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Survey Finds Cheating Among Students At All GPA Levels
An anonymous reader writes "Over a third of undergraduate students admitted to some form of cheating at one of America's top research universities, according to a survey published November in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics (abstract). The researchers expected to find more cheating among the top-performing group — and at the minimum at least some students with excellent grades cheated. Not so. As it turned out, the overall cheating rate was similar to that found in other studies, but the types of cheating and stated reasons for cheating were all over the map. Researchers uncovered one trend among the cheaters: the perception that teaching assistants either ignored or didn't care about cheating."
Not to mention that many students use adderall and other amphetimines, even methamphetamine as study aids, especially during finals and almost always without prescription.
Yep, of course they don't care. University is not really about grades, but forming skills for later in life.
If the skills you want to form mainly involve fraud and deception rather than forging the framework for your life ahead, then they aren't going to work hard for $10/hr to ty and catch you so that you can further develop those skills.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
But what if they are planning on going into politics? :)
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Tech the test and just reading from the book lead to it being all about cheating or cramming for the test.
The brighter the student, the more devious the means of cheating.
Also, I've seen (and caught) students cheating to get into a prestige university school with a highly competetive enrollment. The greater the reward, the greater the desperate measures sought to achieve that award. One student in particular was found guilty of Academic Fraud and expelled from the university - criminal charges may or may not have been pressed as a follow up.
One can well imagine the anger and frustration of those students who didn't make it, when they find someone did and did so through cheating.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So people are forced to show what they learned and not just show it on paper.
They did a study of cheating, eh? With a survey? How do we know they didn't just fake the data?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Students cheating and getting higher grades.
yet the headline says cheating occurs at all GPA levels. So unless cheating is so sporadic (i.e. negligible) that it does not alter your GPA then this seems to suggest that cheating has as much chance of raising your GPA as lowering it. that is, on average it does not work, but the average is composed of individuals it "helped" and those that it "hurt" in terms of GPA.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
A little off topic, but there's no such thing as a filler class. Only people who don't realize the full value of a well rounded education seem to consider breadth courses as a waste of time. At a time I did too, but instead of going into those classes with a bad attitude I went in and learned as much as possible. Sure I wasn't interested in things like social psychology, medieval history or graphic media, but I can talk with a lot more people about topics they're interested in because of taking courses like that.
And at most schools, if you have enough foresight you can craft your breadth courses to reinforce your major. One of my history courses I could take for my Physics breadth requirements just happened to be about the ethics of the Manhattan project... something every physicist should have to learn.
Regardless, people who choose to only expose themselves to a single subject or viewpoint are almost universally boring or close minded, or some combination of the two.
I TA'd classes during my PhD. I'm in no way surprised that there is a perception that TAs don't care about cheating - the fact is that very few of them really want to catch cheaters.
I used to try hard to catch people cheating during exams, on homeworks etc, but this is actually very difficult to do. Typically you have hundreds of papers/worksheets to grade in a week and if you don't get two identical ones in a row, the odds of you remembering that a solution was done in the same way by two students is fairly low. It sticks out when two students get the same wrong answer, but even then it's difficult to prove.
However, the main thing that turns TAs off catching cheats is what happens when you do. First, you have to prove that the students in question were cheating. This is a LOT of extra work on top of your normal workload which usually exceeds your contracted hours by about 50%. Then you have to report it to the ethics committee in your department. This takes a long time, the student has the right to challenge you on everything - and believe me you'll get everything thrown at you from claims of sexual harassment to racism because you're accusing some kid of cheating. This has the knock-on effect of showing up on your SRTE (student rating of teaching effectiveness) if the cheater has friends in the class, and so you get pulled in to see the dept. head at the end of the semester because 6-7 students have called you racist on your evaluations, which in turn doesn't help if you want recommendation letters for a teaching job afterwards. Even worse if the kid is on a sports scholarship, you'll get the coach attesting to his 'good character' - so there's no way he was cheating, you just have a thing against him for some bizarre reason.
