The New York Times reports on how technology has made it easier for students to cheat, leaving universities to play catch up.
With their arsenal of electronic gadgets, students these days find it easier to cheat. And so, faced with an array of inventive techniques in recent years, college officials find themselves in a new game of cat and mouse, trying to outwit would-be cheats this exam season with a range of strategies — cutting off Internet access from laptops, demanding the surrender of cellphones before tests or simply requiring that exams be taken the old-fashioned way, with pens and paper.
Whether or not students are relying on technological gadgets, cheating appears to be quite widespread.
In a survey of nearly 62,000 undergraduates on 96 campuses over the past four years, two-thirds of the students admitted to cheating. The survey was conducted by Don McCabe, a Rutgers professor who has studied academic misconduct and helped found the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke.
She's also gotten quite good at catching plagiarists on papers; all hail the power of Google!
This past semester, faced with a similar problem, an internet search for certain suspect phrases, allowed me to instantly confront the offending students with the source of their plagiarized material.
Phew, for a minute there I thought cheating was actually prevalent.
In 7th grade, I looked the other way when one of my classmates took it upon himself to cheat off of a math aptitude test. Later that year, he found himself in another school after getting himself expelled. Much to his dismay, he found himself placed
in an honors math class -- not what he really wanted.
And if you think that's unrealistic, think about how successful they have been in creating a PC culture on campuses. If universities can create a social taboo against saying anything a minority might find offensive, why not do the same with academic honesty? Why not have mandatory sessions on ethics similar to "rape education" (i.e. PC indoctrination).
The software was originally used for the computer science department, but as other departments have begun taking electronic submissions, the program was expanded to be available for them as well. The disturbing part is that even after knowledge of this software was repeatedly made public to introductory programming classes -- i.e. announced repeatedly in class -- students were still caught who had essentially directly copied programs from eachother and other sources.
officials find themselves ... simply requiring that exams be taken the old-fashioned way, with pens and paper
And why not? Throw two hundred students and six proctors into a lecture hall. Hand out a sheet of questions/problems and blue books, and prohibit any gadgets. What sort of tests are these people giving that require anything other than pen and paper anyhow?
Oh, and the guy who turned all the desks in the class around so he could see the computer screens (presumably from his own desk).. why not just get up and circulate around the room during the exam? Professors are getting to be as lazy as their students.
John McG, the catch here is that you mistake the front that a University wants to put on things for the way things actually are. Practically every university talks about its diversity sessions, training, etc, to be sure. And when students are in the classroom, it's likely that they adhere to whatever they learned - I've never heard a student use a racial slur in class.
But that doesn't keep students from making jokes about race, religion, sexuality, or the like when they're in their dorm rooms with friends or at a party. They just (generally) know better to do things like that in an arena where they be chastized for what they've said.
Thus, all the ethics sessions in the world aren't going to change students who see massive rewards and little to no worry of punishment for cheating. I doubt there are any students who would get up in front of the class to announce their intention to cheat, just as I doubt few if any students would use racial slurs in the classroom. Cheating is private; it's something that is much more like telling racist/sexist/whatever-ist jokes in your dorm room.
I still give written exams because it is just easier. Calculators are allowed and I have suspected a few students of programming in formulas or notes, but never caught anyone doing that. The cheating I did find was old fashion copying or note passing. I was amazed at the light treatment (F in my class and short suspension) that these students recieved. I think I minimize the opportunity for cheating by having the time limit binding.
The Problem: Students cheat. They find new ways to do it all the time. Every time one form of cheating is stamped out, these little bastards come up with a new one. When will the madness end?!? If these students are so clever and intelligent, why don't they just spend their mental resources on actually learning things?!?
In the year 2106, people will still be complaining about this.
Proposed Solution #1: Technological warfare! Every time the students come up with a high tech way to cheat, the teachers should come up with a high tech way to beat it. Teachers should spend as much time thinking about ways to defeat cheating as the students think about new ways to cheat!
Of course, in order for this to work the teachers would have to have as much at stake as the kids.
Proposed Solution #2: Harsher punishments! The punishment for cheating should be so harsh that students would have to be insane to cheat.
A punishment so harsh that only a teenager with a penchant for risk-taking behavior and a lot at stake would dare to cheat! Hell, with stakes that high a student would have to spend more time studying ways to not get caught than studying for a test. Insane I tell you!
Proposed Solution #3: Outsource anti-cheating mitigation and discovery to a 3rd party. Teachers don't have the time or resources to bother with trying to stop cheaters. It is much better to increase tuition and taxes to pay for private enterprises that specialize in stopping and catching cheaters.
Of course, a 3rd party will *always* have the students best interests in mind. They'll work to permanently solve the cheating problem so that they won't be needed in the future.
