61.9% of Undergraduates Cybercheat

RichDiesal writes "A recent study of 1222 undergraduates found that 61.9% of them 'cybercheat,' which involves using the Internet illicitly to get higher grades. Some of the quotes from students are a bit troubling. As one 19-year-old engineering student put it, 'As more and more people are using the Internet illegally (i.e. limewire etc.), I feel that the chances of being caught or the consequences of my actions are almost insignificant. So I feel no pressure in doing what ever everybody else is doing/using the Internet for.'"

Comments

Cybercheat?

[smittyoneeach]

Cybercheat?
Your brain is beat.
You're only as smart
As whiskers neat.
Burma Shave

Re:Cybercheat?

[MoonBuggy]

What makes the article particularly irritating is that their own definition for 'cybercheat' doesn't match the context in which they're using it:

Cybercheating can be defined as cheating enabled by the internet – so cybercheating can occur in any course.

61.9% (757 students) admitted to engaging in online plagiarism. 59% copied a few sentences, 30% copied a few paragraphs, 12% copies a few pages, 4% copied entire documents, and 3% purchased essays. 22.3% admitted to engaging in such behaviors regularly.

It's plain old plagiarism, hardly 'enabled' by the internet and certainly not worthy of it's own new word.

The actual figures, while not brilliant, are far less worrying than they seem to be trying to lead us to believe, and the word 'cybercheating' is just another one of those ploys to gain extra coverage by still implying that the internet is something new and scary, rather than a day-to-day avenue by which old behaviours, from simple conversation to bullying to cheating are carried out.

Re:Cybercheat?

[MaXintosh]

+1. Do we need a new word for each technology? When people invented the Xerox machine, did people start talking about "Photo-cheating?"

In any event, most of the 'cheating' measures are only useful in the more vacuous subjects. In most most of the hard topics, it's easy enough to see if student know material in short form ("Finish in the following: Glucose 6-phosephate is rearranged into Fructose 6-phosphate by _____") and in long form, slightly trickier, but you can generally filter the bulk of cheats by simply asking students some intelligent questions about their papers verbally. It's just that many people have got horribly lazy, or have been forced to lecture unreasonably large classrooms, or both.

Re:Cybercheat?

[alexborges]

People that cheat, don't learn. In the future of all those students, it will all be sorted out: people that cheated constantly only to get a degree, will have lost time and money to get an education that they rejected when they cheated themselves out of actually baking the certificate with actual skills (beyond stealing). So, long term competition, I think, will favor the intelligent. Non cheaters with a degree will go further and get another one, will go to a company and actually make it money instead of looking like they make them money....

Re:Cybercheat?

[MoonBuggy]

Bad form to reply to myself, but this seemed worth adding:

The study also examined “traditional” plagiarism and found similarly high levels – again, 61.9% of the sample reported some type of plagiarism, though this time from books and articles. I am not wholly convinced that the researchers adequately differentiated “online articles” and “offline articles” (students may consider these to be the same thing), but there is not enough detail reported on their method to be sure either way.

Fits pretty well with what I said, IMO. Firstly that the level of plagiarism is about the same either way - it's not some scary new phenomenon that's sucking in our students from those devil-boxes on their desks - and secondly that there's so little actual difference between an online article and a printed one that people (rightly, in my opinion) don't even consider them as different things. An utter non-story, but one of the type we'll keep getting for a while yet, by the look of things.

Re:Cybercheat?

[MoonBuggy]

In any event, most of the 'cheating' measures are only useful in the more vacuous subjects.

Although I find the article to be fairly poor, the one thing that did surprise me was the subjects arranged by cheating level. My assumption would have been the same as yours, but apparently no so:

1. Engineering and technology (72%)
2. Computer sciences and mathematical sciences (71%)
3. Social studies (64%)
4. Business and administrative studies (63%)
5. Law (62%)
6. Creative arts and design (61%)
7. Architecture, Building and Planning (60%)
8. Medicine (58%)
9. Natural sciences (57%)
10. Humanities (46%)

Although it does seem that 'traditional' subjects are firmly at the bottom of the list. More plagiarism from those doing a degree to get a job, and less from those doing a degree to learn, perhaps?

Re:Cybercheat?

[daaxix]

The percentages in their study are also higher for engineering and mathematics students.

Another particularly irritating caveat of this study is that they assign any "copying from the internet" to "cybercheating."

1) It is unclear whether in whatever questionnaire that they used whether the adequately distinguished between "copying a few lines with attribution" vs "copying a few lines without attribution."

2) In engineering and mathematics Wikipedia, Planetmath, Physics forums, etc. are usually useful and correct for undergraduate topics. In these disciplines, for an equation, like Newton's method, there really is only one way (or maybe a few ways) of concisely writing down the equation. If a math or engineering student copied an equation from Wikipedia to use on their homework, this study would label that "cybercheating," which is absolutely ridiculous!

Re:Cybercheat?

[MaXintosh]

#2 must be c/p'ed code or something similar. I can believe that - it's too easy to find code that way. I really can't see how people are cheating on engineering work unless lecturers have become phenomenally lazy in the last decade. Most of the stuff I ended up doing was "Here is unique problem X. Students need to come up with a solution or a method to produce a solution." sort of work. Aside from working with another student (which isn't effective, but often isn't forbidden) how the heck could you i-E-Cyber-Web-Cheat-Net on that?

