Slashdot Mirror
Cheating Via the Internet at College
Electron Barrage writes, "An anonymous professor writes that last year about half of the seniors at his US university were suspected of cheating, mostly due to the Internet and community sites such as Wikipedia. He guesses that perhaps 25%-30% were actually guilty, a huge increase from earlier levels. According to this professor, it's nearly impossible for the universities to keep up with the new forms of cheating enabled by the Net. Will academic institutions learn to deal with this new reality? It sounds a little dubious from this professor's viewpoint." The article mentions the anti-cheating services Turn It In and iThenticate (while decrying their expense), but expresses worry over the new countermeasure represented by Student of Fortune.
A more common excuse as to what's really going on. BTW, I wrote this Slashdot comment. :P
this discussion undermines the ridiculous and hypocritical nature of higher education - creating an institution where what they are really selling is reputation.
as the "web 2.0" empowerment of individuals continues unchecked, people's reputation will come less from the judgement of university systems, but rather from people's actual connections and accomplishments.
the idea of "cheating" will go away, because no one will care what some big, lumbering organization (the university) judges about what you've learned. people might actually be able to go learn what they want from free public resources instead of being trapped in painfully boring situations to get a degree - where they are so unmotivated they cut and paste text from web pages.
Well on their front page their video states they're not evil! So it must be true! I know something that is true for certain though, they're about to be slashdotted and they've a video on their front page. Totally going to hurt their bottom line :P
C3PO - We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life.
Excuse me, but I *am* a professor and I fail to see what Wikipedia has to do with cheating.....
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I would be very interested in seeing statistics on this kind of thing, by department and year, for either individual institutions or a collection of them averaged out. I'm a 3rd year physics student, and I suppose my department and its lack of essays does not see a lot of plagirism. I suppose in some departments it is more about having a degree than knowing the material, but in mine it seems so odd that someone would rather spend time/money cheating rather than just learning the stuff, or switching to business instead.
I have freaks! I did something right...
Top Earners
$43.05 modulo51 from University of California, Berkeley
$34.85 gwhitaker from Florida Atlantic University
$22.96 Manfrin from Miramonte
LOL.
I see no reason why he has to be anonymous, as I would think this is the kind of thing that should be made more public. I don't know how much credibility this actually deserves.
In my personal experience with college, I would say less than 10% of the people regularly cheated (by which I mean copying assignments or programs from external sources or other students). Maybe 50% of the people I knew copied homeworks, and I only know of one person who ever cheated on an exam.
A lot of cheating is in a gray area. For example, getting help from other students could be considered cheating by some and not by others. I know it sounds corny, but the person who is hurt most by cheating is that student. Even in a curved class, most professors are a bit flexible with grading so other students are not too affected by cheating.
Will academic institutions learn to deal with this new reality? It sounds a little dubious from this professor's viewpoint.
Perhaps it's time that the academic institutions came to terms with the information society that we live in, and reassessed their teaching methods. Technology is progressing; you can't rely on static schema for distributing information when the main modes for distributing that information are in such dramatic flux.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
The Student of Fortune website you linked to is the exact reason why colleges and universities also pair tests alongside assignments. While you can cheat on assignments, it requires different cheating skills to skip through tests. It will raise some flags if you pass assignments with flying colours but consistantly fail tests.
Even so, you cannot cheat on an actual work placement (or if you do, it probably doesn't count as cheating.) Sooner or later, cheaters that are incapable of performing in their field of expertise will be filtered out.
The good teachers are already capable of detecting cheaters, through various tell-tale signs. I'm not familiar with them offhand, but it involves checking writing patterns made by the student.
Sounds About Right
When I TAed a CS class, we caught about a quarter of them turning in the same assignment, some with 0 byte diffs from the others, some with just renamed variables. I think about 8 of em got serious disciplinary actions taken.
Attention impoverished college professors with a malicious sense of justice and an ability to write plausible looking bullshit! Now you too can earn $$$ while wrecking the lives of trust fund cheaters!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
...who realises that chances are, this "blog" is just an advertisement for TurnItIn or iThenticate, attributed to an anonymous professor so as to legitimise it when its true author submitted the ad to Slashdot?
I'm not saying that cheating is right; in fact I think it's wrong, but society needs to accept that professors "cheat" just as regularly as students. I can't tell you the number of times I saw diagrams, figures, and tables stripped from other literature or sources, included in Powerpoint presentations prepared by professors and delivered to the class. Talk about academic dishonesty - presenting information to your students that isn't yours and not citing the source is just as bad.
Further, professors are enabling this by making assignments that people CAN cheat on. If professors would stop being so lazy by reusing exams, paper writing prompts, homework assignments, etc., and started using creativity and more in-class, blue-book style written-answer testing rather than relying on the old "ABCD, or E" Scantron multiple choice exam crutch, I think schools would see cheating levels drop, or see the cheaters fail out. While it's tough to do this when it comes to assigning a research paper, perhaps if the professor would think of a creative enough topic and assign a different topic each year, there wouldn't be such an opportunity for students to cheat. Just think, instead of writing a paper detailing the intricacies of the American Civil War in expository form, have students write the paper in narrative form as a merchant in Quebec observing the war from afar. Such an obscure paper would be easy for someone well-versed in the history presented in the class to write, but nearly impossible for someone to locate on a cheating site for duplication.
The answer: professors need to stop being so damned lazy, and then perhaps their students will follow suit.
With the new information economy you can get answers in seconds on the net instead of hours in a book. The people who are successful are the ones who build apon the ideas of others while having enough sense to use their bullshit meter. Students are making a logical shortcut if they build apon one persons ideas from a peer reviewed site like Wikipedia.
If someone writes a paper with stolen passages from the internet from multiple sources they have to at least understand the topic and if they attempt to conceal it they have an even better understanding of the material.
Who cares. As long as they have enough information to make the leap to more complicated subjects then they can fill in the blanks with the internet for all the things they dont quite grasp.
The problem is, of course, not so-called "cheating", but the failure of the educational system to adjust to technological reality. The same holds true of these institutions expending so much effort and funding on stopping so-called "piracy" on their networks.
The inability of our universities and other types of schooling systems to adapt to the free exchange of information that modern connectivity makes possible is a result of the outdated ideas that these systems continue to perpetuate.
The notion that medieval methodologies like education using "teachers", "classrooms", and "textbooks", for example, has never really been questioned. This is because the state-funded educational methods by which most young people gain knowledge today has a vested interest in self-perpetuation.
What is needed is of course a reevaluation of what would be the most effective way of disseminating knowledge amongst the popluation, one that takes full advantage of all technological innovations available today.
This will of course require real school choice, and the abolition of hidebound educational methods. We are trying to build a 21st-century society with medieval insititutions. Something has to give. A free market in schooling, with all schools run as for-profit corporations, would give our society the dynamic, competitive, adaptive educational system we need. Imagine what would be possible if our schools were able to meed students' needs as effectively as modern corporations cater to the need of the consumer. Imagine a generation of children learning calculus as efficiently as Apple innovates the iPod. The possibilities are limitless.
We also need to lower the age for strippers and porn actresses to 17. Give the dropouts a chance to make some decent scratch before their looks go to hell.
Indeed, tuition at the local college is about 2.5 to 3 times what I paid. Now that might not seem like a huge increase... but I've only been out since about 2002.
A friend of mine took the same program, but was a few semesters behind, her tuition during the last semester was almost exactly double what I had been paying, not to mention the hundreds of dollars for overpriced books, parking pass fees, various other student fees, etc.
Such a system ensures that the rich will continue to get richer, and the poor will get poorer. Is student X that went to school Y really smarter? A better worker? Or was it just that student A who went to school B couldn't afford that Ivy-League education. Was student X really a good learner in class, or could he afford to take the same class several times until he eventually passed. Nowadays, maybe the case is that student X could pay somebody to do the work for him, whether online or otherwise.
Sorry, but today's post-secondary education system is a joke, with the institutions reaming students for every little dollar and cent they can. And for the record, the best damn prof I had was not some expensive PHD who spoke self-rightous gobbledekgook and looked down on the whole class (while being 20 years out-of-date and not really teaching anything relevant), he was a gentlemen with a good class mannerism, lots of current industry experience in the given field, and the ability to work with and communicate with students.
The real question should be: Is this caused by an increase in cheating students (and the resources to do so), or is it caused by an industry that has become stagnant, boring, and oftimes irrelevant?
I happen to love my field (IT). There were some courses that I loved. There were many courses that I wandered through (accounting, basic computing courses for the people that *didn't* like IT but wanted a job), and many that were irrelevant (outdated computing languages that almost nobody used... except for the college's sponsoring industries). There were also a lot of courses I wish I could have taken, but lacked the money. One of these days I'll probably have to go back to uni, and I greatly loath the concept of paying for dull, vaguely-related courses taught by barely-competent profs. I wouldn't download my answers or my essays - despite the boredom and irrelevance there is some sense of personal accomplishment to finishing useless courses - but I can definately see the motivation behind some that do.
I remember a certain incident here at school in a class of my friend's. Apparently, after the professor started the exams, he would go back to his office and post the answer keys on the course website. Some kids found out, and would have their friends wait until it was published, then send a text message with the answers. The professor found out this was going on, so during one test he published a false answer key and found all the kids who were cheating.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
When these damned cheaters get out into the workforce, they are going to continue to cheat! If their boss demands a recent history of the economy in Brazil, these losers will just hop online and get the answers rather than going to the library and doing their research. Heck, many of them may even cut and paste text directly from internet resources into their reports, further debasing themselves.
I don't work in an engineering field, but a friend who does told me -- in strict confidence, so please don't quote me on this -- that many engineers these days use computer programs to do their job, and only keep slide rules on their desk in case their boss comes by.
It is a scary world we are entering, with both the workplace and the university become result-oriented rather than method-oriented. One day soon, people may even think they can get a decent education without sitting in lecture halls for 20 hours a week!
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
I go to school to learn not to cheat, those cheating just screw themselves over in the long run. They may get a job and realize they can't cheat at that and don't know anything.
Have the students write in-class essays on whatever topic they're supposedly plagiarizing Wikipedia for. They'll have to either learn the subject, or at least memorize a summary of the main points (which is what a sizable portion of them do anyhow).
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
Being technically apt, I helped her mark most of the assignments for that course. After the first round of marking, I had an inkling that a group of her students were cheating by handing in duplicated spreadsheets.
Her: How can you tell? .... Bob.
Me: Well, for starters, they have the exact same data.
Her: They did do web searches, so they could have found the same site.
Me: Okay, but look at this. (alt-tabs between the 'sheets). They have the same formatting, font and cell size.
Her: It is the default font...
Me: True, but the formatting isn't. But check this out. You know how when you scroll down, then exit the spreadsheet, it "remembers" where you were when you re-open it?
Her: Yes?
Me: Check this out. (scrolls up to "title" line). See the student name?
