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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.
I went to college to learn, and I believe that I learned a lot. Many of them were unrelated to my direct field of study and I wouldn't have picked up unless forced, and I'm glad I was forced. I now find history fairly fascinating, and wouldn't have unless I was put into the classroom of a very good professor. Even in the field of programming, I learned to approach problems in a structured manner instead of just slashing at things until I had slapped together something that worked.
At college it quickly became apparent that there were two classes of students. Those who were there because they loved the subject and learning, and those who were there because someone told them that they should go there and study this because then they'd earn a bunch of money. We in the former class got pretty irritated by those in the latter, because the latter were generally pretty clueless and not really serious. We really tried to NOT get paired up with them, but we did from time to time. And that's a good thing, because know what? When you get into a job situation, there are people there as well who don't actually like what they do, they're just there for the paycheck and aren't interested in doing more than the minimum. Luckily in the job I have now there are teams you can move to that are 100% filled with people who really love what they're doing.
BTW when I say that the two classes of student became apparent, I think that was only to the people who were there because they loved the subject. I don't think that those who were just there to fatten their eventual paycheck realized that some of us really loved the subject, or if they did, they probably just thought we were freaks. Eventually a few of them may have figured out that we were the freaks that bailed their asses out on group projects every time while they wrote the documentation.