is something I consider extremely important nowadays: given the difference in power between student and examiner and that even confessions of cheating are not reliable indication of actual cheating*, it is IMHO extremely important to accuse students on the basis of solid evidence only.

• In his experience, students who cheated/were caught cheating had always anyways failed the exam due to lack of knowledge - which was actually the case.

• The official penalty for cheating was failing the exam, so correcting the exam and failing the student on that basis was safer and just had the same outcome in terms of the need to redo the exam.
• In terms of pedagogy, they had had the reprimand I gave them during the exam plus everyone else had seen someone being caught cheating.

* While marking each homework that is considered cheating 0 without any interaction with the student does not induce any bargaining problem, I gather that it is common to take a more strict view on students who do not admit cheating when accused. I'd argue from that that students may expect to minimize their losses by confession - which would be sufficient to put most interviews with students who are accused of cheating into the realm of that study.

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I found a veritable source for every single one.

Your situation is similar to my catching the cheating student: there's a definitive smell, but not a solid proof: that would require you finding evidence that each student did actually access that web page (during the time of that homework) and maybe even proof of them copying the relevant part.

Without such proof, the professor may still deliver a lecture about cheating or depending on what is up to their discretion assign some more homework that is not found online, announce that homework grades do not enter the final grade, ...

As such proof is not realistically possible, the usual way out is to allow all kinds of sources but require proper citation. This is not only a good excercise of how academic writing works, but it also reverses the burden of proof: regardless of whether the thought was the student's own, it's up to them to check whether the thought has been published before and if so, cite it.
Thus, a lack of citation is far easier to proove than a student using forbidden study material.

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Is this just academia?

Something went wrong here quite obviously. I'd say: on both sides, students cheating and the prof having dysfunctional rules (whatever is done: either condemns without proper proof, or doesn't enforce rules).

OTOH, academia is like the rest of the world.

• There will be inexperienced profs (who may learn and do better in future)
• There will not only be brilliant teachers but also mediocre ones, and finally
• Students are usually comparatively inexperienced due to their age and
• may actually cheat.

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I may add some context: for us,

• homework itself was rarely graded, it was mostly considered an offer for self-study.
  Homework that was graded were either

  • reports on certain questions and I think the topics where handed out according to what was of interest for the teacher that year, i.e. new topics.
  • reports on experiments - here the whole labwork performance was graded
  • reports that were presented during a seminar, so the student was questioned on the topic. And they all used the cite-properly strategy explained above.

• Graded excercises (undergrad/introductory) had the excercise being done during excercise lessons with TAs being around who had an eye on cheating besides helping. Some of these excercises were supposed to be group work, btw.

• In general, noone cared how we acquired knowledge, the emphasis was on having the knowledge when examined. Failing exams, particularly during the first semesters, was very common (we had exams with pass rates at first try of ≈ 25 %).
• Collecting exam questions and studying with such collections was usually encouraged.
• Important exams were oral.

Answer 4

You can't do anything if the student is just looking at his/her classmate's paper. you can only warn him/her to pay attention to their jobs, but you can't give zeros to them. because just looking at another one's paper isn't a reliable reason. It may the student says I have a neckache! That's why I turn my head! (but in fact, he/she is cheating) and you can't prove the cheating. you can only assign zeros to students who have cheating papers with them or who have their hands full of math formulas; because these are reliable and you can prove the cheating to higher university staff. perhaps the professor you're talking about is aware of my statements.

Answer 5

There is an argument that cheating should be clearly and formally forbidden, but it is not important to enforce that.

The reasoning is based on that the student does harm only to himself.

While enforcing it is not fundamentally important, it may still be desirable to enforce it, but with lower priority when short on resources.

The base assumption may or may not be valid, the student may in some context do harm to others, like gaining an objective competitive advantage. But note that, except for the final grades, an advantage in grading of exams or classes is not an objective advantage in the world outside the university. An objective advantage would be receiving a certificate or final grade that has a value independent of what was learned.

For example, this is a valid approach in the following context:

There are introductory lectures that are needed as base for a lecture later in the curriculum.

In studying physics at an university that includes a lecture on statistical mechanics, there will be an earlier lecture of thermodynamics. It is not important to have valid grades for thermodynamics, because a student does not need the grade, but only the knowledge to get a good grade in the lecture about statistical mechanics. A good grade in that implies understanding the underlying concepts used.

A student cheating in the thermodynamics lecture without gaining the knowledge just needs to learn it later. There is no way to understand why pressure and temperature interact the way they do without knowing how they interact.