75% of students at A&M have admitted to cheating in the past year? What a disgrace. Sadly, many of the A&M students I have known have bragged about how much they cheated. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Colleges' war against cheats goes high-tech Computers used to fight rising Internet plagiarism By TODD ACKERMAN Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle Texas A&M University has always prized its honor code, but last year faculty and administrators learned that the majority of its students don't. Seventy-five percent of respondents to a university survey admitted to having cheated in the past year. More than one in three said they had plagiarized papers from the Internet or elsewhere. "The most disturbing thing was a general attitude on students' part that plagiarism isn't a big deal," said Marty Loudder, an A&M accounting professor and chairwoman of a task force formed to address the issue. "Many seem to have the attitude that if something's on the Internet, it's everybody's." Last month, A&M began fighting back. Administrators purchased a subscription to Turnitin.com, a leading anti-plagiarism software program. The service, now used by roughly 1,500 U.S. universities (the University of Houston among them), scans student papers to see if material has been copied from the Internet or other papers in its database, which it claims number in the tens of millions. It's all part of a cat-and-mouse game of plagiarism gone high-tech. Students who log on to such sites as Evil House of Cheat and schoolsucks.com for research papers now must contend with a variety of countermeasures being deployed to catch and prevent academic misconduct, from anti-plagiarism programs to software that prevents cheating on computer-based tests to thumbprint scanners and digital cameras to curb test-taker impersonations. Experts are divided on whether it's a good idea. What is clear is that in this age of the Internet, that paradise for lazy researchers, plagiarism is on the increase. A recent national survey found 41 percent of students admitted to "cut-and-paste" plagiarism -- lifting chunks of material from different Internet sources without attributing it -- up from 10 percent in the late 1990s. Two of three students said the practice is not a serious issue. Cheating is an age-old issue on college campuses, of course. But while educators have long lamented the decline of student ethics, they have historically done little to root out wrongdoing, thinking it's not worth the trouble or how they want to spend their time. Clearly, that's now changing. "Professors tend to run the gamut from a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil type to those who run a police state," said Louis Bloomfield, a University of Virginia physics professor who developed his own plagiarism-detection software after a cheating incident in one of his classes. "But increasingly, professors are realizing that no one wants to play a game where cheaters prosper. If there's no consequence for misbehavior, some people aren't going to be ethical." Bloomfield's incident involved students in one class turning in recycled papers. Forty-five were expelled after admitting guilt or being found guilty by the student-run honor council, and three others had their degrees revoked after graduation. Such action is the exception on college campuses. Universities usually decline to reveal the number of cheating-related expulsions in a given year, but most say that it's rare for a student who cheated to be expelled, particularly for a single instance of plagiarism. More typically, professors tend to give plagiarized papers an F. Turnitin.com's appeal is its massive database -- founder John Barrie says it includes 3 billion pages from the Internet, tens of millions of journal articles and millions of student papers -- and the speed with which it works. A paper submitted to it is returned complete with matches to other works in anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes, depending on how long the paper is and how busy the server is. The software works by transforming letters in papers into numbers. The resulting digital fingerprint is compared to more than a billion documents fingerprinted in a similar fashion. Almost all papers turn up some passages that match verbatim another source, so it is up to professors to determine what is plagiarism. "What institutions like about Turnitin.com is that our database is so massive it serves as an extremely effective deterrent," said Barrie. "It says to students, `Don't cheat; it's a bad idea.' " Indeed, many professors make the program available to students to educate them about the dangers of plagiarism and so they can catch their own inadvertent matches. Pierce Cantrell, an A&M professor of electrical engineering who purchased an individual Turnitin.com subscription after a plagiarism incident a few years ago, says he has students submit their papers to the program and hasn't had any problems since. It doesn't come cheap. For a yearlong, institution-wide subscription, Turnitin.com charges schools 60 cents per student, which translates to around $10,000 for a university of UH's size and $16,000 for a university of A&M's. Individual