Asymmetrical Information

Jane, I'm a wee bit older than you, but I'd have to say that I think we were a more honest generation. I think the penalties for plagarism were generally pretty severe, hell, Joe Biden lost a presidential primary battle over plagarism. I knew that if I plagarized a paper at the college level, I was toast.

I think the Internet facilitates, but does not cause the cheating. I remember seeing the ads for term paper services in the back of Rolling Stone, so the opportunity was always there. But now you can go online and find dozens of term papers on any topic.

My sister is a high school english teacher, and she finds plagarized papers all the time. The search services can work against students as well. She'll find a particularly unique turn of phrase and run it through google. She can usually find the original paper that way.

I hate to get into a "in my day" discussion, being only 35 years old, but it does seem like academic honor and rigor is becoming a bit of quaint nostalgia.

Bob

Hell, I was the boy everyone cheated off of. Does that count?

Hell, I was the boy everyone cheated off of. Does that count?

(ps, the comments seem slow again!)

I'm all over the map on this one.

1)Technology often makes old norms unenforceable, in which case we have to come up with new norms. In many ways this is similar to the ongoing struggle over copyright norms.
2)Teachers are not without their defenses. In-person timed writings are pretty hard to cheat on.
3)Yes, I think the older generation was more honest.

I'm all over the map on this one.

1)Technology often makes old norms unenforceable, in which case we have to come up with new norms. In many ways this is similar to the ongoing struggle over copyright norms.
2)Teachers are not without their defenses. In-person timed writings are pretty hard to cheat on.
3)Yes, I think the older generation was more honest.

I'm all over the map on this one.

1)Technology often makes old norms unenforceable, in which case we have to come up with new norms. In many ways this is similar to the ongoing struggle over copyright norms.
2)Teachers are not without their defenses. In-person timed writings are pretty hard to cheat on.
3)Yes, I think the older generation was more honest.

I'm 27 and in the science field (graduate school in chemistry):

I have to say that I haven't seen cheating during classroom tests (having proctored or graded many hundreds of them.) Of course, that may have to do with the university's honor code.

I think there is a great deal of collusion between students when there is material that they do not feel is important. For example, answers to questions in lab reports are copied nearly verbatim on occasion. I might add these are pre-med students, supposedly the most cutthroat of all.

Jane, you appear to have a coding error on your page. The action for your form is pointing to http://64.235.242.204/~janeg/cgi-bin/MT/mt-comments.cgi which I think is incorrect. This might be why comments are so painfully slow.

I'm 35 and I never cheated in school. Then again, I was reared in a very conservative and strict environment. One reason I never cheated was because of my deep and abiding fear of just how bad my life would be if I were ever caught cheating. In addition to understanding the shame that would be brought upon me, I was also taught that I was hurting myself the most if I cheated in school, and that my lack of knowledge would come back to haunt me later on.

A sad story: I know of someone in her late 20's who cheated on exams at her Ivy League veterinary school. She was caught and suspended for one year, then allowed to resume her studies. She acted like it was no big deal. Would you want this person examining your beloved cat or dog?

Even sadder stories: Teachers who have to fight parental opposition in order to punish cheaters.

Technology is, I think, a red herring. It makes it easier to catch some plagiarists, but I'm not sure that it has increased the amount of cheating. Thus, selection bias.

I do agree that cheating varies by field of study. As a graduate student at Penn, I saw no cheating in my small program. Sitting at the coffee place near Wharton, however, it seemed that every student was cribbing homework and discussing questions on exams that had been postponed for some. What's worse is that all seemed so brazen about it.

Cheating was all but nonexistant at Dartmouth, which has an honor code.

My guess is that it has to do with the strength of the academic community. Large classes and little contact with profs, then, might encourage cheating, while smaller, more cohesive class bodies might discourage it. Just a guess, though.

