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."

Comments

That's what you get...

[mwvdlee]

When getting good grades is more important than actually understanding the subject.

Re:That's what you get...

[scottme]

Part of the problem is having required courses in a program that student's might not want to take and thus might not care about learning the material.

So students should get to do only what they like? I suppose that's a point of view, but it doesn't greatly coincide with what I understand learning to involve.

The role of the pupil - and undergraduates are pupils - involves to a great extent submitting to the greater knowledge and understanding of the teacher. Maybe this comes as a surprise, but most teachers take their jobs seriously and don't assign tasks to pupils on a whim. If they want you to learn something, there is usually a reason for it. What you should do if you're a good pupil is buckle down and learn it.

Later on in graduate school or in employment when you're given some responsibility you can make decisions about what seems to make sense and what doesn't. By that time you'll have learnt enough to be trusted to make those decisions.

it's not really cheating

[dncsky1530]

I use Sparknotes.com often and it really helps you understand books and better prepare for tests. I also use myBiblio for bibliographies which works pretty well too. tutors arent consideredd cheating so why should study aids?

This is not the worst kind.

[random_culchie]

I have also seen sites that advertise (for greater expense) to write papers individually for you. These (if they are individually written) will NOT be caught by any technical means. Its still down to the professor/lecturer to make a judgment based on the persons grades.

finding cheats easy too

[Ev0lution]

My wife teaches at a university, and each year many of the first essay assignments she sets are copied straight off the internet, maybe with a bit of cut'n'pasting but often just a straight copy. We spend half an hour Googling phrases that the students were unlikely to have written (look for the long words!) and i'll bet we find 9 out of 10 sources. A written warning and a lecture from the head of studies and the problem is solved until the next year. Maybe 1 in 10 are smart enough to cover their sources so we can't prove they cheated, but, hey, that almost counts as research... ;-)

Better 95% fix

[boots@work]

If universities are concerned about cheating, they should give more weight to exams, where it is harder to cheat.

Exams alone put too much weight on memorization and performance under pressure, rather than research and long-term thought.

Therefore, tell people ahead of time what the broad area is, though not the specific topic. Let them bring in a few pages of notes, but those notes have to be submitted with the exam.

It may very well be time to re-evaluate...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the importance of college. Middle American society is now at a state where college doesn't mean anything over just having completed some education. My college sociology class (jeez, that was 6 years ago now) touched on the phenomenon of credential inflation, wherein baccalaureate degrees become increasingly meaningless because everyone's got one.

Really, the glut of colleges in the US makes attending one the duty of anyone who wants a decent job. Students go to college out of a perceived need for the result, so small wonder that most of them want to do as little as possible in their time there.

In one sense it mimics the situation in east Asia where companies will hire any student who's gone through a good college; once you make it there, it behooves you to do just enough work to graduate, and spend the rest of the time unwinding (ok, partying) from the stress of having had to pass the entrance exams. Take the entrance exams out of the equation and you still pretty much have the same deal -- kids coming out of high school with more freedom but even less sense of purpose.

From my college experience, it's apparent that students in liberal arts majors (not sciences or engineering -- class by themselves there) really have to try to fail, in order to fail. That doesn't mean self-sabotage so much as willful negligence of requirements. It's my humble opinion that failure to attend class with semi-regularity, to turn in homework at all (not necessarily on time), and to be in class on exam days really requires a conscious effort. More than likely its conscious reallocation of time and resources to such noble pursuits as binge drinking or playing Everquest.

I think it could be time to nudge the bar of standards up, and get a handle on which students actually care enough to do the work. If there wasn't this giant push for everyone to complete college, the smaller number of college-educated people could actually make decent salaries. We've kind of lost the incentive -- now instead of going to college to get good jobs, we go to college to not get bad jobs. Hell, I'm going to grad school to get a good job. I often feel that I'm wasting my youth on it, but being as free of the machine as possible is a pretty strong motivator.

My case for bringing apprenticeship back and giving it some respect is still fairly strong. However, overcoming the five-year itch culture is an entirely different matter which would fill volumes.

cheating

[Blittzed]

Having been a professor for 4 years, it still amazes me to the length that students will go to, and the time they will waste in trying to get out of having to do the work assigned to them!

One case in particular comes to mind afew years back where we set them an on-line tutorial to go through and answer some questions at the end. The questions varied, so this particular group spent DAYS going through the exercise and screen dumping all possible answers to the question, so they could answer any question given as an assignment. If they had just done the task given, it would only have taken them a few hours! I see similar examples all the time of students spending more time trying to "beat" the system, rather than just "extracting the digit" and getting on with it.

Re:cheating

[BenjyD]

My favourite two were during my undergrad engineering degree

- One girl got so carried away copying somebody else's problem sheet answers she copied the name off the top as well and handed it in with the other girl's name on it
- For another problem sheet, several of the questions had been changed from the previous year's version. About 25% of the year still copied verbatim the answers from papers they got from people in the year above us, without even checking the questions.

