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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.
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.
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.
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
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...
people's reputation will come less from the judgement of university systems, but rather from people's actual connections and accomplishments.
If you haven't noticed, a large part of going to university is about connections. Dubya would not have become a member of Skull and Bones if he had been taking classes of "www.affordabledegrees.com" instead of going to Yale. Do you think Dubya has had most use of the classes he took or the club membership?
It's all about connections. Nobody becomes great alone.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
Bad example. All you've done there is turn a history paper into a creative writing assignment. If you're in a history class, it might not be the best idea to be testing someone's ability to write from another's perspective. You should be testing their knowledge of what was covered in the class (i.e. history). This doesn't solve the problem.
The real problem is that most professors or teaching assistants don't have the time to be able to check for cheating. If you have a small class where you can directly interact with the professor, they get to know your intelligence, writing style, etc. It becomes pretty obvious when someone is cheating if you know those things. Most classes you just don't have that kind of interaction, so it becomes easier to cheat.
If your education is an assembly-line process, then it should be expected that people will cheat successfully. If there's a class with 300 students and one professor with a few assistants, it is hard enough just to grade all the assignments and exams. The only way to stop it is to spend time interacting and discussing with the students. In most large public universities, this is damn near impossible.
As I mentioned in another thread, this doesn't make sense. The problem is that 'handed-in work' and exams don't actually serve the same purpose. Professors don't want students to write papers in order to demonstrate their knowledge; they want students to write papers because that format promotes original thought and the development of new ideas. You can't replace this function with exams.
You make an excellent point here, I must admit. Perhaps my bias stems from the fact that I work in fields in which exams are the norm, and not papers.
Still, I do want to argue a different position than yours. Now, I agree with you that exams do not test original thought, the development of new ideas, and research skills. However, I claim that the majority of papers do not do this much either. Many undergrad papers are basically 'book-report'-type things (albeit with several books and more difficult subject matter than grade school book reports). For this type of paper, an exam is a reasonable substitute (the only thing it might not test is long-term writing skills, i.e. editing and so forth, and not short-term writing skills).
For papers of a higher level, that is those that do focus on original thought, I would say the following. First, cheating is less of a problem with such things; they appear mostly in graduate-level courses, with less students, and more direct professor-student interaction. So, perhaps you are right in this case, and papers could continue to be used as the grading technique. However, if cheating were still an issue, there is another option, apart from exams and papers, suitable for classes with few students: a grade based on class interaction and/or a one-on-one interview-type exam. I recall taking classes where part of the grade was determined in this way, it seemed surprisingly fair, actually.
Students learn by doing, and in most academic fields, doing means research and writing. Many college courses need fewer tests, not more.
Again, an excellent point, which you have mostly convinced me of. I would only add what I just said above, that class participation and interviews could also be used, not just papers. A paper accompanied by an interview seems like a particularly useful method; I would think that discussion of the research and thought process that went into the creation of a paper would do much against the possibility of cheating. Of course, this would make sense in small classes only, as I said above.
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.
If you put your heart and soul into research, you wouldn't have to feel so offended by your students, and you'd probably get more meaningful work done. There's no need for a lecturer to wear himself out in organizing a course, since he would just be duplicating the effort that students would be able to find on their own in the library. A number of European universities are now directing faculty effort towards research and limiting formal lecturing, letting students get most of what they need from abundant library resources and visiting faculty only when absolutely necessary. As a graduate student in one such school, it seems a win-win for everyone.
I don't disagree, although I'd argue that the solution to this problem might be more serious paper assignments rather than exams, precisely because exams don't teach writing. The only reliable method for learning how to write well is to do it all the time and to have an extremely critical (and constructively helpful) audience. Students that are required to write a lot become better writers. Of course, I've heard many students complain that focusing on writing skills is a waste of time -- that it won't do them any good in the real world, etc. These students have apparently never seen the kind of horrendous mistakes that can occur when badly-worded emails fly back and forth between companies and their vendors, or even between co-workers. I also believe that learning to write coherently is a good way to learn how to formulate and present well-reasoned arguments generally. Assuming that a student isn't going to spend the rest of his/her life flipping burgers, that skill will come in handy.
Depending on where and what you're studying, they also appear in 300-400 level undergraduate courses, and I think they should appear more. Doing research and writing is (in many fields) very good preparation for both graduate school and the job market.
