Slashdot Mirror
Cheating Made Easy
jefu writes "This NY Times story talks about the kinds of papers that students might find (and buy) on the web. It also mentions turnitin.com a site that will scan papers and attempt to determine if it was copied. The article uses 'The Great Gatsby' as an example and notes that for the time it takes to read the book and write a paper, buying a paper seems a poor tradeoff. However, many books (or required papers) involve much more work on the part of the student, so the question becomes that much more difficult. If you have to do a report on 'Ulysses' it takes a bit more than a few hours just to read the book - let along understand enough to do a reasonable paper on it."
Check and make sure they don't copy others' work. Isn't that part of a professors/teachers responsibility? Kids are getting more sly about things, but teachers need to keep up also.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -Alan Kay
Just have the final exam include writing an impromptu essay about your class paper, and weight it enough that you'll fail the class if you don't understand your own paper.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Then all you have to do is read and understand the the paper you bought.
Don't ask them to regurgitate a summary of the paper; ask them to motivate something they purportedly said in their paper.
> Seems like this would be a lot easier than reading the entire book and doing an original paper.
Yeah, I qualified it as a 90% fix because I know it isn't perfect. But if you're clever you should be able to fine-tune it until cheating and still passing is almost as much work as not cheating is.
Meanwhile, you've tricked them into learning something about the subject matter in spite of there worst intentions...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That people have this attitude that "it's a waste of time," "he thinks its my only class!," "it's just too much work!," etc. My best experiences in undergrad were when I had a huge workload, knocked everything out, even the bullshit work, in incnredible fashion, and reveled in it sleeplessly the next day.
Word to the wise: this is how the real world works. No, it shouldn't be the way it goes, but it is. In upper division hard sciences and math, I pissed away more time googling for examples online that were like problems I was doing than really learning them sometimes. I paid for these times. Bide your time, do your work, but most importantly, carve out at least 5-10 hours a week for side projects you really enjoy. In an 18 credit semester where I was taking PChem, researching 20 hours a week, taking a 2 credit lab (read: 6 hours in lab, 4 hours writing lab reports, and I work quickly), I still had time to work on a software project, do sculpture, AND go out with my slacker buddies like it was my job. You. will. always. have. bullshit. work. Learn to live with it and quit bitching about the system; it's not some nebulous entity that's out to get you.
I mean seriously, what the fuck? You're willing to build up an "immense collection" of other people's papers, skim them, synthesize the pieces and bolt them together like an origami Frankenstein, but not willing to READ THE DAMN BOOK(S) AND THINK FOR A WHILE? Seriously. It's easy. If you're really lost, look up some published scholarly papers on the subject and use them to give you ideas. THEN CITE THEM.
You know all that droning on the professor did in class? All that stuff about "themes" and "tropes" and "methods of analysis?" Guess what. The professor has already given you the tools you need. Look at your notes, then look at the book. Then hit yourself in the head with either/both until you make the connection.
In the humanities, as long as your argument (you do have an argument, right? as in a thesis statement?) holds water and is even remotely logical and grounded in the book, you're golden. Oh, and at the end you'll actually understand the subject, more than "a tiny bit;" as in, you'll be able to apply the things you've learned elsewhere. I hear there are still some idealistic flower-people wandering about who think that's the whole point of college. Damn hippies.
Plagiarism is like cheating at solitaire. It's not even solitaire anymore. You might as well be throwing cards around randomly. Why the hell would you want to spend four years doing that?
There was an argument in a report I read recently that as the internet becomes more prevaliant that studying as a whole will become less important as information will be avialable at your finger tips. The skills that will become more useful are the ability to search effeciently and work out which sources you can trust. Of course studying helps develop these skills but why should I remeber PI to 8 decimial places when I can look it up quicker?
Oh, I don't know, maybe so you don't make an utter fool out of yourself when you write to your significant other? Or, failing that (this is Slashdot ;) ), so you can hold interesting conversations without having to go to Google every third sentence to find out what your friend is talking about?
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If a teacher submits a student's original paper to turnitin.com, doesn't that violate the student's copyright on the paper? (I believe turnitin.com stores the student's paper indefinately to check future papers against.)
Have you ever worked with a recent graduate, just out of college? They're astoundingly inept at everything, while thinking that they're actually pretty good. I submit that college is a load of crap, mostly, and makes no difference in the quality of new hires.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If the goal is a good grade, the issues mentioned are relevant. If the goal is to learn something, there's no substitute for spending time learning it. Keeping this in mind, the usual idea of cheating can be understood as a confusion of these two issues. There's no way to cheat the learning process, and the grading process is just an algorithm which gives useful feedback to the student when the input is constrained to a certain domain.
Well, if you cannot understand books by reading them and need help... do you really deserve to pass?
I read animal farm in high school and I thought it was a decent book. However, on my own I had *no* idea that it paralleled Russian history. Reading other people's analysis isn't cheating (according to me).
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
I agree. Those courses teach you one of the most important lessons in life: when someone forces you to do something you hate, how to avoid doing it anyway :).
Seriously, learning to cheat and slack off without getting caught is one of the most important skills in the working life. Given a chance, any company will simply work you to death - you are expendable labor to them, not worth the shit in your bowels. Once every last bit of juice has been crushed from your carcass, you're simply thrown aside to make room for fresh prey. To prevent this, learn how to give the absolute minimum effort required to stay on their payroll while seeming to work like crazy, to leech on them just like they are trying to leech on you. You owe them nothing, so give them nothing.
This is neither a joke or cynicism. It is simply the truth. You are likely to work for a company, and companies exist to make money, not to benefit their employees. Learn how to protect yourself from them, or prepare to be drained. And school is a place of learning, so...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
becomes the primary goal when "no child gets left behind." Now I know it is non-politically correct to say this, but not everyone is college material. Back in the day, college was intended for the cream of the intellectual crop. Now it's been watered down to job training and high school remediation. Everyone wants a college degree. Is it mere happenstance that the rise of grade inflation on the part of the teachers and cheating on the part of the students coincided with swarms of people enrolling in college?
Especially since in high school kids do not have access to cliff notes or spark notes ;)
Back then, I read only books of interest to me (Ender's Game) not those that did not (The Scarlet Letter). English teacher's are well meaning but are fairly easy to fool. The first thing you do in writing a paper is say that the book epitomizes the prevailing thought of the time or represented "fill-in-the-blank" during a transitional period in "country-it-was-written-in"
I also found comparing any classic book to "The Great Gatsby" was effective.
Then throw in buzz phrases like "paradigm shift", "curious amalgam", etc. and you have got yourself an A paper.
We had to write a paper on a song by Bessie Smith. 2 hours later, I composed the entire paper without doing more than a google search worth of "research."
Not only did I get an A, the teacher suggested that I join the humanities because I "got it".
It shows that how you write is more important than what you write
Boo humanities, yay engineering!
--Joey