Does it bother anyone that faculties and, anecdotally, student bodies, seem to be increasingly lax on the question of what punishment cheaters or plagiarists should receive? I always thought the answer was obvious (expulsion), but when the issue came up at Dartmouth (in a case that was not so much cheating as a visiting professor who had been unclear about an assignment and then tried to nail his entire class for what seemed to be reasons of class envy), many were against such a measure if the allegations proved true.

I sold my high school chemistry answers to those willing to pay. My rationalization was that we students were prisoners, coercively compelled by the state to attend school, and prisoners had no moral obligation to cooperate with their captors, and in fact had the right to subvert their captors' plans and institutions. I had a little problem with authority in those days, a trait that still remains with me, although, thankfully, to a much, much, milder degree.

I sub in the San Diego school district. I see and hear cheating on a regular basis. As a sub, my authority is limited to informing the regular teacher. It is common place, with most students who cheat/plaigarize shrugging it off as "everybody does it," or "I need the grades to get into a good college."

The biggest problem out here is the parents who go after the teacher (with lawyers in tow) for any action that affects their kids college eligibility. I have yet to see a principal stand up for the teacher. Any publicity/lawsuits/etc. might negatively affect the principal's career/retirement/etc.

Most of these kids never get a reality check until they leave college. Sigh.

Education today is more of a credentialing process than a search for knowledge. When people are coerced into doing things they attempt to avoid them.

Can we please not use "Things were better in my day" arguments. Those always strike me as the worst kind of condescension.

As a percentage, the number of people who want to cheat on their exams/papers is probably the same as always. It's just easier now than it used to be, that's all. A lack of opportunity to cheat is not the same thing as honesty.

G

I cheated some in High School because it was kind of an us-against-the-teacher mentality. Normally I would look at the answers of the person next to me, realize they were an idiot, and just do the test without cheating.

In college I never cheated. Then I got to law school and all of these things I would have considered cheating were considered okay to do...taking other people's course outlines or not reading cases and just reading the cliff-notes like summaries. I found the whole thing very bizarre.

Bob wrote:

I think the penalties for plagarism were generally pretty severe, hell, Joe Biden lost a presidential primary battle over plagarism.

I wasn’t aware of this – was this something that he did in school or something on the campaign trail?

Both. He was caught lifting someone's speeches on the trail. I think it was British politician Neal Kinnicks? (sp?) Then, the inevitable digging commenced and it turned out he was disciplined for plagarism in college.

Bob

Well, Girish, back in my day...

Not only was it harder to cheat, but I think that the penalties were more severe. In college a freshman first offender might get away with an "F" in the class. Anyone else was suspended or expelled. Are things still that way many places? They didn't seem to be in the limited time I spent teaching.

I teach beginning computer science and the problem there is finding plagiarized programming projects. I typically use minesweeper and currency converter as project topics, since they are both fun and educational, but unfortunately you can find lots of those already implemented on the net.

Last Fall, I had nine students out of 40 submit a plagiarized project. I'd say that rule 5 is by far the best indicator of plagiarism, but some more good ones are needless complexity (I could here show some of the parser projects in my algorithms course) and obvious attempts to remove complexity when the student does not have the skills to do all of it.

In computer programming, one way to avoid getting caught by googling is to rename all variables and methods. I was once frustrated with a project I instantly knew was plagiarized but couldn't find with Google. Fortunately, that student had been stupid enough to leave in a statement that sets the drawing colour to be a certain RGB colour triple. Google that and presto, that's it right there.

I used to be a professor and for my first 2 years I was inundated with cheating (including crib sheets and copying off of others exams). I even caught a few students red handed, their attitude was "Everyone else is doing it why are you picking on US?" At the end of one course a student came to me and said there was rapid cheating going on, when I asked who was doing it, she said she did not know who they were. I found this to be very frustrating. I then decided to make some changes by making the rewards to cheating smaller. First, I legalized crib sheets, since preparing crib sheets helps students learn the material better anyway. Second, I gave multiple tests on different colored paper in large classes (I would also change the questions slightly and scramble their order) and made sure that students did not have a neighbor with the same colored exam. Third, due to the classes I was teaching all the papers I assigned were long term papers. I made the students turn in outlines, then turn in rough drafts and then make presentations to their classmates about their papers. I would meet with the students about their papers at least 3 times. After I did this I never found or received a complaint about students cheating in my classes again.