Re:Cybercheat?

[Tr3vin]

I had to cybergoogle 'velocitycheat' to mindunderstand what you were cybertalking about.

Re:Cybercheat?

[MoonBuggy]

I've studied physics in UK and US universities, and while both had their share of good and bad professors, one thing I noticed in the US that never happened in the UK (admittedly extrapolating from two universities to two entire countries, but anyway...) was that questions from the textbook would be set as graded work, rather than the professor making up their own unique problems (as you experienced, and as they always did at the UK university). I'm guessing that swapping PDFs of textbook answers is what they're talking about in engineering.

Re:Cybercheat?

[VolciMaster]

A recent study of 1222 undergraduates found that... "As more and more people are using the Internet illegally (i.e. limewire etc.), I feel that the chances of being caught or the consequences of my actions are almost insignificant. So I feel no pressure in doing what ever everybody else is doing/using the Internet for."

limewire!? How recent is this study?

Probably pretty recent - I've run into recent graduates in the past few months still using it

Re:Cybercheat?

[MaXintosh]

Most lab reports should also be impossible to pass off as anyone but your own - the results are too unique for each person. Someone tried to make up their own values for the lab report in a lab I took back in my undergrad, and they were easily caught when the TA looked at the distribution of the results. And if you're required to report raw data too? The time you'll spend trying to cheat on the lab report, you might as well have done it yourself. And any time you ask a student to explain their work (especially verbally) you can really separate those who know the material and those who c/p-ing.

Re:Cybercheat?

[CapnStank]

And I disagree. Although I've never "cybercheated" (from what I can recall at least, I always cite sources) I can see why it is appealing. I've taken more than a dozen courses in my Engineering degree that are beyond useless for my professional career, its how the education system works. So when I'm tasked to write a 20 page page on something in my Humanities Elective course I don't *really* lose anything when I come out with a passing grade and nothing else. The university wasted my time and money on that course and at best I'll be able to win bar arguments on the topic.

You are correct if you assume all cheating is done in relevant courses. If I stole my Digital Network class project from an online tutorial site then I'm cheating myself, but we really can't make that assumption

Re:Cybercheat?

[HungryHobo]

Hell I regularly used tutorial code as a starting point when doing undergrad projects.
Normally I'd add something like "some code based on tutorial code at: http....." and never once did a professor so much a blink.

Why people wouldn't just attribute stuff is beyond me.
From a quick scan of it I too am not sure if they exclude attributed stuff.

Re:Cybercheat?

[ArhcAngel]

I've worked in numerous companies over my career and my experience would suggest you are incorrect. Like it or not cheating is a skill and those who are good at it are usually good at making upper management think they know what they are doing. They are also pretty good at getting other people to either do their jobs or take the blame for failures.

Re:Cybercheat?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

You mean Myanmar Shave?

Re:Cybercheat?

[Locke2005]

In real everyday business life, using existing documents as a starting point instead of generating new documents from scratch is considered a good business practice. Chances are have "cheated" won't effect their careers at all.

Re:Cybercheat?

[khallow]

People that cheat, don't learn.

However, it's worth noting that a college education is a combination of three things: true education, vocational training, and certification. A lot of people are there for the certification. If that's all you're there for and you have no scruples, then cheating is a rational move.

Re:Cybercheat?

[deapbluesea]

I'm replying to the parent because all of the children who replied to this have said basically the same thing and it needs to be addressed.

It appears that the slashdot crowd has no need for a liberal arts (in the classical sense) education. They only want job training instead. This is the problem with our current concept of college. Instead of going to get a well-rounded education that makes us better thinkers, more able to understand and inquire about the world around us, and generally improve our ability to be inquisitive successfully, college in America (and some other countries) is viewed as a way of gaining specialized job skills.

The school I attended had a very broad curriculum. I majored in Computer Science, minored in Math, but also took a year of Chemistry, Physics, History, English Lit, EE, Foreign Language, Biology and a semester of Aero, Astro, Civil Engineering, and Psychology (not an exhaustive list, just the ones I remember off the top of my head). I haven't used the majority of those subjects in my current job. In fact, I haven't even committed any Computer Science for most of my career. Does that mean my entire education was a waste? I certainly don't think so. I've been in situations where my Civil Engineering class actually proved useful to me. My wife loves to talk with me about history, and I draw heavily from my world history classes in those discussions. When studying genetic algorithms, my biology class came in rather handy, and I was grateful for that foreign language class when vacationing in Germany.

In short, my college education has enriched my life, made me a better person, and provided a broad foundation from which to launch new inquiries when I'm feeling curious. I humbly suggest that those who view college as only vocational training take a look at their local community college. There are many degrees offered there that don't require a liberal arts education, don't put you in a position that you feel you have to sacrifice your honor just to get a grade in a class you do not care about, and cost dramatically less than a college where you basically paid for the privilege of cheating your way through the classes you didn't find "useful" to your career choice.

Re:Cybercheat?

[MachDelta]

The problem with torrents is that its difficult for people to easily find the latest single. First you have to find a decent tracker and then you have to find the album, and then you have to selectively download only the track you want. It's relatively complicated compared to entering "Lady Gaga", "Songtitle" and hitting search. Of course, if you want the whole album then a torrent is much easier than searching for a dozen tracks individually. But so much of peoples modern musical taste is discovered piecemeal that it's not always desirable. I used to have Frostwire set up on a box I didn't care about for my girlfriend to find her own music (etc), but that hasn't been viable for some time now. So until I can think of another easy-to-use solution i'm stuck rifling through torrents for some single she heard on the radio (which inevitably has several dozen shitty remixes to further confuse things). Blegh.

