CHIPS AND CHEATING
As long as there have been students, there have been cheaters.
In imperial China, academic dishonesty was so rampant that test administrators searched students for crib sheets, then separated them into isolated cubicles during civil service exams.
The punishment for cheating: death.
Repercussions today aren’t so severe, but academic dishonesty persists--and new technology, from the Internet to personal digital assistants, makes cheating easier than ever. Just this spring, 130 students at the University of Virginia were accused of plagiarizing a physics term paper from the Internet.
Cheat sheets, once written on the palm of the hand, now can be stored on programmable graphing calculators and watches. Palm hand-helds beam test answers between students in class. And Internet term paper mills offer hundreds of pre-written papers for sale.
“The formats change, but the basic problem is the same,” said Bernard Whitley, a psychology professor at Ball State University who studied cheating for the book “Academic Dishonesty: An Educator’s Guide.”
Although technology makes it easier to cheat, recent research suggests that gadgetry doesn’t necessarily encourage academic dishonesty. It’s simply easier for teachers and professors to catch those who do cheat.
Fighting technology with technology, instructors submit papers to anti-plagiarism software--sometimes before even reading them. One university went so far as to demand cell phone records to reveal who a student called before turning in a test.
Educators have caught hundreds of cheaters using such innovations, but they also have prematurely accused some students of academic dishonesty. Students’ work was once assumed to be their own, but now students must prove as a matter of course that what they turn in really is theirs.
“It’s not a situation of trust,” said Lawrence Hinman, director of the Values Institute at the University of San Diego. “Societies that don’t have that in the end can’t flourish. . . . It erodes the fabric of trust between student and teacher.”
Although a majority of high school students admit cheating at one time or another, technological advances such as the Internet have not had a significant effect on the overall number of cheaters. Of students who admitted to copying material from the Internet, only 6% had not previously plagiarized from written sources, according to a recent study conducted by Donald McCabe, a professor of organization management at Rutgers University.
When McCabe asked students at 25 private and public high schools around the country how they cheat, the responses were surprisingly sophisticated.
One student copied text from the Internet, then used a word processor’s auto summarize function to reword the material so anti-plagiarism software would not detect it. Another student, who had not completed an assignment, typed a document full of gibberish, then e-mailed it to the teacher. When the teacher said the document was illegible, the student blamed it on a corrupt file. Others said they stored cheat sheets on programmable calculators and watches and sent test answers via cell phones, pagers and PDAs.
“The variety of things that are available is just mind-boggling,” said McCabe, founder of the Center for Academic Integrity.
For the last five semesters, University of Virginia physics professor Louis Bloomfield accepted all homework assignments on the Internet. Students uploaded their work to a Web page, which everyone in the class could view.
But when a student told Bloomfield in April that some members of the class were plagiarizing final term papers posted online from past semesters, the professor wrote a computer program to look for similarities between papers.
Of about 1,850 papers, 130 were brought before the university’s honor committee for investigation. As of early August, 25 cases had been dismissed and one student had been expelled. An additional 94 remained under investigation and 10 awaited trial before the honor committee.
“It used to require a fair amount of work to plagiarize,” Bloomfield said. “It almost took the same amount of work it took to write the paper. . . . Now you can skip the whole writing process because you can get it in electronic form.”
Bloomfield, who has made his program available to other instructors at https://www.plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu, is not the first to create an anti-plagiarism program to catch students cheating. In 1990, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s student newspaper published an article about a computer engineering professor who used a program to detect duplicated computer code.
Similar programs have found widespread interest only within the last few years. The leading plagiarism detection service, Turnitin.com, now has more than 17,000 registered users, including the entire UC system, said its founder, John Barrie.
The service--which costs as much as $2,000 a year for high schools and as much as $8,000 for universities--compares student papers with millions of documents on the Web, digital books and every paper ever submitted to the site, looking for matching sequences that are more than eight words long.
Teachers electronically submit a student’s paper to https://www.turnitin.com when they are suspicious of its content. Some educators, however, ask students to routinely upload papers they turn in. The teacher receives an assessment of the work’s originality before even reading it.
Barrie estimated that about 30% of the papers analyzed are “less than original.” The program, he said, serves the same purpose as referees at sporting events and IRS auditors during tax season.
“It’s done for the benefit of all the students,” said Jennette Allen, president of Trojans for Integrity at the University of Southern California, who conceded that her work has never been checked for plagiarism. “Everyone wants to earn their grades fairly or should be earning their grades fairly.”
Although students at Georgetown University took an honor pledge before starting classes Wednesday, the university recently signed up with Turnitin.com.
Professors already have run searches on a few suspicious papers, but the university’s honor council is reviewing the service before recommending widespread use, said Sonia Jacobson, the council’s executive director.
Because all papers submitted to the site become part of its permanent database, issues of confidentiality and intellectual rights must be addressed, she said, adding that voluntary submissions by students might be more appropriate than mass searches.
“This is brand new to us, and we want to do it right,” Jacobson said. “We want it to ensure honesty, and for honest students, we don’t want it to be in detection mode so much as to use it as a deterrent. . . . It seems elaborate but at this point necessary.”
At Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, where honor students were caught two years ago sharing information on a history final via e-mail, Principal Damon Dragos said teachers regularly submit students’ text to Internet search engines to check for possible plagiarism.
“Technology is great, but with every new innovation there are going to be people who take advantage of it,” said Dragos, who took over as principal this summer and was not at the school when the cheating incident occurred.
There also are going to be people wrongly accused. A student at UCLA was suspected of cheating when she made a call on her cell phone at the end of an exam, said Joan Nelson, associate dean of students.
Although the student told the professor she called her sister for a ride home, she had to show university officials her cell phone bill to prove it.
Other technologies, such as computer programs that analyze student test answers for patterns of errors, could similarly accuse innocent students of cheating, said Whitley of Ball State. “You have to be careful using those sorts of things,” he said.
Ideally, educators would structure their classrooms to be proactive, rather than reactive, to cheating, said Hinman of the Values Institute.
Paper topics, for example, should be narrow and changed from year to year so students cannot buy one from an Internet term paper mill or copy a former student’s work. Project deadlines should be staggered throughout the term, with paper topics and outlines due before the final assignment.
Most important, Hinman said, teachers should know their students.
“In general, plagiarism and academic dishonesty thrive in a context of anonymity,” he said. “The best steps [to prevent cheating] are really just about fine teaching.”
But Nelson at UCLA said educators also must keep on top of the latest technology “because now they definitely have to be one step in front of the students.”
“I’m sure we haven’t seen the end of it yet,” she said.
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Times staff writer Christine Frey covers personal technology.