Jane:

Of course you never considered cheating; at a safety school like Penn, why would you need to consider it? (I kid, of course. I'm here at the Airport Lounge all week, folks. Tell your friends).

I don't know where editing someone's paper turns into doing someone's paper, but I certainly tiptoed up to that line in college (yes, of course, for "love"). In my experience, cheating wasn't rampant in high school, college, or grad school.

I think it probably is more common now, but I don't think it is because we were more honest. Rather, I think incentives matter, and students today have better information about the rules of the game than we did.

Specifically, I think people recognize that while there is a sort of medium strength meritocracy at work, it is hard to claim that its more than that. If you are within a certain band of ability, you are likely to get a certain range of rewards. But the range can be fairly wide for a corresponding small delta in measured ability. Where the delta might be merely a result of random variance (or cheating), there is a strong incentive to cheat. (Particularly because, in a world which people change jobs a lot, it is difficult to get a strong sense of merit and therefore to catch cheaters). To the extent colleges recognize this (and I think they do), there is no real incentive to punish people harshly for cheating, because the difference in grades doesn't reflect any difference in ability to do a job in the real world (roughly the unstated rationale for the "no-grade" option and Brown, and the reason why it is essentially impossible to fail a class at Stanford). Students see this incentive system and respond accordingly.

To make the pernicious political argument (and convince you to come the Dark Side (DLC)), President Bush is a perfect example of the weak relationship between personal merit (by any measure) and reward. An indifferent student with a bare competence in his own language, a drunk until the age of 40 (or just eight years prior to his being elected Governor), a completely incompetent businessman, nonetheless he has been richly rewarded. (You could absolultely make similar, if slightly differently worded, argument about Clinton). Absent the war in Iraq, we might never have known how incompetent he is (well, some of us still would have, but not everone). And even assuming he is punished (not re-elected), what is his punishment - speeches at $2 mil. a pop?

In a world with such weak meritocratic claims, given minimal chances of being caught, why would you not do the efficient thing and cheat? Any excess effort spent on actually doing the work is effort that might be better expended elsewhere.

One time in biology I couldn't remember if nematodata were acoelomates or eucoelomates, so I snuck a peak at my notebook; turns out they're pseudocoelomates.

I also wrote some papers for an MBA acquaintance, because a) I enjoy research b) he gave me a C-note and a bottle of whisky and c) if he's going to succeed in business he needs to learn delegation.

I only cheated to get through high school Spanish class. The whole class did, the teacher was poor and we did not learn what was on the tests. I made sure that I did not have a foreign language requirement in college.

Bob wrote:

Both. He was caught lifting someone's speeches on the trail. I think it was British politician Neal Kinnicks? (sp?) Then, the inevitable digging commenced and it turned out he was disciplined for plagarism in college.

IIRC wasn’t there some sort of cheating scandal that lead to Ted Kennedy getting kicked out of law school as well?

Having been a university TA, I've seen some of this. There are several easy ways to discourage cheating, however:

- Do not assign open-ended essay topics. Specific questions based on class material are harder to find online (unless it's a very common topic, like Romeo and Juliet or something.)

- Essay tests are harder to cheat on than multiple-choice. Not impossible, just harder.

etc.

Mostly however, I kept a sharp eye on them when they took their exams, read over their papers carefully, and took solace that in the cases where I suspected cheating, they got the wrong answer anyway.

It is considerably easier to catch people. I didn't think of that myself. I found it on the internet.

