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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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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.''
I run a website about video game cheats. Therefore cheating is "a necessary measure and the sort of practice I'll likely need to succeed in the professional world". ;)
Video Game cheats, hints a
I rationally decide to cheat.
-- from an anonymous coward B-schooler :-)
^(oo)^pig~
The study focused on 5,300 graduate students in Canada and the US 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.
The study must have been done on students in the first half of their business degree, and the second half must be the part where they teach, "Always lie about cheating."
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
and an amazing 0% of Political Science students!
They learn quick, don't they.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Okay, I'm not so much the grammer freak, but this one is not good.
"students confessed cheating" maybe?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
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 would like to know where you find anonymous professors, anonymous reader writes, and anonymous joe
please tell me where you got your sources from
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.
Well of course Statistics students has the most cheaters, but they are also the most likely to understand the consequences of admitting en masse to cheating on a survey!!! ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
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.
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 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.
Unless they were cheating on the survey too!
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"
You can't cheat off of someone when you're trying to come up with interesting physics experiments, and then trying to perform them and write a thesis about it. Maybe if I had had a way of cheating I wouldn't have taken 7 years to graduate.
Unless.... I could have faked that data!
Goddammit
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.
Bodes ill for our future health care needs.
Almost a 50/50 chance of getting a doc who cheated his/her way through college.. scary.
On the bright side if your doc is ever stuck with a diagnosis he can always look it up on wikipedia..
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.
Freedom is a state of mind. A mind is a state of being. Stay the fuck out of my mind and my being. - Corporate Avenger
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
May the Maths Be with you!
psst! ...what did you put for "name"?
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
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.
Yeah, but how'd that compare to students studying to become Ninja?
[Insert pithy quote here]
University of Toronto has had a cheating detection program called MOSS running against student program assignments for several years now. How many other schools have something similar?
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?
Cheating is a now a norm in american society.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
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
Mind you, I'm a grad student myself, and I would never, never even consider plagiarizing or copying anyone else's published or unpublished work (at least partly because I think my own work is better than most other people's, anyway :) ). But realistically, grad school is not like undergrad, where every test performance, every paper, every evaluation is being used to sort you out of the herd and give your future employers information about your ability and potential. In grad school, three or four big, important performance evaluations-- getting in, passing comps, finishing the dissertation, getting it published-- are interspersed with lots of smaller "evaluations" that are basically hoops to jump through.
Most humanities and social science courses I know require papers, and most students will get A's on said papers-- A's that are basically meaningless since employers don't look at transcripts anyway. So one's performance on the paper is essentially immaterial-- it's not making you look any better, it's not teaching you much (particularly in courses outside your field), and the professor may barely skim it before dustbinning. Under those circumstances, actually writing the paper essentially just ensures that you waste lots of time that could be devoted to performance points that do matter, like the diss. Plagiarism under those circumstances is still lying, I guess, and lying is always wrong, but I don't think in these cases that it's the sort of lying that necessarily says much about your professionalism or future behavior-- just that you're the sort of person who gets impatient with pointless rules.
Statisticians do!
Now by the morning you'll be good as new. Or dead. The important thing is, we'll know.
Don't you just love the 49% rate on medical students ?
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Sure, only 56% of business students admitted to it... the other 44% just print out fake degrees online and don't ever consider themselves students, they just go straight to "graduates".
stuff |
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.
-------------------------------END--COMMUNICATION
...by quoting your wikipedia article, then editing the same article so when you look back, you won't see any direct match with the stolen quote ;=) ...
Who checks the history anyway
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business persons in this country are so unethical. Well, now they know. Business ethics 101 is all about cheating.
It would seem from these figures, that Law students actually are more ethical than engineers.
;-)
Who did this study, again?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
56% of business students are cheaters! OMG!!1!
What I think this fails to take into account is both the severity and frequency of cheating. Someone looks over the shoulder of a fellow student on a multiple-choice test and directly copies their answers. Definitely cheating. Now, someone includes a line from another person's paper, and forgets to cite it. Cheating as well, but definitely not the same level of cheating. This second form can be accidental, if someone just forgets to add the proper citation.
Also, the study fails to determine how often people are cheating. Does this mean that 56% of business students have cheated ONCE in grad school? Or that 56% are consistent cheaters?
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
I can't see how these statistics can be remotely accurate simply because of the topic. Cheaters are dishonest people and obviously many of them are going to lie.
I know this has been brought up before but what is the significance of this study when its obviously not accurate?
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.
First you must define cheating.. To copy from one and quote as your's - cheating, to copy from many - good research. Ok end of humor... Just the other day we flame a guy that cheats on Xbox live, his explanation is that there are probably others on the other side cheating. Today we hear how 1/2 of all the students are cheating in college. I find some parallels here that really scare me, I am to now assume that 50% of the population cheats at everything?
I would guess the Statistics students who cheat are more likely to be the ones that DON'T understand Statistics...
Okie, this is bad. You can't let the standards of education drop so low. How will the rest 55% survive in this big bad world. Damn it guys, you cant just start your job one fine day - you have to cultivate the habits earlier on from the university.
