Cheating and Authorship

It's interesting to think about how our discussion ranged from robot scoring to process vs. product and the definition of cheating. In some ways, would the blatant manipulation of machine scoring be considered cheating. If, for example, students understood that there was a list of "big words" that the computer values more than another, has the student equally subverted the purpose of the assignment and avoided any authentic expression? What about the student who figures out that there is a particular topic or style that is over-valued by the teacher? I knew that my professor of American Literature was a deep scholar of William Faulkner and a Hemingway doubter - I tailored my arguments to those parameters even though I feel exactly the opposite. Have I expressed what I was supposed to? What am I taught by the feedback that says, "great job"?

I agree with Jen Holden and Shawn that there are concrete, discrete, and measurable aspects of writing that all students deserve the access to and that we as teachers have an absolute responsibility to make sure that those students have those skills. Where I think we could have a longer and deeper conversation is about exactly how those skills are acquired and how we determine the actual deficiencies.  That's neither here nor there.

I think our valid fear of measurement is the inherent lack of reliability that any measurement of writing has. Language is so elastic that there are literally no rules that can't be broken in the right context. None. As Amanda described the idea of placing the evaluation responsibility on an entire teaching staff, I imagined a scenario: take the blue pill and the entire staff grades your students' essay; take the red pill and my robot scorer does it. It makes me queasy. While it's easy to imagine that those humans must be better, it's also easy to imagine it going horrifically wrong. Bias, anitpathy, ego...I might pick the robot given that at least the robot won't simply decide that it isn't getting paid enough to do my job, so it's just going to assign numbers randomly.

What's the answer? I'm examining my most recent practices, and I think I'm emphasizing the process. It's harder to fake and easier to track. The measurement is a bit more subjective (are you working hard? are you using time wisely?), but I think it's been an okay to bend to the whims of the idea of grading writing that allows me to adjust without feeling completely dishonest or unfair.

I know that this may sound insane, but my comment about my students using bad teaching as an excuse for cheating was not made to criticize the students. I think that the Ritter piece is trying to get at that. How do we drive our students to cheating? How do we use the data point that Student X cheated/bought a paper/copied the answers from another student to honestly evaluate our teaching practices? Ultimately, UNPOPULAR OPINION ALERT, I tend to believe my student's critiques of me and my colleagues. With a grain of salt, but there's always truth buried in there. Their feedback is in their words, actions, and attitudes.