Finally, when you show that two students mysteriously answered the same wrong way to the same questions in a row on a test, and you caught them talking during the test, what punishment does the university give out? They make the kid re-sit the test. So the upshot of your efforts are that you've wasted a whole bunch of your time, got a ton of hassle that you didn't need, and the cheater simply has longer than his peers to prepare for a new test which the lecturer is often too lazy to make sufficiently different from the previous one, so the cheater is ready for the questions.
I'd still try to catch cheaters as often as I could, because it was the right thing to do. But it was so much trouble for most people, and you became a 'troublemaker' if you did it, that most of us didn't want the hassle. Even when you explained to the classmates that the cheater was cheapening their degree and ruining their scores, they still thought that you were some kind of monster for punishing their friend.
I would bet at least another third are brimming with resentment because of the third that is cheating. This is unfortunately one more reason that so many bright students become bitter and cynical.
As a TA, I caught people cheating. Reported it to the professor in charge. Who gave them zeros for the assignment and a letter in their file. No other punishment. They all appealed. Someone even brought in a lawyer. When the lawyer heard an appeal would result in a new and potentially worse punishment, he dropped the appeal. Most people admitted to cheating during the appeal hearing. It was a nightmare for me. I learned my lesson and never caught anyone cheating again.
Some pretty jingoistic racist shit, about foreigners seeing nothing wrong with cheating.
Citation needed.
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"They often come from a very different academic culture, where cheating is seen as perfectly acceptable."
Yep, it's the ungodly heathens. Americans don't cheat as much, because they are too dumb to go to college.
The best exams are the Open Book ones - yes, you can see answers in front of you, but your grade is based upon your understanding - if you don't already get it, you don't have enough time during the exam to read the entire book over.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Since you posted AC I just wanted to echo what you said. I'm at a Computer Science graduate school where 90% of the students are Chinese. The other day in class homework was due, and I saw students copying homework in class, just passing it down the row. They all turned it in at the end of class. Best part is, the TAs are all Chinese grad students as well, and are friends with the students. The professor didn't even come to the exam, and the Chinese TAs were almost overtly helping their friends cheat on the exam. It was absolutely infuriating. I saw it in my undergrad too, but there it was Indians. It just seems like something that these people aren't taught.
It has nothing to do with the students, and everything to do with the environment.
That statement is absurd.
Were it true, you would see 100% of the students in a class cheating or 0% of them. You would never see one or ten out of a class doing it.
Your claim is just an example of the lack of individual responsibility common today. "It wasn't my fault, it was the ENVIRONMENT made me do it! Fix my environment and I'll stop being a cheater and follow the rules. Yes, I swear it. You can trust me."
There are indeed filler classes. Consider that some people who go to college already have the skills in question but are forced to take the class for the sake of the credit.
English 101, for example, is a class I would have totally cheated if I knew I could have gotten away with it. We were forced to write canned responses to Dick and Jane stories and the grades were wildly inconsistent, even though the quality of the writings were consistent. At one point a group of students complained, saying that the grading appeared to be totally random! English, being a more subjective subject, can be quirky like that - especially when the professor hates your writing style or color of your shirt. I think the only reason why I got an "A" was because I told the professor that I wasn't a snitch and that he was doing a fine job.
Why didn't I get the credit in high-school? My AP English teacher was a former Mormon missionary who forced us to read Stephen Covey, who also happens to be a Mormon. Yeah. I spent the whole class farting and drawing dicks in my notebook. Art history is also known as a throwaway class, but I learned tons from it. An artist would consider it throwaway class, but the difference between art 101 and English 101 is that English is a requirement. If you'd studied art in your spare time you could choose something else like psychology and actually learn something. English not so much.
Memories can be tricky, but my recollection of high school was that the "smart kids" who got good grades were generally the most rampant cheaters. These were the kids who were in the honors society and went to ivy league schools, and they cheated every damned day so I wouldn't expect that the behavior changed when they went to college. It was almost an institution: They would copy each other's homework at lunch. They would help each other plagiarize the papers they wrote. They would get together and devise ways to sneak answers into tests. It was cooperative and competitive cheating, as much a part of the process as studying.