Just because I'm modded a troll doesn't mean I'm trolling. It just means there's some moderators out there who feel 'insulted'. My point remains valid as a statistical curiosity, regardless of political correctness.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
Statistically speak, it looks to me as if the random error due to the sample size is around 3% per group of students. So it's difficult to say, statistically speaking, whether there is any real variation in the populations. On top of that, you have the possibility of lying about cheating which could introduce systematic biases, although there are ways of controlling for those.
This is actually a bit shocking to me, as a relatively-recent graduate of a doctoral program in a physical science. I can honestly say that I know of no cases of cheating that occurred in my department, so I'm surprised to see that the average is around 50%.
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
I'm enrolled in a Gothic Literature class and was having troubles understanding the timeline. Instead of going to the prof first, I read the Wikipedia. The site read almost exactly like the syllabus. I emailed him asking if he contributed (also about my unanswered question), and he said he had worked on. Profs aren't that "unhip".
In Starfleet you get a commendation for original thinking. Who says the Kobayashi Maru senario is a no win situtation - losers, thats who.
Of course cheating happens. You have professors who seem to think their class is the only thing you'll be doing 24 hours a day for the rest of the semester. Take 5 classes like that in undergrad, or 3 in grad, and the only way to keep your head above water or sleep is to cheat (or invent a time machine). the worst in my experiance is I had one class where it was a choice to cheat, drop the class, don't sleep, or drop every other class and quit work. Since it was a required class for the major, you can see what pretty much every student in the class did (you could tell the few who didn't because they had breakdowns during class and the tests). Not to defend any actions, but B school is more important to find the answer then know it. Plus most of the things you do are group projects with one answer/source. One person spends a bunch of time to find each answer, change the wording, share, everyone only spends 5 hours on each answer and everyone doesn't spend 50 on the test. -Anon Student
Ok, I can understand if you're studying computer science, or engineering, or math, and you cheat your way through English 101. Nobody in these businesses cares about this Shakespeare nonsense unless it's a hobby of theirs, so yes, I think cheating in these subjects, which you are forced to take but have nothing to do with your major, is perfectly acceptible. After all, how can you be expected to understand a sentence like "Wherefore art thou, O Romeo?!" Couldn't she just say, "Where the fsck are you? No sex tonight!"
Why would anyone need to cheat in Liberal Arts? They can't remember the line Would you like fries with that?
There is a large disparity in forms of cheating here. As an example- I was an engineering student, so it was obviously very heavy on technical classes. At a point you realize how ridiculous *some* of the tests really are: teachers have become lazier and lazier in creating their tests- most tests are pure memorization exams rather than tests for conceptual understanding. As the tests relate less and less to practical, applicable knowledge, which um is really what you should be learning, the lesser forms of cheating suddenly become more rationalized, and almost necessary. So you get no notes allowed on a physics w/ calc test that contains problems using maybe a dozen of a possible 40 formulas you've covered in that section. What is that testing? Just pure memorization, basically, and you are going to dump basically all of the formulas that you crammed shortly afterwards. In nearly every real world situation you can use open reference to look up a formula when you need it, draw on others to solve a problem, etc. The testing experience often exists in it's own little box in the world, just be glad you have a graphing calculator that can fit notes. That's the only way I made it through a few classes- even though most of the time I would not need to reference them. I would say that's quite a few ballparks away from copying answers from some other student, which I never considered, but a 'have cheated' answer nonetheless.
I don't know, but you might want to ask the guy who got 1780 on his SATs.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
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'm] ... emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world."
This sort of remark demonstrates how clueless they are about the so-called "real world".
I think that these people would do well to realize that the real world requires being innovative and original. If most of what you expect to do in the "real world" is copy somebody else's work, you will rarely be the first to get anywhere, and that will intrinsically limit your level of success.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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 disagree. There are strict standards and many levels of testing in the Healthcare IT field (I do work in a health care company), and we're really tight following those procedures. One false step from any department and the entire company's shut down for intense FDA Audits. What worries me, though, is so many health care grad students are cheating. At least with comp sci, I have a testbed and a compiler to help me catch my errors. In the medical field, their testbed is my hospital bed!!!
An interesting statistic would be what percentage of business majors are in the greek system. This could be skewing the numbers a little.
It puts the lotion on it's skin, or else it gets the hose again.
First off, how do we know this study is real and the author didn't just make up the results?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
A few years ago, I taught at a private school. One of our biggest problems among the older students was cheating. On test days, students would regularly congregate in the bathrooms to share answers with one another. It was very common to read homework assignments and essays that sounded almost exactly alike -- one group of students even had a sharing program of sorts worked out, such that one person would do Monday's homework, the next person, Tuesday's, and so on. What was really shocking was not how prevalent the cheating was, but how many of the parents reacted when we brought it to their attention. One person was caught with a crib sheet in his lap during a test, and his parents insisted that he hadn't actually been "using" it -- that he had just accidentally left it there after some last-minute studying. One student was using a teacher's edition of a physics textbook to memorize answers for the tests -- when the teacher caught him (by producing his own slightly modified test), the parents admitted that they bought the student the textbook and maintained that there was nothing wrong with that. Some of those kids are probably in college or grad school right now. It's no wonder they don't think cheating is wrong, that they think it's just the way things are done -- their parents encouraged them to do it while they were growing up.
