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.
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.
Excuse me, but I *am* a professor and I fail to see what Wikipedia has to do with cheating.....
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
...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?
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.
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.)
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.
That's simply false. Grading all those things is far easier than grading even a few papers, assuming you're paying attention to what your students are writing. Short assignments, quizzez, and most tests (those that don't involve serious essay writiing) are extremely easy to grade. But grading papers requires you to (1) Wade through the often terrible writing of your students, (2) figure out what they're trying to say, and (3) assess their ideas fairly and critically. Even if a paper is well written, you often have to read it multiple times in order to grade it fairly. If you're grading students on their writing as well as on their ideas, which you ought to be, you have to read it several times in order to grade it two ways.
I think that this is misguided. Yes, good questions can probe for understanding; but the job of assignments in a college course is (ideally) about more than testing what students know. Good asignments push students to develop original ideas and go beyond what the lecture and assigned readings provide. Papers are about challenging students to think and learn, not just assessing their knowledge. Good professors (and graders, if they have any leeway) grade for originality, creativity, and quality of thought. Students who write papers that simply regurgitate lecture and assigned reading ought to receive middling grades at best.
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. --Dan Kaminsky
IAAP, for what that's worth.
I may be wrong, but your post reads like a rationalization from a "guilty" student. Do you have any IDEA how much time it would take to put together a quality course, with nothing but original materials? Not to mention grading students' work? I mean REALLY grading it - paying attention to the individual foibles of each student and trying to treat them like distinct human beings and not just a row of numbers on a grade sheet?
I hate to break it to you, but most of what you in lecture does not originate with your professor. Your prof is there to EXPLAIN it to you, not to CREATE it for you. When your professor publishes original work in their field (i.e. something similar to an assignment for which they get "professional" credit), you bet your ASS they would get in trouble for "borrowing" without citing sources. Their lectures and your assignments therefore belong in very different categories, as far as the standards applied.
I usually tell my students, at the beginning of a course, that I will pull in materials from many different sources in order to create the course lectures and assignments and to give them the best educational experience possible. I explain what I expect from them in terms of academic integrity, and if I catch them cheating, they suffer the consequences. I put my heart and soul into teaching my courses, and when students turn in copied or plagiarized work, that is a slap in the face, especially considering all the effort that I put into the course.
Yes, there are lazy teachers, and that DOES exacerbate the problem, but not in the way that you claim. Lazy teachers are actually much LESS likely to notice cheating. If students run into many teachers like this, and notice that cheating carries no consequences, they may start to feel that it's an under-the-table "accepted" practice, and just part of "the game." THAT is what really damages the credibility of professors, the academic institutions, and formalized learning in general.
Humph. Sure, go pick on the defenseless straw man.
Bosses rarely ask you to write a history of the Brazilian economy. But they frequently say things like this:
"Bob, the client wants to evaluate the feasability of building a bridge across the river near their Saskatoon branch. We'll need to identify potential sites within a few miles of the facility, analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each site, and do a rough estimate of the costs in both time and effort. You have three months."
If you've never written an evaluative argument before, that's going to be really freaking hard. And DON'T wave the "Engineers don't need to write" flag at me - if you're going to be building a bridge, I want to know that you can convey complicated engineering problems to your bosses, who will not be engineers, clearly enough that they can make sane decisions about whether and how to do the job.
Now. I teach writing. When a student cheats by plagiarizing from the Internet, they're cheating themselves of the experience that they'll NEED in order to undertake REAL writing assignments later on. If that bridge collapses because my student wasn't able to communicate clearly to the boss (and the boss's boss) through writing, then I bear some of the responsibility for that. So yeah, when students cheat in my class it's a problem.
As for the "realism" of the assignments, my claim is this: writing is writing. Argumentation is argumentation. If you learn to write, and to argue, then you can do it about any topic from bridge-building to palaeography to proteomics and back again. So don't write plagiarists a pass if you want your bridges sturdy.