Her: Yes. It's Bob.
Me: Right. Because this is Bob's spreadsheet. Now (alt-tab to Mary's, scrolls up) check out the title bar.
Her:
Me: (repeats for three others)
And laziness is very easily spotted. I was able to see the simliar formatting and data. Anyone with a little bit of tech knowledge could spot it. But forgetting to remove the first student's name after the copy-and-paste...
The point is, students who cheat are lazy. And lazy cheating is sloppy cheating. And sloppy cheating is easy to spot. The amount of effort one has to put into cheating "undetectably" would be equal to, if not much greater, than just doing it honestly.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
A person is going to learn in college or they're going to fuck off. Just don't grade on a curve.
How many people are submitting their transcripts for jobs? And what kind of jobs are these?
The only time I've had to show any kind of school records was for a work visa in Singapore (As an American). As far as any other work, it's all been based on my personality and performance.
I thought this was typical, but I could be living in a fantasy land.
(Disclosure: I dropped out of college with one semester left because finishing wouldn't have helped me take advantage of a certain opportunity.)
The sad thing about this is that most professors know that this is happening. And the solution, well, a lot of people aren't going to like it. There's a principled answer (do lots of delightfully unique, practical assignments that can't just be cribbed; include a lot of 'called onto the carpet' type assessment where the students must verbally justify their essay/code/proof/whatever).
Unfortunately, the 'I don't have time or funding for anything special' answer to the problem is to move massive amounts of assessment into in-class, high-pressure exams. So, if you're like me (thrive in these kind of exams, don't mind cram-studying, etc.) you'll love it. But there are many smart people out there - especially, it seems, women - who do comparatively worse under these kinds of high-stakes, high-pressure assessment than they do under comparatively more realistic settings.
As an aside: As someone keen on maintaining the integrity of undergraduate education, I think it would be a great idea to seed sites like Student of Fortune with plausible answers that would slide by some cheating twit, but would instantly be detected by a TA or professor. I bet you could slide some really amusing stuff past these guys...
Any college that lets students walk during graduation after cheating isn't a very good college indeed. Students don't deserve to graduate, but maybe that's a bit too harsh.
Invalidating their grades with automatic F's, not only in the class they cheated in, but all the classes they have taken within that school year, would be the solution. One can figure if one has cheated in one class, one has possibly cheated in others too.
However, for the above to be done, students need to be drilled during freshman orientation. They need to be explained the institution's cheating policy, and what constitutes cheating and what is "fair". Fair is when you cite your sources. At least then, you're being honest about where you obtained your information. Copying and pasteing isn't real work. You're suppose to paraphrase in your own words. (Maybe it's the secondary schools' fault for not better preparing students in regard with this matter.)
I just provide the links to the data and tell my prof to RTFA.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Is it bad for people to have access to information... does it promote cheating? If that's the case, just stick students in a white box and tell them to imagine what an education is.
After I finished reading the whole thing, it just felt like it was an advert for Student of Fortune.
:P
Hey, it looks good. I might take the bait
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
It seems like there is a growing lack of respect for academic integrity now of days. Most of these cheaters have only one goal in college: graduate and make big bucks at all costs. They don't care about academic integrity; they just care about the fat paychecks that they think that they'll receive after they graduate. It's not about learning; it's about getting through school at all costs.
It does no good for somebody to have a college degree if he or she didn't learn anything in the entire process. That is the trouble with cheating. Sure a cheater may be able to bypass an exam, a class, or even a few semesters. However, he or she wouldn't have learned as much (if anything) during school, and the cheater won't be effective when he or she goes to work. Imagine if the engineers that built our transportation systems, buildings, and other structures that we rely on, cheated through school and on the engineering licensing exams? Imagine if our doctors cheated their way through school? Cheating may be the easy way out of a test or class, but it is very detrimental to the cheater in the long run, even if the cheater never gets caught. And, in some extreme cases, cheaters may cost other people money, or even lives.
Students need to learn the value of their education. Undergraduate school is a greuling, grinding, seemingly never ending stream of courses (I'm a sophomore CS major now), but cheating is just a quick fix (if not caught) that certainly doesn't help in future courses, future jobs, and especially for future academics. College is hard. Cheating is a terrible way of dealing with college academics, and it is certainly an ineffective way to learn something.
In a properly run class, cheating would be very difficult or impossible. Call on certain people and make them answer, right then. Give short assignments designed to test understanding right then, in class, and take it up before the end of class. Test more often. Think hard to make certain that questions actually probe for understanding.
But all those things require more work. Lazy professors would rather assign 4 papers over the course of a semester so that they have to grade less, and then wring their hands about how bad the situation is.
http://www.fu-fme.com/
THank you, I'm now going to cheat and copy that assignment for my next!
The knowledge has to be cominning from somewhere. Wether this is from Wikipedia, from abook you stole from the library or from getting notes from somebody who actually did follow the lectures is irrelevant.
Perhaps you could, you know, actually try to find out if the student understands what he has written, irregardless what the source was.
The fact that studets cheat is not new. The fact that professors have methods of finding out if they did the work themselves or not is also a few centuries old. It is just that the methods changed.
Reminds me of when I was cheating (although not on univerrity) I made a cheating-not and wrote it smaller and smaller and that a few times. I perfected that cheatingnote so often that by the time I needed it, I didn't anymore. So the joke was on me, instead of making a cheating-note, I was actually learning and probably spend more time on it this way then when I would have 'learned' it the regular way.
Yet if they would have found the note, I would have most likely still failed, regardless of wether I knew what I had to know or not.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The ones using Wikipedia will be caught when they hand in a paper suggesting that elephant numbers are on the rise.
(Actually in the middle of article number 963 pissing on Wikipedia someone made a comment about the Nuclear Power article being a 'battleground' - I went there and saw this version which seemed rather well written to me.)
..... What has education come to.
God Be Gone
Offer a bounty to catch cheaters. Pissed off at the guy who's getting a better grade than you because he's cheating? Prove it and make yourself a couple of bucks. With every student looking to do in everybody else nobody would dare try to cheat.
Part of the problem is society coddles these miscreatants. One time in Chem I overheard this guy talking about his solution to not having enough time to do his homework. He copied. If I had stood up and made it public what I overheard I could have fucked him over big time. If everybody did it people would be afraid. I didn't. I don't want to bring to much attention to myself. Live like a ninja, hide in the shadows you know.
Anyway moral of the story: Whenever somebody does something wrong, go psychotic on their ass. People think nobody cares if they shit all over the place. If you show them not only do you care, but you just might break their fucking face for it they'll learn. They'll learn to be paranoid. Next time you're out and you don't have a trash can nearby for your candy wrapper put it in your pocket. Somebody might take an offense to littering. And they might not care if injuring you is an appropiate response.
Proctored examinations !
College professor decries as students cheat from books and libraries !!!!
Striving to be common...
The problem is that the system is moving away from graders and TAs and more towards automated grading. The problem is that you take the personal aspect out of education, and are subsituting the TA/grader for a computer program. This takes away insightful comments that a TA/grader would give.
If you get a problem wrong, you get it wrong. If it's a complex problem involving many steps (such as in physics), you could get the first half right, but the second half wrong. If you were to turn this into a TA, the TA would be able to mark the paper saying you are good here and this is where you fell apart. With an automated grading system, however, wrong is wrong. It becomes frustrating to the student to understand where they went wrong. As a way to alleviate such frustration, many turn to cheating with solution manuals and simply plug in the answers from the solution manual so they can get a high score on the homework.
And even worse, I have a friend who recenetly graduated from another university, and he said they used another automated homework system there. He said that there was a program floating around that would take your homework, and automatically solve the problems and fill in the solutions for you. Taking out the hassle of looking up the problem in the solution manual.
As for scantron tests, still feel it is an approiate format to test studens in when the class size is large and the question pool is diverse enough. Granted due dilligence is taken so that students don't cheat during the test.
Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
What's the difference between cheating and learning? When I was in middle school, I used to take paragraphs from sources and paraphrase them and dumb them down so that it would sound like I wrote it, and I was a straight A student. What's the point of this intermediate step? If I decide to read a Wikipedia entry about Thomas Edison to learn more about him, why the hell should I have to paraphrase something that's in that article? And if I paraphrase, how does it make my work any less "cheating" than someone who copies word for word from the same source? What exactly is the definition of learning when you're not allowed to use sources with the actual information on the topic without being considered a cheater? If the point of an assignment is to find information about a topic and then use that information to make an informed decision, then there is no cheating - you either have the opinion or you don't. Sadly, most school assignments are basically reduced to rewriting what you found out either through the textbook or through online sources instead of encouraging you to think about what you've learned and make decisions based on that information.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Affirmative Action.
All the more reason for exams to evaluate understanding rather than knowledge. My university experience at Arizona State was crap because every test, exam and quiz was multiple choice. An 'A' in a class like Human Sexual Behavior meant memorizing names and dates. An 'A' in Latin American History meant memorizing names and dates. An 'A' in Political Economy meant memorizing names and dates. All the rote garbage was like something out of the Dark Ages. The way to test understanding is by making students explain concepts in their own words. That's where open-book exams with long answers and essays are far superior, and where 'cheating' by using references for the specific details is irrelevant.
A-Bomb
The Information Age is here, so Universities better figure it out, like they teach in Creative Probllem Solving.
The Web is all about data. Aren't we all saying no web surfer has any attention span? So let them pull data. Let us assume our Anonymous Professor makes a new test every semester, so there is no place to import live test answers from, and "show your work" means tests must be turned in with several scribbles.
Consider information atttribution. Notice that in conversations, virtually no one documents knowledge? Yet the minute that information becomes written, purists start looking for footnotes, or calling foul on plagarism. Spoken information rests on the credibility of the speaker's understanding.
I have a reasonably sized print library precisely because books remain the only in depth soure of knowledge, after being introduced by the Web.
--TaoPhoenix
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Unfortunately, the 'I don't have time or funding for anything special' answer to the problem is to move massive amounts of assessment into in-class, high-pressure exams. So, if you're like me (thrive in these kind of exams, don't mind cram-studying, etc.) you'll love it. But there are many smart people out there - especially, it seems, women - who do comparatively worse under these kinds of high-stakes, high-pressure assessment than they do under comparatively more realistic settings.
Well, I think that exams don't need to be high-pressure. If you give a 15-minute mini-exam at the end of every lesson, this will quickly become routine. A while ago I was a TA in a class that did something similar (not weekly, but monthly). What is certainly stressful is the once-in-a-semester 2.5 hour exam that determines 100% of your grade. The reason this is common is because it is less work for the professor and his TA.
(btw, I'm not even going to get into the 'woman' comment you made.)
I teach tech at a business school, and have worked battling Internet cheating for a long time. It is not that hard to solve (or, at least, significantly reduce) cheating. Here is what you do:
1. Have students turn in papers electronically through a service that checks for plagiarism (Personally, I use Blackboard's SafeAssignment, which works fine, though Blackboard itself is crap). Yes, it will cost the university money. Control mechanisms do. Consider it an investment in academic reputation.
