
When Did Cheating [on college campuses] Become an Epidemic? - samratjp
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/7/12/when-did-cheating-become-an-epidemic
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RK
I think one of the authors has an interesting point about the different
expectations in different classes (etc.).

As a physics undergrad and grad student we were always permitted and
encouraged to work on our problem sets together. Most of my memories of
classes revolve around sitting in a room full of sleep deprived classmates
trying to finish our problems at about 2am.

In contrast, a friend of mine teaches physics at a university in the UK and is
prohibited by the university plagiarism code from letting his students
collaborate on homework. He thinks it's insane, but he has no choice. Even if
he explicitly allows his students to work together, they can still be found
guilty of cheating...

Different academic cultures I guess.

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drewcrawford
I think a lot of it has to do with a disagreement between what academia thinks
is acceptable and what students think is acceptable.

I realize this isn't a very popular viewpoint. It's much more socially
acceptable to say "kids today are under all this pressure" or "kids today are
lazy," depending on how much you want to blame them. The question is framed in
terms of how much the students are wrong, not whether they are wrong.

Academia has developed rules / guidelines for what is acceptable in their
circles. Who is to say this arrangement is fair / equitable / maximally
conducive to development of new ideas?

Throughout 90% of civilized history, we've operated under a much more
culturally lax attribution system than the one practiced by today's
professors. Why is the new system good and the old system bad?

And the workforce operates under a more lax set of attribution rules as well.
You can ask for help on a mailing list or grab some BSD source code at your
day job, but God help you if you do that in CS1 class.

To be clear, I think there are a lot of other causes to "cheating", which is
really an umbrella term. There are individuals who steal others work to the
point of actually not knowing how to do it. That does happen, but I'm not
convinced that kind of cheating happens any more than it ever has.

~~~
Lewisham
"And the workforce operates under a more lax set of attribution rules as well.
You can ask for help on a mailing list or grab some BSD source code at your
day job, but God help you if you do that in CS1 class."

But if you need grab that BSD code in CS1, you sure as hell won't understand
it. The other thing is that we can roughly equate "being caught for cheating"
as "being fired for incompetency" in the workplace, so while the workforce has
more lax attribution rules, the reason those attribution rules are there at
university is intended to prevent the firing later on.

Having TA'd undergrads in a first year programming course (with GameMaker for
a CS Game Design degree), the ones that hit trouble are the first ones that
run to the Internet for help. They then cut and paste the code, don't
understand it (they don't even realize that variables will need changing), and
their coursework grades will suffer considerably. Sadly, it's only then that
they come to the TA.

FWIW, my 2¢ says that the reason cheating is more rampant is because there are
a lot more students who just don't want to be there; they've arrived at
university because "that's what you do." They don't put effort into learning,
because they're not learning for any life value, as soon as they have the
degree certificate the major could have been anything.

That said, it could be worse in the US than it is now. When I lived in New
Zealand, the incidence of cheating amongst foreign (read: Asian) students was
a source of great alarm, the figures were pretty stratospheric. It was partly
cultural, as they were never taught that it was a big deal to not copy
verbatim someone else's work, and it was partly because they didn't care at
all, they'd been sent there to learn English and get a degree from an English
speaking school. How they reached that point was academic (pun unintended).

~~~
drewcrawford
> But if you need grab that BSD code in CS1, you sure as hell won't understand
> it.

That's my point; it's impossible to really "cheat". You can copy and paste
things off the internet, which violates the artificial rules of academia, and
everybody gets all uptight about it, but you still have to know enough to
google "declare array", which means you've mastered effectively all the actual
_concepts_ of the course. What's left is merely syntax. Which is rote memory.

I know how to declare an array in a dozen languages only because I do so
hourly. Testing this is trivia. Yet everybody does.

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furyg3
When professors/schools started getting lazy... so did the students.

I did a BA in Political Science in the States, and every single teacher was
very concerned about cheating... at the same time they were giving out
multiple choice tests/quizzes and assigning small paper assignments which were
similar for everyone.

I then did a study abroad program in Holland, where nobody was truly concerned
about cheating. Grades were based on group presentation of literature in
class, class discussion, an a big final paper who's topic you developed with
the teacher (and then presented). Final exams, if they even existed for the
course, were long-essay format.

You can't do that with every subject, but there's no reason why your students
should be _able_ to text quiz answers to each other or re-use another students
paper... there shouldn't _be_ any multi-choice quizzes and papers should be
individually developed by students with the teacher.

