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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."
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.
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... ;-)
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> 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
Copying one person is plagarism, copying many people is research.
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
...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"
Isn't that part of a professors/teachers responsibility?
No, it isn't actually. As a student it is YOUR responsibility to act responsibly and in accordance with the academic principles of integrity and honsety. Most institutions have such policies in place, therefore it is assumed that you are abiding by this.You can have it the other way if you like: we will assume that every paper has been plagiarised, and you have to prove to us that it isn't. Ring any bells? How about guilty until proven innocent... That is in effect what your statement amounts to.
"They looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined"
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?
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.
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.
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.