2. Institute a rule that any student submitting a term paper can be subjected to an oral examination about it within a specified time, making paper outsourcing risky. My institution has this in their student handbook.
3. Use multiple methods of evaluation, including class participation. This makes the whole course an evaluation, encourages preparation throughout the course, and might teach you something new.
4. Use fresh examples and/or new and ingenious questions every year, so that the pool of available papers to plagiarize or ready-made Wikipedia entries to amalgamate is reduced.
5. Design the content and teaching of your courses so that they value insight and deliberation rather than repetitive fact checking (for which you should use sit-in exams).
It's not that hard. It just means structuring the control mechanisms to the content of your course, and getting to know your students well enough that you have a multidimensional view of their abilities.
Espen
>> Create 'anonymous' blog post plugging new cheating service.
>> Get it posted to Slashdot.
>> Profit.
This is so clearly a plug for the service wrapped up in the guise of a concerned academic. A professor genuinely concerned with squashing cheating wouldn't link to the site directly. I'd be hard pressed to even mention its name.
Well, I think the anonymous professor's blog is a stealth promotion for Student of Fortune. Expressing indignation like that is a way to get us to go check out the site (which is clearly just getting started - I could Make Money Fast(er) with the Mechanical Turk...and may just be a prank anyway).
There are an unacceptable number of spelling mistakes in the "professor"'s blog. Unless "s/he" was really tired!
My most recent uni (in Australia - as of 2005) paid for the plagiarism check sites AND USED THEM and that seemed to (1) somewhat deter people from copying large chunks of text from Wikipedia and (2) force people who really wanted to cheat (or "had" to, for language/visa reasons) to pay for papers to be custom-written for them. If you're GOING to cheat it is much safer to contract locally with someone who knows the school, faculty standards, local standards, etc.
NOTlonelyOLDlady48
From my experience in a large (>100k employees) global corporation it is actual "cheating" what is better for work.
Generally nobody cares where your results come as long as you are not caught. And this is exactly what is trained in this case at universities.
You learn how to cheat and how much cheating you can safely do.
Of course there is Corporate Governance etc. etc. etc. but in the end the successfull manager is the one who takes most of the credit for others work.
And vivid examples are all around - just seen the case of Dunn (HP) - do you really believe she was the only one in corporate America doing so ?
But she was the one stupid enough to get caught.
Quoted from sibling:
> (btw, I'm not even going to get into the 'woman' comment you made.)
Well hell I will then! It's bullshit. Stop making excuses for the poor performance of women in IT! About 10 times as many men are good at IT as women. Get over it and stop pushing women into something they don't want to do!
I'm a tenured professor at a large, accreditted university
you'd think he'd at least spell check his writing before submitting it.
i give this prof a c-
Yup. I had a few classes where the profs did that, although they were usually weekly 5-minute exams at the beginning of class on the material that had been covered a week or two ago (so if you were a little slow, you would have had time to ask questions/get clarification before you had to write an exam on the topic). I think it worked quite well. Some idiots tried to cheat on those exams, but an assigned seating plan and a little statistical analysis weeded them out pretty quickly.
Why would you? It's quite possible that that's what he observed.
http://outcampaign.org/
... A "Slashdot of Fortune" website, where you can buy /. comments which will be modded "informative," "insightful," "funny" or whatever moderation /. editors to buy? Alternative CSS stylesheets for slashdot?
you're looking for? Maybe even some fresh trolls to replace the GNAA and "Stephen King found dead" trolls? Dupes for the
Somebody should jump all over this, you'll make a killing...
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Wikipedia's more reliable than Britannica.
a ses/Nature_compares_Wikipedia_and_Britannica
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_rele
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm
k bye now
But only because I'm not well-informed on the subject of point 1, which I fully admit. How could I be as a student anyway, when those companies tend to be less than forthcoming about how they do things (presumably because if they were, it could be worked around easily)?
My reluctance with step 1 is with regards to false positives due to chance, and due to quotations.
I'm sure you've heard about the million monkeys with a million typewriters and eventually one of them typing a work of shakespeare - which is based purely on random chance. I.e. a random string generator will eventually produce a work of shakespeare as well. So if we know that that is going to happen, then what are the odds that among a population of millions of students + millions and millions of students before them, somebody is going to write something that is similar if not exactly the same as another student - even those before them? I'd say it's pretty high.. so wouldn't that mean the chances of a false positive by chance is already high?
Then there's the issue of quotes - say you're quoting a source, just a brief bit of course, not a whole paper/dissertation/whatever. Won't that raise the qualifier for those automatic programs' notion of a cheater?
I do realize that flagged papers will still need review by the teacher, and as such it is only an additinal tool - but what if the teacher is wrongly pursuaded by the flagging that the student is indeed cheating, when truth is that they didn't and were just unlucky enough to have written sections similar to another student's?
Cheating can be seen as a creative solution to a problem, i.e. that of answering the question you have been given. In a way that's exactly what we want from students.
Why fight the internet and technology, surely it is better to change to the questions we ask students to reflect this new reality. That way we can assess their ability in a subject as well as their skill at on-line research.
A) I license all of my papers under the Creative Commons license. I really have no idea what it means, but I assume this allows anyone else to use my work.
B) All of my work includes a 15+ page EULA stapled just behind the cover page and in front of the CC license, with the actual paper in last. I have no idea what BS is covered in the EULA either, but it is safe to say that if any teacher reads *my* paper, that they have agreed to my license, and that I am not cheeting. And of course, if they do accuse me of cheating, I can go after damages, including, but not limited to, all expenses for this semester, all expenses for my college education, as well as all expenses for my entire life, since they just screwed up my diploma.
Seriously, software companies have been doing this for a while... why shouldn't college students?
--
JDS
In 1997 I was in a computer science class. Our final assignment was to write a version of the Game of Live in C. A week after turning it in the professor stands at the front of the class and says:
"Isn't the internet a great thing? All those answers at your fingertips in seconds. Just a few words to the wise. If your going to cheat on an assignment, don't cut and paste then hand it in. Of the 120 of you sitting here, 18 will no longer be attending the university and another 15 will not be attending lectures anymore but will get an F for this course.
Just as easy as you can search for the answers, I can search for your code."
Granted this is going back nearly 10 years where the volume of information was less than it is now. I think professors need to tailor their requirements to something that isn't easily googled and downloaded.
Don't get me wrong - cheating is a serious problem that is compounded by the internet. But this whole story and the "article" is nothing but a disguised advert for little-known studentoffortune.com. There is no way that this guy is a PhD - just look at the writing style and silly gramatical and spelling errors. The site itself is in its infancy with absolutely no chance of garnering any attention on its own. It is nothing but a glorified "Google Answers" service.
Why didn't you just RTFA and then copy it verbatim into your paper?
That's how I eventually became the Chancellor of Harvard.
You clueless n00bz today...
TFA is way off-bat.
The Internet has not instilled an expectation for "guiltless and effortless cheating" in students.
The author has simly drawn a mental graph with "the rise of the internet" on one axis and "his personal experience with copy and paste plagarism" on the other. Of course the two variables are going to be linked - because of the increasing prevalence of computers and availability of information - not "because the of the Internet".
He is also fantasising about a utopia where your average student will not cheat given the chance:
"How can we... weed out the cheaters and liars from the honest students"
The reality is that it's a dog-eat-dog world and that people take calculated risks (e.g. plagarism) to succeed.
Cheating has always been around, and is merely a sympton of the mentality of those who are driven to succeed and who understand that the educational "system" will probably screw you as much as you screw it.
"What about morals?!" I hear you ask.
I only have two areas of evidence (personal experience and academic studies found on the Web), and they both point to the fact that the vast majority of people have *very* flexible moralities.
You can't end cheating but what u can do is make it less likely by thinking carefully about the nature of assigments and test questions.
I spent some time as a university tutor and one of my roles was marking essays. When I started as a tutor, people were becoming increasingly net-savvy, and by the time I finished up, there was barely a single essay that wasn't making heavy use of the internet.
In my experience, and I am aware that I am certain to have missed some cheaters, plagiarism, even plagiarism from the net, is painfully easy to spot. Usually a sentence or paragraph doesn't sound like the rest of the essay. Then you do the technical bit: you take a few suspect words and type them into google. If they've plagiarised of the net, you know about it in seconds. It's pitifully simple and really effective.
Wikipedia is the biggest source for plagiarism, and it really puzzles me because, knowing this, I always made sure to read the articles before even beginning to mark.
So, basically, it's not all doom and gloom. Plagiarism is still easy to spot. There are bound to be some that slip through by using careful and sensible paraphrasing; but if they work hard enough to do that, then they probably deserve to get through!
I think it would prove more useful if secondary schools didn't assign book reports, but require students to read the assigned books then be prepared to discuss it as a whole class later on. As for grading, giving out participating points during the discussion.
My father is a professor and uses near-daily quizzes to keep students up on the material, but also has regular exams. He goes to a lot of effort to detect cheating in these. Seating charts were part of it. My favorite touch involved using multiple versions of the exam. These would have the same questions in different order and differently ordered answer options in the multiple choice sections. He would distribute these so he knew which student had which exam. Further, the exams would be printed on different colors of paper. The kicker is that the color of the paper was meaningless, but the students would assume that it differentiated the version of the exam. He would invariably get several students who turned in a set of answers that matched a neighboring student who had a different version of the exam in the same color.
the 'spur of the moment' exams which you refer to are more difficult for women in fields like this because, for the most part, they need to devote a much greater amount of time on a topic to grasp it to the same level as an intellectually mediocre man.
likewise, men can't usually begin to understand the social complexity of women. this is why women make excellent politicians*, entertainers, educators, and other "people persons" where such abilities are necessary and valued.
(thankfully, men have been logical enough to see this as a bad thing, and hvae largely kept them out of it for most of history.)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The university where I studied has created plagiarism detection software for this reason, which is called Ferret.
"An anonymous professor writes that last year about half of the seniors at his US university were suspected of cheating, mostly due to the Internet and community sites such as Wikipedia."
How does he know that people aren't putting their own work up onto Wikipedia? I know I've searched for information on Wikipedia for essays and projects. On occasion I have found Wikipedia lacking the information I have wanted, so after finding it elsewhere I have copied parts from my essay onto Wikipedia. He seems to be missing that Wikipedia can be added to by his students as well as copied from. Where I study I know that "academic misconduct" is so heavily penalised that the risks are not worth taking for the majority of students, so perhaps my view of it is slightly skewed, and cheating at my institution is less widespread than the norm.
they're only cheating themselves out of an education. When they get a career later in life if they failed to learn their trade they'll definitely pay for it. If they cheated to get there and still do well in their chosen field then they obviously learned what they needed too, and maybe skipped out on the unimportant details. If they continue to cheat when they get in the industry and are caught theyll definitely pay for it, and big time.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
What determines success in school is mostly just getting the work done (or cheating). What determines success in the workplace is mostly people skills.