Jim English
Chicago

Somebody tried to cheat off of me once when the teacher left the room. He even tried to take my paper from me and intimidate me!

Well, one nasty punch and several rammings of his head into those old science tables (Thick tops with a sink and gas lines installed with cabinents u nderneath), nobody tried that again with me. It took several years before people tried to bully me again.

Today I filed my fourth disciplinary charge this term (from a pool of 72 students in 2 sections of the same sophomore level course). The first student I caught submitted a paper I use in a faculty development plagiarism workshop at another college within my university (CUNY).

As frustrating as it was to file charges against the first student, it is even more painful to file charges against other students in the same term, as I'd kept them fully posted on the particular hell that awaited said student. They every single one of them knew what this student had done, how this student had been caught, and what was to become of him (Dean of Student Services, F, notation on transcript). The remaining three all submitted their plagiarized work after the first student had been discussed in class.

Hubris? Arrogance? End of term desperation?

I think that there is an increase in the level of cheating that reflects the changing societal standards (or lack of standards). People who play by the rules are thought of as rubes, while those who flout the rules are lionized -- at least they are lionized if they can skirt the rules with style and finesse. Our kids watch and learn that it's NOT how you play the game that counts. Given how we've rewarded people in politics, business, and entertainment despite their lying, cheating, and conniving ways, it's a wonder we have as many honest kids as we do.

I've cheated twice in my life, once in grade 4 and once in grade 10, both for a single point on a meaningless test. That's close enough to clean for me.

And yes, it's probably easier to cheat now, just like it's easier to get caught. I still haven't heard of it happening to any great degree, the worst I've seen is students working together on programming assignments a bit more closely than might be wanted(but nobody was just "C+P+change variable names" on it). Depends on where you are and what you do I suppose.

I didn't cheat in high school because I was naive enough to think that learning the material (which a good test will reinforce) was more important than the grade. It helped that I did well without cheating. Then in college, we had an honor system (We will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do) that, unlike high school, involved one's honor, which we all took seriously, as far as I know. My law school had a similar honor code, run entirely by students but with only one punishment, expulsion, which many students thought too harsh, so cheating (at the undergraduate level) actually resulted in no punishment at times.

George Atkisson finished with:

Most of these kids never get a reality check until they leave college. Sigh.

But one could argue that there never is a reality check. The cheating that's more "prevalent" among my generation is but a symptom of lax enforcement, as David Walser points out, though I suspect cheating is no more of a problem now than it ever was.

Ironically, actions which would be cheating in school are recommended in business. I work as an engineer. If I can copy someone else's work, that's much better than doing the same work over again. Credit isn't even all that important. When we write reports and specifications, we copy as much as we can from other documents and never cite anything. That's not even unethical as all of the documents are owned by the company. You expect people to use the work over and over again.

If I am doing any kind of design, I would be irresponsible not to ask around to find out if anyone has done anything like it before. I would be irresponsible if I didn't have my work looked at by several people to check for any errors or improvements.

I would be interested to see a system of teaching that allowed for this kind of thing. It would be more difficult to work out individual evaluations, but would be more valuable and useful to the students. it would also eliminate some of the incentive to cheat.

Bolie IV

In highschool I would finish my chemistry test, then slump down in my chair so a friend behind me could look over my shoulder. He wore a large cowboy hat to cover his eyes. It was his only hope to get out of that class.

Who does one really cheat? Cheating simply cheats you of experience or knowledge. Intellectual laziness is pervasive in today's society. The internet and Google have made homework an exercise in data transfer rates and inkjet versus laser print quality issues.

Part of the problem is we value expediency over quality. Fast food, fast cars, fast women...you name it - mankind is in a race throughout much of his life until he hits the late twenties when he panics and starts hitting the brakes.

How much do we really know our own personality and emotions? Here's a two week test which one can take to really see our personality and behavior in an honest light and start to master our own consciousness.