Re:Cybercheat?

[deapbluesea]

Normally I'd add something like "some code based on tutorial code at: http....." and never once did a professor so much a blink.

As a college professor, I welcome attributed sources as part of a turn-in. It tells me what the student did himself, and which part of the assignment I can disregard while grading. It is the non-attributed work that gets students in trouble. If I catch it, they get a zero because I can no longer trust that any of the work in the assignment was theirs. If I don't catch it, then the student gets a grade for work they may or may not have done. It hurts the student, and is unfair to those would did the assignment on their own.

Attribution in your work should never be viewed negatively by a professor. I have had students hand me an assignment that is 95% someone else's work, but fully attributed. I graded according to the part the student had done. He got a 'D' since he failed to accomplish most of the tasks of the assignment on his own, but that was the end of it. Another student who did essentially the same thing without attribution got an 'F' and was later dis-enrolled from the school for violating the honor code.

Re:Cybercheat?

[tibit]

If you're a programmer, it really helps to expand your horizons a bit to have some backing in a "hard" science, like say physics, maths, chemistry, biology, or computer science. Going the other way, programming background definitely makes your life much easier when time comes to do lab reports and data processing in any science class. But the experience you gain applying programming to hard science problem solving is I think very valuable: it teaches you a certain discipline and problem breakdown skills. Those are very important when you'll face large IT problems/issues: you will have an instinct to break them down into manageable pieces.

<rant>I don't think that humanities are necessary, useful, or horizon-expanding, for that matter: hard sciences are a study of all Nature, with results that often are very widely applicable, whereas humanities are a specialized study of mostly artistic output of homo sapiens. Knowing literature won't help you in understanding what makes our world work, but knowing biochemistry may well help you understand what made your favorite author "tick" ;)</rant>

Re:Cybercheat?

[MachDelta]

One of my favorite profs evar is my compsci professor. All of his exams, every single one, is open book. Bring your notes, bring your laptop, search google, he doesn't care. Just no talking to other people (the school doesn't like that). His reasoning? It represents the real world. He always says that your employer isn't going to slap you on the wrist for looking something up if you don't know it off hand. But your employer WILL slap you upside the head if you cannot implement it. So, almost all of his tests revolve around understanding concepts and not regurgitating definitions. He asks questions like "what does this function do?" or "what's wrong with this program?" In later courses our tests are more about programming on the fly (which is fucking tough), so the more you can "cheat" and swipe entire functions from class examples or labs or whatever, the better you'll do - because inevitably the test comes down to understanding how all the puzzle pieces fit together and why the fucking thing is compiling, running, and then exploding in your face. Fortunately he gives lots of part marks. Last midterm I got 84% for a program that didn't even run (thanks to a null index I forgot to initialize... ugh.)

The only downside to his approach (and he warns us of this) is that we should try very hard not to cheat outright and mass-plagiarize entire programs/assignments, because if he has to put us infront of the faculty judges - most of whom are english profs - they will nail your ass to the wall because they won't understand that programming is a cumulative process. So there's some give and take on both sides.
In any case, he's by far my favorite prof. Particularly for his little programming maxims... my recent fav: "Always code as if the person maintaining the program is a homicidal maniac... and they have your home address!"

Re:Cybercheat?

[bzipitidoo]

there's so little actual difference between an online article and a printed one that people (rightly, in my opinion) don't even consider them as different things.

One ISP I was with was one of those that required "written notice, 30 days in advance" to quit. So I sent them a written notice, by email. They decided that email didn't count as written. I thought if any business ought to understand, it should be an ISP. Well of course they did understand, they were just trying to cheat.

When I learned they had renewed me anyway, I called and they let me quit, but would not refund the money. Tried to get me to accept the day I had called as the quit date. Even lectured me about how I had to "play by the rules"! I disputed the charge they had put on my credit card, and won.

Re:Cybercheat?

[Attila Dimedici]

The problem is that colleges and universities in the U.S. (and probably elsewhere) have been selling themselves as the route to a better paying job for 50 years. They gave up trying to sell a "liberal arts" education (as opposed to a Liberal Arts education) years ago. The market for vocational training is much larger than the market for a "liberal arts" education, so they have chosen to go for the vocational training market.
You are correct that there is value in a "liberal arts" education, but you are going to find it difficult to convince people to spend more than the price of a new car every year for four or more years for one. The thing about community college is that the big schools spend a lot of time telling you how much more you can earn if you go to them rather than to a more vocational training oriented school.

Re:Cybercheat?

[AhabTheArab]

Limewire is pretty common among non-geek types. That's how the majority of college students download music. It's easier for them to be able to search for a song and download it, which is less complicated than having to go out and find a torrent to download.

Re:Cybercheat?

[khallow]

It appears that the slashdot crowd has no need for a liberal arts (in the classical sense) education.

If you think that's bad, most people who go to college, go for the certification, not the education, not the job training. I think the high rate of "cybercheating" is due to the fact that a lot of people aren't in college to learn, but instead to get that degree. And as long as cheating is easier and less risky than learning, they will cheat.

Re:Cybercheat?

