12 ms·

Cheating and the Honor System

93 points by jtbigwoo 16y ago

famousactress 16y ago
A bit of an aside, but my wife spent the last 6 years teaching high school english and I was surprised to find that there's a number of interesting advancements in the anti-cheating industry. There are a number of anti-plagiarism services that she (and loads of other English teachers apparently) would submit students papers to. The papers are compared to other ones in the database and reports are popped out for ones that match. I appreciated the irony, since it's easy to argue that the internet has made it easier to cheat in the first place.
- mithaler 16y ago
  Yes, these were in use back when I was in high school (I graduated in 2005); I remember I wrote a paper in a history class about Winston Churchill, and it amusingly flagged the first sentence of it because it was just the basic biographical intro that's undoubtedly common to nearly any paper about him: "Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born XXX..." Thankfully it only marks parts of the paper, and the teacher was smart enough to realize it wasn't a real problem. Sadly though, these provide no defense against the multitude of shady for-profit services that write papers for hire that anyone can find by Googling "term paper".
  - famousactress 16y ago
    But, the paper would have to be original.. Can you really get an original paper written at a price that's at least conceivable for a high school student to pay? Nuts. ...and yeah, the results of the plagiarism service were a bit soft, but I think it would notice and annotate if things were in quotations, or likely to be common enough to not be an issue. In fact, I think her department had a general 'score' that they'd considered serious enough to consider cheating, and a sentence or two lifted from the interwebs would get you a marked down grade.
    - Retric 16y ago
      It's vary easy to accidentally lift a sentence or idea if you do enough research and write something of length. Dropping a full grade for a short essay is reasonable but if you handing in 60+ pages it's rather harsh IMO.
      - dvdhsu 16y ago
        High school essays are generally not 60 pages.
      - famousactress 16y ago
        Oh yeah, sorry I should have been more specific.. for one, the papers are much shorter than that (this is high school).. also, when I said their grade was marked down, I just meant that they were penalized.. I don't know by how much.
    - bermanoid 16y ago
      Can you really get an original paper written at a price that's at least conceivable for a high school student to pay? It might be difficult, but that's not even the whole problem. Worse is that parents, who do have the money, will sometimes fund their students efforts to cheat (or even do it behind their backs). I've spent a long time as a tutor (SAT, GRE, subject tests, and most of the math/science courses at high school and college level) in a relatively affluent town, and I've been approached on a few occasions by parents that wanted me to help their kids cheat in various ways (including asking me to pose as their student and take the SAT for them, write college essays, do take home tests and homework assignments, etc.). It's by no means common; I've had hundreds of students and only a small handful of requests like this. But it does happen - never underestimate what some rich parents will do to buy their children success in spite of academic laziness!
    - Dove 16y ago
      Can you really get an original paper written at a price that's at least conceivable for a high school student to pay? Nuts. Oh, absolutely. I see 400-level programming and engineering homework assignments crop up on vworker from time to time; they go for about $15. And copywriting is way cheaper than that. High school english papers are what, five paragraphs? People pay about $1.50 for comparable web copy on Mechanical Turk.
  - deleted 16y ago
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    - gamble 16y ago
      No reasonable person would require a citation for an easily verified, widely-known, uncontroversial fact like Churchill's birthday. You would need citations for every sentence if that was the standard.
yardie 16y ago
I came to this conclusion very late in the game. After working my ass off for 4+ years I realized the university honor code is basically toothless. Ohh, it will tell you a great story about all the things the university could do to you. But in the end it's not enforced or enforced so lightly that they shouldn't have bothered at all. It used to be that cheating was just about the worst thing you could do in college and the university went through great pains to remind you of that. Robbery, murder?! that's a local police matter. Cheat, and we'll keelhaul you on the quad.
- danielford 16y ago
  Keep in mind that when cheaters are discovered, we're required to maintain confidentiality. I've been tangentially involved in one situation where the professor went full out to give the student a failing grade and get her transcripts marked. I've also seen someone in my cohort get kicked out of the graduate school for doing it on the qualifying exam. On the other hand, I've also been involved in two situations where the individuals received a slap on the wrist. So your results may vary.
- mithaler 16y ago
  For what it's worth, at my college it was taken pretty seriously, and professors absolutely did have the power to fail students for it. The About page sadly doesn't say where he teaches beyond "Giant Public University in the South", which is unfortunate because, as cool as this blog may be, I would never want to send any of my hypothetical future children there.
ejames 16y ago
I can't say that I find this particular blog post that interesting. "Teacher applies firm standards, which a spineless administration then undermines" is a well-worn subject if you have spent time reading about education, and this particular post is not a strong introduction if you haven't. The site design, on the other hand, will probably stick with me for a while: a background theme of a Soviet-style propaganda poster where the beaming People's Workers triumphantly brandish gin and tacos. It's distracting and the text is hard to read, but I will probably never forget this site's URL. Sometimes there's value in picking something out of left field and just running with it.
