Detour

Vinny has a post in which he proclaims…

By checking bags in subways, surely we’re letting them win.

Referring to the begining of ‘random’ bag searches in the New York City Subways.

Now I’m a proud American, I really am, but I really disagree with this one.

He proclaims. Vinny, the question is are you a proud New Yorker (and by that I mean NYC)? Or a proud Washington DCer? These are Municipal level actions to check random bags on the subway. I might add that this will be an untenable idea…either everyone’s bag gets searched or no ones bag will get searched. The minute a police officer stops an Arab and lets a Caucasian walk by without a bag check the civil libertarians will sue screaming racism to any news-camera they can find…and there are a lot of those in NYC and Washington DC! 20 years ago you could walk into an airport without going through a metal detector, 10 years ago you could go to the departure gate to waive your Grandma off on a plane, now none of that is possible. Is that un-American, or un-democratic for those not in America, or is it just common sense?

Furthermore, these actions are happening for complex reasons that aren’t entirely connected with the London Transportation bombings. Local governments are looking for federal dollars to pay for transit and are complaining that on a per traveler basis they are given many multiples less money for security then the airports. Ten times the passengers ride public transit each day. Just over $9 dollars an airline passenger is spent on security, while the figure is closer to .09 cents for public transit. Follow the money trail Vinny…follow the money.

Update:Jacqueline has some thoughts as well. I guess I am losing my libertarian credentials by saying this…but I don’t see the big deal. If you don’t like the rules of the subway…then stop using the subway and find alternative (non-government provided) transportation.

John Morrow (Home of the most excellent website econgrads.com ) wrote the following in regard to the idea that using solution manuals for homework is cheating…

John Morrow
July 21st, 2005 at 2:40 am e

Some thoughts regarding dissemination and the discussion : (These are of course the late night opinions of a 1st year student, so feel free to heckle.)

First, ability to conceal solutions. Whether the end outcome from publishing solutions is that all solutions are available or no solutions are available, either outcome is better in my opinion than cliques of students having solutions and others not. I would argue however, that once solutions are made, at least some clique will have access to them. Example:

In a long past semester of mine, 90% of the solutions to problems given were available online and I believe hard copies were circulating from old students. As the semester approached, these solutions were removed from the web (although one prof who was a good sport set a precedent by distributing solutions in class). If you happened to download those materials previously, or started trolling the department for the solutions you could easily get them. So long as you are making solutions by their nature available to a large number of people, who in turn interact with future students who want the solutions, they will be available.

Second, strong incentives. In a graduate course where the median test score is something like 35% and heavily clustered, a 10 or 20% homework grade starts to count quite a bit. In a particular class meeting this description, from talking to current and past students, I would guess around 75% of the homework turned in is reverse engineered from past solutions. As passing qualifying exams are usually based on grades as well as exam scores there are powerful incentives to jockey for position in classes however possible.

Third, evaluation mechanisms and convention. I agree wholeheartedly that the only way to learn most material is sit and solve problems in depth on your own. But as I believe most graders would agree, the further away a solution looks from a standard answer the harder it is to award it credit, regardless of merit, and this goes for homeworks as well as tests. The closer one’s work looks to the convention (e.g. that provided by a solution manual) the better one’s score, as this “proximity effect” competes with content. Learning and knowing convention, especially in a field such as economics where there are a host of conventions: standard assumptions, assumptions to make specific problems tractable, applying theorems without checking hypotheses, geometric arguments, etc. is key both to personal outcomes and learning the field.

I think he has a good feel for the issue.

Looks like these guys got it right two weeks ago…good job!

There was more on Judge Roberts here on July 5th…

*Judge Roberts and the President know each other the President is “comfortable” with him.

*The judge sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and is therefore very familiar with a host of government related issues that will soon be heading toward the Supreme Court.

*Importantly for this White House, Judge Roberts is seen as jurist willing to extend the Executive Branch wide flexibility in both its conduct of general official business and the War on Terror.

*The Vice President seems favorable to Judge Roberts given Roberts’s propensity to give the Executive Branch some flexibility (Judge Roberts participated in the In re: Cheney decision, which struck a blow to the environmentalists seeking a list of participants in energy task force meetings).