[robthebloke]

I don't think that humanities are necessary, useful, or horizon-expanding, for that matter: hard sciences are a study of all Nature, with results that often are very widely applicable, whereas humanities are a specialized study of mostly artistic output of homo sapiens. Knowing literature won't help you in understanding what makes our world work, but knowing biochemistry may well help you understand what made your favorite author "tick" ;)

Nonsense! I'm a senior graphics programmer in the games industry mainly doing low level simd/gpu optimisations for, well, graphics! My education is as follows: I did an Art foundation, followed by an animation degree, and then a masters in animation (And in my spare time quite enjoyed playing about with C++ and OpenGL). I actually started in the games industry as an animator, and accidentally ended up as a programmer (Started somewhere new, the dev team said something was impossible. I proved them wrong with a bit of code, and was immediately re-assigned as their graphics programmer).

Very soon I found I could communicate all technical information from the programming team to the art team in a way that made sense. I could also communicate problems from the art team (which tended to be along the lines of "leg is squelching too much"), into technical jargon ("looks like you're accumulating the wrong matrix into the skin deformation"). Then we have the small matter that developing aesthetically pleasing graphical effects is significantly easier if you've got a well trained aesthetic eye. Understanding how light, shadows, and colour interact is absolutely invaluable in my field - one of those things you get taught in art classes!

FWIW, I'd say about 35% of the programmers I've worked with in the games industry (that figure is MUCH higher in filmFX), have tended to come from an art background. Almost all of the programmers I currently work with, actually attend life drawing classes in their spare time (Even if they can't draw for sh*t!), and spend countless hours honing their art skills. The reason is pretty simple: It's one of the most useful skills you can have in this field!

Re:Cybercheat?

[habig]

My favorite example was freshman physics. A hall mate got a copy of the previous years test through his fraternity. We studied every concept on that test. When we got into the test, it was *literally* the same test. Maybe a few numbers different but the exact same test.

Speaking as a physics prof, I wouldn't consider this cheating. We are well aware that old tests are out there. If people use them to study, fantastic! You're studying. Going over old tests is a great way to study. Cheating is copying solutons from the net and handing them in as homework sets. That's just plain stupid, since when you get to the test you won't have actually practiced how to do any of the problems, and you will bomb.

Now, if the prof in question simply reused a test wholesale, that might not be the best test of your abilities, but I bet that if you truely "studied every concept on that test", you would have gotten a good grade even if he'd cooked up a completely new test. There are only a limited number of concepts we're trying to teach you, after all.

On the other hand, I quite often recycle problems the class had issues with verbatim for finals. And tell the class "hey, remember that Gauss' Law problem from midterm #2? Study it". Those who go back and learn from their mistakes do well. A disappointing number of students still crash and burn.

Also for what it's worth - I agree that having the students memorize formulae is not so useful, in the real world you'd pull out your old textbook or go to the library and get one anyway. I generally tell students to bring a page of notes, I don't care what's on it. The very act of figuring out what they should put on their page is a good way to study. Unfortunately many students obsess so hard about copying down in 2-pt font every example problem available that they don't bother trying to understand how they actually work. And the whole point of physics is being able to figure out how stuff works, which is why you CS majors are made to take it. Problem solving skills transfer from free body diagrams to state graphs just fine.

Re:Cybercheat?

[catmistake]

In fact, I haven't even committed any Computer Science for most of my career.

Nicely put.

Cybercheat?

[Locke2005]

And about 97% of drivers "velocitycheat", or drive faster than the posted speed limit. See, I can make up new words too!

Cheating vs. Illegal Downloads?

[hal2814]

What does using the Internet illegally have to do with cheating? There's a huge difference between downloading the newest Ke$ha song and plagiarizing a source online for your paper (where the 61.9% figure comes from).

Sounds Like A Plan

[WrongSizeGlass]

As more and more people are using the Internet illegally (i.e. limewire etc.), I feel that the chances of being caught or the consequences of my actions are almost insignificant. So I feel no pressure in doing what ever everybody else is doing/using the Internet for."

Those of you who agree with this student please stand up and be counted. Post it on your Facebook pages, MySpace thingies, personal blogs, etc. I want to know who you are when I'm interviewing to hire new talent.

Re:Sounds Like A Plan

[duguk]

As more and more people are using the Internet illegally (i.e. limewire etc.), I feel that the chances of being caught or the consequences of my actions are almost insignificant. So I feel no pressure in doing what ever everybody else is doing/using the Internet for."

Those of you who agree with this student please stand up and be counted. Post it on your Facebook pages, MySpace thingies, personal blogs, etc. I want to know who you are when I'm interviewing to hire new talent.

Why not, y'know, actually interview and gauge their real ability, rather than what's written on paper? Experience means a lot more than having enough money to go to University/College.

Re:Sounds Like A Plan

[tibit]

The problem is that when all that you do is taking others' ideas, you won't ever innovate. Maybe that explains why the finance business world has been, um, suffering recently. They were cheating as long as they could. I'm perfectly fine with academia being "out of touch" with that aspect of "modern working society", thankyouverymuch.

Fuck you neoacademic and fuck you Taco

[geminidomino]

You don't create a new fucking word by prefixing "cyber-" to it. Didn't we already go through this with that fucking "E-" shit ten years ago?