- bdhe 16y ago
  > I can't say that I find this particular blog post that interesting. "Teacher applies firm standards, which a spineless administration then undermines" is a well-worn subject if you have spent time reading about education, and this particular post is not a strong introduction if you haven't. I find this subject very interesting. Could you point me to some, in your opinion, strong introductions?
  - gyardley 16y ago
    'The Five-Year Party' by Craig Brandon is a decent, well-written book, by a former professor at Keene State University in New Hampshire.
  - ejames 16y ago
    I'll have to go back through my reading list to see what I recommend - I've been following education issues to some extent for a long time, long enough that I remember reading better articles but not where I found them. It's a bit much for me to write up on my coffee break, but I'll try and get back to this. Please shoot me an email (in my profile) if I forget to write it up.
    - ejames 16y ago
      There's basically three categories where this problem shows up: grade inflation, cheating, and discipline. Grade inflation is most relevant to colleges, discipline only matters for levels of schooling with mandatory attendance, and cheating cuts across all levels. However, the same issue is in common: In theory, there are standards applied to students, and it is an important priority to distinguish between students who meet the standards and students who don't. In practice, the administration does not necessarily care about applying the standards rigorously. I think the following two articles are a good introduction to grade inflation as a topic: "Can Untenured Faculty Members Stop Grade Inflation?" - Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Untenured-Faculty-Members/45518/ http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Untenured-Faculty-Members/4... "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" - The Atlantic Monthly, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-basement-of-the-ivory-tower/6810/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-b... It can also be useful to read up on business schools, because a business major is not an "academic" subject; more than any other major, the students are looking explicitly for a credential that boosts their income, and don't care about the subject material. The book "Ahead of the Curve" (http://www.amazon.com/Ahead-Curve-Harvard-Business-School/dp/B001RNOPLY/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302987751&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.com/Ahead-Curve-Harvard-Business-School/dp...) is a well-written appraisal of the Harvard B-School and includes chapters specifically on both grade inflation and cheating. Going through these publications and/or following the notes and recommended reading therein can lead to more involved reading on the topic. Articles in the Atlantic Monthly are always a good starting point. The fundamental issue: If an institution of learning punishes students for cheating, or failing classes, or behaving badly, then somebody, somewhere must have both the authority to do so and the goal of exercising said authority. But often, nobody wants to be that person, or the authority is conflicted, or the goal is given less priority than the goal of making money/quota.
gyardley 16y ago
Most universities in America are currently structured so that the students who want to learn can learn, and the students who don't want to learn can coast along between parties for four years. Giving low grades, failing students, assigning a lot of mandatory homework, making the minimum that's required remotely challenging, giving students more than a slap on the wrist for any infraction -- all of that drives away the coasting students, and that's bad for enrollment. If this professor continues to fuss over this, all he's going to do is botch his chance at tenure.
bdhe 16y ago
This is just an anecdote, but I've heard that even if some professors strongly suspect cheating, since the system involves so much red tape and leaves the professor with little power, it is simply not worth pursuing it and ending up losing upwards of half a day. This means, professors, whose free time is already perilously low have all the incentives in the world not to pursue students who cheat, which only makes it that much easier for them to get away with it.
bhickey 16y ago
As a teaching assistant I occasionally came across cheaters. Dealing with them can be a very painful process. In one case students were plagiarizing homework assignments. The instructor invited the accused into his office and presented them with the evidence. He gave them the option of withdrawing from the course or going before a dean. They elected to withdraw. There was some ugly personal fallout from this incident.
pbjorklund 16y ago
Cheating leads to a F, what the heck is that about? At my university, in Sweden, cheating means suspension (that includes plagiarism) for up to 10 weeks. Just last week 5 different cases got 8 weeks each..
- RK 16y ago
  Wouldn't suspension lead to failing as well? (assuming you're not allowed to withdraw from your courses) I believe where I did my bachelor's, the standard punishment for willful cheating was failing the course, one semester's suspension, and a permanent note in your academic record.