If you asked them about it, they'd tell you that it was because they were taking tons of AP courses, and they didn't have time to do it all. Of course, part of the problem was the school's approach to honors/AP coursework: it wasn't necessarily more advanced, it was often enough just *more*. More memorizing, more busywork, and more time consuming. There were kids going home with 10 hours of homework for the night, and so they'd cope by splitting up the work and copying each others' answers.
And I'll repeat: these were the "smart kids". They were the "good kids". In a sense, what they were doing *was* smart. They were stuck in a bureaucratic system, and so they gamed the system. They got what they wanted, even if it wasn't "fair".
I'm so glad that the real world is open book.
Bottles.
Yes, you tell the professor. Who then calls you and the students in to her office, and informs you that you have to take this to the ethics committee, and that you have to present your case against the students to them etc etc. Maybe things happen differently for you, but in my experience if I was the one who caught the cheat, I was the one who had to deal with all the inquests, departmental meetings and so forth. And it was a huge PITA that got in the way of my own work.
"It's not sexist to say that women are bad drivers. Look at the roads, all crashes are caused by women drivers. I'm just speaking the truth, so it isn't sexist."
"It's not racist to say that black people aren't achieving success because they're lazy. They have a culture that frowns upon academic performance, and doing well at a job. I'm just speaking the truth, so it isn't sexist."
The problem with these statements is that they are dubious and not the "self-evident truth" that the commenter would have one believe. Thus, the "citation needed". Because he's making a generalized claim on a stereotype that foreigners are raised to be dishonest cheaters. This claim is also dubious, and it deserves to be challenged as racist, and jingoistic.
Now, sorry, it could be that a person highly respected in population studies, and with academic or at least scientific credibility did a study, and found that this was actually a true statement, and published a peer-reviewed paper about it to rave criticism. And so he just popped onto this here Slashdot, and anonymously posted something that without proper citation and backing would be clearly racist.
Of course, that requires inventing a pretty crazy outlandish entity with odd and unusual methods. I may as well believe in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, or any of the number of gods that have graced human mythology.
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I'm so glad that the real world is open book.
It's really the best way - discourages lazy exam creation and shows how resourceful the student is in the subject matter.
I'm a conceptual learner, always had difficulty with memorising everything. Once I have the concept down pat, I can go seek the help I need from references. If I do not understand the concept, no number of references is ever going to bail me out.
I've certainly seen some "gifted" students hit the wall, face-on when expected to think through a problem, because they only memorized enough to fill in blanks they knew were coming.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There is some truth to this. I teach at an Australian university, and there are a number of people from specific cultural backgrounds who try this every year, because they come from somewhere that, what we regard as, plagiarism is acceptable.
I completely disagree with the "don't give them any chances, just send them packing". This is ludicrous. We catch a lot of these guys out (a lot of them are REALLY stupid and I actually feel embarrassed for them when we do catch them out) and, most of the time, pulling them up on it and explaining the rules to them sorts out the problem. You will always get a small minority who will try to work the system no matter what, but it is exactly that: a small minority.
It's easy to get indignant about it, but if they come from a culture which has different views on what plagiarism is at what point are they supposed to have this explained to them? It seems pretty unfair to let these students come into the university, pay their fees, and then throw them out when they break the rules that they were not aware of. Yes, you can find the university policy on academic misconduct etc if you dig through the website enough, but having the rules buried in some difficult-to-find legal document is hardly sufficient*
*Yes, I am aware that this is exactly how the "real world" works
I wasn't cheating, I was crowd sourcing my exam.
I wasn't cheating, I was engaged in a team building exercise.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Oh wow, you can talk with a lot more people! I sure feel a lot better about my education stalling. I bet that's what colleges have in mind when they shove courses down our throats that will never be remembered because we only have enough motivation to cram a day before the test and forget it. There's no way it has anything to do with the revenue that they gain from tuition.
