With the ripple effects of the alleged CS 4 cheating scandel growing ever larger, students learned yesterday that visiting computer science professor Rex Dwyer will no longer be teaching his second course, CS 15, due to both student dissatisfaction with the staffing of tutorial sessions as well as the alleged incidents of cheating in his CS 4 class.
Dwyer said the staffing difficulties arose because he had not expected to have to recruit teaching assistants as a visiting professor and had trouble finding students to fill the positions at the beginning of the term.
"I felt that [the staffing problem] was not handled well by the department," he said.
Dwyer added that he asked to be relieved of the CS 15 class the day he received the anonymous tip about the alleged CS 4 cheating.
He said in part this was because he anticipates a great deal of paperwork over the coming weeks as he begins dealing with the investigation of the incidents.
Dwyer's expectations
Dwyer also described his expectations for the rest of the term.
"For me personally it's going to be miserable," he said. "I've had to step aside in one class, which I find distasteful to say the least, and in the other class I'm going to spend all the time writing up cheating. This is not how I anticipated spending my time at Dartmouth."
In a BlitzMail message to his class last night Dwyer wrote that he "will begin to review individual submissions for Homework #4 in earnest tomorrow to identify the suspicious ones."
He also wrote that he will review computer logs further in an attempt to see which computer terminals on campus accessed the solutions online.
Dwyer, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, also told The Dartmouth he will definitely not be staying another term at Dartmouth.
In previous interviews with The Dartmouth, Dwyer has cited the cheating, along with several other factors as contributing to his decision to leave.
The first class
Today also marks the first class session of CS 4 since Dwyer told the class that he would begin investigating who may have downloaded solutions to a homework assignment off the class' website and then turned in the copied lines of code.
Some students said they are expecting today's class to be awkward because members of the class are worried about the future implications of the scandal, though many said that they must, in the mean time, work on studying for the exam in the class this Friday.
One student who wished to remain anonymous said he expected the mood of the class to reflect "a basic distrust between the professor and the class as a whole -- it goes both ways."
The student added that while there may be undertones of anxiety among students concerned about the alleged incidents, people will have to presently put the issue aside to continue with class assignments and exams simply for the sake of their grades, if nothing else.
Dwyer said he will continue with the syllabus as planned from this point forward, despite the incident.
Last week he changed the final homework assignment in the class to an essay that would count for 15 percent of students' total grades in which members of the class were to explain the alleged cheating to Dwyer's colleagues at N.C. State.
Dwyer withdrew the assignment in his BlitzMail message last night, writing that he would still review submissions on the topic for extra credit in the class.
He also wrote that while "the number of people suspected of cheating is remarkably large, it is not a majority." He added that he cancelled the assignment in fairness to the majority.
Student concerns
Some students have expressed concerns over the past few days regarding the investigation into the allegations of cheating, saying that many students may have legitimately gotten the professor's code from graders and not used downloaded copies of the program from the Internet.
Dwyer said that at this point it is unclear if these students received the code from the graders or from other sources, though he added that "I'm certainly not in this to get people who didn't do anything wrong."
One grader, who wished to remain anonymous, said that while students were not directly given the solutions to the assignment from graders, a larger-than-usual number of students sought help on this assignment, making it difficult to help everyone.
"There were too many kids there for us to help," the grader said. "There were two hours worth of people and students genuinely didn't know where to get the answer from."
The grader further commented that in order to accommodate the number of people seeking help on the assignment, many graders simply showed students Dwyer's solutions and asked them to compare them with their answers and figure out how the two differed.
Dwyer said he requested a report from each grader and TA to determine which students met with them so that he could better determine who had downloaded the solution and who had sought help from legitimate sources, though he added that if in fact students were given the solution by the assistants that should not have happened.
