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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.
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.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
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 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.
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 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'
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.
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.