Seriously, if I want to learn about history, I'm old enough to research on my own. Colleges are there to confirm that you have the proper knowledge/aptitude within your given field, not make up for a shitty public education system.
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Some UK universities reported a problem when I was doing my PhD that relatively rich people in south-east asia would hire someone to do a degree for their son. This person would turn up, enrol in the son's name, do all of the course, and then send home the degree certificate. The son would then get a job with none of the knowledge or understanding that they were supposed to have and people would complain to the university. A few got caught because the employers sent photographs and they didn't match the ones in the student database, but it's difficult to spot.
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I hope they were either monitoring the survey takers, or had them isolated while filling it out. Otherwise, how will we know how many of the people taking the survey just cheated off their neighbor?
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I never worried about students copying homework from one another. The proportion of a student's grade that came from homework was typically low enough that wouldn't have mattered if every student in the class turned in an identical assignment. However, I'd often use multiple versions of exams; especially when teaching in classrooms where students were seated close together. Surprisingly, when offered a choice between multiple choice exams (with no partial credit) and work-the-problem exams where partial credit was a possibility, most classes opted for multiple choice, even after I warned them that I've probably made every common mistake they're likely to make, so that my wrong answers would often look reasonable. Overall, grades on multiple choice exams seemed to be lower by about half a letter grade.
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
As the original poster in this thread phrased it, it's racism (if you count 'asian' as a race). It's a racist remark if you extrapolate from a small sample to include every member of a race. Saying 'asian people cheat by all copying each others' work' is racist. Saying 'groups, often of asian students, form and all copy one person's work' is an observation.
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You're assuming that GPA correlates with intelligence. I'm not entirely certain that is a justified assumption.
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I'm an instructor at a university, and about 10 minutes before I saw this story, I overheard some TA's deciding that trying to deal with the cheaters wasn't worth the extra time it would take in consultation with the professor.
Yep, the biggest thing enabling cheating is that it's a major inconvenience to punish.
^^this
Having been an "unofficial" TA for EE and and official one for Comp Sci classes, I can tell you that going to the professor is exactly what to do. //begin rant
I once turned in a physics paper that I had done in Adobe InDesign because it required so many charts, graphs, math notation, etc. and the TA in our recitation ask me to stay after class and talk to him about my homework. In no uncertain terms he told me I cheated on the paper, even though no one had ever turned in the same paper. He was just freaked out because I could typeset. God help him if he gets a student who writes reports in TeX... but I digress.
For anyone in the situation where you did not cheat and a TA is accusing that you did, send an email directly to the professor in charge of the class. Get your complaint in writing. As for me, the TA was suitably chastised by the major professor in charge of the class, he hated my guts, and he graded my papers much lower than they should have been. All I could say to the professor at the end of the class was, "**** is doing X, please talk to **** so that he doesn't screw up again."
On to other matters, when I was a comp sci TA, I caught two people who uploaded identical assignments on our web-based submission system. I would have never known there was anything wrong, but that one of the kids forgot to change the name written in the comments to his own. He got a zero on the assignment and had to write an apology letter. Since I was doing this TA'ing at the same time as my Physics class, I knew to go directly to the professor instead of trying stroke my ego. It worked out fine.
Solution manuals are another thing that people have. I'd say that 90% of the class gets the answers from their homeworks in one way or another from a solution manual, if only because they are copying off of a friend's homework, and their friend used the solution manual. In classes where instructors write their own homeworks, this isn't a problem.
But there was a very specific Power Systems class, where most of the students were foreign and the class fell along that normal ~90% distribution. I, and a friend of mine, didn't use the solution manual for that class and, as a result, we got lower grades on our homeworks. The people with the solution manuals would turn in perfect homeworks and the instructor would think that he's got a group of really smart kids this semester (like every other semester) and that my friend and I were delinquents who didn't understand the material and weren't trying in his class. Of course, the final was 40% of the grade in that class, and karma caught up to the people who didn't know their shit. But I still wonder what would have happened if I had the solutions, used them constructively to do my homework assignments, and got good grades on my homework, and did well on the final. That's probably the difference between an A/A- and a B/B-.
