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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."
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.
"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.
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".
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.
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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.