We cheat ourselves in more ways than one.

Though not an English major, I tested-out of the required freshman english at my college. Being broke and a relatively good writer, I accepted a "commission" from a friend to write one of his freshman english papers. This led to several more "commissions," until I was approached by a guy in my dorm that I hardly knew. At that point, I shut it down, figuring it was getting out of hand.

Did I know this was wrong? Of course. But I didn't think of it as me cheating, so much as selling a service. Someone else made the point that some cheating behavior at school is considered good business practice outside of school.

The difference is that while I helped these people in the short run, it most certainly didn't help them in the long run.

This has been quite a thought-provoking thread. As pointed out earlier, the business world sends young people mixed signals on what is expected to be honorable. The abuse of credit terms, lack of full disclosure, outright fraud in accounting, you name it, it happens.

Years ago, I had the credentials to be considered for an appointment to the United States Military Academy. I also had a good shot at several universities with honor codes like the USMA. When you asked about the codes and how they worked most were the same - one violation and you're out.

At all but West Point, students were encouraged to support and run the honor codes but they were not required to report knowledge of an infraction. At West Point, if you did not report a known violation, you were also guilty. I asked the Army officer who handled recruitment why the USMA made this distinction.

He used the example of a officer in combat who is calling in ranges for artillery fire. He said if it was 3000 yards then it had better be right - because a few hundred yards difference might drop the fire on your people and not the enemy. In essence, an officer's word had to be correct and unwavering.

Ultimately, the fabric of society will be injured by academic cheating - but it is a slow decline and you have to be paying attention to notice the effect it has.

I never cheated. I guess I had thought about it, but I don't think I could ever have faced my parents if I had been caught.

At Georgia Tech, my mechanical enginnering major roomate once copied a whole bunch of forumals on a tiny sheet of paper (smaller than a matchstick) and then stuck it in his fly.

Also at tech a Math TA told me that first quarter he was TAing a freshman co-ed who was struggling to pass CALC I (MATH 1307) offered to sleep with him to get an A. He turned her down; he too was afraid of getting caught. A couple of years later, he said he was foolish and would do it if the oppurtunity ever arose again, but it didn't.

One summer I took courses at Widener and ended up writing a Poli Sci paper for $25 for this hot girl
in my class.

When I went to Texas A&M in the late 80's I was never aware of anyone cheating in the academic arena (football was another matter). The university had a zero tolerance policy against cheating, and I had no doubt that if anyone was caught cheating, they would be expelled.

In the mid 90's I started graduate work at another university. I know of instances where students were caught red handed cheating - all that happened was that they were forced to drop the course. The University's lawyer's wouldn't allow anything more severe for fear of being sued.

My point is that the consequences of cheating are not all that severe anymore. This makes the idea of cheating far more appealing. In addition to the immediate consequences, there used to be a stigma attached to being a cheater. I don't think that is the case anymore. Therefore the lenient near-term consequences and almost total lack of long term consequences have caused the amount of cheating to skyrocket.

Just like everything else, I guess we just have to blame it on the lawyers.

My parents were teachers, so cheating and getting caught would have been very unhealthy. To be honest, it was actually easier to just do the work then try to dream up a way of cheating without getting caught.

As a college instructor of some years now, I agree -- there are opportunities aplenty to cheat, and very few consequences, either immediate or long-term. At a number of different universities (which I will not name, in an uncharacteristic display of discretion) I've seen school administrators mouth academic integrity policies and the like, then turn right around and let students get away with pretty much anything.

Remembering my own student experience, I didn't cheat simply because it generally wasn't worth the effort do so (cheating, after all, does require a modicum of effort). Since the effort needed to evade enforcement has diminished, it strikes me that the best solution to the problem, short of teaching at a place like West Point with strict enforcement of academic codes of honor, is to make it easier to actually do the work than to find ways to cheat.