During World War 2, the navy did a study trying to correlate the goodness of its officers with their academic achievement. There was zero correlation. HP did a similar study during the 1970s. Same result. The only case I'm aware of where there was any correlation with what happened in school was for lawyers. In that case the it was shown that lawyers who cheat did slightly better on the job.
Your boss cares if you got your job done. Your boss doesn't care how you did it. If you did a great job because you are brilliant, fine. If you got someone else to do the job for you, fine.
I guess I'm agreeing with you. The other sad thing is that someday your lack of a piece of paper may bite you. Your success on the job depends on you getting the job in the first place. Many/most HR departments do a crude paper screen before anyone clueful looks at your application. No degree, no job. Of course, you can get around that one by applying the old adage: "It's not what you know, it's who you know."
For those of you who read the full blog post, does it seem to you that this is merely an attempt at viral marketing by the propietors of student of fortune?
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
As a part time teacher myself, I wanted to write exactly the same ; teachers really wanting to put e-cheating to a grinding halt can do it easily following this basic iteration : 1) read assignement, 2) spot 'too good to be true' parts, 3) google them up and 4) Profit !
Except it takes some guts to break hell loose. Students are pissed, fellow teachers are pissed (because they need to homework to be on par), management is pissed because parents call by the dozen complaining that their genius offsprings have been chosen as a revenge target by a frustrated, incompetent assistant, etc.
In the long run, I think it's better addressing the question beforehand. Why do students cheat so obviously ? I have no scientific answer to put forward, but I have a feeling today's students are *scared*. Much more than I and my friends were 10 years ago. They obviously don't want to be at the low side of the scale, but they're too scared to fight on their own, in a world where a single failure can spoil a career forever ; they revert to a 'tribe mode', feeling that if half the classroom is stubbornly giving the same answers (to the choice of the font, no less), the teacher won't be able to mark them bad, for fear of his own reputation. And they're not completely wrong ! But I don't think this behaviour is linked to lazzyness in any way. Whatever even they brag about, I can vouch for the cheaters I have personaly confronted that they're more afraid than laid back.
Now, I only mark papers written in front of me. No telephones in classroom, all departure definitive (think about pissing before sitting).
As i see it there is the classic problem of lazy professors assigning the same tasks to students year after decade, and then there is the problem of real time student collaboration.
For the first category, what sounds like the more costly option? :
1. The prof saves time by asking the same questions every year, but memorizes every prior response that was given and constantly scans the net for prior students posting their answers. This can get particularly time consuming if the prof borrowed the questions from their own undergraduate education/adviser/someone else.
2. The prof has to spend a little time every semester coming up with a slightly original idea or a variation on an idea, then grades all the papers that come in with the same level of scrutiny as the papers that would have come in if the idea was the same as last semester.
The second category:
Realtime sharing (collaboration) is a bit more tricky, and actually has a lot of social twists and turns depending on the situation. Like most good folk i come from a software background academically--where you are regularly assigned to write working software to some spec. Out in the real world you are also assigned problems like this, but you have to interface and work with a whole bunch of people (and not just other programmers) to actually get anything done. At least as far as my universe seems to work, the ability for people to work as independent little islands seems completely pointless. It really doesn't matter how unfucking believably brilliant your solution to the problems of the universe are if you can't express them meaningfully to others in a way they can use. Unfortunately people that fall into this brilliant but essentially useless classification commonly end up teaching.
Academia should continue to hold high standards about outright plagairism from unrelated sources, but it should be much more open to original collaboration among groups of students. This is how the real world works. If there is fear that dipshits will slip through because of the effort of others, than the ante just needs to be raised by asking questions to collaborative groups that no single individual could reasonably answer in time.
There's this activity called handwriting. Any paper turned in that's not handwritten starts at a C-mark.
Then again, maybe we can only insist on that in grammar schools.
Yes, that's what I teach.
Except that the cheaters kind of screw it up for the folks who don't as the value of that diploma will drop. Instead of just looking at your credentials they'll start conducting interviews that might last a full day... or two or three. They might start keeping tabs on open source projects or wikipedia and send direct offers to outstanding contributors. Overall, cheaters make it more difficult for anyone with "just" a degree to get a job. And those same people will tend to inflate their resume when they're looking for a job, making for a much more extensive interview process for everyone. That degree might get you in the door for an interview but once you're in there it'll have the same weight as a GED from a promising student who didn't even finish high school with everyone else. Less if the kid happened to spend the last two or three years writing a cool application as an open source project and his code is good.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think only trying to solve the cheating problem by coming up with more effective ways to detect/punish it is the wrong approach to take here. The fact is that we do now have this vast amount of reference material available to us online via Wikipedia and other websites. Rather than try to prohibit the use of these resources, coursework should be designed so that answers cannot be obtained by copy and paste. In other words, assignments should emphasize concepts and critical thinking, instead of just regurgitating facts covered during lectures. Don't ask students to write a paper on Thomas Edison, ask them to write about how Thomas Edison's inventions have impacted modern society, or even better, how they've impacted their lives specifically. While it still may be possible to cheat on such scenarios by buying papers online, it becomes more difficult and much easier to detect. Another method which works very well is giving oral exams, as you can really see different students' thought processes as they answer questions and discuss topics (though this may be infeasible for very large classes). Once students start doing work the real world, they're going to have all this online material available to them; why should coursework at universities be any different?
Professor: You cheated on that essay: you copied it right off Wikipedia!
Jake: You're half right.
Professor: What do you mean?
Jake: I copied it off Wikipedia, but that's not cheating.
Professor: Huh?
Jake: I wrote that page.
After I dropped out of high school, I spent a couple months writing custom papers for people online. It cost them anywhere from 20-30 dollars for a 2 or three page assignment and I'd get about half of it. How would plagarism sofware detect this? It simply can't. Perhaps the teacher can tell if the student's writing style differs, but it was not unusual for the student to give an old paper to us to use as a model. Sometimes they'd also request a certain number of spelling/grammar errors just to allay suspicion.
And, on top of all that, depending on the type of course, students could turn in *every* assignment for a class by the same paid-for authutor. There would be no way to detect a change in writing style if the student has been hiring someone to do their assignment all semester. It could get expensive, of course, but hey, compared to college nowadays it was cheap.
What's the solution? I don't know. I don't even know if it's a problem. But anti-plagarism software is utterly defenseless when the original author didn't plagarize- only sold it to someone who did.
There is some open source software from the University of Rochester called webwork.
http://webwork.rochester.edu/
It's is an automatic math-based homework assignment and submission system.
It can give each student a different version of the same problem.
Part of the problem with most anti-cheating methods is that it makes more work on the already busy professor.
Just that.
The new gold standard for success.
I want my embedded google interface, loose the damned keyboard I
wanna be online 24/7 direct to brain.
Has anyone actually looked at the Student of Fortune site? There are currently TWO - yes *TWO* questions up for answering - one is worth $1.00 and the other $1.25...and that's despite the /. effect - which is probably the best advertising they'll ever get! In all of their history, there has been less than 100 questions asked and their top earner of all time has raked in less than $50 for his/her work. I think it would be hard to make any reasonable amount of money working for this site...especially since you can spend a long time answering a question and find that someone else got paid for doing the same thing - so you did all that for nothing.
I don't think they are a massive risk to academia!
www.sjbaker.org
The whole point of assigments is to stimulate the student to understand the subject on their own power. The grading is based on how well the prof thinks that they've done this. A solution to this would be to have a oral quiz based on the contents of the work turned in. If they understand the work, and can demonstrate that they can defend what has been turned in as their work, then who cares where they copied it from? The goals of the assignment have been achieved.
And to those who say that students copying verbatim from other work (or having it created for them) is an unfair assist, I say that this is no different (in effect) from going to the library and researching the matter. As long as the student can defend the work intellectually, who cares - they've learned! And thats the whole point!
Of course, then one might ask - whats the point of the assignments? Do away with them and simply have the oral quizzes. That would save the professors a lot of work. However, this limits the depth of work that can be assigned to students to evaluate them. And it gives the students a tangible goal to work towards.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
And why didn't you include slashdot in that list? oh, nevermind
wake up and hold your nose
If it wasn't for that site I wouldn't of passed Calculus with Analytical Geometry II last year. The professor never collected homework, but she also wasn't a very good teacher. If I hadn't of had access to worked out solutions to most of the problems in the book, I still wouldn't understand the material today.
Oh please come over here and say that, since poor, little, intellectually deficient me couldn't understand it.
Actually, sarcasm aside, I've found the exact opposite to be true. A large number of the males I work with need things explained in small words, occassionally with explanatory diagrams to understand even relatively basic technical concepts (ok, so for the most part they're accountants, but still...)
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
Blaming the internet for cheating is like blaming guns for murder - idiotic.
Perhaps it makes cheating easier, and in any case it's far far simpler to point to a 'technology' and say "IT IS TEH EVIL".
More problematic and complex to point to:
- over crowded classrooms, and overstretched teachers who are unable to catch what is usually rather obvious
- social promotion and a complete lack of punishment of any kind ensures that what kids learn is that they are suckers if they DO the work; cheaters never get punished, downgraded, kicked out - cultural relativism has ensured that there is always an explanation, always an excuse, and never any shame. Heaven forbid we shame anyone or make them feel bad.
- ultimately, a culture of opportunism and "me first" that's become endemic. Not that it isn't always present in the human animal, but as our culture atomizes (perhaps the real way the internet is making this worse...) there's logically a greater and greater emphasis on narcissism and self achievement at ANY cost.
No, no, it MUST be the internet that's doing it. Sigh.
-Styopa
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=142268&thr eshold=-1&commentsort=0&tid=98&mode=thread&pid=119 25054#11930483
What is a smarter thing to do, working yourself to death reinventing the wheel or using an existing one?
If teachers/professors are dumb enough to assign things that ask people to reinvent the wheel, why are they so surprised when their students come in with one that's already been made? Schools and colleges put way too much emphasis on memorization and spewing forth things that already exist as "assignments," so of course the students are going to go find out the information from an existing source.
Calling this "plagiarism" and "cheating" is just stupid and elitist. Get real.
In my side of the world most (90%) of the grading is done by exams. Very little is graded based on papers and such, at all levels of education. And let me tell you, it sucks. We watch your system with more then a little envy. Why? Because exams don't measure _at all_ creativity or initiative. Only how well you learned _the subject_, and only the subject, and how smart you are. And btw, you can cheat too. This may be a cultural thing, but cheating in exams is quite tolerated by the faculty. Which I used to hate because allowing students to cheat prevents noticing and solving lots of problems with the education in general. "Look, they're passing, so we must be doing our job right".
The program is a game that does a lot of random number generation and text processing. It operates essentially like a shell does.
