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Technology vs. Cheating at the University of Virginia
Isaac-Lew sent in this story about a professor at the University of Virginia who heard rumors that his students were cheating and took action - he wrote a program to search through all the papers, identify common phrases, and flag the cheaters. Now a large chunk of the class is facing possible expulsion for plagiarism.
He had to write a program to do this?
:-)
For about 3 years, I TA-ed an intro-level CS class that tought some rudimentary Pascal programming. It was a computer literacy course, so the bar wasn't high, and it wasn't for majors.
In sections of 50+ kids, I regularly found people who had copped each other's (sometimes non-working!!!!) programs, right down to variable names, etc. How lazy could you get! And this, despite the fact that if they had cheated with someone in one of the other 4 TA's sections they would never have been caught. I never had to diff anything -- you could just tell.
When I found someone doing this, I would hand the printouts back with the following written on them:
See for your grade (on Foo's program)
See for your grade (on Bar's program)
They got the point.
As a UVa grad, let me point out that the class in question here is generally regarded as a complete "gut" class. The large majority of students taking it are either athletes or people who just need a basic physics class to get their degree. It doesn't surprise me at all to hear that a large number of students got buster in that class.
Oh, and the honor system is regarded by many to be much of a joke, too. This really sucks for the students that got busted, but if they're going to cheat that blatantly in what's essentially a "gimme" class, they deserve every little bit that's coming to them. And it's always nice to see the honor code coming under scrutiny instead of simply being exhaulted as the greatest thing since sliced bread. :)
-jdm, (I'm not a bitter grad ... why do you ask?) :)
Well, it wouldn't relate to a community of blind, unquestioning (and arguably in this case, naive) trust, but how it relates to a community of earned trust seems fairly obvious to me.
Sounds like a job for watermark technology.
"As you can see, prof, if you take any paragraph of my paper and checksum it and rad-50 decode it, you get the word SLOPPY. That's why I had to use the strange word 'strategery' in the 5th sentence; it was the only way I could make the checksum come out right. Let's see the bad kid who sits next to me, who isn't named Sloppy, explain why his paper also has that mathmatical feature."
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
While there is a point where plagiarism can be a bad thing, unfortunately all too often the academic world teaches people that teamwork is cheating, and that is not always a good thing. One of the biggest problems (second in my opinion only to the fact that a large percentage of people in the computer business are functionally near illiterate) is that too many people don't work well in teams.
Many Hackers have a bent towards solitary work, and often reinvent the wheel more than they need to in the first place. We don't need the educational system encouraging this bad behavior.
The world of the Internet and open source development is finally providing a way that hackers from around the world can share their work and learn teamwork. This is a good thing.
While I don't know that the professor that was the subject of this article is really a good example of what I'm talking about, his actions are sure to spur on others to crack the whip and take things too far.
I'd rather have the students think about the answer than sit there pushing buttons on the magic box and taking whatever it gives as the truth.
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Another problem is also overzelous professors going too far trying to catch cheaters. I am a college student, and I definitely agree that cheating is a major problem, especially in lecture/paper oriented classes like liberal arts. However, professors must be equally cautious in accusing students of cheating. I like this professors system of checking a database of previous papers, but even so, it is very difficult to find who was the original author.
Some professors aren't so careful, and will accuse students of cheating on a whim. I was so accused after submitting a final paper for a liberal arts class I was taking. The professor thought it was "too good" for me to have written it, and said that I must have copied from some other source. In fact, the entire work was 100% my own, using my own language. I didn't even do any direct research, just wrote a bunch of BS off the top of my head. After discussing the issue with the professor, and he relented and gave me an A-.
I want to stop students from cheating (and artifically raising the grading standard) as much as anyone, but not at the expense of trust between the student and the professor. Thats why I support systems that log papers submitted and run heuristics checks on them, but students should also be made aware that such systems are in use. I think this will be the necessary disincentive to force students to not cheat.
Ultimately I think the problem is exacerbated by massive classes (like this 500 student lecture) where the sole requirements for grading are usually a paper or two plus a final exam. If the particular professor who accused me had known me personally, or been at all familiar with the previous papers I had submitted, he wouldn't have been so quick to pass judgement. Huge classes also promote cheating because students know they are far less likely to be caught in such an evironment.
But thats just my 2 bits.
Spyky
This particular prof was acting on a report that there was rampant cheating, and he was more or less looking to confirm. That makes sense.
However, in other fields where it's more text based (like "read these 4 books" instead of "study chapter 3 on partial differentials"), the papers could be excessively similar because they all draw phrases from the same sources.
Of course, you could argue plagiarism if students are pulling quotes and not citing, but a realistic instructor would realize that the students obviously draw from the assigned texts, and kind of take them as an "implied bibliography."