I think that computer science is new enough that a college degree doesn't directly indicate one's abilities... a lot of the best stuff out there is made by kids still in high school or reformed art history majors that suddenly decided to create something Web 2.0ish. A college degree in Computer Science is usually required to get you a day job... but hardly anyone is creating anything innovative in an 8x8 cubicle at MegaCorp... they are doing it in their spare time... and then getting bought by MegaCorp (who then claims the innovation as their own).
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
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?
I dropped out of college about 18 years ago a bit shy of my degree in Computer Science. I hardly noticed any cheating back then at all. I mean, I'm sure it happened and I knew of a few people who did, but for the most part, it wasn't something I noticed often.
I have recently gone back to school majoring in chemistry and biology and I'm just astounded at the amount of cheating that goes on. And at least 18 years ago, when people cheated, they tried to hide it, even from other students. These days, it's just right out in the open. I have other students asking me for answers all the time. It makes me very uncomfortable because I want to get along with people in my classes, but I simply will not get involved in cheating. I'm pre-med and it would ruin my chances of getting into medical school. And somewhat related, one of the biggest cheaters I've noticed is another pre-med student and all I can think is, if she ever does get into medical school, she's not going to survive very long.
It's leveraging. No really. It is.
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
Wait, they're Canadians! From my graduate school experience I thought they would be Chinese.
Preeeeeettty sure there are more business majors than engineers... so... yeah... thanks for your opinion, but don't need it.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Hey, I was an engineering student and a business student. Does that mean I cheated twice?
What was once true, is no longer so
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.
Is this all just an attempt by a few software vendors attempting to push their unproven "anti-cheating" products into the higher ed marketplace?
Anonymous postings by "tenured professors"? Or a "research paper" that hasn't been accepted for publication in a any respected journal? Do the rantings by a couple of individuals have any more weight than a press release by a software vendor attempting to sell their products to a cash-strapped Higher Ed institution?
I think not.
I'm much more likely to listen to a research study that was conducted in a manner that is generally accepted by the research community. I'm much more likely to believe a non-anonymous, highly respected professor than an anonymous posting. Instead, I am given some kind of story - but there is no way for me to determine if it's valid - or just opinionated spin.
Yes, I have an opinion. But I can be convinced to think otherwise if I see quality information. I haven't seen it.
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.
Winners don't do drugs!
-- Kate
Only you know the answer to your question.
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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Cheating by plagiarization, or sneaking in notes to exams are clearly a bad forms of cheating. The student is obviously not even trying to learn and do the work. However, copying off of another student's work can get a lot murkier, and is not necessarily bad. Definitions of cheating are usually kept rather broad. Why? Because it helps protect the professor.
For instance, let's say that student A and student B have both been working on 20 math problems separately. They decide to compare answers (often considered officially cheating, but in reality a good way of learning), they find that they have different answers on one question. They discuss it and realize that student B was correct for that question. So student A copies the answer to that question off of student B. Technically cheating, but learning has been achieved.
So why doesn't the professor allow this as part of the cheating policy? Well let's say the prof. does allow it in the cheating policy, but then has a student who copies half of the problems from another student and is caught. They can then argue that the cheating policy is vague, and the prof may be powerless. So the net result (at least in my experience in CS), is that cheating policies are officially kept very strict so as to give a prof leeway to come down hard on people cheating to just not do work, but profs allow and expect small amounts of cheating if students are learning from it. The funny thing is that it tends to be a fairly open thing. All too often I've been in classes where the official policy is that no student is allowed to receive any help from/work with any other student in the class, but at the beginning of a class a student will begin with 'We were talking about question x and had some questions about it.' and the prof is all too happy to see that students have been actively trying to figure out the material, even if there was a bit of technical cheating involved.
To reiterate, it just depends upon the intentions of the students when they cheat.
No, it means you cheated on 110% of your exams. Obviously including math.
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Ever been to boston?
while reading this post I thought that while there may be more cheating in these majors, I've always thought that they were the more difficult on the college menu (I know not everyone will agree with that). My point is that pressure/work-load and cheating will always be correlated even outside academia- like baseball or cycling. As someone who has gotten behind on homework and had someone else sign the attendance sheet, I've made myself look hard at the ethics. I personally feel that it is worse to cheat yourself, i.e. not learn - kinda the whole point of school. So I felt it ok to cheat on homework, which could be argued a more efficient way to learn; however there is no learning involved in taking a test. Cheating on tests cheats your classmates, school and yourself -but the silver lining is that it doesn't really hinder gainful employment (as I do know some 'Real' cheaters who are doing just fine).
An opportunity to use one of my favorite Simpsons quotes...