I noticed a sharp increase in downloads every fall and spring of the source code for the game. I received two emails from professors (who will remain anonymous) that students were taking my project and, with very few modifications, were submitting it as their project for a semester.
I love everything being open source, but if people are to cheat using my stuff then that is not acceptable. I decided to hide the source code on the sf.net download page and only have a universal binary for Mac OS X (Windows, you are coming when I get your pch crap done, I also have plans to make a Linux version).
The downloads stopped except for the people who actually wanted to use the program for fun. While I want my app to be open source, it makes me angry that people would use my work as their own. I absolutely hate cheating, so much so that I am willing to stop source code downloads in my projects.
It is sad, really, but if that is what must be done to stop people from stealing my work, violating the GPL, and being bastards in general, then I will have to open up the source for the project only during the summer.
"Unique, practical assignments" are not the principled answer. The princpled answer is: whenever cheating if discovered and can be properly documented [original sources identified, etc.] the students should be expelled from the school.
Why is cheating so common? Because there are no consequences if the student is caught. The school's (university-level) I've taugh at were all too afraid of lawsuits and their reputations to do anything serious about cheating. If they would just follow their own disciplinary procedures (academic probation after a first offence, expulsion after a second), word would get around very quickly and the rate of cheating would go way down.
-JS
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
Most of the people I know that are in collge or whom have already graduated aren't really going to learn. They are more focused on getting it out of the way to start their career but those diplomas are meaning less and less as more people are pushed into higher education. College text books are availible to anyone who has the cash and most schools publish course outlines including homework assignments and in some cases MP3s of lectures so technically you can take the course at a fraction of the price without getting the credits for it.
I'm just glad companies like the one I work for isn't fazed by a degree. I also think it may have something to do with the mindset of the Linux community though.
I write for a blog that uses informal logic to analyze political media TheNonSequitur.com. It is based around a very common assignment for introduction to critical thinking and introduction to logic courses.
A really significant portion of our hits come from google searches like "ad hominem newspaper editorial" and since we are linked from wikipedia under logical fallacies we get a decent number of hits from there as well.
I bet that a significant portion of these searches are cheaters.
I hope that faculty at colleges and high schools have the sense to google their assignments whenever they can and find the resources that their students are finding.
If students were to hand in assignments digitally. The professor, or an assigned member of faculty could cross reference and search for strings of text within assignments across a list of known cheat websites. I'm sure they could get a programmer to write something up for them.
This is college we're talking about, not highschool, so it is likely that students are being prepared for the real world. The internet is part of the real world: what it means is, it should be part of college.
:) And now she does much better.
Now, there's 2 places where you can cheat in college: exams, and homework. Exams shouldn't be an issue if the school handles them correctly (They don't, but thats their problem). Don't crowd the classes as much, have the room in which its being held be "wave proof" (no cell phones, no wifi), and so on. Have TAs look around for people using point to point wireless devices and old school cheats (like someone using a Nintendo DS's pictochat or something to give answers), but that last one is the same as it was 20 years ago.
The rest, is homework. Really. we're talking about college here: students should be given homework that are relevent. If anything can be straight copy and pasted from some web site, then it is not relevent: in the real world, they would have been able to copy and paste it -TOO-. "Googling" answers is a useful real life skill. I remember when my girlfriend started college (as a CS major). She couldn't find stuff on the net if her life depended on it. I had to push her a bit
So when making homework, always have the internet in mind. Yes, it forces schools to redesign some of their content. I'm sorry, but the world changed, if school doesn't, students will not be prepared for the world.
accountants deal with linear, organized structures all day. 'computery' stuff is both abstract and structured.
anyway, i said "for the most part"... most certainly not the rule. i've known many a bright female computer person.
in fact, the ones who were bright were usually brighter than the majority of the guys. but that might also say something about the state of IT/CS schooling circa 1999 - 2002.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
When I finished high school, I was very good and fairly well experienced with computers, and I was very good with chemistry, one of the best in the state. I could do very, very well on Chemistry exams. I wasnt etirely sure what I wanted to do, so when I enrolled as a Computer Engineering major, I also took the advanced chemistry, even though it didn't really serve any purpose for my CompE degree and really only Cem and PreMed majors took it. And the first two semesters of the class that were theory, problem sets and exams I did very well at, usually having the best exam score out of the entire lecture of a couple hundred kids.
2nd semester, though, you also take a one-hour lab class where it ain't problem sets anymore - you're in the lab doing real chemistry, in the library getting real information. I hated it, my results sucked, and I got a C. That class removed any doubt as to what I wanted to do and I'm now a engineer. I will never have to boil water again.
Point of the matter is, in many majors, the real world isn't like the classes or the exams at all. Exams prove you can apply the theory, but they don't prove you can do the job. The real solution is you have to have both kinds of classes - classes that give students the opportunity to do practical things on their own time, and classes that examine whether the students know what they're talking about under controlled conditions. It won't matter if kids cheat the practical classes as they'll fail the exam classes.
I'm still glad I took the chemistry classes though, there are a lot more girls in Chem than in CompE, they bathe more, and I had all the answers. Too bad I didn't figure out how to talk to girls until 3 years later.
paintball
New student: "Yippee! I got $5000 from the state to pay for college!"
College: "What a coincidence! We just raised tuition $5000!"
Giving people the money to buy a product just encourages the supplier to raise prices, since he knows the money is there. The only exception is when there is some other force keeping prices down, and nothing seems to be keeping tuition down. In fact, the major reason tuition climbs so high is that the institutions know people will find a way to pay it.
Any government program to provide free tuition to everyone would have be combined with some regulation that tuition will not increase more than "so much" faster than the rate of inflation.
------RM
To put a positive spin on the story, you could make the claim that colleges are training the next generation of bloggers, who will be highly skilled at copy-pasting content from a variety of online sources and proudly proclaiming themselves as the future of journalism.
I got my degree from some big public university which had been(and still is) cutting lots of full-time jobs. So you have several hundred underpaid part-time lecturers and teaching/graduate assistants and they're expected to do a good job with that lousey compensation. Of course not.
So a bunch of departments went and made generic exams and paper assignments that were reused for years. And the obvious happend, some students noticed and resold their old assignments. Then they went into damage control and required the leaving of the exam question sheet in the room, used to be able to take it home, and nothing was returned, only grades posted which was so much fun when you did any grade appealing/challenging. You had to go to the dept records room or some proctor's office and be supervised as you reviewed your exam/paper and the grading. I tired a CS major until some non-english speaking TA lost/got lazy and didn't turn in grades from the 2nd mid-term to the end. And with no assignments returned thanks to the obsession with cheating there were no records to appeal.
So I got my BA in history, you might think lots of writing, but exams only. Every student is not very good at writing papers and exams which is why I say they're a very bad idea. What is needed are well rounded exams, that kind that can be assembled 15min before they're given, no chance for an advance copy to be leaked. If a paper can be assigned on a topic a better exam can be made. And you can ensure lots of it is on what was said during lecture and only someone who was there and took a few notes would remember.
My minor was Political 'Science' just to see how messed up politics really is. During my last two years or so use use of turnitin.com was required. I objected on the grounds of not knowing what happens with MY WORK once it's turned in. If the school decides to not return work is gets destroyed after a couple months, with those electronic paper checking sites papers may be added to their database, without the expressed written concent of you or major league baseball. And they were lazy enough to use it for GRADING as well and checking for 'cheating'.
Please note: an incorrect, not missing just wrong, citation is NOT cheating and should be only 2-3 points off. The prefered method of citing with and example should be part of the assignment which is to be given in writing.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
After all it's a big public university with large class sizes, and you have better things to do than go to class and do original work.
The problem is, the people of your state actually expect something in return for the $50000 they've invested in you (and saved you).
It's amazing to me that here, where everyone (legitimately) gets in such a tizzy over even the appearance of a civil rights violation, all I've seen posted are comments blaming students and professors for being lazy. (And it seems to be pick one or the other.)
The software used here is a culprit in a crime much worse than a percentage of the student population cheating: it assumes a student is guilty of cheating. By scanning student works against such services when you don't have a reason to suspect that that particular student is cheating, you're marking the student as guilty until proven innocent. What's more, you're doing it to someone who's paying you thirty thousand dollars a year. (amount varies depending on instutition, obviously.)
It's one thing to realize a paper seems to be too good to be written by a particular student, or that five papers are almost identical, or the same three sentences have been used in the thesis paragraph of every paper; but it's quite another to assume your entire class is guilty of cheating until, one-by-one, the computer tells you each student is innocent.
In my view, exams should not be such that knowledge you can look up on Wikipedia is tested to a large extend. Instead, they should be such that difficult situations are to be analysed by the student, taking into account all data that the student can find (rewarding good findings and careful selection), and checking for potential conflicts and inconsistencies to address the question of authoritativeness of sources, which is often used in the context of Wikipedia, but which applies to all sources, including books by "experts".
Having said this, students should be penalised for not citing their sources. It's fine to use Wikipedia, but its use should be property acknowledged.
The professor misspelled a basic word -- amalgamation -- as almagamation.
I'm skeptical.
Anyway, the points he or she raises are very valid and disturbing. Having recently completed undergraduate work, I can attest to the widespread cheating as well as the new methods being used to accomplish such. It's quite disheartening for those of us who believe in hard work and scholarship.
Why do I find it ironic that both sites the author of this piece noted as being used by the schools to help catch cheaters, Turnitin and iThenticate appear to be copies of one another?
H.
When VCR's are outlawed, only outlaws will have VCR's.
Universities generate $millions, sometimes $BILLIONS, in profits, justified by their teaching mission. Meanwhile, cheating jeopardizes entire careers, or at least expensive investments in college careers. That sounds like a big demand for countercheating software and techniques. And colleges are full of people who produce software.
It really sounds like catching cheating isn't a priority for colleges, which are the missing link in those mechanics. Maybe they just don't want to make their product, diplomas, more expensive.
--
make install -not war
...in the late 1980's, at the University of California. For the most part, in the science majors, there was not a lot of hardcore cheating going on, because it was simply too dificult to really get ahead that way. If you didn't really know the material, you would only fail in the next class, as the knowledge obtained in one class was a necessary prerequisite to the next, and so on.
However, on several occasions, I either observed other students cheating, or heard other students refer to cheating, in conversation, especially in liberal arts majors, like economics and political science (my major).
Generally speaking, it wasn't the marginal students in those classes who cheated. Rather, it was the the straight-A students who engaged in cheating. The ambitious ones, who felt pressured to maintain their precious 4.0 GPA's, were by far the biggest cheaters that I saw in college. These were the same students who would turn out for on campus recruitment from companies like IBM and Arthur Anderson, or apply to law school, after graduation. Many were participants in the Greek system. Go figure.
To this day, whenever I see a job applicant with a stellar GPA, I have to wonder: Is s/he really that bright, or is s/he just another ambitious cheater, in a nation that loves and rewards ambitious cheaters?
