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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.
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.
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).