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.

Comments

Cheaters Never Win (Except When They Do)

[stuffman64]

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.

Re:cheating vs. really wanting to learn

[JonASterg]

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.