GetGoodGrades.com Important News About Cheating In College

College Cheating In the News

Click here to see a July 2010 update on cheating in college from The New York Times, one of the most important points made is that now more than half (55%) of colleges are using software and/or companies that check for cheating by students.

The following report on cheating, even though from 2007, is still worthwhile reading [from The Boston Globe online]:

http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2007/05/01/duke_34_mba_students_punished_for_cheating/

Duke: 34 MBA students punished for cheating

By Bloomberg News May 1, 2007

Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business disciplined 34 first-year master of business administration students who were caught in the school’s largest cheating scandal.

Fuqua investigated 38 students, marketing professor Gavan J. Fitzsimmons, who oversees the school’s judicial panel, said. Four were cleared and 34 received disciplinary action ranging from expulsion to failing grades.

The allegations are the largest to hit a top US business school since 2005. Schools have been strengthening their ethics curriculums after scandals at Enron Corp. and WorldCom, which landed the firms in bankruptcy and their leaders in jail. Fuqua posts an honor code that covers cheating in every classroom.

In 2005, the Harvard Business School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, and others rejected 150 applicants who tapped into an online database to see whether they had been accepted.

Nine students face expulsion, and 15 face a one-year suspension and a failing grade in the course. Ten others were found guilty of lesser offenses, nine of whom received a failing grade and one who flunked the assignment, Fitzsimmons said in the e-mail.

The problem came to light when a professor noticed similarities in answers by students on a take-home test.

Three more stories, also in very prominent news media (The New York Times, USA Today, and Newsday [NY]) talk about cheating in college, and why it is becoming more and more of a risk for students.

NY Newsday (5/27:B15)

“NET.CETERA - Students Lie, Cheat and Steal, Courtesy of the Internet”

By Clive Thompson

EVERY COLLEGE class has a couple of cheaters, but this is crazy: Early this month, the University of Virginia was stunned to find that fully 122 students in introductory physics courses had plagiarized their term papers over the last few semesters. About half of those students are now expected to be expelled, making this one of the most sordid cheating scandals ever.

Even more unusual was the method by which they’d been caught. The students were nailed by a computer program written by their professor, Louis Bloomfield, that automatically compared each paper to every other, hunting for similarities of six words or more. He’d heard rumors that the kids were cheating, and, sure enough, the papers his program fingered were almost complete replicas. “I was a bit shocked,” Bloomfield said.

Welcome to the new war in academe, where technology is the weapon for both cheaters and their academic overseers. As students increasingly pilfer papers off Web sites and online sources, professors are girding up with their own technologies to nab the culprits-in a sort of elegant collegiate game of mutually assured destruction....

And:

“Colleges clamp down on cheaters” (06/11)

“Schools get advanced tools to nab cheaters” (06/11)

By Karen Thomas, USA Today (both reports; portions combined here)

The nation’s schools will be using the summer vacation to deploy a new breed of high-tech countermeasures to catch and prevent campus cheating.

Now, educators are battling back with an arsenal of high-tech countermeasures — anti-plagiarism software, biometrics (thumbprints and retina scanning) to ensure test-taker identity, among others — to help curb academic dishonesty.

This summer, thousands of universities nationwide are rolling out programs to detect student work that may have been copied from the Net or from other students’ papers. High schools are putting into place computer technology that ensures that students using the Net for research are forced to cite their sources.

“There’s a combination of technology tools and strategies that teachers have in their quivers now to offset the concern with cheating,” says Don Knezek, director of the National Center for Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology, a division of the U.S. Department of Education.

Come fall, Georgetown University, UCLA, Wake Forest, Clemson and Tulane, among thousands of other colleges and high schools, will greet returning students with a number of cutting-edge tools to track down cheaters and discourage kids from cheating.

Included in the arsenal:

Web-based anti-plagiarism services. More than 1,800 schools plan this summer to deploy turnitin.com, which automatically compares term papers with text on the Internet and in publications. That’s four times as many schools as have used it in the service’s three-year history.