This is a very good idea. I wish I'd had more of these in my philosophy courses, as a replacement for exams. Being asked to write several comprehensive essays on extremely complex topics in an hour and a half, without knowing ahead of time what you'll be writing about, is real torture. It's not enough to be prepared; you also have to be 'in the zone' for writing. An oral exam can test knowledge just as well, without requiring that the student also worry about the technical aspects of writing a good essay in a very limited time span. (Hey, I'm pro-writing, but that really isn't a realistic skill assessment.)
This is what bothers me about the whole discussion of cheating in the classroom: If you're paying attention to your students, cheating isn't all that hard to spot. In the classes I assisted, catching the cheaters was really easy (even aside from the girl who copy/pasted most of her final paper directly from the corporate PR site of a large Washington State software company -- in a computer ethics class, no less). You talk to your students every class session; you get to know something about them, including how clearly they think, and how articulate they are. You talk to them about their paper topics before the papers are due and get an idea of how well they're coming along. If Jimmy, who can't string two sentences together on the days he's NOT hung over, and who knew nothing about his topic the day before the paper was due, hands in the most brilliant writing you've seen in the past year, that raises a flag. But yeah, if you can't manage to catch cheaters just by paying attention, formally talking to each student about their topic after you've read their work is a really good idea.
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. --Dan Kaminsky
Look at the converse -- it's not about teaching, it's about revenue at all costs.
You get screwed by "teachers" and robbed by the schools, you can suddenly find yourself less... respectful... of the notion that honesty plays well, especially when you can't detect a shred of it on the part of the
When you're stuck taking Bullshit 201 or Recite The Teacher's Opinion As If It Were Fact 104 and paying dearly for the privlege... well, them's the breaks.
"Academic honesty" starts with the academics, and I haven't seen enough of it yet to continue this discussion. It's taking responsibility for your own failures -- remember the Stanford "We Can't Code So If Someone Looked At Your Files We'll Just Blame You" scam from last year? It's teachers who either teach the material or get out of the student's way. It's settling on one goddamn revision of the $150 textbooks -- are you REALLY telling me the universities couldn't put their foot down about this if they wanted to? Hah.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Sure. And if a boss tells 30 of is subordinates all do to the same thing, is it unreasonable or unwanted if they collaborate?
The point of my little satire wasn't that there's no point to evaluative thinking, argumentation, and the cogent presentation of ideas. The point was that this little tempest in a teapot is about students evolving the same techniques that are appropriate in business: do as little work as necessary to produce a valid result.
The problem lies in the artifical handicap of "assignments." If a professor wants students to actually think and produce new (or at least constructively derivative) material, the assignment can't be the same for everyone in every class, at college after college, year after year.
The answer is fairly obvious: since universities are largely becomming vocational trade schools for professionals, model the assignments after professional projects. Come up with projects that require several students to interact ccollaboratively -- just as they will have to later in life.
The world has changed, and will continue to do so. The "problem" presented in the original article reflects on the static nature of academia, not the current generation of students. Until academia evolves, students can hardly be blamed for solving old-world problems with new-world approaches.
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
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.
i've done that since a history teacher in high school allowed us a single side of a 3x5 (or whatever the standard size) index card for notes for an entire semester. you'd write as small as you could on a notebook sheet of paper, reduce and figure out what was mos timportant, redo, etc. until you remembered all the fairly trivial things - as you decided "if I can remember it, I won't need to write it down". eventually you get your note card, and then you rewrite it so its legible. by the time you're done, all your notecard has are short abbreviations with dates, numbers, and other pertinent data in CSV, and you've essentially memorized which event belonged to which section of the index card, allowing you to figure out what you had to do.
i've used that method of studying ever since. it's very effective.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
I think learning can go on in the university but it's rare. Of all my teachers, of all my classes less then 2% were about learning something. The rest were mere memorization. I remember one pysics teacher who held open book tests, you could use anything you wanted, books, calculators, computers whatever. He could do that becuase he would ask questions that required thinking really hard and not memorization of formulas. I wish there were more teachers like him but alas that's not true.
These days an undergraduate is lucky if he takes five classes from a real professor in four years. People cheat because they can. They can cheat because the teachers are lazy and ask stupid questions you can look up in a second.
evil is as evil does
Ahh, an exam cynic. A product of the US (or North American) higher educational system, no doubt. :)
Patronizing remarks aside, what I'm saying is that I understand your position, but it's coming from a limited perspective. Go study in Europe a bit. I did. (Sweden)
Yes. True/false and multiple-choice exams are worthless. Yet very common in the US, and perhaps only there.