*Judge Roberts is one of the few judges most likely to be very controversial to left wing groups, but be seen as a quality judge by both the public and the seven Democrats who signed the filibuster deal.

My boss flew me up to Ukiah last week to look at a property that is being converted from an apartment complex to a condominium. I had driven up there previously (a three hour drive), but needed to go back and the boss offered to fly me up in his personal plane. I was nervous to accept the offer. I don’t know what type of plane it was, how good a pilot he was, and how well maintained the plane is. Not to mention one of the Wal-Mart kids killed himself in a private plane a week previously. Boy am I glad I didn’t turn down the offer. Turns out the boss has a top of the line plane…the Cirrus SR22-GTS!

This plane has, what Cirrus calls, an ‘Ace in the Hole‘. Standard equipment on each of the Cirrus aircraft is the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS), a final measure of safety that has already proven its worth in the field. When used properly, this safety system will lower the entire aircraft to the ground in an emergency when other alternatives to land have been exhausted. After slowing the aircraft to 133 knots, a firm pull of the emergency CAPS handle ignites a solid-fuel rocket that blows a hatch and deploys the parachute. Within seconds, the 55′ diameter canopy will unfurl and assist the aircraft descent. The final impact of a textbook deployment, comparable to jumping off a 10 foot ladder is absorbed by the specialized landing gear, a roll cage and Cirrus Energy Absorbing Technology (CEAT) seats. Anyone in the plane would float safely to the ground inside the luxurious leather interior. The dashboard has all of the instrument you would expect on a jumbo-jet, built in radar, weather and topographical information matched to gps, XM stereo…everything but the cocktail service.

We flew over the Napa Vineyards, the Calistoga Hot Springs, and the San Francisco Bay. It was a hot day and there was a brush fire off in the distance, so the air was a bit hazy, but the views were still beautiful. Since private aircraft are allowed to fly so close to the ground, the close perspective really allowed you to see the fine detail on the ground! Cool day.

The University of Virginia has a cheating scandal brewing in the economics graduate department this summer which has implications for every student I have ever met in an economics PhD program. According to Inside Higher Education magazine…

An “alarmingly large fraction” of the first-year class of economics graduate students at the University of Virginia were involved in a cheating incident that came to light this month, according to the department chair.

Department officials said that some problem sets from textbooks used in introductory graduate economics courses have answer keys online. At least one student found answers for a course taken by all first-year students, and apparently shared the information with classmates. Though the solutions were apparently available, David Mills, chair of the economics department, said students should have “known it was off-limits,” but that they instead “used it without the professor being aware.”

I find it incredibly hard to believe that the faculty of any economics graduate department does not know that within a month of arrival most students have access to solution manuals for the books and up to ten years worth of old problem sets and homework assignments.

As my friend, John Morrow, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison puts it…

The current status of graduate programs seems to be that some students, notably those from countries where solution manuals and entire texts are copied as a matter of habit (generally out of necessity) have access to solution manuals. Incentives are clearly not to share them, since grades are often based upon homework covered by manuals. Given that this seems to be the case most places, failing to help distribute manuals known to be in circulation penalizes the just and rewards the wicked….It is also my impression that most students that visit this site, or at least the ones I have corresponded with, are interested in self-study for department examinations, etc. If one is trying to cover 100+ involved problems in a month to prepare for a test, a student without access to a solution manual is at a huge disadvantage to one who has access to a manual.

I remember the frustration of spending hours on a problem, going down the wrong path when a simple check of the first step of a solution would have shown that my simple calculus mistake was the reason I had an illogical answer. I learned fairly quickly that many of the other students did not have the same inefficient time wasting study habits; if they were stumped for more then a half an hour on a problem they would just look at the trusty solutions manual for a hint and continue solving the problem afterwards. Also, some exam questions were straight from the book (unassigned problems) so the student with a solutions manual could do every problem in every chapter and be better prepared for exams in which the mean hovered around 40%. Those students were able to grade their work and spot errors that gave them a deeper understanding of the voluminous amounts of materiel you are expected to assimilate in a first year economics PhD program. It is a huge advantage to do as many problems as possible before a test to hone the problem solving acumen that got you into the program to begin with (you and everyone else in an economics PhD program).