My crazy idea: How about we stop using grades as a measure of the value of a student and start using tests, papers, and quizzes for their intended purpose: Knowledge gap remediation (i.e. find out what the student missed and fill the holes in their knowledge). If we continue to use a student's past errors as a measure of their academic achievements, what message are we sending? That the grade is more important than the knowledge.
-Riskable
http://www.riskable.com
"I have a license to kill -9"
2. Institute a "guest cheater" program.
3. A path to a diploma for all current cheaters (but let's not call this "amnesty").
4. No Cheater Left Behind.
Isn't that what parents are for? To teach right from wrong? To teach work ethic? Sheesh.
Though, that person did have a good point about the power of academia to influence students' thought/speech/behavior patterns via PC-indoctrination.
Someone else mentioned that the PC-initiative is only outward- it is never internalized by the kids. I think that has some truth to it, but it is not entirely accurate. Surely PC-mania has some lasting effect on these young minds. After all, if it was all a show, with no actual effect on people, why would conservatives care so much about it?
A fine concept, but you have to solve the large problem of professors who are not hired for their ability to fill gaps (e.g. teach), but for the quality and prestige of their own work. If schools were really in the business of providing the learning that students seek, it might happen. The reality is that schools are in a variety of businesses, all closely tied to goodwill enhancement - prestige, etc.
To create a similar fear in students wrt cheating, you need to catch them, and then punish them. Which brings us back to square one.
Simply make the quantitative portions of each test copy (or some subsets of test copies) slightly different. This assumes copies of test are returned with the answer booklets so association can be made.
Properly thought out and executed this is very easy to grade. The small variations might be in statements of dimensions, distances, locations, weights, or other "real world" quantitative attributes of the problem statements. If you require answers of N significant figures, just make sure that the variations will show up at that degree of significance.
This method is even easier to use in multiple choice or T/F questions, for obvious reasons.
I once heard firsthand reports from an instructor who used this method to test classes where peoples' lives would eventually depend on the students' actually knowing the material and knowing how to make the calculations properly. He undertook the method after he noticed some apparent copying during early tests. He wanted to make absolutely certain that no student's cheating would cost himself or others any more dearly than just being caught at it.
The students were bomber navigator trainees during WWII.
Making things open book with obligations to disclose written and "live body" sources does not necessarily make the work easier. It makes it more realistic.
Undisclosed live body help seems like a problem that will cure itself over time - witness the novelist at Harvard who plagiarized.
What if the cheater took my daughter's place at Harvard?
Not a big deal in the long run, since there are other great venues for education and the cream will rise.
Two reasons:
(1) The objectives are opposite. The culture of non-offensiveness is an outgrowth of trying to value each person exactly equally (remember phrases like "differently abled"?); the consequence is that everyone's choices and values "must" be equally valuable and valid, so offending someone is equivalent to denying their value/validity.
Declaring someone "wrong" for cheating goes in the opposite, anti-PC direction - it specifically singles people out for doing wrong.
(2) The legal/economic incentives are opposite. It's more likely that an offended person will win a large lawsuit against a university than that an offensively-speaking person will win such a lawsuit. In cheating cases, it's more likely that a punished cheater will win a large lawsuit against a university than that a professor whose crackdown on cheating was overturned will win such a lawsuit. (I have some colleagues who'd be wealthy if this wasn't true...)
Grades don't measure intrinsic value of a student; they signal to potential employers how much a student knows about a certain topic, and about whether a student has sufficient work ethic and/or ability to learn a certain topic. It's up to employers, graduate/professional schools, etc. to interpret those signals correctly, but having no such signal would be far worse.
(By the way thats most teachers, not all, ive gotten caught a few times nd had my test ripped up)
When you go to English class tomorrow, ask for help in the use of apostrophes.
Geesh.
Granted, it would require a substantial investment of time. And it is likely to be criticized as an invalid assessment for students who
are not good speakerscome from cultures where public speaking is not as highly prized as the ability to work in a group setting.Regarding the culture of cheating, I would ask education authorities to look to the public schools --and indirectly, to the colleges who train the teachers to teach at public schools-- to gain perspective. Group work is increasingly the norm (along with other forms of 'non-traditional' assessment). The exam is more and more seen as an anachronistic throwback to the 'bad old days' of individual achievement, and worse, exams are 'biased' against students from group-centered cultures. It is small wonder that many college students do not consider using outside aid as unethical; they've been conditioned to accept it as the norm.
(Would that I were speaking through my hat. Alas, as a former public school teacher, I speak from experience. Teachers are encouraged to assign more 'collaborative learning assignments' and are drilled in these strategies from their pedagogy classes through their ongoing in-service training. In at least one case, I can recall being told to be lenient to one student that I caught cheating because 'she was so used to working with her friend that it carried over into the test situation'.)