Which doesn't make it right to take other people's words and pass them off as your own. But it's so damn common that it passes for decent paper writing at 5/6 of the institutions in this country. While that's depressing, I don't think the kids need to be busted for cheating as much as get some remedial paper writing classes.
Again, these arugments may not apply to this particular case; these students might indeed deserve expulsion. However, I don't know that the approach is widely applicable.
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Bottom line is a computer can't think, only calculate extremely quickly and accurately.
Another note, to discourage calculator use, give partial credit. The calculator program user will have no work so if they have a typo in thier calculations or whatever, they lose 100% of the value of the question where as someone that showed all thier work and got one little step wrong could get nearly full credit. The other way is to write intelligent test questions that require you to think to understand the solution but have easy setup and calculations so that even if the calculator helps you its not on the important stuff. Word problems rock for this purpose.
Though I must say I pulled off a LOT of B's by heavily using partial credit. Sketch down the first few steps of solving the problem that I could remember and get 75% to 90% credit on the problem even though I had no idea how to actually complete the solution.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Greetings, This guy doesn't hold a candle to Phil, Destroyer of Lives. If you were a CS student at RIT in the late 1990's, then you know who I am talking about. He knew all the tricks. He printed out programs, laid them on top of each other and held them up to the light. Sure, they changed the variable names, but the silhouettes looked the same. He also saved programs for four or five semesters and had all sorts of scripts to diff them against each other. He caught people all the time. Luckily, I worked with Phil and wasn't a student of his ;)
Eric
Are you kidding?
I love these guys, and you should too.
They're the ones who come around the corner every half-hour asking me to explain pointer arithmetic or how a driver interface works.
I'm the star, they're the droids. Pay is commensurate. If this was an egalitarian industry with no pyramid of skill distribution, we'd all be making low-five-figure salaries, and thinking it was as right as the mid-six we're making now, because our peers would be, too. The broader the competition, the better your superiority stands out. It's better to be one in a million than one in a thousand. You get my drift.
It will take a few years after you graduate to sort you to your spot in the hierarchy. But you know how the playing field is laid out. Use that to your advantage.
--Blair
"U. of Macchiavelli, '84"
Excellent point! I have a fond memory of running into my 3rd grade teacher once I was an adult. She actually apologized to me after all those years, because the kid who sat next to me copied from my papers, and she thought it was _I_ who was cheating (I didn't know the kid was copying). She realized her mistake the next year when I wasn't in her class anymore, but the other kid was, and the quality of his work plummetted.
A potential solution to this would be to simply not punish the ones whose paper got copied -- only the one who plagerized. Sure, some people will get away with "aiding and abetting", but better to a let a few guilty go free than to punish someone who was truly innocent.
Those who can't manage, manage managers.
Hope he doesn't analyse my Slashdot posts!
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
As a former CS major, I must concur. Not only is avoiding doing your own research an act of sloth, but if you are not cognisant enough to PARAPHRASE the purloined material, then you should employ yourself at a fast-food restaurant until you decide you're ready to fill your cup of knowledge at a state university.
I beg to differ. Like it or not, in the real world, you have to deal with other people, and sometimes, other people are dolts. This doesn't change the fact that you have to work with them.
In surveys of employers, `communications skills' are almost universally listed as the most desirable characteristic of new graduates. Actual technical proficiency usually slips in at number 4 or 5 on the list. Group projects are intended to give practical experience at communicating in and with a group of other people.
The problem with small group projects is twofold.
I was once of a similar opinion as you - given a group project (group of 4 or 5), I would usually end up doing the whole damn thing, and everyone else in the group shared in the good mark: a fact that pissed me off no end. Then I did a _real_ group project - in a group of 60. This was a second year uni project. We had a semester to organise a conference, each write a paper for the conference, peer review the paper between ourselves, and present the paper at the conference. We had to raise funds, organise every aspect of the conference from tea and cookies to keynote address. At the end, we published a 300 page book of proceedings, had it printed. I still have some copies sitting on my shelf.
A project this big cannot be completed by a single person. This forces you to organise, and work in groups. Rather than trying to finish everyone elses job (which is not feasible), you learn that you have to convince others to do their job.
The best feature of the large project I did was the peer review at the end. Students were asked to assess every other student. These asessments formed a large part of the final grade. Surprisingly, when given the responsibility, students will identify those who are not pulling their weight.
Group projects, if done properly, can be extremely rewarding. However, if group projects are to succeed, the project needs to be big, the group needs to be big, and the marking scheme needs to be independent.
A group of people working in concert can acheive much more than a single individual - I would not have been able to publish a book of proceedings by myself. In addition, for the remainder of that degree, the entire class had a great sense of comraderie, as we had all been through something gruelling, and we had done it together.