These people are probably running an oil refinery near you right now. Be afraid.

Just do what we do...

[ImaLamer]

At my school (some of) the text books often times have an advertisement for turnitin.com on the backs of the books (composition class text books). This lets you know day one that the teachers are aware of this service - and makes you aware such a thing exists too.

Problem is however I once was looking up something on the Windows 2000 architecture and noticed a site had the same word for word definition of "kernel" as my book. So I googled the exact phrase.

Seems there were 100+ sites using the same exact definition. Well, by looking at the pages I noticed they all had the same author. Basically the page was on 100+ free hosts (and a few paid hosts).

Well, I wondered who copied it first. Was the book the original or the website? After further investigation I found out our books are made in India. Likely it was the same person writing the book and decided to make a web page out of his work. Then I stumbled across someone who claimed to work for the company writing the books and he said the deadline for the books is 20 days!

You must write a book on Cisco routers in 20 days too! Well, Sybex should sue the book writers because they not only stole text but diagrams right from their CCNA texts. Our Novell Netware book said that ARP was responsible for name-to-ip address resolution too!

Extra mod points to the person who can guess which crappy school I'm stuck at...

Hint: The text books are written by NIIT.

erosion of quality

[lutefish]

IANAL, but I am a university professor of English. Admittedly, I have the advantage of teaching thousand year old books at a world-class university, which definitely narrows the options for 'buy em' papers to be submitted, but beyond that, avoiding/catching the 'purchased paper' all comes down to proper teaching. First, one can always assign particular paper topics: what sort of cow-town university assigns a paper, even for Freshman intro to composition, on 'Gatsby' without providing further guidance - themes and topics discussed, already, in class, issues examined and developed throughout the class, etc. This in itself gets rid of the ex nihilo aspect of purchased papers: 'gatsby as hero', 'gatsby as anti-hero' don't hack it when you've been discussing 'daisy as hero' or 'novels of social disfunction', for example.

If you do choose to give students freedom in choosing paper topics, which I prefer, at least know your students and their work. Although it can be more problematic in large survey/lecture classes, somebody should know them and their abilities - you, TA, GSI, somebody. Again, the relevance of the paper to at least some of the ideas discussed in class is an obvious tip-off, as is a comparison to the students' interests exhibited in previously submitted work. It's not hard to spot a purchased paper, at all, if the professor/teacher is doing their job of teaching properly. 'Book reports' and cliffs' notes at the university level? Pah.

All of which brings me to the point of my rant - this kind of stuff only happens at institutions that employ crap teachers. Not necessarily lousy universities, but ones that permit shoddy, sub-standard teachers who should be teaching elementary-school english to pose and parade as 'professors'. Even with a 4/4 brutal teaching load at a large public institution, this kind of thing is simply a non-issue for teachers that actually work at it, rather than treating academia as if it were some sort of sinecure. It's an ivory tower only if you let it be, and if purchased essays are proliferating throughout academia, it reflects far worse on the professors who are too thick and lazy to preclude such submissions (or identify them, without google or a paid service, on the strength of their knowledge of the student and his/her work), and the institutions employing them, than students, of whom there will always be a few willing to try and cheat their way around substandard interest, intellect, or discipline. /rant.

Drafts and Oral Examinations

[Potor]

I worked at a Belgian University and our program used to catch many cheaters (although some no doubt went undetected). Our method was simple: students had to hand in drafts as the semester wore on, and many professors would make an oral examination of the paper part of its evaluation. You cannot speak convincingly of something that you did not write.

One professor had an even more radical method: he would only allow students to write about books that had just appeared, and the students had to structure their essays around specific questions that the professor posed. Impossible to get around this, unless you hire someone to write it to spec.

cheers, potor

not violate the copyrights on their students' work

[OolonColluphid]

There is another aspect to that, of course. One of my professors, Scott Nicholson, discussed the problem on CNN. I thought there was something about it on the website, but I couldn't find it in a quick look this morning. Anyway, he did a small piece discussing how little of a phrase one actually needed to find matches on the web. Four or five words is often enough.

He took a poll in one of my classes about turnitin.com and other sites. The students were overwhelmingly against it. Not because we're cheaters, but because we agree with the McGill student who fought the system. Many of us, oddly enough, consider turning in papers to a service who will keep it on file a copyright violation.

Dr. Nicholson's solution, and that of many others in our school is to use stepped assignments. If there is a large paper due at some point in the semester, we have to submit paper proposals by a given date. For some, we need to have outlines or a short presentation for the class at a later date. Most professors will allow students to submit papers for critique in advance of the due date. All of this is to not only make it more difficult for someone to buy or obtain a paper from somewhere, but also to help the students plan and work on the assignment over the semester rather than putting it off until the last minute.

And then, if necessary, there's always the Google trick.