So, along with the suggestions made previously:

Never assigning problems out of the textbook (nearly every popular textbook has a webpage or fifty out there with all the answers)

Encouraging group-work and interaction between students, and incorporating it into class. And making all exams 'open-note'.

Coming up with new questions and problems constantly -- particularly fun if it can be tied to current events. (encourages me to actually read the news)

Keep assignments managable, interesting, and relevant.

This involves more work on my part, but on the positive side, it does seem to make me a better teacher and even tends to get students more involved in the class....

As for Bolie's question about the wholesale incorporation of existing texts and the like into the class -- a fascinating challenge, particularly as at the graduate level (I am in the social sciences), more than a few courses seem to be structured in that way.

In answer to the question about Teddy Kennedy, he was sent down from Harvard for plagarism. But they took him back and gave him a degree. Don't know what daddy gave Harvard in exchange. I remember all this from his first campaign for the Senate when I was in college. I seem to recall a Crimson article on cheating in the Ivy League when I was a freshman, but I don't recall any details. I do recall some details from the article on Ivy League suicides - some quite ingenious and grisly ones in fact....

Ive never cheated, well, at least Ive never copied anyones answers or paraphrased without citation.

Ive had the good fortune to attend a public high school with, among other things, a group of higly motivated administrators whove got a lot of time on their hands because of the lack of violence in the halls.
Smart kids, all around, and they get nailed left and right.

I dont cheat because its easier for me to just do the work and be done with it, and if I screw up, I take what Ive gotten.

But Im surrounded with people whose only goal in life is to please others and get into the college theyre supposed to, and then the grad school, and become the doctor or lawyer their parents want them to be. No more of an excuse than the fact that none of us really want, or need, to do most of the work, but its a factor.

Previous generations may have been more honest and morally upright than mine. I wouldnt put it past them.

But were a product of the world you run, so we'd all appreciate it if you were a bit less condescending and self-righteous.

That being said, Im not above helping others out. Ive had people ask me a question about the topic of a paper and then go on and use it verbatim.
Its always bothered me that doing that is considered cheating, on my part.

Strictly speaking, its my intellectual property, and mine to do with as I please. And since I dont care about others taking credit for ideas of mine that Im not going to use, the only ones who end up getting hurt by it are the students that are cheating.

They can make their beds and sleep in it. Its a lesson in adulthood that is sorely needed...

I never cheated while in school (college from 1980-1986). I was a computer science major, and other than our programming projects, there was nothing we really could cheat on. Papers were few and far between, and tests were a joke.

I did come into contact with a group of students who plagiarized other people's work. I was helping someone debug a problem when I realized that the portion of code that I was looking at was an early version of my own project. It shocked me (I was very naive at the time) and I made sure that I mentioned it to the teacher... on the off chance that he might thing it was ME who had cheated. That was the only time I ran into it.

Argh, I hit return too soon. I was going to say that I interviewed that same student a few months ago. It's been nearly 20 years, and I still remembered that incident, and I have to say that it was a contributing factor towards hiring someone else.

What goes around, comes around.

This is an interesting topic. Personally, I think the issue of cheating academically is small potatoes compared to what really happens in the business/political arenas.

I, unfortunately, am a bit older than most of you (44). I started working in corporate America at 17 and after 27 years, I can't think of a better example of "cheating" than those individuals I have encountered along the way who are incompetent, but good schmoozers and moved up based on sucking up to whomever. I don't know if people of my generation are more "honest," but I can tell you that corporate America had a heart/conscience 27 years ago.

I was actually accused of plagiarism in my last semester of graduate school. I wrote a paper on interest rate parity and couldn't find anything to describe it other than equations. So...I cut and paste them into my paper (citing all references) and I think they were so far over the prof's head, he got ticked off and came after me.

The long and short of it is he planted someone behind me the day I took the final. Thank God I am not a cheater and I finished the class with a B. But what a horrible experience.

Diane

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