Cheating at Universities is more common than you think

[Madalch]

That is not my experience. In all the years I've been teaching at an university, I've given Fs on tests where cheating occurred (the most recent was this semester, when a student was using a blackberry during her first,and last, exam) and on papers that were plagiarized. Sometimes this resulted in a F in the course, and I never have had to go through any lengthy hearing process.

I'm sure it varies from one university to the next, but that was the reason my prof gave me for not attempting to penalize students more for copying their lab reports.

 

[TraneWreck]

I played baseball at a school that consistently has top-ten sports programs---basketball and football teams being the big money makers. They would not consistently have top-ten basketball and football teams if cheating were not constant.

I mostly took classes without any other athletes in them, but to fulfill a graduation requirement I enrolled in a general-ed level science course. It was filled with athletes. The test was multiple choice scan-tron.

The class was in a large lecture hall with theater-style rows of seats. When we would take tests, people would copy may answers from the seats next to me. The people next to them would copy of of those. Then the row behind, and on and on. In all, probably 25 people based their answers on my test.

I just said, "I'm just going to take my test, you do whatever the hell you want. Don't tell me about it, and don't talk to me. If someone gets busted and we all have to take the test again, I'll be fine."

It's a difficult thing to ask a freshman to stand up against an athletic department with millions of dollars invested in you and all the guys cheating off of you.

 

[WildCat]

Intersting article by a professional paper writer here: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.

For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let's be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.

I recommend reading the whole article, it's a doozy.

 

[AnnoyingPony]

I'm not in a university yet, but I have seen plagiarism happen at the junior high school level.

I was peer-editing a boy's essay against gun control. Aside from the fact that he didn't seem to know what gun control was, he had one paragraph that was simply a list of bulletpoints on gun safety copied from a gun safety website.

 

[sadhatter]

If you punish a student for cheating, the student (no matter how guilty s/he knows they are) is likely to file a complaint. This will be handled by the university administration, and there will be a hearing similar to a trial. This is time-consuming for the instructor, and there is a significant chance that the administrators will sympathize with the student no matter how obvious the instructor thinks the plagiarism is. (If I see a student looking over another student's shoulder during the exam, that will convince me that he's cheating, but the Dean's not going to take my word for it.) An instructor who is juggling two or three courses, plus possibly research, isn't going to want to devote time to such hearings if the outcome isn't assured.

When I was a lab instructor and caught students plagiarizing lab reports, the usual punishment was that they would get a zero on that lab, and not be allowed to write the lab exam (which meant a significant hit on their lab grade, but also freed them from a stressful exam that all the other students devoted a great deal of time studying for). Any more serious punishment would have required an administrative hearing, and the prof didn't have time for that sort of thing. But he did sit down with the students, outline the evidence against them, and outline the possible punishments for them (such as expulsion) in order to put the fear of Gawd into them. The students would then be grateful to receive only a zero, and not contest it.

The student I mentioned who handed in his photocopy of the other guy's lab report- he initially was worried that getting a zero on this lab report might lower his overall grade to the point where his average might not get him into med school. I made sure he knew that academic suspensions and expulsion made his GPA the least of his worries.

judging by the reactions we have gotten i would say this is fairly likely to be the case. I would think the financial issue had a bit more to do with it, but it is clearly stated anyone being expelled for any reason will not be refunded any money. ( to be fair it also goes on at length about cheating , and the punishments, and we can see where that is going. )

Especially considering it is a good chunk of the students ( i hate to say this, but it is true. It is about half or so of our group of students from india. I don't know what, if any significance this would have, but it is a fact somewhat important to the story. The irony is, as people, i don't mind any of them, they are good guys, but they have no qualms about cheating. And in a fairly competitive field, that doesn't sit right with me.) i think the time constraints , and effort could be the deciding factor. Honestly if it was one person , i wouldn't care that much. But it being so many people, so obviously, well that is what is getting to me.

And it is not just the impact it might have 7-8 years down the road. I spend the vast majority of my time busting my *** , I have had to limit my social life to a day or two , maybe per week. ( a lot of weeks, even this is just an hour or two watching t.v. with my friends.) But they are getting relatively similar grades, and getting to chill out on a fairly regular basis. ( What really kills me is when one of the people doing it asks me if i want to go to the bar.) As someone who puts a lot of value in chilling out this bugs the crap out of me.

Any idea what i could do? It is getting to the point where if i knew where to go i wouldn't mind going over the prof's head.

 

[Madalch]

Especially considering it is a good chunk of the students ( i hate to say this, but it is true. It is about half or so of our group of students from india.

I'm not going to say that it's true that people from the area of the subcontinent cheat more than other students, but I can confirm that, in my experience, they certainly have that reputation.