Russ %-)
PS: Any educators who are interested in the project I talked about here; I'm more than happy to advocate student centred learning to those looking to implement it.
... and never, ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.
The article says that it takes a six-word phrase to trigger the initial match. That's quite a bit if you think about it; three- and four-word phrases are going to be relatively common, but beyond that...
It seems to have worked, too:
Good corrective feedback mechanism there.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
As a former English major, I have to agree. Not only is it lazy and slack to skip doing your own research, but if you don't even have the brains to REWORD the stuff you're stealing then you ought to flip burgers for a few years until you decide you're ready to be a real student.
"Smear'd with gumms of glutenous heat, I touch..." - Comus, John Milton
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
This interests me a lot. Joe Cheater cheats on his final exams and graduates - let's say college - on other people's work and with a slippery-at-best grasp of the subject his diploma says he's reached a certain level of comptence/knowledge in.
Then he goes out into a workplace that expects him to know what his diploma suggests he should. What now? Well, his strategy is going to be either to catch up fast, or keep looking for work to borrow/steal and pass off as his own. Probably the latter, because if the former was an option he probably wouldn't have had to cheat in the first place.
Is this any harder in the "real world" than it was in school? Nope. The internet is out there for everybody, and it's now just too hard to track everyone's work in a foolproof way. Will he get caught? Maybe eventually - but he's got a pretty good shot at becoming a comfortable PHB too, since so few of us have the energy to verify everything people claim. How hard would it be, for example, to print up a realistic-looking diploma or grad school transcript on a laser printer at Kinko's? If someone handed you one and it looked real, would you call the university to verify that it was real? No, you'd say "wow, MIT!" and hire him/her.
I used to teach GED classes, and I had students who passed who came back and told me that they had essentially closed their eyes and guessed at the multiple test questions, and done this over and over until they got a passing score. So they were out in the world with the equivalent of a high school diploma, who were barely literate and couldn't add 12+13.
We can write nasty things about cheaters, but they do it because we're all too lazy to police/stop them or really verify what their diplomas say they can do. The professor in this article was a very rare exception (he sounded like a cool professor, too). As long as people accept paper credentials as proof of ability (IT certification, anyone?), cheaters will keep doing what they do. Why shouldn't they? It's a much faster way to the top, and most of the time, we don't mind that much.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
"extensively footnote my paper, referring to classmates paper as source...."
Not at all. The cheaters, having both low coding skills and morals, but an impressive sounding degree, are doomed to become senior managers and CEOs.
Don't you read Dilbert at all? I assure you it wouldn't be as funny if it wasn't mostly true.
...let me just say that anybody who cheats "How Things Work" probably doesn't deserve to be at UVa in the first place. I could not take that course, because I was an EE. The course was considered both redundant and overly simplified for engineering majors.
However, I would be really surprised if even the most hung-over College of Arts and Science people couldn't at least pull a "gentleman's C" in that course. It's reputation was on par with other offerings such as "Cinema as an art form" and "History of Jazz", aka "History of Guts" if you catch my drift.
The other thing that non-Wahoos may not have picked up from the article is that there is a "single sanction" honor code at UVa. If you are convicted of cheating, you are expelled. There is no other punishment for "honor violations". The system has been criticized for inflicting its penalty disproportionatly on minorities. The flip side of that is that affirmative action programs encouraged people to enter UVa when they were not prepared. These are the people who will feel most pressured to cheat.
Of course, that was the way things stood when I graduated eight years ago. I'm sure some aspects of this are different now. OK, probably not, but one can hope.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What's shocking to me is not that people are handing in papers with long portions taken from other papers, but that the school is doing something about it. Even when I pointed out that a student had handed in a paper with a different name, the student got no formal reprimands.
Universities know where money comes from. I'd be very interested to see any followups to this article.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
The TA looks on bemusedly the whole time. When the student arrives up front, the TA says "I'm not accepting your exam, we finished fifteen minutes ago."
"Do you know who I am?" says the student.
"No." says the TA.
"Do you know who I am?" says the student, "Do you know who I am?"
"No." says the TA.
"Good" says the student and sticks his paper in the middle of the stack of papers and walks out of the room.
Cheers,
Milo
Do your own work, never have a problem.
The risk is that some of the students are probably innocent, merely being guilty of having their own papers copied without their knowledge. Indeed, we've seen many cases here where the person whose work was copied ends up in a situation where they have to prove their own innocence.
Unfortunately, the technology of online composition and submission of papers (as typically done at most Universities) lacks sufficient security, encryption, and authentication standards.
I just fear that the cost of this action could possibly end the academic careers of too many students guilty of nothing more than failing to see how their work could be copied.