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Which Grad Students Cheat the Most?
SpectralDesign.Net writes, "The results of a research paper released Wednesday reveal who is admitting to cheating (in North America). The study focused on 5,300 graduate students in Canada and the U.S. and concluded that the biggest cheaters were business students — 56% of them admitted to copying papers, plagiarizing, etc. The author of the study said, 'The typical comment is that what's important is getting the job done. How you get it done is less important. You'll have business students saying all I'm doing is emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world.'" Other grad-student cheaters include: engineering students, 54%; physical sciences, 50%; medical and health-care, 49%; law, 45%; liberal arts, 43%; and social science and humanities students, 39%. These numbers are close to the guesstimate of the anonymous professor.
They mean that Business students are the least dishonest.
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As a university professor, I have caught cheaters on numerous occasions (approximately one a semester, often more) -- mostly undergrad, but the occasional grad. I have heard that justification numerous times. It's an odd one to give after you got caught; obviously, failing the course and facing possible expulsion is hardly "getting the job done." But I get the sense that I am the anomaly - I think students get away with cheating in many of their courses. Most of the cheating I find is plagiarism, and there are many cases where I don't think the student really understood what they were doing. I had two very interesting cases - both grad students, bizarrely enough - where the student plagiarized work that I had written. One of them copied sentences from an article I had written that was published on the web, and used them without attribution. The other had actually plagiarized a wikipedia entry that I was an active contributor to! I caught the latter one because I recognized a quotation she used as one I had contributed to the wikipedia entry; when I went back to look at it, entire chunks of prose were being used without attribution. I do think there is another explanation for a lot of these cases than "getting the job done," however; many of the students are doing things that are so stupid that they must know (at least subconsciously) that they will get caught. I think there is a category of cheaters who are seeking attention, as bizarre as it might sound.
I don't like to call it cheating.
It's just a question of which resources you are utilising to accomplish the task.
Maximizing the benefit of your available resources is clearly something you should do both in school and in real life.
Where cheating breaks down is that you are improperly using them in violation of the rules. In school it is cheating, plagarism etc, in "real life" it's fraud, cooking the books etc.
Go ahead push the rules to the limit, but don't use the "real life" excuse, it's just as invalid in school as at Enron.
Enough said.
Yeah, because there's an infinite difference between business students at 56% and engineering students at 54%. That's likely within the margin of error for the poll, which means there is no real difference between the two.
But you go ahead and stay comfy wrapped in your preconceptions.
Fucktard.
"The typical comment is that what's important is getting the job done. How you get it done is less important," McCabe said. "You'll have business students saying all I'm doing is emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world."
Which is exactly the type of reasoning that leads to this clusterfuck. Perhaps it's time for professors and the deans to expel these students rather than let the behavior continue? The cheaters might learn a valuable lesson, and society as a whole would be the better off for it.
Now trackback the cheating of those in Enron and MCI/Worldcom back to their cheating days at Harvard and other business schools. I bet the relation will be pretty high up there.
Interestingly, in my studies I stumbled upon 2 or 3 subjects which were plain impossible to pass without cheating. And not that "I failed", simply anybody not cheating would fail, and most of the cheaters still wouldn't make it through. The subject was too difficult for my group, for the group year before, two years before, three years before and that's where known records end. From groups of 30-50 students 2-10 most proficient at cheating would pass at the first try, the rest would get a clue and re-try while cheating (passing another 10-20 students or so), and whoever tried the honest approach, would simply fail.
Interestingly, these were informatics-related subjects.
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It's actually easier to cheat at IT. Google has the answer to any IT question. If you cant find it on google, then there's a forum setup with someone that'll help you. I know this because (all though I've never been to school for IT) I have a job as a php programmer because I know how to search google for what I need.
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If you're taking a multiple choice exam for a graduate level math course then your degree probably won't be worth the paper that it's printed on and you might as well just cheat anyway.
I've worked for several companies, ranging from small dot-com startups to Fortune 500 giants. The best ethical behaviour I've seen in my career was working for a billion-dollar financial investment firm. The worst ethics came from a start-up founded by former professors (humanities and engineering).
I really think there's something to be said for using the internet in certain situations. Using google is sort of like 'Open-Book' exams. It should really be encouraged in order to make finding information in the modern age part of your skill set.
Why waste time debugging php yourself that when someone has done this for you already?
while normally I would rant against such generalizations, unfortunately I have found this one to be, in my experience, true.
I am a masters student at a state university in petroleum engineering. Due to current market forces (60+ bucks a barrel) most US students stop at an undergraduate degree and start working. As a result the current nationality distribution is skewed towards foreign students.
I quickly discovered that every major national network (iranian, turkish, south american, chinese, etc) had all of the previous years' assignments and exams. Woe to you if you did not belong to said networks (ie US and the poor Dutch exchange students), you were at a serious disadvantage...at least in the general classes. The moment you got into a specialized class it became basically impossible to cheat. Even if you had previous years' stuff, it doesn't help if you do not understand how to even read the stuff. Try faking it on well logging, enhance oil recovery, or a numerical methods class, and it very quickly becomes clear who are muppets and who are not. As a result ther is a real statification of students, capable ones, and those who are just squeezing by. You never see any of the latter in the interesting classes.
