Crafty college students are pushing the limits of technology into a new field–cheating. They text-message exam answers on their cell phones, program formulas into their graphing calculators and lift PhD-level analyses via a Google search.
Who needs to scribble the answers on your own palm when a friend can beam them to your Palm PDA instead?
Tools meant to enhance education, especially the Internet, are increasingly being used as creative instruments of cheating, college administrators say.
Sometimes students go to extremes: Last year, two Columbia University students were arrested for staging an elaborate scheme to cheat on the Graduate Record Exam and then sell the stolen test questions. Police found $12,000 worth of high-tech devices, including walkie-talkies and a transmitter designed to intercept test questions.
In another high-profile case, University of Maryland officials in January caught six students using their cell phones to cheat on an accounting exam. The professor posted the exam answers online after the test started, and students communicated with friends outside the classroom who looked up the correct responses.
Although no major cases have surfaced locally, university administrators know that cheating goes on. At DePaul University, for example, a few cheating instances involved PDAs, while at the University of Illinois at Chicago a student used multiple devices to cheat. Both schools declined to give details.
Still, using the Internet to cheat is the most prevalent problem, educators say.
“The Internet has provided an irresistible new opportunity for cheating,” said Donald McCabe, management professor at Rutgers University and organizer of a recent plagiarism study.
According to the research, 38 percent of undergraduate students admitted to one or more instances of “cut-and-paste” cheating in the last year, and 44 percent said such behavior is trivial or not really plagiarism.
Scores of Web sites, such as Cheater.com, Buypapers.com or Schoolsucks.com, offer immediate access to finished essays. During a quick search, essays on all the classic topics came up, as did a number of papers on topics such as “why cheating is immoral.”
“Last year, three students out of my intro psych class bought the paper off the Internet and presented it to the class. The professor found it [online] and failed them,” said Alma Hodzic, 19, a junior at Loyola University.
“It’s not a very big problem on campus yet, but if students don’t realize … that you can fail and that it’s not right, eventually it will be a big problem.”
Most students, however, do not copy a whole paper and turn it in; instead, they cobble together a hodge-podge essay by pulling sentences and paragraphs from different sites.
Cutting and pasting together a paper from online sources is the most frequent cheating offense using technology, said Belia Gonzalez McDonald, assistant dean of students at UIC.
“Ironically, it’s also the easiest to detect,” McDonald said.
Professors suspicious of a student’s essay –it’s too good, doesn’t flow or doesn’t answer the question–can combat technology with technology. Sometimes a simple Google search will produce the source, but more schools are subscribing to anti-cheating services such as Turnitin.com.
Papers submitted to Turnitin.com are checked against multiple databases: the Internet, electronic books and journals, as well as every other paper submitted to the service (about 10 million essays).
The company receives 15,000 student papers a day, of which roughly 30 percent are “less than original,” said co-founder John Barrie.
Teachers need a service like Turnitin.com because the cheating problem is only getting worse, Barrie said.
“Our institutions are cranking out future leaders with shaky ethical foundations and poor critical analysis. Enron is a baby game compared to the problems we’ll have in the future.”
In one of Jessica Berger’s classes at DePaul, a professor asked all the students to test their papers against the system before handing them in. The 18-year-old freshman says she welcomes services such as Turnitin.com that promote fairness.
“I don’t cheat, and it’s aggravating that some do, because if I’m going to work … and they’re going to get a better grade because they’re copying, that’s awful,” Berger said.
But others are hesitant about detection services, which they say eradicates trust between the student and teacher, the foundation of good ethics
“Stopping cheating isn’t what we want to do,” Rutgers’ McCabe said. “We want to promote integrity. Turnitin.com will reduce the level of cheating, but I’m not sure we’ve taught students anything.”
For schools, a matter of trust
The University of Maryland is one of a number of schools that have responded to high-tech cheating by employing a so-called “modified honor code.” Under a strict honor code, students are left to their own ethics, but under the “modified” code, exams are proctored by faculty.
Asking students to monitor and discipline their peers, as with a student-led honor council, is an effective method, too, said Gary Pavela, director of judicial programs at the University of Maryland.
“There are student leaders who really do want to make a difference, and if a school will … give them real authority, they will be very strict about the issue of academic honesty,” Pavela said.
Penalties meted out by student-faculty judicial panels can range from a reprimand to a yearlong probation to expulsion.
Other schools are combining anti-cheating services with intensive ethics training and asking faculty members to promote academic honesty in the classroom, said Diane Waryold, executive director at the Center for Academic Integrity.
At the Illinois Institute of Technology, the academic honesty code will be revised with an eye on countering cheating devices, said Dean of Students Doug Geiger.
“The advances in technology, while they are of great significance, [bring] dilemmas that we didn’t foresee.”
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Cheating by the numbers
– 38 percent of undergraduate students reported cut-and-paste plagiarism using the Internet.
– 40 percent of undergraduate students reported cut-and-paste plagiarism from written sources.
– Less than 5 percent of all undergraduate and graduate students indicated they turned in a paper using most or all of the text downloaded from a term paper mill or Web site.
– 36 percent of undergraduate students reported sharing information about a test already taken with a student about to take the same test. Many students felt this was trivial or not cheating at all.
– 4 percent of undergraduates indicated they had reported another student for cheating.
– First-year students report cheating at near the same rate as upperclassmen. This represents a change from previous surveys in which first-year students reported lower levels of cheating.
Sources: Rutgers University, the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University
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Cheat sheet: How they do it
Aside from extremely complex cases involving hidden wires or breaking into computer systems, most high-tech cheating cases rely on basic, everyday electronic devices.
– Graphing calculator: Students program calculators before an exam. Most models include a file for “notes” where students can input formulas and other data needed for the test. More common in high school, administrators and students report.
– Personal Digital Assistant: Known to most as “Palms,” but all brands now include some communication ability, whether it’s an infrared beam for small files or full access to the Internet. Students zap answers to each other across a classroom.
– Cell phone: Students text message to each other for information. It has occurred within the classroom, as well as with an outside source.
Fair warning: Instructors are getting hip to all this, asking students to put away all gadgets before a test begins or switching to simple numbers that don’t require calculators.
–REDEYE
