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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
When getting good grades is more important than actually understanding the subject.
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If you're ripping off a paper about Gatsby just be sure to mention where he cleaned the dried bit of shaving cream off the other guy's cheek. English teachers love that part. At least I do, and now, if I see it in a paper, I'll assume you're a /.'er and I'll give you an A for the semester so you can sneak out and go drinking.
/., I can think back of Daisy saying, "I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything... Sophisticated -- God, I'm sophisticated!"
That way, when it's 1:06am and I'm up grading papers and slacking off reading
...the cheat I could have really used in school was a wallhack into the teacher's lounge.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
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 story was already posted three times.
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.
Rather than spending money on a paper, just run around the 'net picking up term papers on many and varied subjects. It's easy to do. Then trade with your friends and build up an immense collection. Finally, skim all the papers on your subject which you have collected, stitch together one term paper, edit it into your own personal style (even if this means it is less polished) and do minimal research to pad it out. You can do all of this research on the internet if you are careful, especially if your instructor does not demand that you provide citations for every last thing.
This will not work for a thesis, but if you don't understand your thesis, fuck you anyway.
This does take a lot longer than just buying a paper, but the risk with that is that you might be buying someone else's paper, and it might be detected. If you're willing to live with that risk, that's fine and dandy. Otherwise this should get you through it with a minimum of work expended, while producing a paper which will not show up as being copied, and even teaching you a little tiny bit about the subject matter.
I have never done this because I have never had a class which required a term paper which I found demanding. Then again I've mostly been taking applied arts classes recently, and they have had practical examinations.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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... ;-)
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.
Write "Insightful" SlashDot posts for losers
...
Profit!
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
> 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.
several of the teachers subscribed to a lot of the websites where you can buy term papers and reports.
While this doesn't stop the people who pay to have one written for them, or the ones who do a fair amount of tailoring their "store-bought" essays, it at least helps eliminate the stupid cheaters.
I actually enjoy reading, so in my opinion, it's a waste of time and money to buy your reports when you learn so much more by doing it yourself. Not to mention the fact that you know you earned your grade honestly.
I actually feel sorry for the people who short themselves by not doing the work themselves.
Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
...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.
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.
"They looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined"
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?
When you can just buy the damn degree! (itll take you 5 days).
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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?
I have also seen sites that advertise (for greater expense) to write papers individually for you
I would bet that they don't really write individual papers. They possibly have a stash of papers ready to go, and just "individualise" them to some degree.
Remember...what they are offering to do is ethically questionable anyway.
Actually, the author of the article did just this - she bought 2 papers on Gatsby, one pre-written and one written specially for her. (At an appropriately higher price, of course).
The pre-written one was apparently pretty badly written (arguably like your average high-school student would write it), and the custom one was written with such excellent language that it was very well done. However, as she points out, most students can't write nearly as well as this paper was written, so in fact using an individually written paper could actually be more dangerous to the student in this case. As you say, a judgement on grades to determine if student X could actually have written the paper is needed here.
Personally, I think it's quite an innovative bit of entrepeurneership from the websites point of view, but what kind of study skills does it promote? So you prove you can find the easy way out - remind me never to drive over a bridge you built after doing all your studying by paying other people to buy it for you...
Daar is nie 'n lepel nie
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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.
Get your Unix fortune now!
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.)
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.
Amor omnia vincit. Occasionally.
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.
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
All work submitted to Turnitin is checked against three databases of content:
[...]
3. Millions of student papers already submitted to Turnitin.
So the teachers commit copyright infringement by submitting their students' works to turnitin and turnitin commits grand scale copyright infringement by copying, preserving and capitalising on "millions of student papers" without the students' permission. Great business!
Yea, I have to agree with you. Talk about lazy students...how about pointing out the lazy teachers? I only had a few teachers up through high school and only ONE professor in college where these rip-off papers would have worked.
For one, my high school teachers quizzed us in two different ways. One, our ability to analyze a story, as in term papers, in-class essays, etc. Two, our ability to read a story. Usually this was simply a daily quiz on what we were supposed to have read the night before hitting several factual minor points that no summary would include. We were told this would be the case, and we were told ahead of time that we should read with a notebook open and take notes on anything we thought might be covered (we were free to use our notes on the quizzes). Some teachers that used this technique didn't want to waste class time so they'd give us the quizzes to take home. They still worked really well.
Some teachers didn't like this because they thought it overtly communicated mistrust to the students. Instead, they opted for the multiple draft process for term papers. No paper was simply written and handed in. It was drafted, corrected by the teacher with suggestions, handed back for rewrite. This process would usually go three or four times, and you'd be asked to analyze how your thesis applied to specific small events in the book, again, not covered by any summaries. By the time you were done writing the paper, if you had tried initially to avoid reading the book you eventually had to go into it pretty deeply. Using the custom-written papers on these rip-off sites would cost several thousand dollars, one custom paper per draft. (And how would you communicate with the paper writer what they were supposed to do? Would you fax in the first draft with all of the teacher's margin notes?)
