Not if you’re a student. If you’re a professor.
Young, naive Panos Ipeirotis, a business school instructor, discovered that a bunch of his undergraduate business majors
(background on that burnished major here and here) had plagiarized, and he called them on it.
After announcing his intention to report the cheating to the dean unless students turned themselves in, Ipeirotis said, class became contentious and awkward, and his teaching evaluations suffered. His typical evaluation in this class, 6.0 to 6.5 out of 7.0, fell to 5.3. In his blog post, Ipeirotis wrote that Associate Dean Susan Greenbaum and the department chair “‘expressed their appreciation’ for…chasing such cases.” But his “yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, and significantly lower than inflation, as my ‘teaching evaluations took a hit this year,'” he wrote.
Lesson learned:
“I doubt that I will be checking again for cheaters,” he wrote.
July 19th, 2011 at 7:37AM
Well, that’s just a tactical mistake. If you turn students in for plagiarism precisely when you find it, then they are no longer around at the end of the semester to fill out the evaluations.
July 19th, 2011 at 7:40AM
My initial reaction was “Wow–the Southeastern Conference is investigating a ponzi scheme? They’ve really beefed up their enforcement.”
Oh. Not that SEC.
July 19th, 2011 at 7:40AM
Sorry–right comment, wrong post.
July 19th, 2011 at 11:12AM
One would hope that the people running a ***business school*** would have some understanding of the way measurement & incentive programs work…it should be obvious that giving too much unthinking weight to student evaluations will encourage this sort of thing, along with grade inflation and excessively-easy classes, just as unthinking weight given to customer evaluations of sales reps and sales managers could easily encourage unnecessary discounting to the point of destroying profitability. Evidently not.
In his amusing and depressing new book “Car Guys vs Bean Counters,” former GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz takes some strong swipes at the business schools…He argues that in the period immediately after WWII “Business educators..felt like the cleaning and maintenance crew in an art gallery: necessary, yes, but hardly the main attraction” and they endeavored, successfully, to increase their status by over-intellectualizing business and positioning it as more of an academic discipline than it in fact is.
July 19th, 2011 at 1:59PM
If a school, or faculty, wants to make intellectual honesty important they can end plagiarism easily. At my university they have implemented a highly effective system, there is an administrator who deals with it for faculty. You just send a report with a photocopy of the student’s assignment and plagiarized document and the student is called into the assistant dean’s office to explain. No crying students in your office, the prof is not the bad guy, and students quickly learn that all plagiarism is centrally reported, even if a prof chooses to deal with it herself she is required to send in a report — to make sure repeat offenders are caught. I have found plagiarism is way down in the years since this has been implemented and, even better, I spend almost no time dealing with plagiarists.