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I would say Maths/Statistics has the most cheaters, pretty much everyone I know who takes it cheats at it.
As a former (undergrad) math student I can honestly say that it all depends on how you define cheat; yes like every good math student I will argue over definitions. In one of my courses my Professor openly said that he anticipated that everyone would end up working in groups to understand and solve the challenging proofs, but he required us to write it up on our own and use our own words; as he pointed out in real world math you needed to be able to collaborate with other mathematicians in order to solve difficult problems, and anyone who was trying to get a "free ride" on the work of someone else would (probably) fail the tests so he wasn't concerned.
In many humanities and social sciences the point of a paper is to come up (and defend) your own argument; any collaboration (beyond editing) can be seen as a type of academic dishonesty.
The fact that more than half of engineering students admit to cheating should be more than a bit disturbing, if they are cheating in their engineering classes. I don't want to go through a tunnel or over a bridge that was designed by one of these folks.
On the other hand, they weren't asked in which classes they cheated. So we could be talking about an engineering student having a friend write an english paper for him, which, while less than desirable for his education, is not a matter of safety.
A blog about stuff.
Ethics isn't a required course in many, many undergrad & graduate programs.
This applies to business, (pre-)med, and a variety of other fields.
Then, even with an understanding of ethics, some people just don't care.
50% is a huge number though. I imagine things might break down a bit differently if the question was something other than "have you cheated within the past year". It's like asking everyone with a car "have you broken the speed limit in the last year?"
I'd be much more interested in comparing the incidence of students who cheat once or twice with those who regularly cheat.
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I don't know... I'd almost rather drive over a bridge designed by a student who copied a tried and true design than one who made an original. Heck, I know I've made some pretty neat and original bridge designs, but I wouldn't really trust their safety.
LegendMUD
So you're disagreeing with results of a survey with 5,000 students across two large countries because you attented one school, with one group of people, and had one group of friends that didn't exhibit the behavior? Is this the type of rigor they taught you in Business school? I'd get my money back.
My career spans similar extremes, and my experience mirrors yours. My hunch? Oversight works.
At a small start up with no outside investors, no one really cares if a shop getting 30 emails a day over DSL is using a warez copy of Exchange. If the owner decides to go that route, it filters down to employees who will feel free to use email, phones, etc. for personal purposes.
At the big firm, folks at the top are prone to be more aware of the oversight, especially in a financial firm. If I know my boss's boss's boss is concerned about the contents of communications coming into and out of the company, and the implications of records of those communications being subpoenaed, then I need to be concerned about my use of those resources.
(....typed while at a computer in said billion-dollar financial investment firm)
I'd believe a well-concucted survey over the anecdotal evidence of some random business school graduate any day of the week, anyway. Nice try, though.
I have many friends in engineering, and all of them had to become certified "Engineers in Training" before being employed. This process involves taking a couple standardized tests which were general science and math knowledge, and one that was taylored to their specific engineering field. I don't think many cheaters would be able to pass it.
;)
Once that is completed they have to work for 5+ years, take more exams, and then they can be considered a "Professional Engineer."
I think its scarier that computer programmers, who might be working on that software running life support machinery, doesn't need any professional certifications other than a college degree
I got nothin'
This level of critical insight is about what you'd expect from a b-school grad, isn't it...
I want to know how they phrased the question.
As someone with an undergrad engineering degree I can confidently say that I never cheated in college. However, certain phrasings of the question could cause me to respond differently. For example, if the question was asked, "Have you every used another students work to complete your own without the instructors explicit consent." I'd have to say yes.
I spent many late nights in computer labs or study halls working with other students in an attempt to understand the material. Often times this means working homework problems together. Sometimes I'd do the problem independently and then share the results with others, other times I'd make little or no progress and have someone explain it to me. It wasn't about copying answers, it was about understanding the methodology. A poll question that understands this distinction is difficult to come up with. I don't ever remember a teacher telling us not to work together in an engineering class (aside from exams) but I don't think they all explicitly told us it was ok - mostly because it is part of the culture and it wouldn't occur to them to endorse it.
I wonder what the study's definition of "cheating". FTFA:
It's relatively difficult to smuggle notes into an exam when the professor is watching you take it, and that criterion is not very ambiguous, so I doubt this makes up the bulk of the statistic.
Copying the work of other students is a little more vague. Is this limited to straight-out copying someone else's work, or did they include working with other students to solve problems? I know that at my school, we're encouraged to work with other people on most of the problem sets given out as homework, and I'd suspect this is the attitude at most universities. The homework sets that are supposed to be completed alone are far less common, and specifically designated as such by the professor. I can't imagine that the study would be stupid enough to count 'working together with other students' as 'copying work', but if it did, this would explain a lot of the disrepancy.