The word is "cheat," dickholes. It's not any different because it's on the internet. What is this, a fucking patent application? /rant

Re:Fuck you neoacademic and fuck you Taco

[kalirion]

Somebody forgot to take their cyberlithium this morning....

Re:Fuck you neoacademic and fuck you Taco

[Quiet_Desperation]

Whoa! Your cyber-rant was uncalled for, e-dude. Take an iChill pill.

Cybercheating

[Confusedent]

61.9% have cybersex with someone other than their girl/boyfriends?

This just in from 1985

[pablo_max]

87% of students in the pre-internet age copied directly from the encyclopedia.

How is it news that kids cheat? Teachers never had it so good. Google has made it so easy to catch them it is ridiculous.

Re:This just in from 1985

[TheRaven64]

If you can copy from an encyclopedia and get a good mark, that says more about the course than about the student. It says that the assignment is testing knowledge, not understanding. These days, it's trivial to acquire knowledge, but understanding still has a lot of value.

If it wasn't 99% memorization no one would cheat

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what: we "cheat" in the real world, universities and schools. We have reference materials to give us facts and information. Our real skill comes from how we *apply* that information, and separates the merely good from the great. Schools don't teach or measure that true ability, all they "teach" is how to recall facts that we can look up in the first place.

It's pathetic. We don't actually learn anything, schools are just a training ground for trivia shows, and give unfair advantage to people that have a better memory. Has nothing to do with your actual skill.

It's time to stop this garbage and teach people real skills and test to that, instead of making schools and universities glorified "Jeopardy!" games.

Just Rewards

[Anonymous Coward]

I found some pretty damning evidence that a relative of mine was cheating in high school, using the "purchase a paper online" method to "write" instead of actually doing the work himself. While he graduated high school without incident, you wouldn't call him a great student. He went on to college, but dropped out after one year of his own volition, though most of us suspected the real issue was (though never confirmed, as he wouldn't share) his grades. The work is there to for educational means. Cheating means you learn nothing, and yes, sooner or later, you will reap just rewards.

Cheating

[Spad]

You're only cheating yourself.

Nobody cares that you have a degree if you can't even answer simple questions about your subject in an interview.

Re:Cheating

[characterZer0]

A lot of hires are done by HR departments and middle managers who do not know enough about the subject to ask even simple questions. To them, a degree means a lot more than your ability to answer questions or to do the job. Your suit matters more than your ability to answer questions.

What Classes Are They Cheating In?

[BJ_Covert_Action]

TFA does a cheater percentage breakdown by field. They show fields like engineering and tech and computer sciences as having a higher percentage of cheating students in them than other fields. I want to know what types of classes the students are cheating in. TFA mainly discusses using online "paper mills" to print out reports that the student themselves didn't write. As a recent engineering graduate, I rarely had to write a report for any of my classes that actually mattered for my education (math, sciences, engineering applications, etc.) All of the work was done primarily as projects and problem solving. The only reports we did have to write were discussions of our own projects, something that couldn't be plagiarized or downloaded from online.

The classes that did involve report writing were things like Jazz history, Literary Analysis, Political Studies, etc. In other words, us techie majors had to write extensive reports on matters that we just didn't give a fuck about, for classes that added absolutely nothing to the skill set we would need for our careers. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the engineering and and compy sci. students that were cheating, were cheating in their GE and liberal arts classes because they just don't give a shit about those topics. Furthermore, they are probably overworked and under-rested when it comes to studying for the classes they do care about. So, rather than waste their valuable time writing a report about The Scarlet Letter (something that should have been done in HS), they say fuck it and download one. Honestly, I can't blame them for that. It's good time management and it shows they know how to budget their energy for things that matter.

I would rather see a breakdown by class type that involved cheating for each one of those field breakdowns. If my guess is correct, I say go forth and cheat my young engineers. Spend your time actually learning calculus, mathematical analysis, and designing something. That's what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life so you might as well learn it now.

Re:What Classes Are They Cheating In?

[ALeavitt]

Maybe you and people like you should stick to trade schools so that you can learn a career and nothing but a career, and leave higher education to the people who actually want to get an education. Cheating your way through an education that you don't want is a disservice to you and a disservice to all of the people whom you are preventing from getting an education by taking up a spot that you don't even want in a class that you don't even care about.

Re:What Classes Are They Cheating In?

[martas]

An interesting perspective. I was personally extremely troubled by the much higher [claimed] incidence of cheating in math/sci/engineering students, since I really want to believe that those kids are capable of becoming good and honest contributors to their respective fields. But your hypothesis does make a lot of sense, and I can only hope that you're right about the cheating occurring mostly in classes that are of little relevance to their future occupations. Even in that case, I'm not happy about it -- there's a moral barrier that is broken when one cheats, even if only a little, that I think makes it easier to cheat later on (yes, yes, a slippery slope argument; I think it applies in this case). Still though, I really hope you're right.

Re:What Classes Are They Cheating In?

[Skarecrow77]

you are working under the assumption that 4 years (or rather, 120 credits) in college is "an education". I understand your misconception, they do everything in their power to convince you of such.

Re:What Classes Are They Cheating In?

[DarthVain]

I would say go to technical college then. Have fun at DeVry. Those that want a more well rounded education and not just training, will benefit from your absence.

I think people forget that education isn't just to prepare you for a job, but rather for life and to become a better more educated person.

You talk of "paper mills", but in actuality your ideal university is exactly that, churning out diploma's of peons ready to be sent to their corporate cubes.