  - Fargren 16y ago
    Not necessarily. At my college, attendace is not required for passing. As long as you do well in all your exams and pass all practical your assignements (two or three each quarter), you are ok. So suspension would bw tough but not and automatic fail. That said, at my college cheating means you are probably expelled, and I'm not aware of suspension as a punishment for anything.
robobenjie 16y ago
My school (Stanford) the teachers were required to leave the classroom during tests and we were supposed to use the honor system. I never cheated and I don't know anyone who did. Maybe his sarcastic comment at the end has more truth in it than he meant. People tend to live up to expectations. If you prevent cheating by having a person who's job it is to catch you then you feel like if you don't get caught you have won. On the other hand if you are expected not to cheat because it is not what a honorable person does, then if you cheat it is because you have failed.
- pingswept 16y ago
  I was a TA at your school (Stanford). I like that policy, but I also witnessed cheating firsthand. Specifically, I graded a take-home midterm exam where 3 students handed in the same bizarrely wrong answer. The students received penalties on that test, but no other disciplinary action was taken. This was in the mechanical engineering department in a graduate level mechatronics course (that I suspect you've taken). If I were making the rules, those students would be out of the university the same day. There is no shortage of smart people who would love to attend Stanford, especially the engineering school. I have no idea why enforcement is so disgracefully lax. In the electrical engineering department, I regularly had classmates ask me if we could "compare answers" on homework problem sets. Sometimes (rarely), this was for a genuine goal of education-- if your answer is wrong, you want to know that so you can figure out the right answer. More often, it was clueless people trying to collect answers from multiple other people. Drove me up the wall.
  - Confusion 16y ago
    In my experience (another school, another country), it was usually allowed to take a take-home exam together with others. The understanding was that the exams are sufficiently hard, that students smart enough to pass do not allow others to freeload and that working together with other smart students teaches important skills in addition to a better understanding of the subject. The same goes for homework problem sets: me and two others would usually first solve them ourselves to the best of our ability and then compare answers, which was always an educational experience; the more so when no one had successfully solved the problem on their own or when it took someone a while to convince the other two their (identical) solutions were wrong.
Jd 16y ago
Fairly useless unless you know the institution in question, how widespread the problem is, and whether or not it has been worsening. My personal observation is that many of the structure in question is oriented specifically towards jocks who are recruited for their brawn and not brains and are expected to spend much more time building muscle than exercising their noggins. Given that my personal observation is limited to an ivy league institution, I'd imagine this would be all the more so at a large public institution in the American South, in which sports are probably considered more important than book smarts. Moreover, many of the recruits (coming from impoverished inner-city schools where they are moved from grade to grade regardless of their performance) are likely completely incapable of performing basic algebra, let alone the sort of math they would be expected to do in standard university level courses. In other words, this sort of behavior is entirely expected given the nature of these institutions and probably is a fixture in them, likely neither worsening nor improving.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  In my experience, football players usually get special incompletes. Basically, what happens is that if they are in danger of failing a class, the coach demands that they do a lot of practices during the game. They then get an incomplete and get to retake the course.
_delirium 16y ago
I've noticed less bureaucratic outcomes in the cases I've observed, but that might be good luck. If it's especially blatant, such as a student turning in an essay that is on the internet, the informal procedure is that the professor says, "this essay was clearly on the internet, you didn't write it, you get an F on it". The student could insist on a formal process (which is probably required), but the outcome of a formal process could result in them being suspended or expelled entirely, so if the evidence is solid, is probably not a good gamble. Admittedly a bit trickier when it isn't a piece of paper like that. Personally it doesn't bother me that much, because the problems I'm worried about fixing in education have more to do with learning than the value of degrees. If people who want to learn aren't supported as well as they could be, or are even actively discouraged/demotivated, then that's a big problem and something teachers/lecturers/professors need to worry about. If people who never wanted to learn are getting degrees they don't deserve, meh, I guess that's bad, but we pay administrators to worry about PR things like the university's image, so let them come up with a policy to deal with it (or fix admissions to let in fewer such students). There's even a few cases of opinionated smart kids cheating because they don't find the assignments helpful, in which case I don't even really care about them doing so (and maybe even care more about whether we can fix the assignments instead), though admittedly that isn't the common case.
hammock 16y ago
What does this rant have to do with the honor system? I don't appreciate the author throwing mud at a great self-governing system used in many schools by invoking its name when it's not even relevant here.
orky56 16y ago
For better or worse, this is the same of type of action schools take on major offenses. In universities, first possession of marijuana or underage drinking is dealt with a warning and perhaps community service. In the real world, there are real consequences for these actions as well as plagiarism. I guess college tuition is really just an insurance policy for crimes?