faculty members can buy a year's access to the service for $100 for 100 papers. Not everyone thinks plagiarism-detection services are a good idea. Arguing that that they breed an atmosphere of mistrust, many experts argue that universities should spend more time promoting integrity than policing cheating. Such universities are often those with academic honor codes -- such as Rice University -- where students are allowed to take tests at home or in class without proctors. Duke University's Center for Academic Integrity, a proponent of the philosophy, cites studies as showing serious cheating at schools with such codes is one-third to one-half lower than the level on campuses that don't have honor codes. "I think routinely screening all papers submitted in classes would dilute the trust students feel is placed in them," said Rice Provost Eugene Levy. "Do we think encouraging high integrity by projecting an expectation of it fosters high integrity? Of course." Still, much of the concern about plagiarism comes from students, who complain to professors about others' cheating because they feel it puts them at a disadvantage. The Virginia case that resulted in 45 expulsions and three revoked degrees, for instance, came about because of such a complaint. The sentiment is voiced by A&M student body president Matt Josefy. He says Turnitin.com is too new a tool for students to have an opinion on it but that most want to see a solution to the cheating problem. He said he hopes the software program ultimately will be unnecessary because of a change in student attitudes. A&M officials hope so, too. The software program is part of an effort to bring renewed attention to the school's honor code, which requires any cheating to be reported to the honor council and second instances to result in expulsion. Some professors are adding the line "I pledge my sacred honor that I neither received nor gave any assistance" for students to sign at the top of exams, an affirmation similar to one used at A&M in 1887. Such professors know no detection-system is foolproof. Brigham Young University professor Wilfried Decoo, the author of Crisis on Campus: Confronting Academic Misconduct, says there are tricks to elude detection programs, such as writing papers in a word document and then using the thesaurus function to change every few words. He suggested that professors make essay questions personal, such as comparing the research topic to the student's own experience, so it is harder to plagiarize. "Remember, if someone really wants to plagiarize, they'll find a way," said Decoo. "Some students are like hackers. Some will always succeed in eluding firewalls."
I've been to scared to cheat in college. I mean if you get caught than your pretty much done, not worth the risks. If Im taking exam and I know Im going to bomb it than Im going to bomb it. Id much rather get a 40 on an exam than have the opportunity to steady my butt off and try to get an A on the next one rather than face stiff pealnties b/c I was glancing at somebody elses scantron. Plus theres like 10 TA's for a larger class on a test day. Thats 10 sets of eyes not going to happen. Cheating for a term paper? Are you kidding me those are free A's. Why waste money
I can't believe there are people who would cheat in college. That's it...go ahead and cheat yourself out of your education that your paying for. That's brilliant. Well, most people probably cheat in their basic courses because they don't want to write English papers or whatever. If you get caught, though, then you probably wish you had just done the work. I was in a programming course in college once and everyone printed to a central lab and printer where we each go pick up our print-outs. Well, some idiot decided he would take my program that I spent several days writing the code for and plagiarize his program. He literally took the code print-out and typed it in as his own. When I went to pick up my print-out, it wasn't there so I printed another one not knowing what happened to my print-out and I turned it in. So, a few days later, the professor calls me and this other person up to him at the end of class. He then blatantly accuses us of conspiring to cheat like we both were in on it. He obviously didn't have the facts but he had already labeled us co-conspirators. He threatened an "F" for each of us in the course and possible expulsion. At that point, I was like "hey...I wrote the code and I can prove it. The only person that cheated is standing right there cause I know I did nothing wrong". I was really pissed off at this guy and I wasn't about to tone down my reaction. Anyway, the teacher finally quit threatening us and asked us to turn in what supporting work we had for the writing of the program code. I turned in a big paper bag full of pseudocode and program code. This other guy didn't turn in squat as he couldn't have had anything. So, two days later or so the professor tells me I am exhonerated. That's all he said. I guess the other guy came clean and I proved my case. But, I was still kind of pissed because it still felt like I was guilty of something. I didn't get an apology, an explanation of the outcome, or anything....just that I was no longer under suspicion.