Half of the people in senior level of any college don't belong in college in the first place. They aren't scholars,nor academics, or intelllectuals. They are there because their parents have insisted that they be there, and because there is no other place for them to be.
Little that they are 'studying' will be of any use to whatever job they eventually do after they leave college. So what difference does it make to anyone whether someone buys a termpaper on John Milton or actually reads or attempts to read what the fool wrote hundreds of years ago?
University is corrupt racket perpetrated by the administrators and teachers who themselves were tricked into believing in it previous generations ago. It is the epitome of 'bait and switch' false advertising. No society needs to have 30-50% percent of its young people graduating from college. Especially when the young people exit the experience with a lifetime's worth of debt and no guaranteed way to relieve it.
Eventually everything that you 'learned' in college will be either discarded as surplus intellectual baggage or will be actually learned correctly when you need to know the material in question in order to actually be paid to do a job that requires specific and focused knowledge.
Let's examine the real reason that many young people accept the degradation of the university experience. They want to party, puke, get high, and fuck sluts. Well you have a basic natural human right to do this. You don't need to pay $20,000 a year to some creeps running an 'academic institution' in order to validate your normal instincts.
Then there is the social class issue, which is the at the unspoken crux of the college experience. Historically, graduation from a university puts one in either the upper class of society or in the fast track there. That isn't true any more. Upper class people are that way because there parents had or made money. You are the opposite. You went from being debt-free and having no money and no job to being $80,000 in debt and having a shit job after graduation. You are in a lower social class after your graduation by the reality of having an $80,000 debt that has no tangible assets attached to it. You went from being a uneducated freeman to a poorly-educated indentured servant. College tricked you; you didn't rise in social class, you fell.
Intelligent and savvy young people are beginning to realize that college is a no-win trap today and are beginning to (very quietly) avoid it.
Technology is replacing textbooks. I honestly don't need to look in my textbook anymore to reference answers - I haven't bought any of my textbooks this semester thanks to services like sparknotes, wikipedia, and so on. The *only* problem is when the professor references a specific passage in the textbook, but I have noticed that is becoming less and less frequent... That's besides the point though, I believe that an education isn't nearly as important as most people say it is. I'd rather make money blogging and spend my time doing that rather than go to classes. ;)
1. Free tuition for residents (with some limitations and restrictions) would mean no more worries about the given amount one would have had to pay back not only for the principal borrowed to pay for tuition, but the interest too, concerning student loans.
You are aware that is socialism?
Here is what happens with socialism. The government ends up regulating it, not the market place. You can graduate as an engineer and get paid less than general labor building homes. So what happens is a lot of people graduate, but end up doing something else. It lowers the wages of the degreed people, as the market gets flooded with them. I knew a person in socialist country that had a degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Astrophysics, but worked as an underpaid intermediate programmer for wages less than the national average. (The person was talented and sociable too but didn't want to move).
The trouble is everyone wants Harvard, MIT or Yale. The truth is they churn out for money egotistical self-import types that really know no more than local college graduates. My experience, from a business perspective, is the best workers come from lesser expensive local community colleges. Too many MBA's tend to run down companies in wages, dysfunctional politics and just plain bad decision making.
But to this thread. There is nothing new here. Plagiarism has been going on from the day the first writings. Even before the Internet students would go to different libraries searching out books to copy from that were not in their library, but the smart ones gave the professor what he/she wanted to hear. Two things the post secondary education gives you, 1) You learn how to learn on your own and 2) You have to give the professor who has the power to flunk you what he wants (puke learning). The truth is very little "research" goes on, so if being original in sending a paper to a professor you have to make it real good or bye-bye. Conformance is part of the experience.
That's C- work. This was written by an undergrad, and a second-rate one.
(If this really was written by a tenured faculty member somewhere, that school has serious problems.)
So what's your solution? Capitalism? It doesn't work. If there were safeguards on a capitalistic free market economy that took the pointy edges off for the little guy I'd be all for it, but talk to an Appalachian who can't get health care (and don't give me bullshit about not being turned away from an ER) or an inner city kid who can't afford the local university. Sorry, but sometimes the government does need to get involved.
The US economy is fancied among its fans as "adaptable". I fancy it as an economic reactor with the control rods removed where workers are continously fucked. Try retraining at 55 years old when an Enron debacle goes down. On top of that the amount of long term funding toward theoretical and/or long term research is dropping through the floor because it doesn't influence next quarter's profits. It's going to bite us sooner or later.
An oral exam, lasting a half hour to an hour, will usually give much more information, and would provide the students with valuable feedback. It also works a bit like those computerized exams where you only get enough questions to place you (as accurately as possible) on a scoring scale.
I'd love to give oral exams to students, but there are several major problems - first, with any number of students, it can be very difficult to schedule. Even with a 30 student class, orals would take 15-30 hours to manage and this at the end of the term/semester where you have other exams, grading and the like. Secondly, and perhaps far more importantly, orals (as well as the kind of flexible written test mentioned above) are almost completely subjective and thus probably unacceptable to most students. The trend these days is toward specific "goals and objectives" for a course with measurable and definable "outcomes and assessments". Something like "can use inheritance in an Object Oriented Language" is becoming unacceptably vague. Something more like "Given a Java class, the student can define a subclass with additional methods and fields." is likely to be more acceptable, but with this trend we're now seeing people demanding even more precise specifications ("Given the java class ArrayList, the student can build a subclass with an iterator that generates the elements in random order"). This makes writing the test easier, but also means that teaching to the test is not only inevitable but demanded.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator advocates doing away with grades and diplomas. Students can show up and do the work, or not, their choice. Do it that way and there's no reason for anyone to cheat. Those that don't do the work will get farther and farther behind, feel lost, finally get discouraged and quit. What happened? They flunked themselves out!
Over the next few years, the school of hard knocks kicks in. If they're intelligent, they get bored at the mundane jobs they're stuck with. They want to do something more interesting. They start educating themselves. Suddenly they're learning because they have a passion for it, not because they want a piece of paper. They're getting a real education, not a fake one.
Does it give employers a way to pre-filter people? No. Would it work for everyone? I don't know, but it worked for me. I started out as a math major, goofed off, fell behind, switched to a nice easy anthropology major. Got an entry-level graphics art job after graduation. After a while, started seeing ways I could automate things if I knew how to write software. Started buying programming books. Ended up getting a job writing software, now making high five-figures, still kinda bored. Now I'm studying computer real computer science books with every spare moment.
I talk to people who got real CS degrees, and find out they know less than I do. They mighta been taught the stuff in school, but they promptly forgot it, because they had no passion for it.
If it's a fake education anyway, if people are going to forget what they just learned because they don't care about anything besides a piece of paper, then it doesn't really matter that people are cheating, it's just a slightly more advanced expression of the same underlying problem. Get rid of the external rewards, and at least what remains will be real.
What is the real value of University Education?
:)) I remember back in highschool I asked the PGP guy (Phil Zimmerman?)about what was wrong with me using my 486's PRNG to create data for a one-time-pad, and he answered. That was a _novice_ level cryptography question and yet he answered me. I couldn't afford to go to a university where he taught, but I was able to ask _the man_ directly and get an answer (that was several years more advanced than I was able to fully understand at the time).
I sometimes hear about people that go to private liberal arts colleges and pay 30k+ in tuition to get a 4 year degree in art appreciation. And i say "you are a damn idiot.. you'll never pay off those student loans and you are utterly unemployable"
But, by the same token, I know I went to school with all those kids that heard CompSci was the degree to get to land a cushy computer job with a big salary. And I despised these kids for chasing money in a field they weren't interested in, dumbing down the industry, etc.
Hypocritical? Probably. (assuming that the 30k/yr art appreciation was done out of true love for the subject, which, isn't always the case)
As I am at the stage of life where I am thinking about children and how to financially plan for them.. the prospect of paying for 4 years of college education per child, in a system where prices seem to double every few years.. means that a 1m 4 year education in ~20 years is going to be common place. it seems like a 4% annual COLA increase in salary has you making 2.19* what you would today after 20 years, but the cost of university education is far outpacing that. So in real dollars, education is becoming rapidly more expensive to the point that one must consider paying for it in terms of investment value (putting me in the second camp, above)
For all of the effort I spent getting dual degrees (BS CS, BS Mathematics), I cannot say that I use _much_ of it in my day to day job. The CS work has given me excellent context and background in what I do, and I have a good sense for what is possible and what isn't, what is performant and what isn't, etc. But I am not sure the current scheme really "works".
I could just as well buy the Hennessey and Patterson book and read it myself. I still have my copy, and I remember at the time being interested enough in it that in addition to the assignments out of the book, I wrote a cache simulator to try and convince myself of something it said that I was unconvinced of. There were only a handful of us that were doing non-assignment work, and there was nothing about being at a university that was _condusive_ to doing extra work out of love of the field... it was easy to get burnt out doing the stuff you were "assigned" to do, and nevermind the distractions of learning how to become an adult, chasing girls, etc.
So what is the value of a university education? What makes it worthwhile?
Is it more than a booklist? Is it a booklist + assignments? A booklist + assignments + access to experts? Is it merely that it is a societally accepted way for kids to move out of their parents house but not have any real responsibilities for a few years.. which ostensibly they use to fill their heads with an education?
Could I replicate a CS education by asking questions to sci.* and comp.* on usenet? (1st year project - write a filter that drops any replies about mortgages, genitals, or medicines
Since college, I've moved to a town with lots of blue collar work and where University education and professional jobs aren't as prevalent. I've got some good friends where the wife has a (professionally useless) 4 year degree and a desk job she hates, and the husband dropped out and has a blue collar (litterally - he wears mechanics coveralls) job he really likes.
He comes into contact with lots of other non-university-graduates. One story he was telling me is how he ran into a 40s-50s year old career welder (welding is somewhere between an art and a skilled trade if you've
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
As far as higher education goes, I really dont feel like cheating or applying myself so whats the Cheapest / Easiest four year degree they offer (and im being DEAD serious) since i have a Decent paying job now im able to bankroll it without meeting the requirements laid down by pell grant, or tution so what have you guys got? underwater basket weaving specialist or higher will do.
No. Socialism is an economic system based on the "means of production" being controled by workers rather than by a state-backed minority group of owners.
Government "social" programs such as tax-funded tuition can exist in either capitalist or socialist economies. A free tutition program bear more on the "free market"/"command economy" axis than on the capitalism/socialism one.
Uh, this can occur in a capitalist system also. In fact, it happens fairly frequently in the U.S. now. (Met a fellow tending bar at a coffee house last week who has a C.S. degree. Of course, he said he got the degree mostly to get his parents off his back about going to college.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Had a guy I worked on a group book project (each member wrote a chapter) copy from 4 different sources to form his entire paper. He intermixed them but it was still obvious that he hadn't written any of it. Two things made this particularly amusing; he didn't fix formatting when he pasted into Word, his Greek characters came out garbled and fonts and paragraphs were spaced differently. Second, he plagiarized from one work which the professor had extensively written about in his PHD dissertation.