If an instructor doesn't realize that kids who takes their classes know about the stakes, especially from people who come from societies where anything less than perfect is considered garbage, he or she is deluding themselves. //end rant
Why not announce to your class in the early part of the course.
"Last Year I caught 20 people cheating. They got 0 for the assignment. They all appealed as is their right. They all dropped their appeal during the appeal process. Cheating will not be tolerated."
My Father was a teacher with a course that had prerequisite assignments before you were allowed to sit the exam. Legend has it one person did not hand in the assignments. He waited for student to hand in exam and tore it up in front of him. A legend was born that day. Whilst it soon became illegal to take that action (The completed exam being the students work) Everyone knew where they stood when it came to prerequisite assignments and cheating.
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English Haiku is
This one time we took 27 hours studying every problem in the book- including making a test of all the example problems and doing them until we could see the answer and write the problem.
For 2 of of us- it turned out the professor had gotten cute and made a test entirely out of example problems. They finished in 15 minutes and aced it. I finished mine in about 40 minutes and aced it.
Oh wait.. I guess that wasn't cheating. And I was working a full time job taking 13 hours at the time. So anyone who isn't working full time just doesn't have an excuse.
The closest I came to cheating ever was buying solution books with every category of problem with solutions and working them until I understood them and buying an extremely powerful calculator which was allowed.
Cheating doesn't pay. You don't know the material - it makes the next class even harder. The only class you'd be justified to cheat in would be one that didn't matter at all to your degree. In which case- why are you taking it?
The more you know- the less afraid you are and the easier later classes will be.
---
Also was a student judge for one cheating case. Was a girl- she even copied the exact errors from the other student. She got an F for the class and that was it. I think that's fair-- the penalty should not be completely draconian. Kids make mistakes.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
THIS. Holy shit do students not understand how data isn't perfect. Every course, I get questions about "Why do I get an acceleration due to gravity of 9.7? I thought it was 9.8, your equipment is broken.". They don't understand error bars, significant figures, propagation of errors, etc. You have to make them very comfortable before they start writing out what they see and providing appropriate error analysis, otherwise they just play with the equipment for an hour and then write down what they think you expect them to say.
it's more like $22/hr but you're limited to being paid about 10 hours a week.
And it's not like we don't care, it's that we don't always find it, and if we do we make a judgement call on whether or not it was actually a violation or not. We just gave students a programming assignment on sockets, connecting to one of our own servers and doing some stuff. I'm sure half the class copied their generic socket connect code and simple UI verbatim from the Oracle/sun website, which they might think is cheating, but it's not (at least not on this assignment). We take the attitude that if you can find it on the web, you're going to use it, so we build our assignments assuming that will happen.
Where we catch cheaters is in *written* work, where they have copied from the web. But even then, if you copy one paragraph in a 10 page paper, I may not catch it, and I may not think it worth running through the automated tools (which costs us money) because the paper pretty clearly isn't copied overall. But I catch about 10% of students cheating on things, and that's spanned 4 universities in canada, and I always refer those caught up the chain.
We also know student work together and things like that on assignments. I'm sure some of that crosses the line into copying or the like, but really, if you can't do it on the exam, you're doomed, if you copied it on the assignment drawing a line between where you gave up, and your friend started to help isn't always easy (or sensible).
