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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.
You'd think in business that it would be fairly easy to see who was cheating because when people write extended essays it would show up strait away with people using the same sources in the same way etc. I would say Maths/Statistics has the most cheaters, pretty much everyone I know who takes it cheats at it. They even sit next to ech other unsupervised during exams and sometimes take multiple choice exams... maybe they just seem more trustworthy?
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
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.
I've seen this too often when managers focus on getting their numbers in instead of doing the right the first time. One company I worked for promoted the supervisor who always got his numbers in to be the department manager. Senior level people started to leaving (I was number three out of a dozen) since the guy was so ruthless that no one wanted to work with him and he would find reasons to fire you if try to hold him to a higher standard. What happened? He hired new people and quality took a serious hit but he got his numbers in number. BTW, the company is facing bankruptcy but the manager is still getting his numbers in.
The survey gives the percent of cheaters who admit the cheat? Does that mean the business students are the most honest in admitting they cheat, and the other students (**cough** law students **cough**) both cheat and lie more?
Billy Madision, where the business graduate is asked to give a speech concerning business ethics in a "decathalon of education", this results in him pulling out a gun and trying to shoot his opponent.
Pretty accurate protrayal of what i've seen in the business world...
Unfortunately, when you work for a corporation whose ONLY motive is profit then moral considerations are barely an afterthought, to the detriment of everyone who uses that corporation's products and are affected by the same and those who work for the corporation.
Having just graduate from Business School earlier this year, I have to disagree with those statistics. Everyone I knew was very careful about NOT cheating. However, there were lot's of "Group Projects", including take-home exams, where the professors actually encouraged students to work together. I don't think that qualifies as "Cheating" though.
The biggest cheater I've ever seen was a grad student who plagiarized his entire masters thesis, and then at the thesis defense didn't even know what the material in the paper was, to the point where the examiners were asking him to explain why he covered things that were not in the paper, and he just bluffed about that too.
Lesson here: If you're going to plagiarize a major paper, there are two things you should make sure of:
1) Know what's in the damn thing (maybe even actually read it?)
2) Don't take a paper written two years ago by your main supervising professor and submit it as your own work, that's just stupid beyond belief.
End of the story was: No graduation, just a quiet dissapearance, and never seen again.
ok, let's keep this civilized. In Group 1, posters who would like to rant about the general decline in morals in this country, please line up right here; Group 2, people who want to say that these students are only following the example of a world gone to hell in a hand basket, please line up right next to Group 1. In Group 3, we'll have those who would like to say, "who cares, it's just school, I did the same thing in college but I don't do it when it really matters". And finally, Group 4, those of you who would like to post variations on Slashdot cliche's, please line up outside the free sterilization clinic, and I, who for one, am welcoming our new ethically challenged overlords, and am imagining a Beowulf cluster of processors designed by immoral engineers (in the Soviet Union, no less), will be right behind you.
I am a student in the MBA program at my school. If you want to look at the big cheaters, look at the Public Administration students. These guys are VERY brazen about cheating and their teachers don't seem to care. Most of the PA students get into trouble in the 'normal' business classes, like accounting, due to cheating. Plagerizing, collabrative work when it isn't suppost to be (like take home finals), turning in the same paper in multiple classes. Our instructors in the management classes use turn-it-in religiously, so it can get funny to see the surprised look on the PA students faces when they get told that they get to have a fun talk with the Dean.
In God we trust, all others require data.
I wonder if there isn't some amount of truth to that.
At my college, our final graduating class size was less than 10% what it was when we started. I know of people who cheated, copied, and plagiarized in the associates program but none of them made it to the final graduation. Oddly enough, only about 33% of our starting class graduated the assoc program, we had 5 students tossed out of the school in the second to last class of the program for plagiarizing code. Once we got into the bachelor's degrees, even though the papers got longer and more common, there was significantly less cheating. Sure, there were a few slackers who depended on other people in group work, but it was more like 15% than 50%.
I would be much more interested in seeing those numbers from graduates, not active students.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Disregard the labels and you see something that is honestly disturbing to me.
the LOWEST % was 39%, and that is assuming that every one reported acuratly (I call BS on that), and I am sorta scared.
I admit, I never finished college (let alone start grad work), however I never cheated on anything when I was there. When I had problems (and I did have alot of problems) I sought help, I didn't get some one to do the work for me.