Mr. Burns: I've always felt that there's far too much hysteria these days about so-called cheating. If you can take advantage of a situation in some way, it's your duty as an American to do it. Why should the race always be to the swift or the jumble to the quick-witted? Should they be allowed to win merely because of the gifts God gave them? Well, I say cheating is the gift man gives himself!
Homer: Mr. Burns, I insist that we cheat.
Mr. Burns: Excellent.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
This is about people who said they cheated. There are four groups of people.
Cheated/Admitted
Cheated/Denied
Didn't Cheat/ Said they did
Didn't Cheat/ Said they didn't
If we could compare real stats to these, that would be interesting. But i don;t think this is indicative of the real world. Just what people are willing to tolerate.
Have you read my journal today?
I think you missed the part about having a 'testbed,' which I took to mean as unit tests / integration tests.
(54 + 50 + 49 + 45 + 43 + 39) > 100
PUH-LEEZE!
Karma: NaN
Actually, most engineering students don't go on to take the FE and become RPEs. Very few people I know did, at least. I have a BSEE and I'm a CPU architect these days. (Well, co-architect if you want to get nit-picky about it.)
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
C. Montgomery Burns: "I've always felt that there's far too much hysteria these days about so-called cheating. If you can take advantage of a situation in some way, it's your duty as an American to do it. Why should the race always be to the swift or the jumble to the quick-witted? Should they be allowed to win merely because of the gifts God gave them? Well, I say cheating is the gift man gives himself!"
Simpsons Episode: Mountain of Madness.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
Little roll and plain hyper-reduced photocopies by two medical students (both women).
In the second picture there is an eurocent for comparison (however, sizes are similar).
And here there is a scientific paper about cheating in medical schools published by the British Medical Journal; in particular, about the possible relation with future dishonest behaviour.
Agreed. Mod parent up!
We were technically supposed to "do our own homework," but everyone I knew did not take that to mean they couldn't work together to understand how to work the homework. As you say, it's not the same as copying answers. Rather it's about understanding the procedure. I fail to see how it's cheating if you and a friend work it out, vs. if you go to the TA or to the professor's office hours and do the same.
That said, I do have direct data from a friend of mine pursuing a BSME at a local school, and she has complained multiple times about students sharing solutions manuals, actively copying each others' homework answers, etc. These people openly admit that they don't care that they're not doing what the professor asked of them.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
I feel very saddened by this study. I am an electrical engineering master's student and I have never cheated and would never consider cheating. My policy has always been an honest failure is orders of magnitude better than an ill gotten A. (This has worked so far without me having to confront any "honest failures", but this study does make me wonder about all the people in my undergrad classes with suspiciously perfect homework scores all the time that i was competing with on the curves) The simple fact is, some things are very hard, both in mental effort to comprehend the material and sheer level of work required to succeed. If you don't love your area of study enough to tough it out and maintain your integrity, you really shouldn't be there. In engineering at least, cheating wouldn't even be possible in something like a group design project with large deliverables, since working with groupmembers is part of the process and faking your deliverables wont fool anyone (professors, people considering you for jobs, and most importantly yourself). Cheating in general will hurt the cheater most of all, because they will have gaps in their knowledge that will put them at a disadvantage in the future (it's hard enough remembering all this material when you work it all out yourself honestly). Cheating hurts you, those forced to compete with you, and eventually anyone depending on you to produce quality designs/code/(insert output for your field here) later on. Within the group of people I personally know and work with, I have observed no cheating whatsoever. Everyone takes our university honor code and our professors instructions on what level of collusion (including none) is allowed on things like even small homework assignments seriously. We all accomplish the ever important "getting the job done" by working hard, not by bending the rules. I used to generalize this to all of engineering, believing we had some intrinsic integrity and work ethic that allowed us as a group to design and build so many cool things. Now, I'm afraid if the majority of even graduate engineering students admit to cheating I'll have to go back to judging people completely individually with no positive prejudgement based on area of study. I have lost a bit of faith and trust in my cohort, and that makes me sad. (Lighter note: I was going to try to work a reference the the ST:TNG episode "The First Duty" in here somehow, but I've decided there's enough righteous indignation above to forgoe cranking the nerdiness up to 11 with a star trek reference in a serious post about ethics)
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.
... several years ago I knew a Chem E. major who told me that in some of his courses the instructors taught the class about circumventing EPA regulations, toxic waste dumping, etc. in order to save some bucks. Monkey see, monkey do.
If you think that's bad
I think you're talking about two different things. Creating applications on a computer is much easier nowadays, due to simpler, high-level, fail-safe languages with interpreters included with most common computers. Faster machines also mean that optimization really isn't that big of a problem (for many things). There still is a place, though, for people who innovate both in the areas of strict and low-level implementation, as well as pushing the envelope from a more mathematical/scientific perspective.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Read the article. It says further that 50% of physical sciences students cheat as well. Not surprising given recent Shoen affair... I hope most of them cheat on secondary subjects, like evolution, global warming or sex harassment classes.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Edit: The post above lost all formatting somehow, that will teach me not to use the preview button. If modding the post, please mod this correct version instead.