that is really sad.. that's all i have to say about this.. because if 75% admit to it.. im guessing more than that actually do it
"it's only cheating if you get caught" Al Bundy (on the episode where he won the senior citizen olympics even though he was too young to qualify.)
that's damn near like saying i can't believe there are people who would speed considering the percentages of people who most likely do either. first, we're not calling copying hw problems or anything related to hw cheating are we? b/c then the number would be 100%, and most of our profs don't even mind group hw. i'm assuming this is for big things like tests and papers. i never cheated in elementary, middle, or high school and not in my first year of college. and then came along the core ChE classes where you actually knew most of the people in your class and had a group you could hang out and coordinate stuff with. and of course the impetus for it all, Physical Chemistry and the fact our professor gave us 7 possible essays before a test and said we'd have to answer one. solution? type them all into your calc beforehand. then of course came thermo when our prof told us the class website and people went to it and just happened to discover that the hw solns from last semester that were still up (and were taken down later that afternoon) were the solns to our hw also. solution? print all that stuff out (was about a 2 inch stack of paper when done) and type it into the calc before quizzes (quiz problems came directly from the hw, which we never actually had to turn in for a grade). oh and the midterm questions all came from the hw too. reactor? one TA in test room who was usually looking down doing her own hw or something for other classes, hmmmm. that was easy to pass stuff around. of course there have been classes where cheating was impossible essentially and i pulled out my A's in those classes too. it's just that the crutch is nice to have. essentially if you don't wanna know people cheat in college, don't venture into the world of chemical engineering at UT. we always say we're gonna write a book one day about how we pulled it all off and why most of the graduating che's don't actually know anything (though some of us definitely do) about ChE.
I'm pretty sensitive to cheating subjects because I was reprimanded for cheating in my history class in high school even though I DID NOT cheat. But, no matter what I said in my defense, my name was smeared and it was the teacher's word over my friend and I's word. Then, in college, I had the incident posted above occur. I know people cheat in college. I've seen it first-hand. I've seen a professor leave the room and groups of people cheat. Of course, there is a thing called group homework which everyone has been involved in. The more blatant forms of cheating I would never consider in college are cheating during tests and plagiarizing most or entire project/term papers. If you do that and get away with it, then more power to you. Some people may feel they have no choice because they can't do it or feel they can't do it so they do it to survive. I've never been in such a position where I didn't feel I could do it so I had to resort to cheating like that. But, every person's situation is different. I didn't have to work through college, either.
i think part of it is i almost feel entitled to not work so hard in school anymore. i busted my ass through high school and now it feels good to work so hard. and on the subject of getting acused of cheating and not. ****ING mathcounts in 7th grade. our freakin' team got kicked out for cheating and we had 3 of our 4 people in the top 10 and would've gone to state. we couldn't believe it, and my dad was seriously pissed, b/c he knew i'd never do anything to cheat at a competition like that (and i never would, despite anything i've done in college, this is completely different) and when he called to ask why we were thrown out, they said 2 members were horseplaying or something. we still had no idea what they were talking about. even our teacher seemed to not believe us. now that whole incident pissed me off. i think they just couldn't believe our school had 3 people do that well out of nowhere since it never had before and just made something up. oh and then there's the time i got DQ'd from a number sense test b/c they said it looked like i may have tried to squeeze a number in b/t two other numbers i wrote. lets pretend i actually had to do that: a) that's not a reason to miss that problem, only writing over a number or scratch work is and b) you only miss that problem, not get DQ'd. and we would've been the 3rd place school if not for that. i graded that test in later years and people would write all over the damn thing and we'd only get to count off for each problem they wrote on, so that made me even more pissed. so i actually feel entitled to cheat to some extent. you reacted by never cheating at all, i've decided i've got some making up to do against the system.