My experiences from Sweden were the following: First, exams are far more common, and far larger in size.
Second, true/false exams are never ever used. I never had one and never heard of anyone else having one either.
Third, multiple-choice exams exist, but seem to be quite rare. I only had one in four years, and that one was still augmented by two essay questions and the fact that they deducted points for wrong answers on the multiple-choice part. (The clear message being: Don't even think about guessing your way)
I think there are two very simple reasons these tests are used so much in the US, and neither of them are because they're a good method. First is because they're established and part of the academic culture. That kind of stuff is hard to change. Students don't want tougher exams, and Profs don't want to appear harsher than the others. Second, the Professors are lazy. Why use a test that involves more work from them and will generate complaints from the students, when you can stick with the same-old and everyone's happy?
So on to essay exams, which you've probably guessed would be the usual type, then. Your first criticism is that they're too short. Well again, there's a solution: Longer exams. Where I was studying the typical length was 4-6 hours. Bathroom breaks weren't a problem. The basic order was: Noone gets to leave during the first hour but latecomers can arrive in that period. After one hour, you're permitted to turn in your exam and leave if you want and bathroom breaks are permitted. Bathroom breaks are allowed one at a time, and the exam monitor keeps a log of which students leave and the time of their departure and return. They also log the seating arrangement and the time the exam was turned in. There are also voluntary 10-minute rest breaks where those who wish can leave with a second monitor. (who otherwise is outside, usually checking the bathrooms).
I never saw that dicipline broken. Cheating did still occur of course, but the worst I ever saw was people stuffing a note in their pocket and checking it in the bathroom. And that's of course impossible to stop. But so is any dedicated cheat. And the amount of information you can inconspicuously fit in your pants is rather small.
But anyway, point is the bathroom thing can be solved, and has been solved.
Your second argument is even sillier. Bad handwriting? That never seemed to stop them over there. But if it's that bad you can simply require the answer to be written in block text. Or set the condition that illegible answers will not be graded. That should do it.
You leave out what is, IMHO, the most superior form of testing though. Namely oral exams. (not necessarily the formal type) There is simply no better way to assess someone's knowledge and understanding than by talking to them, asking questions and follow-up questions to understand their thought process. And it is very much a real-world type of situation. The only drawback is that it's labor-intensive. I saw some creative solutions to that, though. One was to have a written examination to qualify for a passing grade, and an oral exam for higher grades. That filters 'em out quite well. I think that's because people won't take a chance on it unless they feel certain they've got at least some shot at it. First because it's harder to fake it. Second because people are a lot more reluctant to parade their ignorance in person-to-person communication than on a piece of paper. (Of course, some might simply be too nervous. But if you want to talk real-world, then they'll need to learn to deal with that sooner or later, and
I disagree. Everything I've ever learned states you should reference as close to primary sources as is practical. So there would be no reason to reference something else you wrote, you'd reference whatever is applicable from the references of the other paper on this one - otherwise you're just making people run around more for no good reason. Of course, if you want to say "for further reading on related topics" etc, that's fine, but not required.
Specifically, if I wrote a paper last year on topic A referencing study B, and this year I'm writing another paper that has a mention of Topic A again, I would expect to reference study B in this paper as well.
Even if you're copying your text for part of this paper from your older paper - it shouldn't need a reference. You can't plagerize yourself, just like you can't violate your own copyright.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Wow. Seriously. Fuck you to hell.
Do you have any IDEA how much time it would take to put together a quality course, with nothing but original materials?
The OP accused some professors, like you, of academic dishonesty and laziness. The dishonesty comes from using uncited sources, and the laziness comes from creating assignments in a way that students can easily cheat on them.
What part of that said to throw out textbooks? What part of that said to use "nothing but original materials"? That proposition is nowhere in his argument. What a wonderful straw man you've created. A demand to cite your sources and a request to stop using Scantron != "use 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?
Johnny, now I've called you after to class to discuss your test results. I see some real problems here, Johnny. Look at your answer to question 27! If you want to answer "E", then you've got to bubble in the whole circle. Look what you did! You only partially bubbled it in! Johnny, this is unacceptable, and it's going to affect your test results, as well as the rest of your life. Think about that for a moment, Johnny!
Did I mention, fuck you?
Their lectures and your assignments therefore belong in very different categories, as far as the standards applied.
Oh, you vile hypocrite fuck.
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.
