What we're seeing now is a bit of an arms race between cheaters and teachers. Why don't teachers "cheat" a bit themselves?
Namely, why don't universities extend the statue of limitations on academic misconduct to several years, or even decades? Collect all student assignments in a database and routinely re-run them through the most up-to-date cheater-catching software available. Anyone who gets flagged, even years after graduation, gets their degree revoked if they don't make an adequate defence to the university.
If this is done, students don't just have to fool teachers and their tools at the time they take the course, but all tools developed for years afterwards. Having cheated would become like having a sword of damocles hanging over your head. If you could pour years of tuition and "hard work" into a degree and establish yourself in a profession only to have it all ripped away years later because you cheated, how many would still cheat?
With methods like this, the take-home essay could remain a part of education.
If this seems too objectionable, there are still labour intensive ways to work around the problem. e.g. Oral exams. You can assign take-home essays and then have the prof or TA's interview students about the essay. If they can't answer some basic questions about their own essay and some of the sources it uses, that's a fail.
In a sense, that is what happened in Germany in the last 20 years or so, when people looked into the doctoral titles of politicians.
Turns out: it did not change anything. Even in cases where the universities revoked the titles, politicians were hardly ever affected at all. Some became our equivalent to governors weeks after their cheating was unveiled.
I wouldn't say it changed nothing. Take the Guttenberg incidence for example. But more often it doesn't lead to actual repercusions, I agree on that with you.
>Collect all student assignments in a database and routinely re-run them through the most up-to-date cheater-catching software available. Anyone who gets flagged, even years after graduation, gets their degree revoked if they don't make an adequate defence to the university.
So if some new overhyped plagiarism detection system spuriously decides that I cheated years ago and I've long since thrown away any notes that might show otherwise, I lose my degree? I don't see how that's a good idea.
Once you have a number of years of actual job experience, do people still care whether you have a degree? (And do people really even verify somehow whether you have that degree in the first place?)
Unfortunately, cheat detecting systems create false positives sometimes. I would not like to increase the odds of getting falsely flagged for cheating when run against multiple cheat-detecting systems when you no longer have a relationship with the professor and he doesn't remember you.
Namely, why don't universities extend the statue of limitations on academic misconduct to several years, or even decades? Collect all student assignments in a database and routinely re-run them through the most up-to-date cheater-catching software available. Anyone who gets flagged, even years after graduation, gets their degree revoked if they don't make an adequate defence to the university.
If this is done, students don't just have to fool teachers and their tools at the time they take the course, but all tools developed for years afterwards. Having cheated would become like having a sword of damocles hanging over your head. If you could pour years of tuition and "hard work" into a degree and establish yourself in a profession only to have it all ripped away years later because you cheated, how many would still cheat?
With methods like this, the take-home essay could remain a part of education.
If this seems too objectionable, there are still labour intensive ways to work around the problem. e.g. Oral exams. You can assign take-home essays and then have the prof or TA's interview students about the essay. If they can't answer some basic questions about their own essay and some of the sources it uses, that's a fail.