One of the digital age education whipping boys has long been that the Internet makes student cheating easier. An essay by Greg Forster called “Universities Wimp Out on Fighting Cheaters” sets this matter straight. as Forster writes: the technology edge is really for the good guys. This is the crux of it:
Nowadays, everyone who’s concerned about academia talks incessantly about how computers and the Internet have made plagiarism so much easier. But not a lot of people are willing to talk (in public, at least) about the real source of the problem.
Let’s be clear: computers and the Internet aren’t the problem. They’re a big net gain for the fight against cheating. They do make the act of plagiarism easier, in the sense that there’s a wider array of things available for copying, and it’s less work to hit “cut” and then “paste” than it is to copy things out by hand. But computers also make catching plagiarists easier — and the technological edge for the good guys is a lot bigger.
There are some really impressive computer programs that will take your students’ essays one by one and search the web for similar text. Search engine technology is so powerful these days that it does an excellent job of rooting out plagiarism. You can’t even fool the machine by changing some of the words around — it can identify text that’s similar but not identical, allowing the teacher to compare the two and judge whether plagiarism has occurred.
If you wanted to change the words around enough to escape detection entirely, you’d have to essentially rewrite the paper. In other words, you’d end up doing the assignment honestly in spite of yourself.
Comments
@ 09:33
Comments are closed at the original site, so I’ll comment here.
First, technological fixes (Turn-it-in, etc.), only allow you to catch the laziest cheaters, and those who do not have much money. Many students who are well-off can now appeal to a market that allows them to outsource their work, all the way through to a doctoral dissertation at the extreme end. Cutting and pasting, while annoying, is really the least concerning sort of plagiarism going on, though turning a blind eye to it may be the nose of the camel.
Second, the author seems to be complaining that someone won’t do his job for him. While I understand that many universities would rather ignore cheating or handle it “softly,” I’ve had support in the cases where I have prosecuted to expulsion. If you say that your are going to be tough in your syllabus, you owe it to the non-cheating students to actually do what you say you are going to do. Moreover, you owe it to your fellow faculty. This is a matter of doing your job well, and if your university or chair doesn’t support you, you should still do the right thing.
In several of cases, I have had a student cheat who had gotten off with warnings from two or three other faculty in my department. In a graduate program, we had students who had cheated and had minor punishments several times in a row. There entire cohort knew of this and publicly complained that the faculty was cheapening the value of their degree and their classroom experience by letting this go on. Faculty who convince themselves they are being merciful are in most cases (there are exceptions to every rule), just rewarding and reinforcing students’ beliefs that all is fair in love and grades.
The evaluation process is messed up. As of next semester, I am no longer grading individual assignments. Students will get a grade at the end of the semester, and that’s that.