Needless to say I went back to NL for my next degree.

~~~
GeoffWozniak
I floated the idea of essay questions by the students for a 3rd year
programming languages course I taught at university (in North America). I was
just about run out of the classroom.

Since I was bring paid about $1250 CDN a month and was trying to finish my
PhD, I didn't press the matter. Still, it seemed as though students didn't
want what likely would have benefitted them. (Or perhaps they knew how to play
the current system to get passing grades...)

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onedognight
I cheated whenever it suited me in high school. It was a easy and I was lazy.

Then I went to a college that had an honour code that they took seriously
enough that we were allowed to take our tests in our dorm rooms or where and
whenever (within a reasonable period) we wanted. They were often timed, and or
had other specific rules, but it was up to us to follow them. No one checked.

This respectful attitude was such a breath of fresh air that I stopped
cheating immediately.

~~~
Ardit20
In the first instance I would say you were being unethical, in the second
stupid.

That is my opinion, and the experience you shared is yours only. I think, much
does depend on what you are expected to do and what you consider yourself is
right to do, but when it is so easy and there is no accountability at all,
considering that a first class degree is so much different from a third class
degree in the work place, why on earth would you not find the answers from the
book and take a day or even week.

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ecaron
When professors started thinking of education as a secondary role to research.
I'm positive if someone mapped the likelihood of cheating with a given
professor against that professor's workload, there would be a correlation too
heavy to miss.

Think about it. In the business world, people are far more likely to zone out
on presentations given by people who'd rather not be presenting - so why would
the classroom be any different?

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InclinedPlane
I think much of this stems from a conflict at the heart of the problems with
modern higher education.

From the one side is the perspective that school is a burden. That tests,
assignments, and homework are a trial to be endured until you are rewarded
with your certification of official recognized smart-ness. That the student-
teacher interaction is an adversarial relationship between authority figure
and child.

From another perspective comes the idea that school is an opportunity. That
tests, assignments, and homework represent the cobblestones on the road you
must travel to acquire knowledge. That the student-teacher interaction is a
cooperative relationship between mature, adult peers.

Increasing demand for degrees partly due to the rise in credentialism in the
work-force combined with prolonged immaturity (professional, personal,
financial) in young adults has combined to assault the quality of education
from both sides, leading toward the former perspective becoming increasingly
dominant. Through such forces the acquisition of knowledge transforms into the
plodding repetition of busywork and finally into little more than a monetary
transaction. At this point we are already well past the stage where the
average quality of a college education has degraded to shamefully dismal
levels, it is only now that the signals are becoming too obvious for us to
continue ignoring it.

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hugh3
Well, the first real university was the University of Bologna, founded in
1088. So I'm guessing somewhere around 1088.

~~~
mahmud
Al-Qarawiyyin University, since 859AD:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_madrasahs_in_con...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_madrasahs_in_continuous_operation)

No one was allowed to practice medicine unless they passed an exit exam, also
first university to take attendance.

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aspiringsensei
What I'd like to know is: when did asking students to perform tasks easy to
cheat on become ok?

I find cheating reprehensible and am a conscientious objector, but when
professors and teachers gave me busywork I came up with my own solution.

I didn't do it.

I got good grades in high school - never had less than a 3.4 or so at a well
regarded high school - but in some classes I simply wouldn't do 50% of the
work. Instead, I would go up to the teachers and say "I don't understand why
you're asking me to do this."

Most of the time...possibly as a function of small class sizes...they gave me
other assignments.

Students have to understand that a lot of teachers aren't sure what's best.
Good ones will acknowledge that. Great ones will let you just play around with
the material.

~~~
m-photonic
>Instead, I would go up to the teachers and say "I don't understand why you're
asking me to do this."

Man, I wish I had thought of that.

~~~
aspiringsensei
Seems pretty intuitive right? I wish I could take credit for it...my dad
suggested it.

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philk
I think if they forced students to actually work on meaningful problems they'd
get around a lot of this.

~~~
zbyszek
Indeed, but in my experience, students regard a problem as "meaningful" if and
only if it will appear in the exam. Were they forced to work in a manner
designed to stimulate their intellectual curiosity for the subject, many would
complain that the course was too hard and the teaching methods were unfair,
leading to fewer students enrolling for it. Low pass-rates and low take-up
look bad, and the faculty administration would scrap the course.

I am generalising wildly here, of course.

~~~
philk
That's true, but I think it's important to draw a line in the sand and say
"students don't get to dictate that their studies should be easy".[1]
Otherwise we end up with courses that teach little, are easily gamed, and
produce graduates with little value.

[1] And to be clear, I think universities as a whole should take up the fight.
When an institution keeps handing out degrees to anyone who pays tuition it
devalues the college overall.

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tmsh
Cheating goes away in large percentages when the environment promotes people
having faith in themselves.

It's harder to teach people to have faith in themselves in harder, sharper,
less forgiving economic times.