My area of study is not academic dishonesty, but occupational fraud and more specifically the impact of corporate culture on employee behaviour. If you look at organizations that have problems with rampant fraud, what you see is a pattern of unethical behaviour in the top ranks that trickles down in such a way that ethical players can't compete in that environment and are driven out. This article leads me to suspect a top-down unethical culture that is separate from, but not necessarily unimpacted by, the home culture of its participants. What I mean by this is that the school itself, including administrators, ethical committees, professors, and teaching assistants are either turning a blind eye to cheating, creating opportunities for cheating, or actively participating in it, or they have created an environment where cheating is perceived as necessary to get ahead. In addition, the metrics (grading schemes, rules for dealing with academic dishonesty) the school uses may be flawed in such a way that they inadvertently punish honest students or reward cheaters. However, you also have to look at the students who are being accepted. Have they overwhelmingly paid a great deal to go there or made significant sacrifices? Do only the most competitive students get in? Do they have a lot to lose if they do not perform to the same standard as their peers? This is where personal and family culture can come into play, and more often than not does, but I would be careful not to assume that the differences between American and Asian cultures are having the impact suggested above. 'Cheating' behaviours do seem to be more socially accepted in Asian cultures, and the school environment is more competitive, but I have never seen any relevant comparison of unethical behaviour while studying in a foreign environment, as compared to foreign students. For all we know, the differences are the result of the administration's behaviour in Asian schools, or hyper-competitiveness resultant from poverty or overpopulation, or any number of localized variables. It may well be that Asian students actually behave more ethically than their American counterparts, given the right environmental cues.
I cheated. I brought a slide rule.
Have gnu, will travel.
".... you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!" -- Will Hunting
Have gnu, will travel.
No, I'd argue the exact opposite. We live in an age where the most advanced topics are increasingly interdisciplinary. Neuroscience, biomedical engineeringm, robotics, artificial intelligence, biochemistry, nanotechnology, materials science.... these are all inherently interdisciplinary fields. Moreover, when you delve deep enough into a subject, if you have some breadth of knowledge, you begin to recognize how your work is readily applicable in a different fields. In some cases, what you are working on in your physics research might be much more useful in say chemistry or materials science.
So punishing students for cheating and giving the next batch fair warning (due to the rampant cheating the previous year) is being a douche?
So a student facing a penalty for not doing the required work in order to take an exam is a douche move? Granted the description is theatrical but it's not like the stated policy implied the exam would ever be accepted in the first place.
What is cheating, really? I mean this to be completely serious. There are some interesting stories here already on how someone cheated on this or that test. Some of them sound like 'studying' to me (like working every sample problem until the answers are memorized? Cheating!?). Some of them just sound like study groups.
I got a B.A. in 1992 and I recall only one or two times where instructors gave any guidance at all about what level of cooperation among classmates was appropriate. Since that had never happened in high school, I had no experience applying those guidelines. So with only one or two classes as exceptions, I did all of my homework alone. The one large study group I attended regularly was a logic class in the Math Dept. that had tremendous overlap (in subject matter, not students) with a formal logic class I had already taken in the Philosophy Dept. I would *always* do the proofs first, in my room, then join the study group. I acted more like a TA, trying to explain why something was, or was not, a proof. I was probably more rigorous than was necessary (imho: Mathematicians use logic as a tool, like an Engineer uses math; Philosophers study logic as a subject, like Mathematicians study math) because of my prior exposure.
I remember most clearly how worried I was that I was cheating with my fellow classmates. I didn't know the boundary lines.
I also worried I was cheating when I was not the leading light in a class and I needed help, badly. Since I didn't know how much help was too much, I never asked. When I took a class where I was completely over my head, I simply sank like a stone.
With social skills that come from loving Logic like a Philosopher, it's clear that I needed *practice* with group work. The few sentences at the beginning of the course from the prof simply do not cut it when you're halfway through a Data Structures assignment and need help (serious help) just getting the $%^&* code to compile. When the guideline is vague ("You may discuss assignments outside of class, but I expect you to turn in code that is your own") is it cheating to ask the code-god in your residence suite to just find the syntax error and just tell you what it is? Don't explain it, I won't understand, just tell me!
The original article says their survey included the option I "received unpermitted help". You tell me? Did I cheat?
in my experience. As a group they were bright but completely amoral. In fact they are the first group whom I have ever seen who would sabotage each others' work (lab experiments, incorrect notes, etc.) whenever possible. Just the sort of people you want as doctors.
To me the douche in the story is the one who didn't do the work but still wanted a pass.
Somebody saying "no" to that person? I wish we had a few more of those.
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