That's not to say that I would particularly like to take "jazz history", however that is why they are called "electives". You get to choose what interests you outside of your principle discipline. What is not to like? I think taking things like Classical History and Astronomy during my CS degree made university more fun any interesting, not to mention meeting more people of the opposite sex.

Re:What Classes Are They Cheating In?

[RingDev]

As compared to the "education" you'll pick up over 4 years of pumping gas for the local 7-11?

The education you get at most colleges is entirely based on how much you put into it. You can slack through your classes, plagiarize, do minimal efforts, etc... and get a degree in 4 years with out learning a whole lot. Or you can engross yourself in your studies, push not just to meet the prof's requirements, but to exceed your own limitations.

The biggest educational lesson you can learn in undergrad studies, IMO, is learning how you learn. Some people pick it up on themselves. Some folks (like myself) get that one prof that makes their life a living hell before we finally figure it out.

I have three degrees in the CS/IT/Management fields. And of all of that schooling, Mr. Phillip Anderson's Speech class is, IMO, the most educational class I've ever taken, and for reasons that have nothing to do with speech.

-Rick

Re:What Classes Are They Cheating In?

[BJ_Covert_Action]

I should probably make it clear that I never actually cheated myself, in either my core classes or my GE classes. I very much enjoyed most of my liberal arts classes. As one other respondent noted, they had more cute girls in them. Furthermore, I really did appreciate having a broad and diverse education. However, I don't think that a broad and diverse education is something that a lot of technically minded individuals are interested in. As such, I can see exactly how and why they would feel justified in cheating in what some would consider to be worthless classes. Combine that with my bad habit of taking extreme pleasure in encouraging morally ambiguous behavior in my peers, and you end up with the post I slapped up above.

When it comes right down to it, I am very glad I took the classes that I took in school. I am also very grateful for the opportunities I was afforded in learning about such a broad range of subjects. But many of my peers didn't share that perspective, and I can understand where they were coming from. So I guess I just appreciate that different folk have different habits and values, and I am not particularly troubled by such an observation.

Re:What Classes Are They Cheating In?

[dkleinsc]

There are a lot of problems with that view on things:
1. If you're taking classes on jazz history, literary analysis, political science, etc, I sincerely hope you're interested in it, because it's probably costing you something on the order of $200 per class session. If you wanted to attend a school with practically no requirements beyond technical work, you should be looking to transfer to a school that has that.
2. Being able to digest information about non-engineering topics matters more than you'd think in engineering. For instance, if you were designing 'green architecture' buildings, wouldn't it help you to be able to make sense of all the political, scientific, and economic discussions around green architecture?
3. Being able to write well really matters, because part of your job as an engineer is being able to describe your designs.
4. Why would your life possibly be worse off by knowing something about jazz history or literary analysis?

If they're overworked and under-rested, they need to find a way to lower their courseload or get some more rest, not find a way to cheat. Although I went through a pretty rigorous program myself, my solution to the rest problem was to get to sleep at more-or-less the same time every day, get up at more-or-less the same time every day, and work on schoolwork from about 9 to 4:30 unless I was in class. The result was that I found myself getting projects and papers in good-enough shape well before the due date, and would spend a few hours refining the results, and could devote my evenings and weekends to fun stuff and frequently ending up with it being 2:30 on a Friday afternoon and nothing to worry about until Monday morning.

Complementing people on their time management when their solution is to not get something done is a bad idea.

I don't recommend everything Joel Spolsky writes, but his college advice is pretty good.

Re:What Classes Are They Cheating In?

[Attila Dimedici]

And there is your fundamental mistake, you are assuming that someone with a bachelor's degree can handle basic writing tasks better than someone from a tech school and won't consider someone from a tech school. Therefore, people who can't handle (or don't want to handle) basic writing skills go to get a bachelor's degree and cheat to get it. Since you don't actually check whether or not they have basic writing skills (if you did, there would be no reason not to consider a tech school graduate), they do not lose anything by this strategy. The result being that those institutions that give out bachelor's degrees can charge more.

Limewire?

[vlm]

As one 19-year-old engineering student put it, "As more and more people are using the Internet illegally (i.e. limewire etc.),"

People still use limewire? Is this a dupe from a decade ago? Either this kid was about 8 when limewire was "cool", or this kid is planning his big 30 year birthday party this year.

Re:If it wasn't 99% memorization no one would chea

[Anrego]

Agreed... sorta.

There is also a problem solving component to it. Yes, being able to google that problem and find something that at least gets you started is an important skill, but there are occasionally original problems, and sometimes seeing what others have done can hinder creativity.

I always make a habit of working a problem initially with no reference material, to develop a kinda rough first impression solution. Then I'll go looking around at similar problems and how people have solved them. Existing collective experience is too great an asset to ignore, but at the same time if we just copy off one another, nothing moves forward.

I totally agree that making students memorize arbitrary facts is pointless. Memorizing and (more importantly) understanding core best practices is valuable, but having students write a test on "how to use random almost obsolete library X to do Y" is just silly.

Schools need to be reformed.

[flogger]

(Disclosure: I'm a teacher and I am pretty sure my principal isn't reading slashdot.)

Cheating...
Nearly everything that a "teacher" calls cheating is an accepted practice in the business world. Schools, in the US anyway, are mainly geared toward getting a student involved in some type of business.
Cheating - Looking off someone's work.
Business - Gaining direction.

