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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.
Those who can't manage, manage managers.
Hope he doesn't analyse my Slashdot posts!
--
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.
Do you "get buster" or "make a buster?"
...
I always thought it was the latter -- either "make a buster" or "had a buster". Buster, of course, being synonmous for "fart" in the midwest. Or at least in my specifically midwestern high school where people used to sit in chem and phsyics class in hard plastic chairs and make a lot of loud, long busters.
Now, lest this post be marked off-topic, I'll say that as a former freshman comp teacher, I found myself spending more time checking search engines for "matching phrases" than I did actually grading and putting comments on student papers.
What's remarkable about cheaters -- freshmen cheaters in particular -- is that they tend to steal from the most obvious sources. I had one student in a film class filch an entire review from Roger Ebert. The only thing she changed was the byline on the review.
When confronted -- and I made the confrontation as quick and as business-like as possible -- she threatened to report *me* to the deans for harrassment. I laughed. She stormed out of the empty classrom and, sure enough, the next day I heard from a dean that I'd been "reported."
I explained the situation to the dean. He was floored by it -- floored by the cheating, the flagrant theft, and then floored finally by the formal report filed by the student.
I flunked the student. I was contacted by the parents and reported a second time. (I had *driven* the student to cheating because my teaching style was sub-par, said the parents)
A week or so later, I dutifully trudged down to the dean's office and came face to face with mommy and daddy. They were furious with me. "What was a graduate student doing teaching a class?"
The dean explained that, well, that was how it was usually done. We all agreed -- myself included -- that grad students weren't *always* the best teachers, but for the most part they were more than adequate and -- oddly enough -- sometimes *more* enthusiastic about the subject matter than their professional peers.
That was the end of that arguement but not the end of the case. The parents insisted that their daughter was innocent. I said, well, it's kinda hard to claim innocence when I have proof.
"Proof? What proof?"
"I have your daughter's paper and Ebert's review."
That's not proof, they insisted.
I was confused. I looked at the paper, looked at the review and then wondered aloud: er, what is it then?
It's proof of nothing, they said. That's not my daughter's paper.
The dean and I looked at each other.
Eh? I said.
The dean explained that, yeah, that *was* their daughter's paper.
"Did you see her turn that paper in? Did you see her give you that specific paper?"
I knew where this was going. The dean did, too. But the parents persisted. They wouldn't let this thing rest.
And on and on
The thing was never really resolved. I personally didn't change the student's 'F'. As far as I was concerned, she flunked my class. But I could never get further confirmation from anyone if, in fact, my 'F' stuck. It was all very insidious.
Anyway, my point with all this?
Some students are lazy fuckers with peabrains. Many students are not.
The lazy fuckers deserve to get caught and flunk.
...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.