Cheat-proof software. More than 100 high schools and colleges next year will use Secureexam, tested in 19 schools including Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., and the University of North Carolina last month. The software prevents cheating on computer-based tests by blocking students from using other applications, such as e-mail and Web browsers. Columbia University and thousands of elementary and secondary schools using McGraw-Hill textbooks will install software supplied by the publisher that embeds automatic footnoting whenever a student accesses source material on the Net.

Biometric IDs. Thumbprint scanners and digital cameras will be installed in national standardized testing centers to curb test-taker impersonations and monitor students.

“Professors need some help,” says James Sandefur, chair of the honor council at Georgetown, where educators will decide in coming months whether all student work will be checked for plagiarism, or whether professors’ discretion will determine which papers are scanned.

“Most school districts are looking aggressively for cheating-type software and interventions,” says Heidi Rogers, president of the International Society of Technology in Education. “Most schools want to promote responsible and ethical use of technology.”

This school year closes amid several high-profile scandals involving cheating by students. More than 120 students are under investigation for plagiarism at the University of Virginia, which has one of the nation’s most rigorous honor codes.

Last month, more than 100 high school students in three schools in the Washington, D.C., area were required to retake an advanced-placement history exam after essay questions leaked out via the Net.

One department at UCLA tested an anti-plagiarism service this year. A scan of about 150 student papers and 1,000 lab reports at a cost of $1 each turned up “significant instances of plagiarism,” says biochemistry professor Steve Hardinger, who ran the tests. It was enough to convince administrators. “Now we have a university commitment to do it next year.”

Other schools are getting aggressive on campus with students, with software and services designed to detect plagiarized text. “Not only do we wish to battle plagiarism,” says UCLA’s Hardinger, “but also we’ll be letting students know we're using the service, and we’ll nip it in the bud — just don't do it.”

Columbia University is among schools testing new software that automatically generates and permanently embeds Web addresses as footnotes every time students use information from the Net for school reports.

And:

The New York Times (6/28:G1,6)

“Lessons in the School of Cut and Paste”

By Katie Hafner

...Often, teachers are suspicious from the start. “if the student hasn’t done a lick of work or produced anything during the stages of a research paper, then suddenly this beautifully typed-up paper materializes, that’s a sign,” said Cathy Aubrecht, an English teacher at....

...Dr. McCabe said he was deeply concerned about the cavalier attitude toward plagiarism among students coming up through high school and beginning to enter college....

...In high school, moreover, the consequences are not so grave as they are in college. High school students caught cheating are usually given a stern lecture or, at worst, a failing grade. On rare occaisions, seniors will not be allowed to graduate. College students caught plagiarizing, especially at institutions with strict honor codes, are often suspended and may even be expelled, Dr. McCabe said.

Dr. McCabe said he believed there was less cheating in college than in high school not only because of the consequences but also because students take college more seriously....

...At the same time, the web has made it much easier to catch plagiarists. A growing number of educators routinely use Web-based services for detecting unoriginal work.

Turnitin.com, a popular service, offers a simple method that allows both teachers and students to submit papers to electronic scrutiny. The service compares the paper against millions of websites, a database of previous submissions and papers....

...Dr. John M. Barrie, a founder of Turnitin.com, estimated that of all the work submitted to the site, nearly one-third is copied from another source....

...Such services are surprisingly effective, especially as a deterrent.

Dr. Steven Hardinger, a chemistry lecturer at the University of California at Los Angeles, said he had students submit their own papers to Turnitin.com, with the results sent to him.

“The use of Turnitin.com as a deterrent is perhaps much more valuable than as a way to ferret out plagiarism,” Dr. Hardinger said. “We really hate to see plagiarists and hate to punish them, but we want them to know we’re watching.”...

***Now, more and more often, teachers, professors and schools are determined to discourage students from cheating and to catch students who still cheat. Cheating simply is not a good idea, and there is no need to cheat when you follow the system and strategies in “Get Good Grades In College Now.”

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