Some friends of mine have speculated that maybe UV is trying to shake out a large first year class and have used this as an excuse to cut down the number of students. It is just unbelievable to think that the professors are so out of touch with reality that they don’t know solutions are photocopied in volumes every semester. Hell we had a professor give everybody full credit for our homework because everyone had the solutions manual anyways. I guess it could be possible that a naïve group of professors don’t know this goes on. A friend at Cornell pointed out that he couldn’t remember the last time a professor in a first year PhD program even graded an assignment? I know my TA’s graded damn near everything…I still have the unintelligible handwriting on my problem sets to prove it.

I don’t know anybody at the UV graduate economics department (I was accepted with a fellowship to attend the program and would have been in this years class had I had the inclination), but I would love to know the real reason for this controversy. Is it internal faculty politics? Naivety? Too many people passed the qualifying exam and the department wants to save money? If anyone knows, please email me.

What I am certain of is that, based on the information available so far, nearly every student in every graduate level economics department is guilty of cheating. Could it really be that having a copy of the solutions manual really cheating? Damn!

Update: It has been brought to my attention that the University of Virginia is usually referred to as UVA (not UV as I posted). Ooooops!

Update II: Ian writes in comments a post that deserves to see the light of day…

Glad to see you post something on this Chris. As you know, I think this is a very bizarre move on the part of the UVA econ department. I would think that a program like UVA, which I understand to be rather competitive in the first year, it would be preferable to ensure that students not gain an edge over each other by the accident of access to information. I suppose kicking students out for “cheating” is one way to do that, but of course all it means is that the people who have the materials will just do a better job of hiding them from one another. If solution manuals are outlawed, only outlaws will have solution manuals. The other way to remove the advantage conferred by having the solutions is to make them available to all students.
This is why it is incumbent upon graduate students to make old class materials as widely available as possible. First, it is the ‘fair’ thing to do, since it restores the balance of competition within departments (not to open a debate on the notion of ‘equality of opportunity’). From a practical standpoint, if graduate students are ‘out’ about sharing old course materials and solutions it forces administrators to acknowledge the issue early on. At the very least it makes it harder for them to pretend ignorance of the practice at the end of the year.
John Morrow deserves a great deal of credit for getting this information out there. I hope to do something similar for the incoming class at Cornell, and would like to open a dialogue with our DGS on this topic. Of course, there are always copyright issues to worry about. Mr. Morrow could speak more to these than I, since his website seems to have drawn some fire from publishers. Maybe it’s time for econ grad students to begin a grand project of ‘open source’ solutions. We wouldn’t have to worry about copyright violations, and they would probably be better than some of the terrible (and often wrong) solutions in the official publications (not that I’ve ever seen them, of course; I’ve just heard).

Update III: Crowebar has more here.

This just doesn’t add up.

Wait…lemme check the answers to make sure….

nope…this just doesn’t add up.

Update IV: Steven Levitt writes…

A few things surprise me about this article.

First, when I was in grad school, no one cared how you did on problem sets. They had nothing to do with your final grade. I got a “check minus” on every problem set in the most important fall quarter class the first year (Frank Fisher’s micro class), but I got an A in the class. Of all the things to cheat on, problem sets would be at the bottom of my list.

Second, I wonder how the professor didn’t notice. Either the students were creative, or the problems must have been pretty easy, so a lot of right answers weren’t surprising. At MIT and Chicago, I feel like hardly anyone ever gets
a completely right answer to anything.

Does the honor code apply to professors? If, say, a professor pretended to grade some undergraduate papers, but really a grad student did it, would the only choice be that the professor gets expelled?

an annonymous commenter writes that…

The problem sets are what the papers are focusing on but they are not what is being focused on here at UVa. Somewhere between 3 and 9 students are suspected of cheating on the prelims which is what started the whole thing.

This would make more sense to me.