 

[quixotecoyote]

I've taught public speaking courses (and will hopefully do so again soon) which are a little difficult to cheat at, since your "voice" is a lot more apparent in that it's actually your voice.

I would spot check the preparation outlines in google for direct copying, and while that wouldn't catch the paper writer WildCat linked, it was aimed at keeping honest people honest.

I only ever caught one girl, who did a copy/paste from a law enforcement website for a section of her speech. Since it wasn't the entirety of the speech, I had a talk with her and called it a failure of citation, knocked that part of her grade off, and kept an eye on her work in the future.

I didn't find any other incidents, so maybe she learned something.

 

[BowlOfRed]

One appalling thing is the lack of quality in the papers people actually buy in order to cheat with. I remember visiting a website years ago that was mentioned in an article about that sort of thing, and reading some sample excerpts of literature papers. The ones I read were of horrible quality--poor writing in the first place, and they managed to completely misunderstand the books they were supposed to be about. I guess that's the danger of a market for illicit goods: no quality control!

HA! I know a person that in the ancient days of the web placed an "interesting" piece of literature up to see what people would say about it. It's amazing how many people are rather upset that not everything on the web is true (or how many people might use a random site in an exam without checking sources).

I sometimes liked to see who had linked to it or copied it. The original server is no longer up, but I found a copy of it referenced on a site that sold exam papers. I can only presume that they were adding things that were automatically farmed via keywords or they're not familiar with history. I can't find the sale link any more, so either they took it down or the company itself is gone. But here is the original document. Yes, you could have paid money to a company for this paper on Mark Twain.

http://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/archives/WRIT102/marktwain.htm

 

[Elaedith]

I also know of at least one person- my best friend- who semi regularly buys papers from an online service. She's never been caught and is actually very blase about it. She fully expects to get away with it Scot-free. And she has, for years. She says that her sister also does it but at another place.

A student I taught recently was suspected of plagiarism in her first year but not enough evidence was available. We finally managed to track down the site at the end of her second year, and paid the subscription to access it. Subsequently all her work from the entire two years was retrieved and checked and almost every piece was found to have been purchased from the site. She had all her marks retrospectively withdrawn and was expelled from the university with nothing (expect two years of fees and a black mark on her record).

Another student at my university a few years back had his entire degree retrospectively withdrawn as he was about to graduate after discovering past plagiarism. He tried unsuccessfully to sue the university for not discovering it earlier!

 

[AnnoyingPony]

HA! I know a person that in the ancient days of the web placed an "interesting" piece of literature up to see what people would say about it. It's amazing how many people are rather upset that not everything on the web is true (or how many people might use a random site in an exam without checking sources).

I sometimes liked to see who had linked to it or copied it. The original server is no longer up, but I found a copy of it referenced on a site that sold exam papers. I can only presume that they were adding things that were automatically farmed via keywords or they're not familiar with history. I can't find the sale link any more, so either they took it down or the company itself is gone. But here is the original document. Yes, you could have paid money to a company for this paper on Mark Twain.

http://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/archives/WRIT102/marktwain.htm

So Mark Twain was a Jew raised by Native Americans who wrote secret messages to chefs through his books?

That has to be a joke.

That reminds me... once a kid used an Onion article for his current event essay.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

For example, Mark Twain once said "The reports of my death have been greatly exagerated." If we take the first letter of each word in this quote, TROMDHBGE, then translate by one letter so that A->B, B->C, etc. We get USPNEICHF. Rearranging, his message was "U Spin, Chef". Similar tricks can be applied to many of Twain's passages.

2char

 

[BowlOfRed]

So Mark Twain was a Jew raised by Native Americans who wrote secret messages to chefs through his books?

That has to be a joke.

Yes the original page (unadorned, never submitted to a search site as was more necessary back then, unlinked to by the creator from any other site), was a joke of sorts.

But it still got picked up and was available on a "for fee" term paper site. So some of these places aren't even paying for the source material. It might just be automated collection. Maybe looking for any pages called "A history of..."?

 

[sadhatter]

I'm not going to say that it's true that people from the area of the subcontinent cheat more than other students, but I can confirm that, in my experience, they certainly have that reputation.

See i had never heard that stereotype before this year. And the irony is , that where i am there are all kinds of Ct's , for lack of a better term about the indian students.

I mean, on a personal level, they are all pretty good guys, so it sucks even worse to , on one hand not have any problem with a person. But on the other have a seething rage that they are pulling off around my marks with substantially less effort.

But half, to me any way, is a huge percentage. Especially for something like this. I don't think it has anything to do with race specifically, but maybe the type of people who would choose to take this course? ( i am going to school next year for full pharmacist, doing this to get a few credits that will transfer. And so is one other person, and i find that comparatively , we both take the course more seriously.)