- icegreentea 16y ago
  To some extent, that's an acknowledgement to the reality that colleges and universities aren't just a place/time to learn, but also be exposed to new things, and 'trying shit out'. Basically, universities are this bizarre bubble between childhood and the 'real world', where bizarre halfway rules apply. I'm pretty sure it's been seen that way for quite a while. It's also pragmatic. If you handed out 'real' punishment to everyone, they would be so brain boggling drowned in paperwork (this is also ignoring the serious drop in enrollment). Honestly, with drinking and drugs, the universities' goal is really to a) make sure no one gets hurt on campus and b) make sure they never actually have to punish anyone. The hope is that the 'warning' scares the kids off enough so they go about their drinking and doping in a smarter way so they hopefully won't be caught again. And for what it's worth (this completely depends on location I guess... at least here in Waterloo), if you're caught underage drinking, or smoking pot pretty much anywhere by anyone who isn't a police officer, you're likely to just have your stuff confiscated, a stern talking to, and kicked out on the threat of calling the popos. It's just way easier that way for everyone.
- redthrowaway 16y ago
  "Major offenses...first possession of marijuana or underage drinking..." That's what qualifies as major? I don't give a damn if my classmates drink and blaze; I do care if they cheat and implicitly lower the value of my degree in the process. Then again, nobody at my school cares about liquor or pot, so I guess it's hard to compare it to schools that view either as an actual issue.
  - orky56 16y ago
    I'm just saying from an objective, legal perspective. Some of these universities are public so you would think they would more strongly enforce the law. When you're really young, you get a lot of lenience based on your age. In college, I'm not really sure why you would get an excuse? If it's about finding yourself, then it's just temporary and artificial. Whatever you thought you knew no longer applies once the "rules" change. /rant
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tom_b 16y ago
For another point of view, as long as we are slinging ancedotes . . . My wife teaches a large, but graduate level, seminar. Every semester, a small number of students are caught blatantly plagiarizing sources in papers. These cases are required to be handed over to a student-staffed and managed honor court. In every case that has been handed over to them, the student-staffed and managed honor court has failed the student.
- lutorm 16y ago
  Another anecdote: my wife's teaching a class at MIT now, and they have problems with homeworks being basically copied from the MIT OpenCourseWare web site, which apparently contains the solution to pretty much any problem given in any of the previous years' classes. I'm actually genuinely troubled by what to think of this unfortunate intersection between unprecedented access to information and requiring students to do work beyond Googling...
- T-hawk 16y ago
  I also went to a college with a student-adjudicated honor system. It really does work, because the students actually have the better incentive for applying discipline. They're the ones that will be competing with the scoundrels for class ranking and job hiring. But what's the incentive for the administration to cost itself a tuition payer? Of course, it is possible for the honor court to go too far and be prejudiced against peer students out of sheer competitiveness, but it would seem that happens rarely enough to make it the lesser of evils if a factor at all.
michaelochurch 16y ago
The penalty for cheating should be: you fail the course in which you cheated and withdraw from all others. You're immediately suspended. You can't get back into the college until you've logged 12 months of gainful employment in "the real world". (Military service counts.) Yes, the real world. Where you can do nothing wrong and get fired for looking at a powerful person the wrong way, and where people actually struggle. Ok, so get out there and have that experience. Now you know (a) that you're very privileged, as a college student, and (b) you have no right to complain about the unfairness of an 'F' for cheating; it's not unfair. Once you've learned that lesson, welcome back but don't fucking do it again.
- elechi 16y ago
  Privileged? Ha. What a odd way of putting it. In what way is going to school a privilege? It's almost expected for everyone to go to a college/university nowadays. In what way is a college student privileged? If you get caught cheating in a class, fail him or her in THAT CLASS. Mention it in their academic report, so that other teachers in the university are aware, and they the teachers themselves can decide whether or not they want that particular individual in their classroom.
  - Dove 16y ago
    A college student is privileged in that they have the free time to learn, all day every day. They may not realize how special this is until they decide, at thirty while supporting a family, that they want another degree -- and they do it via night classes, working eight hours a day and studying four, and it takes a decade.
    - elechi 16y ago
      I don't want to get too pedantic, and this may be beginning to get off-topic, and for that I apologize. But your example still isn't one of a privilege. What your example shows is that it is easier to concentrate on one thing instead of two or three things. Is time really free if you're choosing to just concentrate on one thing? Joke all we want that being a student is a job, but in most ways it is a job. Maybe not as strict as one, but if you're doing it properly, it should be as consuming as one.
gerner 16y ago
I was on one of these academic integrity hearing boards as a student representative at Cornell. In my experience the board was strongly in favor of failing students outright and adding a notation to their academic record. It's not as bad as expelling them from the university. But it's not like it was some softball slap on the wrist either. And the cases we were presiding over were not simple. We had a case where a student started a test early, as the exams were being handed out, but before everyone got a copy, and we took that as a serious violation of academic integrity (this student was not completely failed out of the course.) Our objective was not at all to "mildly scare the students until they Learn Their Lesson and then let them off the hook."
