Which Grad Students Cheat the Most? 397
SpectralDesign.Net writes, "The results of a research paper released Wednesday reveal who is admitting to cheating (in North America). The study focused on 5,300 graduate students in Canada and the U.S. and concluded that the biggest cheaters were business students — 56% of them admitted to copying papers, plagiarizing, etc. The author of the study said, 'The typical comment is that what's important is getting the job done. How you get it done is less important. You'll have business students saying all I'm doing is emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world.'" Other grad-student cheaters include: engineering students, 54%; physical sciences, 50%; medical and health-care, 49%; law, 45%; liberal arts, 43%; and social science and humanities students, 39%. These numbers are close to the guesstimate of the anonymous professor.
You know what these numbers really mean? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You know what these numbers really mean? (Score:5, Funny)
It means that Captain Kirk was a Business Student.
KHAAAAAAAN!
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I must be really old or something. I'm accustomed to people attempting to adjust reality to approach or meet an ideal. Here we're adjusting idealism to meet reality!
Come to think of it, it's rather like Bush trying to change laws to fit his actions rather than make his actions fit within the law.
Yes, I'm pointing out that there's a MUCH bigger cultural problem in the U.S. and perhaps that's what this article is really about... Does it start in the schools or has it managed to infect t
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`cheating' in business is self-defeating. ie: consider cheating in school: you're paying money for a degree, yet you're not getting all you can get out of the school (namely, the knowledge you've paid for). What's the point of cheating?
In business, I'd consider `cheating' to be: `being creative with the financial report', and generally pumping the price of the stock... and cashing out. When business folks cheat, it's usually the shareholders wh
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Cheating is a way of achieving. The thing is that it will come back to haunt you. When I was in HS and below, I cheated some, and I was not a good student then, and the classes I cheated in, I still did not do well. The classes I did not cheat in, I did well in. I too call BS on the numbers here, but I would guess that being that 50% seemed to be the norm, I would also bet that those were also in the bottom 50% of the class as well. It takes about as much effort to cheat your way though a course and ge
cheating (Score:4, Funny)
After analyzing the risk and the return, (Score:4, Funny)
I rationally decide to cheat.
-- from an anonymous coward B-schooler :-)
Re:After analyzing the risk and the return, (Score:5, Funny)
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I'll try three times now
First Half Students (Score:5, Funny)
The study must have been done on students in the first half of their business degree, and the second half must be the part where they teach, "Always lie about cheating."
Need graduates, not students for sample (Score:5, Interesting)
At my college, our final graduating class size was less than 10% what it was when we started. I know of people who cheated, copied, and plagiarized in the associates program but none of them made it to the final graduation. Oddly enough, only about 33% of our starting class graduated the assoc program, we had 5 students tossed out of the school in the second to last class of the program for plagiarizing code. Once we got into the bachelor's degrees, even though the papers got longer and more common, there was significantly less cheating. Sure, there were a few slackers who depended on other people in group work, but it was more like 15% than 50%.
I would be much more interested in seeing those numbers from graduates, not active students.
-Rick
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If you were trying for funny, KUDOS!- it is in a sad way, but how true anymore.
PoliSci (Score:5, Funny)
They learn quick, don't they.
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Actually, their results are included in another degree. Would admit to being a poli-sci student?
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Who Is Admitting To Not Editing (Score:3, Funny)
"students confessed cheating" maybe?
Sad but true... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen this too often when managers focus on getting their numbers in instead of doing the right the first time. One company I worked for promoted the supervisor who always got his numbers in to be the department manager. Senior level people started to leaving (I was number three out of a dozen) since the guy was so ruthless that no one wanted to work with him and he would find reasons to fire you if try to hold him to a higher standard. What happened? He hired new people and quality took a serious hit but he got his numbers in number. BTW, the company is facing bankruptcy but the manager is still getting his numbers in.