I feel very saddened by this study. I am an electrical engineering master's student and I have never cheated and would never consider cheating. My policy has always been an honest failure is orders of magnitude better than an ill gotten A. (This has worked so far without me having to confront any "honest failures", but this study does make me wonder about all the people in my undergrad classes with suspiciously perfect homework scores all the time that i was competing with on the curves)
The simple fact is, some things are very hard, both in mental effort to comprehend the material and sheer level of work required to succeed. If you don't love your area of study enough to tough it out and maintain your integrity, you really shouldn't be there. In engineering at least, cheating wouldn't even be possible in something like a group design project with large deliverables, since working with groupmembers is part of the process and faking your deliverables wont fool anyone (professors, people considering you for jobs, and most importantly yourself). Cheating in general will hurt the cheater most of all, because they will have gaps in their knowledge that will put them at a disadvantage in the future (it's hard enough remembering all this material when you work it all out yourself honestly). Cheating hurts you, those forced to compete with you, and eventually anyone depending on you to produce quality designs/code/(insert output for your field here) later on.
Within the group of people I personally know and work with, I have observed no cheating whatsoever. Everyone takes our university honor code and our professors instructions on what level of collusion (including none) is allowed on things like even small homework assignments seriously. We all accomplish the ever important "getting the job done" by working hard, not by bending the rules. I used to generalize this to all of engineering, believing we had some intrinsic integrity and work ethic that allowed us as a group to design and build so many cool things. Now, I'm afraid if the majority of even graduate engineering students admit to cheating I'll have to go back to judging people completely individually with no positive prejudgement based on area of study. I have lost a bit of faith and trust in my cohort, and that makes me sad.
(Lighter note: I was going to try to work a reference the the ST:TNG episode "The First Duty" in here somehow, but I've decided there's enough righteous indignation above to forgoe cranking the nerdiness up to 11 with a star trek reference in a serious post about ethics)
I read the numbers and they seem pretty low. Here in Greece 100% of University students cheat on homework assignments. There are "bookstores" around Universities that somehow get their hands on homework from past years and students go there to xerox the one they need and go home and copy them to a clean sheet of paper.
And I'd guess about 99% cheat in exams. Everybody goes into class 20 minutes before the exam begins and write everything they'll need on the desk. Then they copy when they exam begins.
How is it in other countries? I want to hear from people all over the world on this because I think we've overdone it here.
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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.
So having an Engineering degree, a Master's in Computer Science, and working on an MBA, I must be a big cheater! ...Or is everyone in my courses cheating off of me???
...
Could these figures be exaggerated? I mean, there still exists the chance that someone made an honest mistake somewhere and is perfectly willing to rectify that once it is pointed out.
nor inhale
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
There still is a place, though, for people who innovate both in the areas of strict and low-level implementation, as well as pushing the envelope from a more mathematical/scientific perspective.
It's called embedded systems, and from the rampant use of cell phones, pda's, and mp3 devices, I'd say business is booming.
I got nothin'
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.
It's nice that you can read only part of my post and not the rest of it. You skipped the section where I mentioned testing. Kudos for your advanced collegiate skills.
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?
Enough said.
I didn't cheat in grad school at all and knew very few who did.
In fact, the only time I ever cheated on a test was the color blindness test for my military physical. I knew that I wasn't going to be able to read the numbers in the colored dots so I memorized the sequence as I stood in line waiting for my turn. For some reason, when I got to the head of the line, the army seargeant giving the test started going backwards through the book instead of forwards. I got the first two or three in the backwards sequence but then I missed a couple. He started choosing pages randomly in the book and I couldn't get any of them even the ones I already had.
There was an occasion in grad school where I could easily have cheated to help someone else. We had weekly homework to turn in each Monday in my Calculus of Variations class. The morning of the first homework assignment, an engineering student asked if he could see my homework to compare my answers to his. It was not unusual to check your answers against each others and then if there was a difference to go through the work and find out what either of you did wrong. So I let him borrow my homework for that purpose and he disappeared to an empty room down the hallway for an hour or two. When he came back, it was obvious he had copied my homework.
So the next week I didn't do the homework. He showed up on Monday morning and asked if he could see my homework and I told him I hadn't done it yet. This continued through the entire semester. Every Monday morning, he would ask to see my homework and I'd tell him I didn't do it yet but I would before the end of the semester.
Finally, the week before the last homework assignment was due, I did all the homework for the whole semester except the one I had already turned in and on Sunday night, I went up to the Math Department mailroom and put it in the prof's mailbox. The next morning the engineering student showed up and asked if I'd done my homework yet. When I told him I had done all of it the previous week, he was very visibily relieved. But he quickly became very upset when he asked to borrow it and I told him I had already turned it in.
Employers care about what you learned in business school? I thought they only cared about what school you attended. Besides, isn't business school about creating a personal network? Why bother with papers and tests if they get in the way of building that network - it is the really the only reason you should be attending business school.
Where are the technology and computer science students?
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.
How about answering your own question with a little math, shall we?