Cheating - copying.
Business - Using available resources.

Cheating - use of internet.
Business - again, using available resources so you can build on another's success.

Cheating - adjusting grades
Business - Creative accounting.

Cheating - asking a friend for an answer
Business - Collaboration. This person is a team player.

Our educational system is 19th century organization using 19th century ideals. What should we teach today? How about some analysis: Teach not "what is the right answer?" but "Why is this answer right?"
Teach not "what is X?" but "How does X change when Y is introduced?"

Get people to think! You get the idea.

Re:Schools need to be reformed.

[vlm]

Our educational system is 19th century organization using 19th century ideals. What should we teach today? How about some analysis: Teach not "what is the right answer?" but "Why is this answer right?"

The real world is : What is the correct term to google? Closely followed by, how do I evaluate and then apply google's results?

Honestly this is how probably about 50% of out in the real world R+D hours are spent. That and soaking up on the stream of consciousness of /. like a sponge.

Re:Schools need to be reformed.

[hedwards]

Perhaps that just means that the business world doesn't have any ethics or morals. It also probably means that MBAs ought to be required to take a lot more courses dealing with ethics because quite frankly they don't seem to understand that you can't just steal from people and justify it by being profitable for your business. I hope that there are more MBAs that don't think that way than I think they do, but looking around I have very little optimism for that.

Re:Schools need to be reformed.

[Skuto]

In reference to your post's parent, it's also fair to say the other, and perhaps most enlightening, 50% is spent on some variation of "why isn't this working?" followed by "what idiot wrote this?"

Cyber-Cyber-Cyber

[Mac-O-War]

I have translated the article summary for those of us who only speak Cyber-English "A Cyber-recent study of 1222 Cyber-undergraduates found that 61.9% of them "cybercheat," which involves using the Cyber-Internet illicitly to get higher Cyber-grades. Some of the Cyber-quotes from Cyber-students are a Cyber-bit troubling. As one Cyber-19-year-old engineering Cyber-student put it, "As more and more Cyber-people are using the Cyber-Internet illegally (i.e. limewire Cyber-etc.), I feel that the Cyber-chances of being Cyber-caught or the Cyber-consequences of my Cyber-actions are almost Cyber-insignificant. So I feel no Cyber-pressure in doing what ever Cyber-everybody else is Cyber-doing/Cyber-using the Cyber-Internet for.""

Solution

[ThoughtSpaceZero]

If education didn't carry such a ridiculous profit motive for everybody involved we wouldn't see:

a) situations where kids feel obliged to cheat or else their life is ruined
b) situations where the university passes you even though you know exactly nothing so that they can boast numbers

Education needs to be freely available and de-standardized. Exam grades can't and never prove anything. Like all restrictions of this kind (DRM, War on Drugs, Welfare), it just ends up alienating legitimate users, those who want to go to university to actually learn something and not practice 3-4 years of rote memorisation and regurgitation onto an exam sheet. When you think about it, the exam paradigm such an abhorrently ridiculous method of assessing people, especially in today's climate where I have a permanent connection to the internet, any time of day, anywhere I go.

We are, as a society, done with memorising trivia. The "expert" of yesterday is a relic, all you need is some logic skills and wikipedia and you can be an "expert" in something almost immediately.

I would recommend any who haven't seen to watch this video by RSA Animate on Ken Livingstone's seminar on education paradigms.

that why we apprenticeship like systems not teach

[Joe The Dragon]

that why we need apprenticeship like systems not teach the test. It may be better to make the tests more hands on with open book / open Google / have or have no test but a as you go grading. The teach the test idea leads to things like paper mcse.

Re:Another 25% are still lyiing

[by (1706743)]

I had a take-home final where the prof basically said, "you can consult with any inanimate object to help with this final." Someone said, "so, we can use the internet, but not a dog?" at which point the prof said, "well, unless your dog has a decent grasp of quantum mechanics, I don't think the dog would help anyway."

It was an interesting strategy, and I actually learned a lot by reading through relevant papers. So long as the problems are obscure enough, there's really no way you can cheat (aside from working off of other students) -- at best you can find a paper which steers you in the right direction, and that's a Good Thing in terms of finishing the final and learning...win-win, in my opinion.

Re:The article does not define cybercheating

[tehcyder]

So what exactly is cybercheating?

It's when you have cybersex with someone you're not married to, obviously.

Why cheat?

[goombah99]

Cheating is hard work. Why not simply hire some smart kid from pakistan or china to just enroll in school as you. He/shee can take all your classes. You won't not even have to pay them, just pay them with the tuition your not spending. You can still be on campus, live in the dorm, since you, or at least your name is enrolled and matriculation. party for four years and get a degree and a great GPA. Maybe audit a few classes if there's a hot chick. Your impersonator goes home with a great education.

I mean seriously, why not? If cheating makes sense then does this not even make more sense. Plus your not even stealing from your fellow students. They are still competing against a fellow student. Just one that is smart and not cheating.

Re:If it wasn't 99% memorization no one would chea

[digitig]

Once you get past grade school, history is no more about memorization than engineering disciplines are.