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getting the job done (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:getting the job done (Score:5, Funny)
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Outside of academia, it is generally accepted truth that original research is a foolish waste of time (okay, maybe in print
Re:getting the job done (Score:5, Insightful)
They do, it's called properly attributing your sources.
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The benefit of the doubt (Score:4, Interesting)
In my junior year of comp sci undergrad, I took a class with my friend (hi, Aaron!) that required us to write a lot of programs. We usually talked about the projects in detail, figured out the best way to solve them, then went off and separately implemented those solutions.
One assignment was the typical "you have ten telephone lines and five operators..." sort of problem. We hashed out our strategy as usual, sat down at our respective computers, and typed out the exact same programs. I mean it. Line-for-line identical. Since we both pulled variable names out of the assignment text ("int telephonelines = 10; int operators = 5;", etc.), we'd evolved the same formatting style from years of working together, and we were implementing the same relatively short algorithm, our answers were perfect matches.
Fortunately, our professor was a good guy and believed our convincingly dumb-struck expressions when he told us what he'd discovered. We were also both able to explain every step of the algorithm and why we'd chosen it, and we all had a good laugh about it afterward.
I know that's a bit different than a kid turning in your Wikipedia entry for credit, but remember that strange things do happen sometimes, and not every case of obviously blatant cheating turns out to be legitimate.
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So the alternative was to not finish some assignments and get poor marks, or copy them, and then study like mad for the final.
I feel that the important thing is to learn the material. You can't cheat on a final exam, and if you know it
Re:getting the job done (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this a bad alternative? Basically no one but you cares about your marks, and you end up getting what you deserve. If you're unable to pass without copying, you don't deserve the degree. If you're unable to get an A without copying, why the hell do you think you should have an A?
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Cheaters who admitted? (Score:3, Interesting)
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This applies to business, (pre-)med, and a variety of other fields.
Then, even with an understanding of ethics, some people just don't care.
50% is a huge number though. I imagine things might break down a bit differently if the question was something other than "have you cheated within the past year". It's like asking everyone with a car "have you broken the speed limit in the last year?"
I'd be much more interested in comparing th
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Reminds me of the movie (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty accurate protrayal of what i've seen in the business world...
Unfortunately, when you work for a corporation whose ONLY motive is profit then moral considerations are barely an afterthought, to the detriment of everyone who uses that corporation's products and are affected by the same and those who work for the corporation.
Re:Reminds me of the movie (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Reminds me of the movie (Score:4, Insightful)
My career spans similar extremes, and my experience mirrors yours. My hunch? Oversight works.
At a small start up with no outside investors, no one really cares if a shop getting 30 emails a day over DSL is using a warez copy of Exchange. If the owner decides to go that route, it filters down to employees who will feel free to use email, phones, etc. for personal purposes.
At the big firm, folks at the top are prone to be more aware of the oversight, especially in a financial firm. If I know my boss's boss's boss is concerned about the contents of communications coming into and out of the company, and the implications of records of those communications being subpoenaed, then I need to be concerned about my use of those resources.
(....typed while at a computer in said billion-dollar financial investment firm)
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Pretty accurate protrayal of what i've seen in the business world...
No, I disagree. If profit is the only motive, then actions which waste profit are immoral. So I gather from the description of your examplee, the business graduate is acting in an immoral manner because he is attempting to waste both his future income potential and that of his target. Businesses from the profit-only viewpoint would support the basic rule of law because it lowers costs, preserves assets, etc.
Ultimately, a moral code is
Cheating vs Utilizing resources (Score:4, Insightful)
It's just a question of which resources you are utilising to accomplish the task.
Maximizing the benefit of your available resources is clearly something you should do both in school and in real life.
Where cheating breaks down is that you are improperly using them in violation of the rules. In school it is cheating, plagarism etc, in "real life" it's fraud, cooking the books etc.