Now, students, of course I'm allowed to cite anything without telling you where it comes from. I'm the professor, after all, and you're the student. I'm not suggesting that you follow my example because you're supposed to look up to me, NO! I'm demanding that YOU cite your sources, or else I shall take my vengeance upon you in the only way that I can and fail you! Ha-ha! Certainly, you shouldn't expect the same from me! I'm better than you, and my demands shall be met!
Yeah, I'm sure you're students love you. Fuck you to hell, bitch.
THAT is what really damages the credibility of professors,
Damage done, professor.
Maybe you were in the wrong field of study. In all of my undergraduate major-specific courses, I always had a professor who loved teaching the subject, was passionate about doing related research, and was very knowledgable about the topic at hand. I never found cheating to be prevalent, simply because the answers to the problems did not exist (each professor usually made up the problems we were given). My undergraduate degree is in Aerospace Engineering, and almost all the homework and exams we received involved questions that simply could not be cheated on. I don't know how it would be easy to cheat on a homework involving the "prediction of viscous losses on overlapping rotor-blade interactions." Try finding more than a handful of relevant papers on the topic on Google.
I think that the problem may stem from people's majors being over-generalized by the professors. I know that if people did cheat in my major, they ended up hurting themselves; it's not easy to understand problem-solving methods when you never spent the time to learn them.
I am now in graduate school for Aerospace Engineering, and I find that cheating here is non-existant, if not impossible. How does one cheat on problems that the professor makes up during class, and expects to be solved by the next lecture? And cheating on a thesis? Good luck defending it.
If you steal from one source, that's plagiarism. If you steal from many, well, that's just research.
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.
You know, once upon a time, I shared your ideas about college. Most people I came into interaction within the tech field collaborated outside of academia and pursued their intellectual goals because academia was either not interested or had no knowledge of said goals at the time. Out of my friends, many distained academia for their own reasons, but largely it is because there is a projected image that to complete higher ed one must participate in a rat race that is both a racket and a soul-sucking experience. In some fields, I cannot deny that. These academic departments will make school a chore instead of a labor of love. You cannot do anything about that unless there is an overhaul of personel. However, whilst this mentality of cranking out graduates is prevalent in the departments that have direct vocational aptitude, it is definitely not in the liberal arts or the hard sciences. When I went back to school when I was 25, I did a great deal of research and self reflection before hand. I looked not to what was good for a job or for a career, but what I intrinsically found lacking in what composed of my intuition. I chose mathematics as a degree to pursue, hoping that one day I could solve interesting computer problems with tools garnered from the said study. Not all college professors are good teachers. However, all of them are there to learn and they are enthused, tickled pink even, when someone steps to them with the appropriate enthusasim and attitude about learning. I went back to college after being repeatedly convinced by professors whom partake in the local chess club. As an undergrad, I am allowed to take first and second year graduate level math courses, and invariably when there is an undergrad math course with a graduate equivalent, I partake in the higher level class. No professor, and I do mean _not one_, has found me to be irritating. Tiresome maybe, but whilst they would grow short in patience because I don't get it right off the bat, they will not hesitate to try and help me again with the same problem the following day. Either I'm doing things the right way, or I'm really really lucky, where I do not deny that in my situation, it's a little bit of A and B Perhaps people who go into math want to learn it for the most part, or perhaps the an air of humility and desire to learn garners me friends in the department with similar attitudes, but everyone whom I've spoken to about their attitudes towards the topic seems to want to garner understanding. Most of the people that I study with, do want to learn the material at hand and find the pursuit of intellectual understanding to be satisfying. We get overjoyed when we notice progress in our game, and we cheer as other people start picking up theirs too. Now I'm getting to solve interesting math problems with computers, and I can't be happier. If you do your research before going to school, and hit the right school for your academic pursuits, many departments in even bargain institutions will work for you. If you are wanton for a renaissance education, I've been told that Evergreene State (state school in particular) and many smaller liberal arts colleges (in generality) will cater to your palette. Evergreene State does not offer grades for their students. The final feedback of the classes come from you as a student and your instructor in the form of one or two page essays. I once dated a girl from that school and had the opportunity to read her transcript. It includes responses from her about herself in the class, her class, and the instructors feedback on her in detail for every class she partook in. Each class is actually a series of topic which are in turn seperated into seminar and discussion sections. It seems that the rat race has been mostly excluded from this curriculum, and I would suggest looking into it if you have the self motivation to see yourself through this degree program.
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?