Let's say there are 10000 business majors and 50% of them cheat. That's 5000 cheating business people.
Now, lets say there are 5000 engineerings and 50% of them cheat. That's 2500 cheating engineers.
So, there's a pretty big difference between 2500 people and 5000 people. You have to normalize against the entire population or the percentages are pretty much useless. 17% cheating from engineers and 33% from business majors across just these two groups in this example.
Clearly honesty isn't someone one could conclude since honesty includes more than just cheating. Stealing for example.
So, no, I'm not fucking retarded. I'm an engineer you sociopath.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
This got modded funny, but I drive an extra 30 minutes every day to avoid the Big Dig tunnels. I figure it's just a matter of time before one of them is full of Boston Harbor water.
Claiming credit for someone else's work is bad, but broadening and diluting the definition this much is counterproductive, I think.
I would be curious to know the name of this company. Care to point a finger for me? ;)
IAAL, and I can't figure out how 45% of law students cheat. Most every school in the country follows the same model - each class, you have one exam at the end of the term, and that exam is 100% of your grade. The exams are almost always essays, and the grades are based upon your ability to spot the legal issues in a fact pattern, state the rule of law, and apply it to the facts. Many exams are "open book" because the book doesn't matter. Memorization is not that important. There aren't papers to write or mid-term quizzes.
Really the only opportunities to "cheat" would be if you're on the staff of an academic journal, or in an advocacy/legal skills course, but those are rarely part of one's GPA. Even if 45% of the students could figure out some way to cheat, I seriously doubt many would. Most schools put the fear of God into you, because if you're caught, your career is basically doomed. And most schools make it an ethics violation if you know that another student is cheating, and you fail to turn him/her in. There's paranoia aplenty.
It's a head-scratcher....
they weren't asked in which classes they cheated
The business students were probably cheating in Ethics class.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I am nothing and should be everything
Well when I crossing a bridge, I'm going to think that at least 54% of the engineers were inclined to use reference materials :) the tendency at least seemed to me to be the more technicaly demanding the course work, the more likely the students were to cheat, hardly something unexpected when you actually think about it, then there is the Business students way up at the top out of porportion!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Personaly if someone in a PhD program in a physical science admits to cheating in a course he had to take in eastern philosophy, I don't fine that to be a big deal. Consider this the instructor at my college used to debrief the students after they had taken the state boards and adjust the course to teach what was on the tests, I think 3/4 of our test questions were basicaly stolen from the state boards; would that count as cheating? If it does then we were at 100%.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I'm a computer science major and I have plagiarized and cheated in the past.
It was not that often and it was always for convenience, not because I needed it. Sometimes, I had to write papers which had no purpose other than making sure I read something--Like those biology papers about phosphate's role in plants. It annoys me. And it is not because it impugnated my honesty or some such romantic nonsense. It annoyed me because it was unneeded. Unlike some, it takes me effort and time to write up 4 or 6 pages on something. I am a perfectionist. I am psychologically unable to just type crud away at 20 WPMs. And so I must waste countless hourse of my time trying to paraphrase several sources as best I can. That doesn't teach me biology, it teaches me HOW TO PARAPHRASE! And That's only useful to slashdot editors, not to a biologist. He could've just tested me on it and saved me the pain.
On the other hand, I have never cheated on papers which addressed something actually worthwile. I have written some essays about my friends and family, videogames and drugs, plays and books. They were not easy to write, but when I finished them, they meant something to me. I felt the writer's satisfaction. I'm a pretty good writer; Not good enough to write books, but good enough to get As and Bs on english essays. As you'll have noticed, my punctuation sucks.
As far as cheating on tests goes, I almost never do it. Once, I did it because one of my professors was a really horrible teacher (but a nice guy!). The entire class had signed a petition against him within a month and over half of them were cheating in the final. It has NEVER happened before. I worked pretty hard to no avail, cheated on the last test and passed with a C in the class. I am so glad I cheated and passed. I went on to get an easy A in the harder course on the same topic, without cheating. Other than that, I did a few dozen times out of tens of thousands. Most of them were formulas since I have a hard time memorizing those.
Of course, I recognize that many do not share my motives. But then, that's just the world we live in, ain' it?
Embedded devices are getting more and more complicated. My current mobile 'phone is two whole orders of magnitude (base 10) than my first PC, and that PC had support for some quite high-level development tools. Most of the code that needs to run on a modern cell 'phone could easily be written in Smalltalk and be fast enough; most even come with a JVM these days.
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My ex-girlfriend is just starting a PhD program in a US university in mathematics, and 90% of what she is doing is completely irrelevant to what she wants to specialise in. I can imagine that this kind of setting would encourage cheating. If I were to be forced to jump through pointless hoops before getting on with real research, I imagine I would seriously consider any means of making my life easier.