If the prof knows the student, you can't cheat

[PolygamousRanchKid]

The University I attended had a system with "preceptors." A course would have a lecture with all the students from full prof once or twice a week, and a few more times a week a session with a smaller group (~10-15 students). The preceptor could be a grad student, or an assistant prof, or also even the full prof. In that smaller group, the preceptor gets to know the students, which makes cheating impossible. The preceptor would know if some dumb-ass in class wrote a brilliant essay, which was way beyond his or her intellectual faculties. The preceptor also gave you your grade.

Unfortunately, this was not as extremely enforced in engineering, which was my major. But the prof would come by during the lab exercises, and grill everyone on what they were doing and why and what they thought they would learn.

I took a lot of high level literature courses as electives. After the first essay that I had to write for one course, the preceptor pulled me aside after the class. She said, "You're not a literature major, are you? I'll bet that you are an engineering student!" She told me that essays from literature majors had very good ideas, but they tended to ramble. Engineers didn't have the best ideas, but their essays were all very well structured. She knew that I didn't cheat on the essay, because she heard what I said in class.

Want to cut out cheating? Get more direct prof to student contact.

Re:Why do we so much filler classes? make then pas

[Jimmy King]

As a college drop out who is fairly successful but has also returned to college due to the whole "YOU MUST HAVE A DEGREE!!!!" craze, this is an idea that I frequently suggest should be how it's done. Not directly relevant to the degree? Cool, you have to show up and do what work you can, but why force people to try to become "experts" in things that they are not interested in and have little to no use for? In some ways working in the real world for several years and maturing before going back to school have made things easier for me. In some ways it has made it harder. Now I don't just suspect that I'm not likely to ever need the information from World History 101 to do my job, I KNOW I don't need it because I've been doing my job without it for years.

I have been told many times it's to make me more well rounded and ensure that I've been exposed to as many things as possible so that I can discover new things I enjoy. Those people can fuck off. Becoming "well rounded" is for people with spare time and money and/or a true interest in doing so. It's not required for most jobs, but they want to make the college education a requirement for those jobs anyway. With the time and money investment required for college, if it's so that I'm qualified for a job, then the classes that are not related to my job shouldn't affect my grade, future hireability, etc. prefereably I shouldn't even have to pay for or sit through those classes and it should maybe be more like a pure tech school/trade school sort of thing. Perhaps like an extended version of the certificate programs offered at some colleges.

Re:precisely why i cheated on all my science class

[theskipper]

Because calculus, chemistry, biology, physics, etc. all help the development of critical thinking and curiosity. It's inherent in the process. Which (imho) is crucial for the individual and society as a whole.

That's not to denigrate history, music or the arts. Quite to the contrary, there's critical thinking there too. A well-rounded person should know these things.

There's way too many folks walking around that think they know science stuff because, well, they think they know it. They think theories are just theories and have no clue that behind the curtain, there's real hard work involved with knowing stuff and making stuff. They only care to see it as magic.

And this lack of critical thinking causes problems all throughout society from discerning scams, to public policy creation to plain out-right kookiness on display every day. Around the water cooler, TV, radio, newspapers and especially the internet.

An educated society with well-rounded citizens will fare better than the opposite. Just a thought.

The original article is from 2008

[langelgjm]

The blog post is from 2011, but the article it discusses was published in 2008 (so the study itself was probably done in 2007 or so). (‘Not necessarily a bad thing ’: a study of online plagiarism amongst undergraduate students. Neil Selwyn, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1469-297X, Volume 33, Issue 5, First published 2008, Pages 465 – 479.)

Re:Because they see them as the same?

[commodore6502]

"If Nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

"That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by Nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

"Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property..... Grants of this sort can be justified in very peculiar cases only, if at all; the danger being very great that the good resulting from the operation of the monopoly, may produce more evil than good [think RIAA and MPAA]." - Thomas Jefferson 1780s
.

>>>There's a huge difference between downloading the newest Ke$ha song and plagiarizing a source online for your paper

Ke$ha has a new song? - "Yeah it sounds just like the last one, which sounded like Katy Perry's California Girls." - Oh she's cybercheating then.

Dark Ages Coming?

[dubiago]

I could see a gigantic consequence of this being that people go online for the quick answer and people start losing the ability to conceptualize exactly what that answer means--they'll be so wrapped up in finding the right and narrow answer that their point of view in the subject matter will be greatly narrowed. I think we've seen it manifest itself already in the past couple of decades.

A great concept, this notion of mass cheating on an overwhelming level (or so it seems) when you're talking about passing a test or turning in a paper. But, in the long term, I could see this concept as being a tool to humanity's intellectual demise.

Not that there's any way you can stop it, I suppose. It's like a train that you see coming in the distance, and you're entranced by it like a deer in headlights and it seems there's nothing you can do to move out of the way.

I don't think for an instant that cheating kids get excited about learning new things. I think they're just trying to do what they can to get the A, and little do they know they're potentially trading out a little bit of cognitive enrichment pertaining to the subject on which they're so desperate for that answer to get that A.

Not to say I didn't have my own bouts with cheating back in the day (I'm only human). In retrospect, however, now I can see the bigger picture a bit better. And I can also see how it likely robbed me of some of the essence of the subject...and, if you're getting a degree in higher education, aren't you there because of a certain passion for the subject? In that case, shouldn't essence be everything? A physics professor of mine once said it best: it's not all about the answer, it's all about the journey.

I'm an advocate of the notion that you learn more when you fail than when you succeed; stumbling through to come to a wrong answer can be more beneficial than breezing through to get the right one.