Go ahead push the rules to the limit, but don't use the "real life" excuse, it's just as invalid in school as at Enron.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:3, Interesting)
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Good luck in the Business world, son. It eats honest people like you for breakfast.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
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OK, that's a little rediculous. This is a survey of people who admitted to cheating. Are you saying that you don't think they know when they're cheating or not? A grad student totally knows the difference between, as in your example, working together on a group project or a take-home exam, and something like plaigar
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For example, in one class I had, the professor had done research on the theory of high temperature superconductivity. He gave us a bunch of papers and told us to "fill in the blanks", basically to derive the theories used. It was perfectly acceptable for the three of us in the class to work together, or even to go to any professor and get advice on our work. At a
'The ends justify the means' (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is exactly the type of reasoning that leads to this [slashdot.org] clusterfuck. Perhaps it's time for professors and the deans to expel these students rather than let the behavior continue? The cheaters might learn a valuable lesson, and society as a whole would be the better off for it.
Ok, now trackback.. (Score:5, Insightful)
When cheating is the only way? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interestingly, these were informatics-related subjects.
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And the problem is exacerbated by grading on a curve.
Even if you do it honestly and score fairly well numerically, if everyone else cheats and gets near perfect scores, you fail.
Schools don't realize it but grading on a curve places students who try to work on their own at a real disadvantage.
In some ways I believe teachers are complicit in the cheating. They will deliberately catch a
Unfortunately, not all grad students can cheat (Score:2)
Unless.... I could have faked that data!
Goddammit
Sickening.. (Score:3, Funny)
Bodes ill for our future health care needs.
Almost a 50/50 chance of getting a doc who cheated his/her way through college.. scary.
On the bright side if your doc is ever stuck with a diagnosis he can always look it up on wikipedia..
ok, let's keep this civilized (Score:3, Interesting)
Cheating in Business School (Score:3, Interesting)
I am a student in the MBA program at my school. If you want to look at the big cheaters, look at the Public Administration students. These guys are VERY brazen about cheating and their teachers don't seem to care. Most of the PA students get into trouble in the 'normal' business classes, like accounting, due to cheating. Plagerizing, collabrative work when it isn't suppost to be (like take home finals), turning in the same paper in multiple classes. Our instructors in the management classes use turn-it-in religiously, so it can get funny to see the surprised look on the PA students faces when they get told that they get to have a fun talk with the Dean.
Naruto (Score:2)
Tricks of the Trade (Score:2, Interesting)
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That's cheating? I suppose it would be if it was forbidden by the prof to look at old tests while studying.
Devil's advocacy (Score:3, Informative)
Mind you, I'm a grad student myself, and I would never, never even consider plagiarizing or copying anyone else's published or unpublished work (at least partly because I think my own work is better than most other people's, anyway :) ). But realistically, grad school is not like undergrad, where every test performance, every paper, every evaluation is being used to sort you out of the herd and give your future employers information about your ability and potential. In grad school, three or four big, important performance evaluations-- getting in, passing comps, finishing the dissertation, getting it published-- are interspersed with lots of smaller "evaluations" that are basically hoops to jump through.
Most humanities and social science courses I know require papers, and most students will get A's on said papers-- A's that are basically meaningless since employers don't look at transcripts anyway. So one's performance on the paper is essentially immaterial-- it's not making you look any better, it's not teaching you much (particularly in courses outside your field), and the professor may barely skim it before dustbinning. Under those circumstances, actually writing the paper essentially just ensures that you waste lots of time that could be devoted to performance points that do matter, like the diss. Plagiarism under those circumstances is still lying, I guess, and lying is always wrong, but I don't think in these cases that it's the sort of lying that necessarily says much about your professionalism or future behavior-- just that you're the sort of person who gets impatient with pointless rules.
Why it's only 56% of business students... (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
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No, it just means the law students are better at not admitting to being unethical.
