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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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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."
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and an amazing 0% of Political Science students!
They learn quick, don't they.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
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.
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.
Now trackback the cheating of those in Enron and MCI/Worldcom back to their cheating days at Harvard and other business schools. I bet the relation will be pretty high up there.
Interestingly, in my studies I stumbled upon 2 or 3 subjects which were plain impossible to pass without cheating. And not that "I failed", simply anybody not cheating would fail, and most of the cheaters still wouldn't make it through. The subject was too difficult for my group, for the group year before, two years before, three years before and that's where known records end. From groups of 30-50 students 2-10 most proficient at cheating would pass at the first try, the rest would get a clue and re-try while cheating (passing another 10-20 students or so), and whoever tried the honest approach, would simply fail.
Interestingly, these were informatics-related subjects.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
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..
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.
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.
I would say Maths/Statistics has the most cheaters, pretty much everyone I know who takes it cheats at it.
As a former (undergrad) math student I can honestly say that it all depends on how you define cheat; yes like every good math student I will argue over definitions. In one of my courses my Professor openly said that he anticipated that everyone would end up working in groups to understand and solve the challenging proofs, but he required us to write it up on our own and use our own words; as he pointed out in real world math you needed to be able to collaborate with other mathematicians in order to solve difficult problems, and anyone who was trying to get a "free ride" on the work of someone else would (probably) fail the tests so he wasn't concerned.
In many humanities and social sciences the point of a paper is to come up (and defend) your own argument; any collaboration (beyond editing) can be seen as a type of academic dishonesty.
The fact that more than half of engineering students admit to cheating should be more than a bit disturbing, if they are cheating in their engineering classes. I don't want to go through a tunnel or over a bridge that was designed by one of these folks.
On the other hand, they weren't asked in which classes they cheated. So we could be talking about an engineering student having a friend write an english paper for him, which, while less than desirable for his education, is not a matter of safety.
A blog about stuff.
So you're disagreeing with results of a survey with 5,000 students across two large countries because you attented one school, with one group of people, and had one group of friends that didn't exhibit the behavior? Is this the type of rigor they taught you in Business school? I'd get my money back.
LegendMUD
I have many friends in engineering, and all of them had to become certified "Engineers in Training" before being employed. This process involves taking a couple standardized tests which were general science and math knowledge, and one that was taylored to their specific engineering field. I don't think many cheaters would be able to pass it.
;)
Once that is completed they have to work for 5+ years, take more exams, and then they can be considered a "Professional Engineer."
I think its scarier that computer programmers, who might be working on that software running life support machinery, doesn't need any professional certifications other than a college degree
I got nothin'
I want to know how they phrased the question.
As someone with an undergrad engineering degree I can confidently say that I never cheated in college. However, certain phrasings of the question could cause me to respond differently. For example, if the question was asked, "Have you every used another students work to complete your own without the instructors explicit consent." I'd have to say yes.
I spent many late nights in computer labs or study halls working with other students in an attempt to understand the material. Often times this means working homework problems together. Sometimes I'd do the problem independently and then share the results with others, other times I'd make little or no progress and have someone explain it to me. It wasn't about copying answers, it was about understanding the methodology. A poll question that understands this distinction is difficult to come up with. I don't ever remember a teacher telling us not to work together in an engineering class (aside from exams) but I don't think they all explicitly told us it was ok - mostly because it is part of the culture and it wouldn't occur to them to endorse it.
As a social science grad student, each assignment was unique. I might be doing a paper on X while my friend wrote something up about Y. Professors always vetted paper topics to make sure that no two students were working on the same subject. Aside from comparing class and reading notes, there wasn't much we could do to help each other out.
A few years ago I went back to school and got a CS degree (already had degree in Economics). I was approached many times from other CS students asking for help on programming/database/math projects. Most of the time the questions were legitimate and I wouldn't consider them 'cheating'. However, there were times when I was flat out asked to share my code/algorithms. I hated that. One of the primary reasons I went back to get another degree was because I loved the problem-solving aspect of software development. It's kind of like cheating in games. If you're handed the answers, where is the challenge? Where is the benefit? Also, I found that (at my school at least) there was a strong community of Indian students who stuck together. Once I made a few friends in this small community, I found that the cheating was rampant. Code sharing, test sharing, etc. was commonplace. It always put me in a difficult situation when I was asked to show someone else my code. I don't mind helping others (frequent message boards), but simply giving someone else code that I worked hours on was out of the question.
Ever been to boston?
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?