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My girlfriend is a big high flying professional medical college instructor. One of her duties is to go through and process plagiarism cases, do fact finding, and make recommendations for action against the accused. By the time a plagiarism case lands on her desk it has failed the plagiarism checking program: "turn-it-in". Some interesting facts about her situation: -As the school where she works has a lot of foreign students worth big bucks..... Many actions that recommend punishment are overturned by higher ups. The money is more important than ethics. Warm body + cash = good student. -The buck rogers program "turn-it-in" puked once and gave out conflicting results on different dates for the same paper. ( They are having their I.T. people ask the vendor support about how that could have happened ) -Some foreign students come from cultures where it is considered a compliment, to copy work created by someone else. This takes effort to inform them what is considered unacceptable. Language barriers between teaching staff and students don't help. -The preventive briefings to students still needs a lot of work so less plagiarism cases land on her desk. -As there doesn't seem to be any hard punishment... the usefulness of checking for plagiarism seems useless.
I'm sorry, I can't accept this Coke you just handed me to help me stay awake while I do my homework. It would constitute unauthorized collaboration between students, which is an honor code violation and thus cheating.
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It's called the "FE" (Fundamentals of Engineering) exam. It's hard to cheat on.
1. They give you a reference book which has all the equations that are on the exam. Obviously, equation-based cheat-sheets are useless. (Keep in mind that this book has >100 pages)
2. The breadth of the test is so large that any cheat-sheet you would use wouldn't cover 5% of the material, or would be completely obvious to the proctors. (Remember, the official equation book is >100 pages)
2. They require you to use calculators from an approved list -- and the first requirement is that the calculator not be able to store equations or programs.
3. They check ID to verify you are who you say you are, have assigned seating, and check the ID versus the assigned seating versus the exam ID while you're taking the exam.
I'm sure they do other stuff too.
Pass rate on the test is apparently about 50% for first timers, about 55-60% for second timers (iirc). Making sure your engineer has taken the FE exam with the domain specific test and passed it is a good way to make sure your guy knows *something.*
MBA's are the army of satan on this earth.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
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 have to say they are absolutely true. If you are honest, it will hurt you financially (yes there are exceptions, I know). It is a cruel dog-eat-dog world out there.
This is not saying I encourage cheating, but only that if you don't cheat and don't know how and when to cheat it may hurt you financially.
However, you may sleep better at night and be able to look in the mirror without guilt, which may be worth more than the 20k you didn't get.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Yeah, sure... Engineers don't need to understand speling or grammer or how to express ideas clearly & concisely... They dont need too rite dokumentation a maner that are easy reed... Uther ngineers will have noo problem inside following such dir rections to buld a brige or understand coments in a progrram.
And if you think that programming doesn't involve much english, you've obviously never seen extremely large assembly programs written for DSPs.... Virtually every line must be commented and even that leaves a lot of details out. [Yes it sounds crazy, but its true]...
There's no such thing as self-documentation assembly code, especially when its written for a SIMD SHARC processor...
But why is this a question of safety? Well, what if programing controlling large/dangerous machinery/explosives...
Most people I came across in med school were honest. The ones who I thought were lazy/slackers/cheaters usually did not do well. The tests were set up in such a mannner that it was impossible to cheat - besides that since you studied soooo much by that point, you certainly did not want anyone else getting your hard studied answers. I proctored some exams - everyone keeps their head down and does the test. Cheat sheets are useless due to the voluminous amounts of information being tested.
I call bullpoop on this and would like to see this questionaire.
..........FULL STOP.
I'm not sure about other PhD programs, but ours doesn't require any courses outside our department. I know there are still schools around that require all PhD students to become fluent in another language, but that's been falling out of favor in the sciences over the past 10 years or so. So from my perspective, cheating in graduate school implies you're cheating in courses that directly relate to your degree.
I wouldn't consider teaching for a standardized test "cheating," but rather an unfortunate side effect of standardized tests. If a course is supposed to prepare you for a particular standardized test, then it's obviously in the instructor's best interest to gather as much information about the exam as possible and tailor the course to the material on the exam. That includes having the students work through lots of questions that are very similar to (or even taken directly from) exams from previous years.
I preface this post with a disclaimer that much of what I am about to describe applies to law schools in the US and probably in other "common law" jurisdictions such as the UK and Australia. It does not apply in "civil law" jurisdictions like France.
Law schools are generally accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA) and are commonly ranked into 3 tiers. There is an fourth tier of unaccredited schools. If you attend and graduate from an ABA accredited school, you can sit for the bar exam in any state. If you go to an unaccredited school, you can usually only sit for the bar exam in the state in which the school is located (provided also that the school is "state-approved").
Top-tier law schools (also called the "top 20" although it is commonly stated that there are 25 schools who can claim a place in the top 20 - go figure) generally teach using the Socratic Method. Students don't listen to lectures by professors. Rather, the professors lead class discussions by asking questions about court decisions and then change the facts of each case when constructing hypothetical questions to see if the students reason their way to the same conclusion as in the case decision or whether a different decision is warranted. This is an unnerving way to learn (especially with those professors who strictly adhere to the method and refuse to reply to any question except with a question of their own) but in my humble opinion and experience, it is the single best way to develop and hone critical thinking skills.