These Numbers Mean Nothing (Score:2)
What I think this fails to take into account is both the severity and frequency of cheating. Someone looks over the shoulder of a fellow student on a multiple-choice test and directly copies their answers. Definitely cheating. Now, someone includes a line from another person's paper, and forgets to cite it. Cheating as well, but definitely not the same level of cheating. This second form can be accidental, if someone just forgets to add the proper citation.
Is Thre Really Any Variation? (Score:2)
This is actually a bit shocking to me, as a relatively-recent graduate of a doctoral program in a physical science. I can honestly
You might want to ask (Score:2)
It's all relative... (Score:2, Interesting)
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1. making up fake references.
2. taking someone else's ideas as your own without giving credit.
3. pure plaigarism (an extreme example of 2, and then some.)
4. making claims about a work that you haven't studied directly (using secondary sources while trying to give the impression you are using the primary source.)
5. making false claims to buttress your argument (making stuff up... "Gertrude Stein had been diagnosed with cancer earlier that year, before finishing the novel." Whe
Clueless... (Score:2)
"[I'm] ... emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world."
This sort of remark demonstrates how clueless they are about the so-called "real world".
I think that these people would do well to realize that the real world requires being innovative and original. If most of what you expect to do in the "real world" is copy somebody else's work, you will rarely be the first to get anywhere, and that will intrinsically limit your level of success.
What about computer science? (Score:3, Interesting)
This article doesn't distinguish between grad and undergrad (and is a bit dated), but it I think it is interesting: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/march1
Computer Science cheaters (Score:4, Insightful)
Why degrees don't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Good companies to work for will generally treat this kind of attitude with a 'fired with cause'. There are a lot of bad companies out there to be an Initech slacker at, collect a paycheck, and do as little thinking as possible. I have no idea why anyone would want to end up there. So, it's kind of a self-correcting problem in that sense.
For those actually working for a college degree, it's more annoying. I have a CS degree, and I never cheated in college. (Really. Risking explusion is so not worth it.) Yes, it was obvious that some jerks were, and it leads to more experienced people like my present self finding very little corrolation between the degree and good hires, so it does devalue the diploma. But if you actually can contribute individual insights, are smart, and can get things done, you'll rise above these shortcutters very quickly. They'll work in the trenches at a job they hate, while you decide between Google or a hot startup for a career path. You'll win, in the end, 9 times out of 10. So don't worry about that other guy.
Winners don't do drugs!
Oh come on... (Score:3, Funny)
(54 + 50 + 49 + 45 + 43 + 39) > 100
PUH-LEEZE!
Flamebait, but (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with the previous poster from Harvard, who was appalled that cheating could be so widespread when it was conspicuously absent from my peer group. Why aren't the schools throwing these Bozo's out,with a nice note on their transcript about "violation of educational ethics"? No wonder the world is so screwed up, we're so busy trying to make a buck that we've forgotten the basis of civilization. Machivellian behavior is only advantageus when it's statistically improbable. In primates, troops disband (often violently!) when trust degenerates below a minimum threshold. Since our society is based on similar social contracts (e.g. shared trust), I would expect extremely serious repercussions as the percentage of liars/cons/cheaters increases. I need a nice rock to hide under.
Makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
To put this another way, no one takes a history major because they want to make the big bucks after college, while no one goes into business school because they are fascinated with the subject material in the classes.
Re:Statistics student understand surveys! (Score:4, Funny)
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Numbers don't lie (Score:2)
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You're an idiot. A well-written multiple choice quiz of the "choose the most appropriate answer" variety for testing particular abilities executed at speed can be made more frightening than a "waffle at length" variety where you can always get something for kinda, sorta, vaguely understanding.
If you equate testing to frightening, then you're worse than an idiot. Grading is up to the instructor, and it is not required to pay by the word. On the other hand, with a "multiple guess" test, it is required that
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We do however, have the highest proportion of crammers and caffine addicts.
