4 Votes
Has the Notion of Academic Cheating Changed?
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I remember when cheating was easy to identify. Hidden answers for a test? Cheating. Copying another’s work (without citing)? Cheating. Working beyond time constraints? Cheating. So what is it these days that seems to make so many people justify the act? Perhaps its just the “I’m Special” generation not wanting to have anything negative associated with their persona. Maybe the Internet has made the concept of share and share alike just part of culture. Or it could be status quo and this is simply the modern evolution of yesterday’s cheater.
There was a blog about cheating in computer science at Stanford that I found somewhat applicable. The students described their motivation to cheat was that with code, it’s easy to copy and paste plus they felt the liberal arts had an unfair GPA advantage with their subjective grading. As an added twist, the students knew their professor, Eric Roberts, ran their assignments through a lexical analysis tool devised to detect plagiarism between current code and past code. These students clearly had to make the decision not only to cheat but to cheat and beat the system.
Then you have examples like German teenager Helene Hegemann who authored Axolotl Roadkill. This book has been receiving praise for her being a young author and making it #9 on Amazon’s German site along with her earlier play and movie productions. But then a reader discovered numerous passages (pages even) were completely plagiarized from another book, Stobo, without even an attempt at paraphrasing. Even more twisted is that her book is amongst the finalist entries at the Leipzig Book Fair where judges acknowledged they already knew it was significantly plagiarized.
So should I just start lying to get ahead or what?
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More importantly. by Anonymous
I think more importantly is the fact that some student cheat out of desperation. Desperation stemming not from their own incompetence or lack of effort; rather desperation because the instructor fails to do his job. Students have no real legitimate reason unless the test/assignment given is unfair in its nature. It’s also quite insane to assume that students will keep up their duty of “a good person” when obviously the world around them is full of deceptions and cheating. Why even the very institution they go to are full of them. How can we then expect students to have some sort of honor system? Do we expect them not to change since they were 8 years old watching brainwashing shows that teaches kids idealistic things, but not practical?
-EOS
Hard is easy; easy is hard by Occams
they felt the liberal arts had an unfair GPA advantage with their subjective grading.
I always thought the opposite. Subjective assessments make it much harder to get good grades.
In science and mathematics there is usually a right answer, although you have to get there the right way. If you do then you can score very high marks with no argument.
However, subjective assessment is usually full of nuances, opinions, tastes and personal bias. Even a very good answer can score poorly if it hits the assessor in a bad mood.
I think the conventional wisdom was that the “hard” subjects are mathematics and science, and languagesand that the “easy” subjects are English, history, geography, and arts.
It occurred to me in high school that this was quite wrong. Once a few concepts, laws and rules were understood (not “learned”) then the so called hard subjects allowed for unequivocal quick answers carrying high marks. The soft “easy” subjects on the other hand, usually required lengthy assignments involving many hours of work and rooting around in libraries, and the subjective assessments made getting high marks problematic.
Cutting and Pasting from Father to Son by gnifyus
Or it could be status quo and this is simply the modern evolution of yesterday’s cheater.
I’ll never forget, years ago when I was a Cub Scout leader, at one of our Pack meetings we had a game at the end of the night called “The Peanut Race”. For anyone unfamiliar, all you have to do is hold a peanut in a spoon and run as fast as you can to the other side of the gym or playing field without dropping it from the spoon. (It’s a relay race, and someone else has to run back.) Anyway, I see over in the corner, one of the fathers “teaching” his son how to hold his thumb on the peanut so he can run as fast as possible without any danger of his peanut falling off. At a Cub Scout game for crying out loud!
Maybe the Internet has made the concept of share and share alike just part of culture.
I did this just today. There are so many sites offering free code and code snippets that they want you to take, I’m not surprised people actually do forget it might not be part of the class exercise to use pre-written code.
So should I just start lying to get ahead or what?
In seventh grade we had to write a poem. They posted everybody’s on the wall. I noticed this supposedly "smart’ kid copied his directly from a book I had. (Apparently the teacher was unfamiliar.) This guy has a pretty big job around my neck of the woods right now. Hmm.