90% of a college degree is discipline. The effort to stick it out, show up for class, write the papers, take the tests. Most college degrees are worthless pieces of paper.
And what makes it worthless is the high price paid for that worthless piece of paper.
Until their senior year, most students have very little contact with a professor, instead spending most time working with grad students assigned as Teaching Assistants. Students are just a number. Graduates spend most of their time teaching for the worthless professors that can't teach, but have tenure just to write books as a secondary source of income.
And the worst part of all of this? None of it prepares you for the real world unless you're in Electrical engineering, or some other science/technical background.
Working for the government, or in a sales/marketing job? or entering the military as an officer? Or even being a stock trader for a Wall Street firm? Working as a CPA, you need to know accounting rules, but that can be learned in accounting classes. 4 years of college and $100K isn't required to learn that.
Look at online colleges. No professor. Most of them have qualified tutors with college degrees that are assigned to help out online as students ask questions. There certainly isn't much of a price break though... you're not paying classrooms, real estate, maintenance personnel, or even a stack of professors. What do you get from an online degree? And where does the money go?
College is a scam. Teaching and the whole educational system is a snake oil operation. Teacher unions, professors' tenure... it's all a reason for the topmost people to retain power without having to perform.
I'm a firm believer in merit-based pay. If the teacher is good, and the students remember what they've been taught and do well in careers, then the teacher should be paid more. Instead, we pay them based on their educational level and years of service.
And as soon as someone steps in to buck the system, to improve education and get rid of the dead weight, the teachers' unions and the left wing wacko socialists step in and start complaining.
The whole educational system revolves around money. Teachers and unions cry about money. Money, money, money. They can't teach because they don't have enough money. I'd LOVE to throw millions of dollars at a big school district year after year, and PROVE to these boneheads that money won't solve their troubles. Because as sure as they are that money will solve their troubles, after several years, when student still have the same troubles they've always had, then money won't be the answer... and the teachers/unions will have to come up with something new... and what will that be? Video games? Parents? They'll find anything they can to blame the problem on anyone but their curretn system.
I really hope that wasn't an English professor.
I like music
Here is what happens with socialism. The government ends up regulating it, not the market place. You can graduate as an engineer and get paid less than general labor building homes. So what happens is a lot of people graduate, but end up doing something else. It lowers the wages of the degreed people, as the market gets flooded with them. I knew a person in socialist country that had a degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Astrophysics, but worked as an underpaid intermediate programmer for wages less than the national average. (The person was talented and sociable too but didn't want to move).
That's a gross oversimplification. I live in a wefare-state country, and could probably find graduates earning less than labourers, but that isn't because we don't have to pay tuition fees, it's because the unions ensure the people who build houses get paid well, especially if they're very well qualified: do you think anyone can build a house with the same level of quality and speed as a highly trained worker with years or decades of experience? Of course not!
The other thing you're wrong about is the market being flooded with graduates. The USA has a higher rate of university attendance than the welfare-state economies of Europe, for the simple reason that it's one of the only ways to get a good wage/salary over there. Over here, people can earn a good wage doing manual labour, especially if they're skilled, so the ones who don't want to go to university do that instead, without having to accept a life of being poor.
The situation you've described is, I think, valid for the old command economies of the Soviet Bloc, where education was centrally planned, but the problem there was the central planning: the state planners simply can't know what sort of education or training everyone should take. It is not necessarily applicable for democratic socialism, where education is a choice, and not the only path to follow if you want a good job. There are, however, labour market problems in certain countries, such as Germany and France, which relate to rigidities (i.e. it is very difficult to lay off workers once employed), but they are not problems with welfare-state economies generally (e.g. they do not apply in Holland, the Nordic countries, etc.).
So what else is new? "Research papers" were being sold in University newspapers 4 decades ago when I went to college.
If professors are smart (and some are), they will invent new ways to evaluate students' performance and knowledge.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
I could of sworn that if you write a paper and then reuse that paper word for word as yet another paper that you are commiting plagiarism. (and these days, doesn't the death sentence apply to plagiarism?)
I remember taking an exam on a computer using our laptops because laptops were required at the university which I attended. Myself and two other people were the only people not in the chat room giving each other the answers (it was code we were writing btw). Cheating happens all the time. You don't tell on the people because you can't prove it, and it will make your life hell for the rest of the time you spend with them. The only difference is when people get out in the real world and start interviewing for jobs, they're not going to know what they're talking about and I do (although I get really nervous in interviews and sound stupid, but that's beside the point).
Hey, guessing is good enough for college professors and, apparently, slashdot editors!
And now that he has "real data", why not make comparisons and post them? The Internet is so fucking cool, ain't it? You don't have to make any sense at all!
Students want multiple choice exams because having the answers in front of them enables visual recall of the correct answer. If a professor tries to institute tougher tests (in the U.S. at least), the students protest. There are consequences for this - student evaluations count in promotion and tenure. Getting slaughtered because your tests are too hard happens to all beginning professors. Then, they learn that they have to tailor their tests to the student culture if they want to keep their job. Bottom line: get real and stop complaining - college students are adults and they get what the ask for / deserve out of their education, for better or worse.
Foolish indeed are the professors who do not search both the web and wikipedia. In the experience of those I know, students take the most obvious ones, generally from the first page of hits. Foolish indeed are the professors who do not customize paper topics, or who repeat them. As an ug in an art history survey course, a subject I like, I handed in what must have seemed like a suspiciously good essay on an object in a museum. She asked me to describe exactly where in the museum it was.
In one of my English courses we were required to write that old standby, the persuasive essay. Being in a somewhat snarky mood and rather tired of having to dish out the same damn essay year after year, I declared that my topic would be "unresolved controversial issue", wrote it, and turned it in. Rather pleased with myself for being such a punkass, I then posted it to my website, where it was discovered by the professor; he called me into his office to give me a big lecture.
I was utterly confused as to what his problem was until he turned the monitor towards me, showing me the familiar blue-and-gray, at which point I dissolved into insane giggles and pointed out not only the date and time it was posted, but followed the link of "kitten" back to the identifier of my real name.
I got an A on this paper.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
It really seems to me at least, after 4 years of poly sci and history undergrad at an average state U (University of Iowa)that the only thing "higher" in higher ed is the general student body, well that and tuition each year, lol
Seriosuly though, the problem I have is not that TA's teach so many classes, at least at Iowa once you get into sophmore level classes you are at least going to get a fauclty member teaching the majority of the class. My true resentment is that so many teachers have started using attendance policies that are unduly severe, for example in several of my classes it has been 3 unexcused misses and you fail. In theory if the teacher has truly releavnt insightfull material to lecture on you should be motivated to show up because the material will be on the test or because the instructor is generally good at what they do. What has happened repeatedly in my experience is that instead, the teacher, a fully qaulified faculty memeber, will literally read the powerpoint outline for the hour long class, then post it on the internet, and still fail you if you do not sit there and listen to them speak it.
IMHO that is a travesty, if i can learn the material on my own why does the teacher need the ego boost of me sitting in front of him/her, especially since i have paid for the class anyway. This level of education is rapidly turning into high-school style babysitting, while making sure to as little intensive coursework as possible for the student and the teacher.
I must bid you farewell....... "walks out amid the gunfire"
This is a free-for-all open conversation that will effectively disappear in 24 hours, not a doctoral thesis.
If by "24 hours," you mean "probably forever," sure.
Actually, I think that most Slashdot comments will probably be more widely accessible, and accessible for longer, than all but a select few doctoral theses.
I don't mean to exaggerate, but I wish more people would realize that every time they hit the "Submit" button, they're carving something into the digital equivalent of a stone tablet. Barring a nuclear war or extreme shortage of hard drive space for CmdrTaco's porn collection, it's going to be around forever.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Amen. Actually, I'm surprised that it took this far down in the discussion for someone to say that.
If you give an assignment that someone can complete in twenty minutes by copying and pasting out of Wikipedia, the biggest problem isn't the cheating per se, it's that the assignment was so brainless. What possible purpose could that serve? A slightly more intelligent student would just have read the WP article, and then retyped it in their own words, or changed slightly more of it so that it wasn't obvious that it was a copy/paste.
I suppose if the purpose of the class was some sort of technical writing, perhaps this would be a valid technique; however, I don't think that the intent of most classes where this is being employed, is to teach students how to regurgitate material in slightly-changed form. (Or if it is, then we have a more serious problem -- why does that class exist and what purpose does it serve?)
My opinion is that a well-written question will allow students to employ all the resources at their disposal, and still be effective as a teaching tool. In other words, it doesn't rely on artificially-induced stupidity or blinders in order to make people think (which rarely works).
There are a few legitimate reasons to limit what resources can be employed on a particular task, obviously, but they're minimal. The first rule is what I refer to as the "Nuclear Flyswatter" rule. Sometimes it makes sense to give a trivial problem and require that only minimal resources are used, because you're trying to simulate a real-world situation where those resources wouldn't be available. For instance, in a geology class, you might want students to be able to identify rocks without grinding them up and putting them into a mass spectrometer, because in the field, you wouldn't have a mass spectrometer. Thus, it would be appropriate and fair to require students to identify rocks using nothing but field tools, if that's a skill that the class is meant to impart. Also, there are legitimate concerns about keeping the playing field level; it isn't particularly fair to let some students employ resources that aren't available to everyone, if they're being graded against each other on the same scale.
In real life, people use whatever resources they can get their hands on when they're trying to solve a problem. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to artificially deny their use, particularly since a better instructive and pedagogical technique would allow them to become part of the learning process, rather than working against it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
HMMMM... Women do better on out of class writing assignments. Lot's of students are copying out of class writing assignments off the web. There are lots of women students. 2+2+2=?
hilarious
or (fairly obvious) reasons I won't be naming any names.
Why is this guy so afraid of going public? Why does he have to remain anonymous?
He has tenure. He's concerned about the well-being of his institution. Wouldn't going public have little risk, and potentially greatly improve the quality of education at his and other institutions?
This smells like a fake.
Watching out for sites like these is an important thing to do, and despite the sensationalism that accompanies any newly discovered (by the press) form of cheating (as well as any new story containing the keyword "internet"), it's good that universities watch out for that sort of thing. However, just as important is that students are given a chance to defend or explain their actions before a summary judgment is handed down. From an ivory-tower-theoretical perspective, this should be expected of an educational entity, where the a priori assumption should be that the students don't know how to do everything right (this doesn't mean they shouldn't be expected to think for themselves, learn the material, etc., just that they may need to be forgiven for mistakes in presentation).