In law school the cases you read are specific (and real) controversies between parties. You are supposed to read the cases (and trust me - if you don'tand you are called on in class - at random most times - it will be painfully obvious if you did not read and analyze the cases) and then try to draw out general principles of law from the cases. This is the exact opposite of most undergraduate programs in the US where students are expected to learn the general principles and then apply those principles to specific situations.
Against this background then, students still need to receive grades. Most law school courses give one final examination - all essay questions with either 3 or 4 hours to complete. The grading is based partly upon your knowledge of the law but mostly on the quality of your legal analysis. These are tests where there are really no opportunities to cheat save copying your classmate's answer verbatim - very hard to do with the professor right in front of you. From the professor's perspective, these types of tests are exceedingly difficult to grade because not only do the professors have to read each and every essay, they also have to fit the grading into a mandatory normal grading distribution (a/k/a "grading curve" - in place for most law schools).
Some tests are multiple choice and still require your ability to engage in legal reasoning but like any other multiple choice test, all you have to do is copy a mark on a sheet. However in 3 years of law school, I only had 1 test that had any multiple choice component and that test also included a significant essay.
For some classes, such as seminars, there is no exam but there is a significant writing assignment upon which your grade is entirely based. This assignment is usually expected to be a publication-;quality paper on a legal topic related to the topic of the seminar. As with any other writing assignment done without in-person supervision, there are numerous opportunities to plagarize. However, seminars tend to be smaller in class size and the professor (if any good at all) frequently engages the students in dialog. I th
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
After I posted that I re-read TFA and noticed it was "cheated last year" rather than "cheated ever"; so while I still stand by my post, it really doesn't apply like I had thought, it increases the problem rather than mitigates it.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
...are you... could you be... are you implying that the researcher..... **Cheated** ?!?!?
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
The other 55% elected to take the fifth.
*joke rimshot*
---southpaw
I hate cheaters. When other people cheat, it devalues my degree. Furthermore, it is a slap in the face to anyone who puts in the time and effort to legitimately receive the marks. I believe there are many other students who feel the same way. I was wondering -would it be possible to set up a system whereby students police each others work? Say, after the final due date has passed, the assignments all become accessible online (arbitrarily coded so we don't know which assignment came from which person) and students can flag passages or portions of the assignment that appear to be violations. Overseers then, presumably the prof, can look over the most oft flagged sections (if not all of them). I would have no problem participating in such a program. Cheating pisses me off to no end, and the childish notion that "snitching" is wrong does not affect me -these people are breaking the rules and adversely affecting both the system itself and me personally- I would be happy to see them caught in droves.
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.
At my alma mater (Purdue), no mechanical engineering student had failed the EIT exam in the 7 years before I took it... the record may be even longer now. When I took the test there was a break for lunch during which several students went to a local bar and returned to the test drunk.... other students left 2 hours early so they could go to a football game. And no one failed.
The EIT exam is a joke. None of the material is beyond sophomore level classes, and on top of that you only need to get around 70% of them right to pass.
And the professional engineer certification is pretty much only really required for civil engineers. Other disciplines get it only sometimes... and some discipline like Aero engineering get it.
AND I work with several people who cheated they're way through engineering school. They get by at work by having other people do their work for them and by schmoozing and kissing ass, and often very quickly end up in management. Basically they skills the honed by cheating in school serve them well in the real world, and those of us who actually did the work in school end up carrying everone's weight in the workplace as well.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Pass rate on the test is apparently about 50% for first timers, about 55-60% for second timers (iirc). Making sure your engineer has taken the FE exam with the domain specific test and passed it is a good way to make sure your guy knows *something.*
My god that is scary. That test is frickin' easy.
I didn't study a lick, and I took it in a domain different from my degree (there is no FE test in Aero engineering). I got bored with the test and left early before completing it... and I passed. Everyone at my school passed it the year I took it (and over 100 people took it with me).
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
At least in schools that enforce academic honesty standards.
When I was in school I saw a kid flat busted cheating on a calculus exam. Out the door he went. The only way into another school was to deny he ever went to the first school. Such denial is itself grounds for the boot at any future school.
I suspect a law 'Character and Fitness Committee' amounts to: 'Can he keep up the appearance of honesty?', 'Yep, he's in.'
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Well, I'm not saying it's a test that identifies world beaters. Just saying that you have to know *something*.
If you can do calculus reasonably well, you can probably pass that test.
Which domain did you take it in?
And the reason I ask about what domain specific version you took is because well, if you took the MechE test, then you did take the domain for your degree ;)
AeroE is just a highly focused MechE degree -- at least, it is as taught at most places.
(In my case, I took my FE in the EE domain, but *technically* my degree is in Computer Engineering. Which is to say, my degree is just a focused EE degree that gives up some analog focus in favor of some digital focus)
I took MechE, but all of the fluid problems used different terminology and were all about pipe flow. The structures problems were also very different... and the dynamics problems were pretty much non-exisitant. Saying Aero is a subdomain of MechE is like saying MechE and Aero are a sub-domain of CivilE. Technically true, but the fields diverged a long time ago.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.