Finally, there was a teacher who I did not personally have but taught in my high school that required students to compose one essay per reading that was more or less primarly composed of direct quotations strung together. This sounds silly, but it was a very good way of seeing if your thesis held water against the actual text of the book. At the beginning of his course, something like 90% of the theses handed in were rejected and rewritten because it would be painfully obvious that the student didn't have a clear idea of what the author was saying (after all, not a lot of interpretive wiggle room when it comes to using direct quotes).
Yet another technique, the in-class creative essay. The teacher would simply ask the students to write an essay that compared/contrasted some element of two specific readings. Try to do this based on cliff notes of both works and you'll see it doesn't really work that well...the success of this kind of essay requires a knowledge of the texts more intimate than summaries provide.
These are just the ways I've actually had teachers ensure that students read the material. I could probably think of a dozen more if say, oh I don't know...it was MY JOB. What exactly are we paying teachers for if they can't solve this fairly simple problem?
Having said that, I will say that I have used what I considered to be ethical techniques that my classmates did not consider ethical (though I doubt my professors would have had a problem with it). I found it works particularly well for philosophy courses for some reason, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work just as well in literature for most people. Before I read anything for a particular college level philosophy course, I'd go to the library and do some background research on the philosopher, what he thought, what he was trying to say, and then do the same kind of research on the particular work itself. This way, I'd know what all of the later philosophers, professors, and graduate students thought about various aspects of the work. I found this much research was often sufficient to gain a true understanding of the material without having to read the material itself, which was very useful when I was in a ti
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Do your papers come with a disclaimer "for research only"? If so, are you willing to make them available to professors in a database that can be searched to catch students who are cheating by using them?
When I was at College we discovered a pretty simple system. Now the staff weren't the brightest --- in fact, most of the students in my year already had degrees, whereas some of the staff hadn't even finished High School. Great teachers, bad academics.
Anyway, we'd be given a book to read, prescribed by the syllabus. If the teacher was new on staff, chances were they hadn't read it. If they had been there longer and had read it, it would have been so long ago it didn't matter.
We came up with a guaranteed system to pass those book reviews.
The problem those of us with degrees had was that we simply couldn't do that. We were trained to go in boots and all, and none of those essays were hard. But funnily enough, the system worked better than hard work and thinking.
Great staff, though. In that situation, being around people with real life and trade experience was a worth a lot more than reading a book none of them clearly cared about.
Cogito, ergo sig.
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.
How many of you have ever helped or been helped by a boyfriend/girlfriend? I know of several instances of advanced degrees that were really earned by significant others. (It only seems to be possible in soft subjects, like English or Social Sciences.)
Love makes people do strange (and unethical) things.
I once wrote all of the essays for a g/f in a college-level English class. I was proud of them. They were really good - too good. One time, her laziness saved her from being caught: she skipped a class after having turned in one of my best efforts, and, luckily, therefore missed having to read it aloud to the rest of the class. I'd put too many words in that she didn't know and couldn't pronounce properly. The close call told me I had to dumb my stuff down a bit.
How the teacher never caught on, I'll never know, though it may have had something to do with how hot she was. There are certainly many ways to catch this kind of thing (as the above discussions show). He gave her an A+ and a glowing recommendation that helped her to transfer to a better college. I felt bad about aiding and abetting. That g/f is long gone, but I believe her lack of a good foundation in English eventually caught up with her (I'm now married to someone who'd not have needed nor would have sought such help).
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?
Speaking as someone who actually read Ulysses, I think actually taking the time to read the book actually makes you LESS able to write an intelligent essay. I sure as hell had a better idea of what the book was about before I read it.
I thought it was just me, but then I ran accross this guy who described reading Ulysses as "...like having a rib ripped out of my body, being beaten with it, raped with it, and then being forced to eat it," which about sums up my feelings for it.
In conclusion, if there are any schoolchildren out there, there is no course of academic plagarism whose punishment is worse than actually having to read Ulysses! For gods sake, don't let it kill again.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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
Back in 1996, I had to do a paper for a weed-out course Political Science on gun control.
:)
:)
Being the good student, I attacked this paper with vigor, and spent about a week on it, gathering statistics, charts and whatnot. I scored an 'A' since it was overkill for a Freshman/Sophomore course.
Well, I was a C.S. major and the web was just starting to hit full stride, and I heard this commentator talking about a web site called 'School Sucks' (www.schoolsucks.com) which gathered research papers for people to download.
"What a novel idea!", I thought.
So I submitted my Gun Control paper to it, along with my email in case anyone had any problems with it. HEY! I spent a lot of time on this paper! I didn't want it to go to waste! tee hee.
For over 5 years later, about once every week, I got an email from someone who used it, thanking me, and some even adding to it, much like an open source project.
All told, I guess my little research paper led to over 200 A's, and made a lot of people happy.
Was good fun.
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