A few examples:

• Talking about how challenging the course is at the beginning of the quarter and showing charts of grade distributions --> It's nowhere near as bad as he makes it out to be. This may even have the adverse effect of priming the less confident students to do worse because they were expecting something difficult (self-fulfilling prophecy).

• Tries to show how he's tough on cheating by sending out emails with statistics on how many cheaters caught after end of quarter --> There's an obvious danger of overfitting data to present an appearance of being more tough on cheating. (Even in his own email he admits that of the X cases he's investigated, Y were falsely accused. In my quarter he accused over 10% of the students enrolled of cheating, and over 10% of those students had their cases dismissed.) Also if his desire to reduce cheating is sincere, then he should be actively fighting cheating throughout the quarter rather than just mass-processing evidence at the end of the quarter. (According to policy, instructors must report incidents within a certain time period of discovering evidence, so maybe his way of complying with policy is to simply discover any evidence at a time more convenient for him?)

• Says he considers in-lab programming exams to be the best indicator of a student's programming ability --> Students can do poorly on these exams and still pass the class. There's often even a curve as well (which IIRC is based on mean, not median, so even if the median score is decently high there still might be a curve depending on how many 0s there are).

• Mass-emails his students with links he sees on Hacker News ("look at how in-the-loop I am by reposting a story that you may have already seen this morning given that we read the same websites")