Mabey If I had cheated like a large number of people aparently do, then I would have finished my College education.....
Meh I would rather be an honest drop out then a fraudulent grad.
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
It probably has more to do with students ability to budget time and allow for the proper schedule to write a paper than attention. There's also the typical slacker that just looks for the minimum effort path. Of course, as they expect to be far younger and hipper than you, you wouldn't even think to look at a place like Wikipedia for information so that source is perfect for plagiarism.
Outside of academia, it is generally accepted truth that original research is a foolish waste of time (okay, maybe in print media its okay). Getting things done (i.e. a report written) in the minimum amount of time is the measure of one's financial worth to a company. If we want to produce real crack business grads, we should teach them how to plagiarize without getting caught. Of course, if you want them to be honest, upstanding citizens...well, by the time they make it to college their parents have probably already ruined them for that.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I used to run the "Acadamic Committee" in my 1980s college fraternity - about 100 guys each year in a 10K student university. Most of our job was campaigns to reinstate members who'd been expelled for low grades or partying too much (and burning down a frathouse, but that wasn't my committee ;). After that, our biggest operation was lending out old tests in our library from which members could study (for the often-repeated questions). I knew about all kinds of cheaters, including paper-writing operations, all around the school - we used to trade with other frats and "independents".
Every biz major I knew cheated regularly. At very least by studying the old questions first, before studying the entire section being tested. But extending to buying/stealing tests not in our library, buying papers. I even knew one biz major who paid someone (smarter) to take a class for him, attending occasionally but taking every test.
The universal attitude among biz majors was actually "this whole major is a cheat, to get me a business job without having a business". Sure, they learned some accounting, some marketing, some management, some finance, but those classes were all seen as "dues" to be paid, not any source of training necessary to do the job.
Once I got out of college, through a successful business career modelling and supporting in IT many businesses large and small, I learned that they were right.
--
make install -not war
How exactly does one cheat in the Humanities? I mean it's not like there's a "right" and "wrong" answer, like in Math and Engineering. As someone who taught Assembler to undergrads, I never had a real problem with cheating, because of the way I structured the assignments to encourage groups to work together, and because I gave really hard tests that I made up every quarter, so there was no test recycling. Well that and they were all engineering students... Sure a few may fudge an assignment here and there, but I made it clear that if I saw students putting forth effort to learn the materials in labs and during my office hours, that I would grade their efforts accordingly. It was amazing how many students did extra work because they felt like I was actually paying attention to the work they were doing, and it mattered. A buddy of mine, had the "privilege" of teaching one of those required JAVA computer programming classes to Business students. They were infamous for "hiring" someone to do their homework for them, or for downloading an answer on the internet. He also would catch many grad students (often of foreign nationalities) who kept batteries of his tests on archive, by giving a test that "appeared to be identical" to the last test he gave the quarter prior, with very slight changes. He said it was amusing how many students just memorized the answers in multiple choice tests(A B C or D), never even bothering to learn the material or even read the questions. It was killer for those who had issues with the language... because he could tell they'd studied an old test, rather than the actual topic of the question... --Ray
http://www.beanleafpress.com
I'll disagree with you... A compiler catches grammatical errors, not mistakes in design or bad assumptions about the system your program is supposed to control or model. When the computer and software in question is a realtime system the need for rigorous design and testing is an order of magnitude more difficult. I've seen a number of folks who claimed to be experienced at embedded system design make some pretty nasty mistakes, none of which were at the level where a compiler or testbed could flag the errors.
Less is more.
This article doesn't distinguish between grad and undergrad (and is a bit dated), but it I think it is interesting: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/march1
What's even scarier is the code I have seen on some medical devices. I won't name the company, but the quality I saw on their products was consistently the worst code I had ever seen. I'm not a super experienced programmer, but I have been out of school for over five years and I have worked on code on everything from web, embedded, to entertainment industry projects. I have seen some really good stuff, and this was not it.
Granted the code over 10-years old, but broke every damn rule in the book. Globals everywhere. Poor documentation. Poorly named variables. Poorly named functions. The same code being copy and pasted throughout the project like thirty times with minor changes here and there. So one bug would be cascaded across n-number of possible places it could occur. As this implies no coherent design. As the code copying illustrated they just had poor understanding of how C/C++ compilers even work, or had a buggy compiler in their day (totally possible).