For example, I was accused of cheating twice during my college career:
1. Thermodynamics, which for some reason was a very natural subject for me, but my hallmate was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of formulas and tables. I tutored him extensively outside of class, always careful not to simply supply him with the answers. A sharp-eyed TA (good for him) noticed that our reasoning on one assignment in particular was suspiciously similar. The three of us met with the professor, where we explained the situation. Fortunately I still had the scratch paper from some of our sessions. He had us independently work out a problem from the material we had covered a couple of weeks earlier, and we were both able to complete the work to his satisfaction. Everyone maintained a cool head throughout the entire proceeding, and no ill will was assumed.
2. Technical Writing. This was a case of a very lazy professor whose interest in the class faded palpably over the course of the semester. The assignments were varied (resume, instruction manual, presentation, etc.) and I took pride in being to adapt myself to the different formats. At the end of the semester, the professor seemed very eager to get the class over with. The last assignment was to write a proposal - I did a grant application in a field that the prof. most likely knew nothing about (brain sciences - yes, I switched majors). The comments on my returned assignment strongly implied that I had plagiarized, although they never explicitly used the word. "Proposal" was even placed in quotation marks at one point. I emailed to have the accusations clarified, since I had searched on my own and could not turn up any sources that were very similar to my work. Far from solid evidence, I was told that my writing style in that assignment seemed too different from my previous ones, and that I should "drop the attitude." Further questioning by me resulted in being offered a "deal" to drop the matter and take a C (minimal passing grade) in the class. Fortunately there wre mechanisms in place to allow me to go higher up and seek resolution from the administration, and it appears that the ruling will be in my favor. Steps in the process have included having my work for the entire semester checked by other professors who have taught the course.
All of this is to say that there are people watching out for cheating already, and so the battle cries that generate headlines are largely misplaced, but often overlooked is the equal importance of treating the students fairly and of treating the situation itself as a learning opportunity. Also, as halcyon1234 said in an earlier comment, good cheating is just as hard as doing the honest work.
Posting anonymously because #2 above is unresolved and I don't want to appear to be slandering anyone or inciting problems at my school, especially because I think they are handling it well. I will, of course, be sure to publicly praise them once the whole story can be told.
I agree with you about the 15-minute mini-exam. Unfortunately, many questions don't fit well in this format - some of the better exams I've sat are assuming that you are spending 40 minutes per question. The principle still holds, of course.
As for the 'woman' comment... Unfortunately, many people did get into the comment, and many of them said asinine things. I do recall reading some research on differences in gender-based outcomes on 'high-stakes, single-shot exams' that weren't reflected in other performance indicators, and this seems to have been supported by my experience. This sort of high-stakes exam is a confidence test, and men (even the incompetent ones) often seem more confident than women.
And to the assholes on the thread, it wasn't because the women are all cheating in their other work. As it happens, nearly every cheat that I've ever caught in my teaching career is male, and much of the detection of this was by automatic software plagiarism detectors (so it's not just because I'm nicer to women). Well, aside from the guy that I saw handing in his written assignment into the top of the pile and his friends into the middle of the pile - nice job, dude.
Nor is it because the women are necessarily weaker at IT or anything else (which wasn't even mentioned in the study I saw - I think it was a general difference).
When I went from High School to Uni there was a distinct feeling "this is where real learning begins". Usually because for the first time in your life you actually had some say in your choice of education - you chose it. Sure I have friends who went to College/Uni and partied a bit too hard, but partying is part of learning :)
Everyone survives, everyone finds their place. Not everyone can be Donald Trump and quite frankly alot would never want to be.
Having a degree or certificate out of tertiary education is a huge advantage in getting a job initially, but really its worthless after job experience kicks in. The IT industry is notorious for having a sub-industry of futher certifying its groupies, for large amounts of money, to keep "up to date" with latest technologies. Though this has merit, a bit too much weight has been associated with many of these certificates. Word starts getting around that certs are a bit of a tug and easy to get ones can be used as a ticket. Easy path, cheating, its a fine line and "professionals" are doing it every day. Students hear about these things and it certainly doesn't help their faith in the value of study or their final certification.
There are certainly better approaches than expending huge amounts of effort trying to stop cheating. It can never be stopped and really the temptation really needs to be there for people to make a choice, for themselves.
Most parents instill enough values through their kid's life that they know the consequences of cheating and the feeling of accomplishment of doing work themselves. But for the sake of everybody, in first year Uni/College lecturers should be re-instilling some real world motivation not to cheat rather than just saying "DON'T". (Alot probably do already). Basic anti-cheating methods should be in place, but nothing Draconian. However, the penalties for being caught cheating should be quite high, as they are in real life. If they get away with it, they may learn a lesson in guilt, or maybe not and have a fruitful career in crime.
W.r.t to the net being a cheating source, that is plain ridiculous. Our open book exams were the toughest damn ones of the lot.
Mod the parent up, this is spot-on. Colleges and universities are slacking on their own academic integrity policies and diluting the quality of education in the process. The threat of instantaneous, procedurally-mandated expulsion is the best deterrent a faculty member has to dissuade students from cheating. But, as the article states and I can attest, that's not happening. There's no reason why catching cheaters should be a technological arms race between students and faculty-- if a small handful of kids were expelled in the first semester for their first cheating offense, as those academic integrity pledges they all sign says will happen, chances are all but the most recalcitrant would refrain from cheating altogether.
I taught as adjunct faculty in a prestigious Masters-level program this summer and can attest that plagiarism is rampant. In my class of 14 students I caught two. One admitted to it, the other was caught red-handed thanks to Google. In theory both should have been expelled. I initiated academic integrity proceedings (most schools have a procedure in which faculty document suspected plagiarism and talk to the student, and then, if not satisfied with the student's excuse, report it, at which point it is out of the faculty member's hands) and failed both students. Lo and behold, the administration let them continue in the program. Now, that's frustrating as an instructor to have no authority to put your foot down, but the real losers here are the other students in the program. They see that, in fact, you can get away with plagiarism, meaning that the very worst students among them will probably do so themselves at some point (sabotaging their own education), and the very best students will be demoralized by the knowledge that the program isn't nearly as prestigious as it seems to be. There's no way professors can hold this problem in check when school administrations are working against them-- the problem isn't technology, it's greedy and shortsighted school administrations. Clearly dismissing large numbers of students is not a good thing by any means for a school as a whole. But how in the world did dismissing students who break academic integrity pledges become more problematic then graduating them? I mean, isn't the whole point of a degree to certify that you completed a set curriculum of coursework? Allowing these kids to pass defeats the whole notion of a degree as a signifier of a certain level of aptitude.
I just started a first year biology course at a fairly large university in western canada, and we were told on the first day that all hard-copy labs must be accompanied by an emailed version to make it easier for them to check for plagarism. I think the anti-cheating measures are being taken too far when they are placing the responsibility on the student to ensure their work can be checked for cheating. Like many people have already said, base the bulk of the grade on short, pointed exams, and don't bother checking how the student learned the materal.
There is an easy solution: I am going to patent "cheating using the internet". Then I will charge all those cheaters horrendous fees.
AccountKiller
I was a college history and geography instructor. The department standards for teaching these courses emphasized term papers or research papers of one sort or another, which was becoming a problem as early as 1998 (when I finished my degree and began to teach). Almost every student cheated on these papers by either copying them from a web site or swiping stuff directly from the encyclopedia programs on their PCs. Like I'm an idiot, I could tell. The cheaters (or plagiarists) were given a choice, get an F for the paper, or doing it over again. They always chose to do it over again. This got old very quickly. So I broke the rules. No more research papers, term papers, or any other prepared materials. Essay tests ruled my world. Sometimes I took a page from one of my old math teachers, and gave them the subject of the essay and permission to bring one page of notes with them to the test. After getting a little heat from the department for only giving essay tests or short answer tests, I added presentations to the requirement. A student had to make a presentation to the class and stand for questioning afterwards.
These were all introductory courses. How I'd manage an advanced course where research papers would be a necessary, I don't know. Perhaps I'd require each student to submit an initial bibliography, an outline, partial draft, and only then a final draft. That's a hell of a lot of work for me, though. But just asking for a paper without any structure to prevent cheating is like leaving a laptop on a restaurant table while going to the bathroom. And you're surprised it's gone when you get back?
School exams (at 16) in the UK have migrated over the past 15 years from almost entirely exam based to heavily coursework based.
One reason for this change was the gender differences in exam scores.
Now of course, girls are outscoring boys quite significantly. And it doesn't matter, because getting an A is now so easy they've had to add A* as a grade, and even those are easy to achieve.
As someone who CANNOT (physically) control the legibility of my handwriting and is attempting to go through a university system to be allowed to type answers, which is quite complex and requires tests that cost $1,000+, just telling someone "we'll fail you if you don't write properly" isn't a good solution. Oh, and you'd be failing a lot of people for the quality of their handwriting, not their learning ability, their effort, etc. etc, which last I checked isn't the purpose of the educational system.
Plenty of people go to college to get a degree, whether they actually learn anything or not, based on the perception that a degree in a certain field will guarantee a salary at a certain level. Those people take the same attitude to their jobs when they graduate. They don't care if they are doing good work, or if they are the ones actually doing the work, they just want the paycheck. I work with someone who supposedly has a degree in CS and experience with several programming languages, OO concepts, etc. After working with this person for several months it is obvious that this person learned NOTHING in school, does not understand OO concepts (or programming in any form), and really has no interest or ambition to learn. The attitude seems to be 'get it done so I can keep my job'. Every day this person asks me for 'the answers' or for code. I try to explain concepts, but this person doesn't really care. Just yesterday this person asked me "don't you ever wish you had a job where you didn't have to think?" I often wonder why this person 'supposedly' got a degree in CS in the first place, but of course it is because of the perceived income level, regardless of the fact that this person obviously does not enjoy the work or have any real aptitude for the job.
But that's one moment in time. Is it still true? Was it true a month before the paper was researched? We've no way of knowing, one way or the other. I'll be interested in that fork of WP--mentioned here a few days ago, I think.
So, if by "more disrespectful twords learning", you mean "let those gosh-darn plebes try and rise above their station in life", then you're right. But you're kind of an elitist.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I don't think it makes sense for universities to give grades. What is the point? With heavy grade inflation, many of the top schools have been slowly reducing the information content in grades, anyway. Besides, grades are often inconsistent and quite arbitrary. Classes should be about learning, and making them about something else is ridculous.
Also, universities should be about networking. Students should have a chance to meet all sorts of different people. However, I don't see what meeting people has to do with earning a degree, and if students are just there to meet other people, should they still be awarded a degree? If not, schools would then have to admit students, to who, they don't expect to award a degree.
Degrees should be granted when you've sufficiently learned whatever it is that degree is in. If schools want distribution requirements, those things should be added to the requirements of the degree. Before graduation, all students should be tested to see that they've met the requirements. Presumably, less formal evaluations should be undertaken more often to ensure students are making reliable progress. However, it is still a sticky subject that combining teaching and evaluation creates a conflict of interest. They should probably be seperated.