Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Cheating with Technology is Not Cheating?!

Plagiarism is a rampant problem on campuses and has been discussed in depth at mine. I was on a committee that discussed it, and I have taught quite a few instruction sessions on plagiarism.

So I found this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education particularly interesting. Apparently, students don't consider it cheating if they use technological methods, such as a graphing calculator with equations stored on it.

It's also interesting that professors often overlook it. It does make sense that people who cheat will ultimately do poorly on tests, but still. Really? What has happened to higher education?

And lastly, I think a call to standardize punishment for cheating is in order. My campus has an honor code and a system of enforcement. However, it doesn't get at the different types of plagiarism - unintentional, lesser plagiarism, full-blown plagiarism, etc - so professors often handle it in class and don't report it. This also results in inconsistencies across courses and frequent cheaters not getting reprimanded (well, I'd assume that latter happens, but I haven't heard of any situations).

Interesting stuff.

1 comment:

Matt Wade said...

I don't want to sound mean but it seems like a problem the teachers started. When students cheat it's the teachers' job to find out and deal with it, but It's greatly demoralizing to the students who work hard and don't cheat when the cheaters get away with it. It's sorta like well why bother when you can just cheat. I don't know that's just the way I see it sometimes.