Anyway, we did unit testing on their stuff and it was a pain in the butt because we had to hard code all of these globals. What counted though was these units did perform in the field well and passed all audits, but as you might expect there were bugs that dealt fatal blows. The hardware seemed quite solid, but the software just wasn't there yet. Sorry I can't name specifics or say who I am, but the story is true.
When I was working on my Master's in CS, I can tell you that cheating was rampant. I remember one class in particular in which every student (as far as I know) other than me and one other was working together on homeworks. Without the prof's permission, of course. For most of the semester, my homework average was below the class average because of this. It was quite frustrating since I could tell from classroom discussion that I knew the material better than most of the other students.
When the final exam came around, luckily, I got my revenge. I was briefly suspected of cheating myself when I got the highest grade in the class. But a discussion with the prof convinced him and I got my (deserved, if I may say so) A.
Incidentally, most of the cheaters in the class were PhD candidates.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
Whether it is is 56% of 39%, it is equally distressing.
That even 40% of those business and law students who very well may be the future business and political leaders of our society lack the integrity to stand or fall on their own merits, is deeply saddening.
Rather than earn their degree and reputation by hard work and dedication, they instead choose to tell the lie that the work of another is their own, fraudulently misrepresenting their own abilities, work ethic, and personal integrity. They rationalize their despicable behavior on the notion that there is nothing wrong with cheating, only with being caught.
No doubt they will fit in well in the halls of government.
In preparation for their arrival, we should continue to push for more transparency and public accountability in our government. They are coming. Let's be ready for them.
In my junior year of comp sci undergrad, I took a class with my friend (hi, Aaron!) that required us to write a lot of programs. We usually talked about the projects in detail, figured out the best way to solve them, then went off and separately implemented those solutions.
One assignment was the typical "you have ten telephone lines and five operators..." sort of problem. We hashed out our strategy as usual, sat down at our respective computers, and typed out the exact same programs. I mean it. Line-for-line identical. Since we both pulled variable names out of the assignment text ("int telephonelines = 10; int operators = 5;", etc.), we'd evolved the same formatting style from years of working together, and we were implementing the same relatively short algorithm, our answers were perfect matches.
Fortunately, our professor was a good guy and believed our convincingly dumb-struck expressions when he told us what he'd discovered. We were also both able to explain every step of the algorithm and why we'd chosen it, and we all had a good laugh about it afterward.
I know that's a bit different than a kid turning in your Wikipedia entry for credit, but remember that strange things do happen sometimes, and not every case of obviously blatant cheating turns out to be legitimate.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Isn't that the lesson that business school is supposed to teach?
`cheating' in business is self-defeating. ie: consider cheating in school: you're paying money for a degree, yet you're not getting all you can get out of the school (namely, the knowledge you've paid for). What's the point of cheating?
In business, I'd consider `cheating' to be: `being creative with the financial report', and generally pumping the price of the stock... and cashing out. When business folks cheat, it's usually the shareholders who end up being screwed.
When business folk -improve- their company value (stock price isn't `value'), that's not cheating (that's just business are usual). So no, cheating isn't how one runs great businesses... it's how one ruins them (and makes a few millionares in the process---which isn't a thing business schools should teach).
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
I know that most of the time in engineering we worked together on assignments. Even when the assignments were "individual", we got together, and worked together, compared answers, eventually figured out who was right, and used that answer. It's a lot more how things work in the real world anyway. No engineer just works by themselves, without running their work by other people. We never considered it cheating, we all did equal amounts of work, and didn't let people just copy the entire assignment an hour before it was due. Usually we would just do the assignment by ourselves, and then compare and correct. We weren't copying answers in exams, or copying entire papers or assignments. But the work hard hardly even done entirely on our own.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
This may be because of my background in christian education, but I think that the job of any academic institution is not to produce succesful students, but good ones. Obviously things don't work this way in real life, but I think it is a good goal. We already have enough troglodites running around trying to to make a buck or two. What we need is people with guts and integrity, not the cowards I see trying to see me their various thing-a-ma-bobs. Pomp and wealth are both pretty meaningless anyways: at the end of the chess game, the King and the Pawn both end up in the same box.
I don't think very many people would consider this cheating at all. Why would some professor think he can control how people do their homework outside of the classroom anyway? The answer you turn in is still your own, and collaborative thought was used to help each person come up with something. It would be a different story if one person did the work and gave/sold it to everyone else to just turn in a copy with their name on it.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."