<p>Is cheating really as rampant as articles make it sound?</p>
<p>I read the article today and thought it was very timely.
The short answer is yes, there is a lot of cheating. The long answer is students today do not consider sharing homework and lifting a few sentences from the internet cheating. With the information age the lines have become less clear, at least in the eyes of some. The universities seem to be pretty clear on what they feel is ‘cheating’.</p>
<p>The article is fascinating. Thanks for posting.</p>
<p>It says: </p>
<p>"ORLANDO, Fla. The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central Florida.</p>
<p>The 228 computers that students use are recessed into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen using, say, a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test later is easy to spot.</p>
<p>Scratch paper is allowed but it is stamped with the date and must be turned in later.</p>
<p>When a proctor sees something suspicious, he records the students real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for evidence…</p>
<p>As the eternal temptation of students to cheat has gone high-tech not just on exams, but also by cutting and pasting from the Internet and sharing of homework online like music files educators have responded with their own efforts to crack down.</p>
<p>This summer, as incoming freshmen fill out forms to select roommates and courses, some colleges Duke and Bowdoin among them are also requiring them to complete online tutorials about plagiarism before they can enroll.</p>
<p>Anti-plagiarism services requiring students to submit papers to be vetted for copying is a booming business. Fifty-five percent of colleges and universities now use such a service, according to the Campus Computing Survey…"</p>
<p>While this may seem to be unacceptable on the students’ part, I sympathize with them. Some curricula are simply unreasonably difficult at certain schools; engineering in particular. You would think that some schools would get the message when you have anti-suicide fences being erected during midterms and finals, but they don’t.</p>
<p>I don’t remember seeing ANYONE cheat on a midterm, final or even a quiz in college. Not in 3 years here.</p>
<p>Cheating on assignments definitely happens–but not really that frequently. I’ve found that most people want to understand the subject. </p>
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<p>This is pathetic. You choose your school. You choose your path/major. You choose your classes. IMO most curricula have become much easier, and grade inflation more rampant. If someone thinks otherwise, they should take less classes. Or get help from classmates/TA’s/professors. Or utilize the endless academic resources most colleges offer. Or find a different school. Or find a different track. Or leave college.</p>
<p>if you’re going to cheat, don’t get caught. the end.</p>
<p>There are levels of cheating that are honestly considered acceptable by the majority of college students. Most people would have a problem with copying off of another students test, but when a friend of mine got a TA to tell them what one of the questions on the test was going to be about you bet I specifically studied that question. Was that cheating? Yeah, probably. Do I feel bad, and do I think anyone would have done differently? No and hardly anyone.</p>
<p>Oh, and it’d be great if we’d start calling plagiarism what it actually is. People cite EVERYTHING now, and it’s pointless and stupid. If something is in multiple reference works you DON’T need to cite it. It’s a waste of time and space. When I was a UTA and grading papers I swear nearly every person would cite the densities of elements. It’s the density of an element! You don’t have to cite that!</p>
<p>“if you’re going to cheat, don’t get caught. the end”</p>
<p>very very true.</p>
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<p>Well if you would have seen them, they probably wouldn’t be very good at cheating.</p>
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Fear is the great motivator. Most students would rather do that than be expelled for not citing something they thought they didn’t need to cite.</p>
<p>If someone seriously plagiarizes (copies entire sections from another work or even an entire paper) then yeah, expel them. This whole zero-tolerance BS is just professors being too lazy and weak-kneed to actually sit down and look at occurrences on a case-by-case basis, so they hide behind treating every instance the exact same way regardless of severity. It’s absolute crap.</p>
<p>Quote:
If something is in multiple reference works you DON’T need to cite it. It’s a waste of time and space. When I was a UTA and grading papers I swear nearly every person would cite the densities of elements. It’s the density of an element! You don’t have to cite that!</p>
<p>That’s because if we dont we run the risk of being accused of plagiarism. It is a waste of time, blame the teachers who tell students they have to cite everything that isn’t common knowledge.</p>
<p>decline of ethics in our country’s students is just setting up our own failure in the future. Every empire in the past that has crumbled have shared 3 common points that led to their demise:</p>
<ol>
<li>ethical and moral decline</li>
<li>Great interest in atheletics and sports (■■■ you hockey moms. and every past empire leaves one physical thing - a stadium)</li>
<li>decline in work ethic</li>
</ol>
<p>wait, the US shares these too…</p>
<p>gg america</p>
<p>You can’t cheat your way through an engineering major. Sooner or later your lack of understanding the material will catch up with you.</p>
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<p>Perhaps you misinterpreted my statement. I in no way support cheating. But I do notice the fact that some schools refuse to change their curriculum no matter how much tension is caused within the students, which eventually leads to cheating. </p>
<p>Also…curricula have gotten much easier? I would like to know where and how. I would think it would be the opposite, especially in science and engineering. For example, the sheer amount of information many of those majors have to take in rises every succeeding decade or so. When Isaac Newton was in college, the only Math requirement was 7 books of Euclid, something that a current middle/high school student would go through. Up until the 1800’s, becoming a master of many scientific fields was not so far-fetched.</p>
<p>While I can’t vouch as an engineering major, you should go check out the Engineering forum on this site. Horror stories detailing students scoring an 8/40 on a final, yet passing with an A due to a relative lack of knowledge.</p>
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<p>I see students cheat all the time – even on finals. All of the cases the students were either Indian or Chinese nationals. Some professors care, some don’t, because it’s very hard to convict someone of cheating.</p>
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<p>At every institution where I have taught, the professor does not determine guilt or decide on the punishment. At my current institution, as at so many others, those are decided by an honor council comprised principally of students. When a professor suspects academic dishonesty, he or she is required to report it to the honor council. After that, the professor is simply a witness. Finally, based on my experience, the assertion that all plagiarism cases are treated exactly the same is—how do I say this?—absolute crap.</p>
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What you should also take note is that homeworks/problem sets in engineering, you can work together. Work together vs. cheating. This working together eases the difficulty, but working together also requires time and commitment (vs. cheating).</p>
<p>“Some curricula are simply unreasonably difficult at certain schools; engineering in particular.”</p>
<p>Sure…make the curriculum easier so anyone who wants to can become an engineer. So what if bridges fall down and prosthetic limbs don’t work because the engineers who helped design them were incompetent.</p>
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I had a professor last semester who said we could work together on problem sets.</p>
<p>However, if the work looked too similar to someone else’s, you were given a zero on the assignment. For crying out loud- it’s mechanics! In some situations there’s only going to be one way to solve the problem, so of course the work will look similar!</p>
<p>Fortunately, I never got a 0. He gave out at least 2 dozen (anyone who got 2 was sent to the academic integrity board; something like 8 students were…). I know people who got 0’s that shouldn’t have, yet people who blindly copied other people’s hw weren’t caught.</p>
<p>It was the biggest load of bs ever. We shouldn’t have always felt so nervous for simply working with others…</p>