Probably the largest component in the study is plagiarism. This is pretty clear-cut, but I have to wonder -- how many opportunities are there for plagiarism in a graduate level Physical Science curriculum?? I think out of my entire coursework, I was required to write two or three papers at the most, none of them longer than a few pages. Most of our coursework was problem sets, which I suppose could be plagiarized in the sense of "copying someone else's work" as above. But even if this were the case, the percentages they give seem unreasonably high.
I wouldn't be surprised if the study used an unnaturally broad definition of "cheating" so that the statistics would come out this way, just for shock factor. After all, how likely would you be to read an article that claimed half of all graduate students are cheaters, compared to one claiming that less than 5 percent are?
As a social science grad student, each assignment was unique. I might be doing a paper on X while my friend wrote something up about Y. Professors always vetted paper topics to make sure that no two students were working on the same subject. Aside from comparing class and reading notes, there wasn't much we could do to help each other out.
A few years ago I went back to school and got a CS degree (already had degree in Economics). I was approached many times from other CS students asking for help on programming/database/math projects. Most of the time the questions were legitimate and I wouldn't consider them 'cheating'. However, there were times when I was flat out asked to share my code/algorithms. I hated that. One of the primary reasons I went back to get another degree was because I loved the problem-solving aspect of software development. It's kind of like cheating in games. If you're handed the answers, where is the challenge? Where is the benefit? Also, I found that (at my school at least) there was a strong community of Indian students who stuck together. Once I made a few friends in this small community, I found that the cheating was rampant. Code sharing, test sharing, etc. was commonplace. It always put me in a difficult situation when I was asked to show someone else my code. I don't mind helping others (frequent message boards), but simply giving someone else code that I worked hours on was out of the question.
This is part of the reason why I weight college degrees so lightly when I interview people. It just doesn't mean much, when half the students only know how to google for answers. While that is a useful job skill (I google problems every week, if not every day), an employee that just does that, and isn't thinking independantly or really understanding the problems is a big problem.
Good companies to work for will generally treat this kind of attitude with a 'fired with cause'. There are a lot of bad companies out there to be an Initech slacker at, collect a paycheck, and do as little thinking as possible. I have no idea why anyone would want to end up there. So, it's kind of a self-correcting problem in that sense.
For those actually working for a college degree, it's more annoying. I have a CS degree, and I never cheated in college. (Really. Risking explusion is so not worth it.) Yes, it was obvious that some jerks were, and it leads to more experienced people like my present self finding very little corrolation between the degree and good hires, so it does devalue the diploma. But if you actually can contribute individual insights, are smart, and can get things done, you'll rise above these shortcutters very quickly. They'll work in the trenches at a job they hate, while you decide between Google or a hot startup for a career path. You'll win, in the end, 9 times out of 10. So don't worry about that other guy.
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A tried and true design for one application might be disastrous in another application, especially if the design being copied is unique. If 1940 hadn't had a one particularly windy day, lazy bridge designers might had copied a narrow, understiffened suspension bridge design instead of thinking for themselves and taking little things like aerodynamics into account.
I know, this isn't the greatest example, but it's the first thing that came to mind.
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I agree with the previous poster from Harvard, who was appalled that cheating could be so widespread when it was conspicuously absent from my peer group. Why aren't the schools throwing these Bozo's out,with a nice note on their transcript about "violation of educational ethics"? No wonder the world is so screwed up, we're so busy trying to make a buck that we've forgotten the basis of civilization. Machivellian behavior is only advantageus when it's statistically improbable. In primates, troops disband (often violently!) when trust degenerates below a minimum threshold. Since our society is based on similar social contracts (e.g. shared trust), I would expect extremely serious repercussions as the percentage of liars/cons/cheaters increases. I need a nice rock to hide under.
Problem is, these are GRAD students. Undergrads take a lot of unrelated crap (that makes them better human beings, well-educated, etc.), but grad students' class loads should be fairly focused on their major, no? No english papers for them to pass off...
Actually, most engineers would probably do well for themselves to spend a little extra time in English class & "outsource" one of their more technical classes - there's enough overlap between classes in the field that you could probably put the missing pieces together from other coursework fairly well.
Whether you're an idiot is independent of whether I choose to click "Create Account" or, indeed, whether I have an empty scrotal sac. Your arguments continue to resonate idiocy.
The strawman in your second paragraph is easily blown over, as I stated multiple times that I see multiple choice as a way of testing a particular type of skill (alongside the skills tested in an exam by written problems and essays). I've never suggested "a multiple choice exam".
You also seem to be suggesting that an exam should either "go through all the material" or is so unworthy that it should be replaced with "a take home" or a "project"! What courses did you take in grad school with such narrow scope that you could test *the whole subject matter* in the space of one exam? Education is about developing skills and understanding, not book recitation.
Of course, to approach your aim, the kind of quickfire questions that might be obtained from, say, a multiple choice component, would be great for covering concepts from across the syllabus.
If I were to order those types of majors by the potential income a grad could expect, it would come out in the same order.
To put this another way, no one takes a history major because they want to make the big bucks after college, while no one goes into business school because they are fascinated with the subject material in the classes.