Cheating Via the Internet at College 467
Electron Barrage writes, "An anonymous professor writes that last year about half of the seniors at his US university were suspected of cheating, mostly due to the Internet and community sites such as Wikipedia. He guesses that perhaps 25%-30% were actually guilty, a huge increase from earlier levels. According to this professor, it's nearly impossible for the universities to keep up with the new forms of cheating enabled by the Net. Will academic institutions learn to deal with this new reality? It sounds a little dubious from this professor's viewpoint." The article mentions the anti-cheating services Turn It In and iThenticate (while decrying their expense), but expresses worry over the new countermeasure represented by Student of Fortune.
Sadly, you're right (Score:1, Informative)
During World War 2, the navy did a study trying to correlate the goodness of its officers with their academic achievement. There was zero correlation. HP did a similar study during the 1970s. Same result. The only case I'm aware of where there was any correlation with what happened in school was for lawyers. In that case the it was shown that lawyers who cheat did slightly better on the job.
Your boss cares if you got your job done. Your boss doesn't care how you did it. If you did a great job because you are brilliant, fine. If you got someone else to do the job for you, fine.
I guess I'm agreeing with you. The other sad thing is that someday your lack of a piece of paper may bite you. Your success on the job depends on you getting the job in the first place. Many/most HR departments do a crude paper screen before anyone clueful looks at your application. No degree, no job. Of course, you can get around that one by applying the old adage: "It's not what you know, it's who you know."
Re:Define cheating... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Looks like an ad for Student of Fortune (Score:2, Informative)
The top earner recieved $20 from one person, for answering two stats questions (which look to me like they could probably be answered by an A-Level statistics student or first-year university course in stats). That sounds like a fluke to me - or possibly even engineered by the owners of the site to make it look like a money-spinner.
The second-highest bounty - $1.00 - is for a URL. One person's preview reads "... id.com/dict/spanish-food
Anybody using this (to ask) is easily parted with their money anyway, since answers and even *gasp* hints are often given out on online forums for free or for some internal currency system (reputation/karma)
Re:Looks like an ad for Student of Fortune (Score:2, Informative)
Sad.
Re:cheating vs. really wanting to learn (Score:5, Informative)
At college it quickly became apparent that there were two classes of students. Those who were there because they loved the subject and learning, and those who were there because someone told them that they should go there and study this because then they'd earn a bunch of money. We in the former class got pretty irritated by those in the latter, because the latter were generally pretty clueless and not really serious. We really tried to NOT get paired up with them, but we did from time to time. And that's a good thing, because know what? When you get into a job situation, there are people there as well who don't actually like what they do, they're just there for the paycheck and aren't interested in doing more than the minimum. Luckily in the job I have now there are teams you can move to that are 100% filled with people who really love what they're doing.
BTW when I say that the two classes of student became apparent, I think that was only to the people who were there because they loved the subject. I don't think that those who were just there to fatten their eventual paycheck realized that some of us really loved the subject, or if they did, they probably just thought we were freaks. Eventually a few of them may have figured out that we were the freaks that bailed their asses out on group projects every time while they wrote the documentation.
Re:You know what's worse? (Score:4, Informative)
Not at all unreasonable. But before you can work effectively in a group, you need to know how to work alone. Which is why we give them assignments in college where they have to do it themselves. Plagiarizing and collaborating on assignments that explicitly call for each student to work alone undermines their learning.
1) No good teacher uses the same assignments year after year. I change mine every term, and so do most of the other teachers I know. We do so, not because the old assignments get "stale" somehow, but because students pass on their papers to newer students.
2) Assignments should always offer a decent amount of flexibility. This is partly because the writing tends to get worse when the assignment is inflexible. But it's also because reading forty or fifty essays on the same topic, most of which will be poorly written, is an exercise in masochism. Building flexibility into the assignments gives the students scope to find an approach they find interesting (or at least tolerable) and keeps the instructor from going insane during grading.
3) In a freshman level class, and indeed in most undergraduate classes, you can't expect the students to create new material. With rare, rare exceptions, it's simply beyond their current capabilities to come up with genuinely new contributions to knowledge. If they get to that point, it tends to happen towards the end of the undergrad years, or in graduate school.
4) The thinking part is the real goal. And in this respect, the only thing you need to do is craft an assignment that requires the student to grapple with ideas that they haven't thought about before.
Every single one of these pedagogical goals is completely destroyed when the student plagiarizes. If they don't do the assignment, they're not learning from it.
You seem to be talking about students working together to complete the work; I'm talking about students who turn in "essays" in which 80% of the words have been pasted without alteration from web sites. It's my job to teach my students to write. You learn to write by WRITING. If they copy and paste giant chunks of text from the Internet, then they're not writing that text. Somebody else did. And when they turn it in without citing their source, they're lying about it. When they put their name at the top of a paper that contains unattributed text from other peoples' work, they're claiming that work as theirs.
This is one of the fundamental tenets of academic life: you do your own work. If you draw on somebody else's work, you put it in quotes and you give a citation, both to acknowledge their contribution, and to allow your readers to consult the source for themselves if they'd like. If you don't, it's plagiarism. It's lying. It's theft. It's wrong. A lot of students don't seem to understand that. I tell them at the beginning what plagiarism is, why it's bad, and how to avoid it. BEFORE the first paper comes due. I devote a whole freaking class period to it. And STILL they turn in the plagiarized papers.
This is NOT a "tempest in a teapot." It's a real problem. It takes time and resources away from the other things I have to do. Dealing with one plagiarized paper can take four to seven hours, not counting the administrative stuff.
As for "evolving techniques" -- well, we academics aren't stupid. Nor, as some other posters (not parent poster) have suggested, are we lazy. We're going to continue to evolve countermeasures, catch every plagiarist we can, and punish them. And we're going to hate every minute of it, because we signed on to teach, not to police. So please - raise your kids to do their own work rather than leaching off other people.
Re:You know what's worse? (Score:2, Informative)
KFG