Re:hm (Score:4, Funny)
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As a former (undergrad) math student I can honestly say that it all depends on how you define cheat; yes like every good math student I will argue over definitions. In one of my courses my Professor openly said that he anticipated that everyone would end up working in groups to understand and solve the challenging proofs, but he required us to write it up on our own and use our own words; as he pointed
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At the graduate level? Mathematics and statistics at the graduate level tends to be very different from high school and early undergrad math and stats, and also tends to be assessed rather differently. I've had several graduate math courses that were assessed by having the students give lectures - I'm not sure how you can cheat at that easily, especially when the lecturer olr any other student can ask y
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I pr
Re:hm (Score:4, Insightful)
As a social science grad student, each assignment was unique. I might be doing a paper on X while my friend wrote something up about Y. Professors always vetted paper topics to make sure that no two students were working on the same subject. Aside from comparing class and reading notes, there wasn't much we could do to help each other out.
Re:Business Students... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because there's an infinite difference between business students at 56% and engineering students at 54%. That's likely within the margin of error for the poll, which means there is no real difference between the two.
But you go ahead and stay comfy wrapped in your preconceptions.
Fucktard.
Re:Business Students... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, they weren't asked in which classes they cheated. So we could be talking about an engineering student having a friend write an english paper for him, which, while less than desirable for his education, is not a matter of safety.
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A tried and true design for one application might be disastrous in another application, especially if the design being copied is unique. If 1940 hadn't had a one particularly windy day, lazy bridge designers might had copied a narrow, understiffened suspension bridge design instead of thinking for themselves and taking little things like aerodynamics into account.
I know, this isn't the greatest example, bu
Re:Business Students... (Score:4, Insightful)
Once that is completed they have to work for 5+ years, take more exams, and then they can be considered a "Professional Engineer."
I think its scarier that computer programmers, who might be working on that software running life support machinery, doesn't need any professional certifications other than a college degree
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1. They give you a reference book which has all the equations that are on the exam. Obviously, equation-based cheat-sheets are useless. (Keep in mind that this book has >100 pages)
2. The breadth of the test is so large that any cheat-sheet you would use wouldn't cover 5% of the material, or would be completely obvious to the proctors. (Remember, the official equation book is >100 pages)
2. They require you to use calc
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Ever been to boston?
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Actually, most engineers would probably do well for themselves to spend a little extra time in English class & "outsource" one of their more technical classes - there's enough overlap between classes in the field that you could probably put the missing
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No, it means you cheated on 110% of your exams. Obviously including math.
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the LOWEST % was 39%, and that is assuming that every one reported acuratly (I call BS on that), and I am sorta scared.
I admit, I never finished college (let alone start grad work), however I never cheated on anything when I was there. When I had problems (and I did have alot of problems) I sought help, I didn't get some one to do the work for me.
Mabey If I had cheated like a large number of people aparently do, then I would have
Re:Business Students... (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone with an undergrad engineering degree I can confidently say that I never cheated in college. However, certain phrasings of the question could cause me to respond differently. For example, if the question was asked, "Have you every used another students work to complete your own without the instructors explicit consent." I'd have to say yes.
I spent many late nights in computer labs or study halls working with other students in an attempt to understand the material. Often times this means working homework problems together. Sometimes I'd do the problem independently and then share the results with others, other times I'd make little or no progress and have someone explain it to me. It wasn't about copying answers, it was about understanding the methodology. A poll question that understands this distinction is difficult to come up with. I don't ever remember a teacher telling us not to work together in an engineering class (aside from exams) but I don't think they all explicitly told us it was ok - mostly because it is part of the culture and it wouldn't occur to them to endorse it.
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Don't re-invent the wheel (Score:2, Insightful)
Why waste time debugging php yourself that when someone has done this for you already?
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I am a masters student at a state university in petroleum engineering. Due to current market forces (60+ bucks a barrel) most US students stop at an undergraduate degree and start working. As a result the current nationality distribution is skewed towards foreign students.
I quickly discovered that every major national network (iranian, turkish, south american, chinese, etc) had all of