Tangaroa 16y ago
I had a professor who told the class to cheat. He justified it by saying that anyone in the real world today can go online and get help for any problem they have. Another unspoken reason is that he would not cover the material he would test us on, which was not in the book either, so allowing cheating would cut down on student complaints and let him do less work. I complained about it and nothing happened since he was tenured and close to retiring. One might say he already did.
atacrawl 16y ago
At my school, before every test and on every major assignment, each student had to write out the school's written Honor Code and then sign it, serving as a contract through which they could nail you to the wall if you got caught cheating.
scott_s 16y ago
Some universities have very strict punishments for cheating - sometimes including kicking students out of the school, permanently. Having due process in place in order to ensure that those punishments are meted out fairly is a good thing.
WalterBright 16y ago
At Caltech, we had an honor system. Proctoring of exams was not allowed. Most exams were take home, even though they had strict time limits (normally 3 hours). Once you opened the test, you had 3 hours to finish it, but since you were in your dorm room it was entirely and deliberately left up to your integrity. Tests were typically open book and open note. Some other characteristics: 1. Professors were not allowed to take attendance or base any part of the grade on attendance. 2. Homework was graded, but that grade had no influence on the course grade. Students were encouraged to use any resource, collaberation, etc., to understand and do the homework correctly. 3. Grades were based on exam scores. Policy was that if you could pass the exams, you got credit for the course even if you never showed up for class. In essence, the university treated us like adults. They provided an opportunity to get a first class education, and if you didn't take full advantage of that, that was your problem. The students liked this state of affairs immensely, and if you did cheat (and thereby threaten the honor system) you would be ostracized. Peer pressure can be extremely effective. I don't know anyone who cheated. For example, I know one student who, 1 hour into a 3 hour exam, fell asleep. He woke up a couple hours later, and finished the exam anyway. But he told the professor what had happened, and the professor was very sorry but he had to fail the student. The student was not angry about this, he blamed himself and took responsibility.
- mentat 16y ago
  "In essence, the university treated us like adults." The funny thing is that most adults aren't "treated like adults" if your intention is to compare this with working conditions. There are very few jobs that don't care about attendance at all and only care if you get the project done right and on time. I'm not saying it should be this way but rather just that it is. It could be because most jobs don't employ everyone who is of the same high quality of character as you relate.
nathanb 16y ago
FWIW, Google spelunking reveals this university to be the University of Georgia, whose policies I would have expected to be better than that. However, public state schools do have to deal with a lot of pressure from the state to not expel taxpayers and stuff like that, which is unfortunate and wrong.
ubertaco 16y ago
Allow me to give the other side of such a story. When I was 16, I took English 101 at a local college (joint enrollment, wanted to get it out of the way for my college undergraduate degree). While there, I was, to my surprise, the top of my class. My grade average was 102 (the professor gave a maximum of 105 on each paper) and I'd had two papers read in class as exemplary. Unfortunately, my professor was also staunchly politically-polarized, and would frequently spark political debates in class and use absurd examples for things that did not need to be politicized ("when citing a credible source, such as CBS, use this format. Non-credible sources, such as Fox News, or White House press releases [George W Bush was sitting president at the time] will not be accepted."). In one such discussion, the professor took a very difficult-to-support stance (I do not recall the substance now; this was in 2006) with which I and most of the class disagreed. However, as often happens in classroom settings, I wound up as unofficial "spokesman" for the general class consensus. The next assignment was the final paper, worth ~25% of my grade. I was given an F due to plagarism. When asked for proof, the professor highlighted a few sentence fragments here and there as "copied directly" (without stating the source from which these fragments were allegedly copied) and full paragraphs as "too far above [my] ability to be [my] original work." Her reasoning was that, on the whole, my paper "sounded more like a seasoned journalist than a mere college pre-freshman," so it was obviously plagarized despite any substantial lack of proof. Because there was no system of appeals, the F stood, and my overall grade for the class dropped to a B. Simply because the professor disliked my political stance.
- deleted 16y ago
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- ohashi 16y ago
  I had a similar situation at grad school. I turned in a proposal (what ultimately was my thesis proposal). I had created my own model and it was described as such in the text. I got accused of plagiarizing my own model because I didn't cite a source. The comment was 'it is as if you are claiming to have invented it yourself.' approximately. The next line of feedback was something to the tune of 'This is what some might consider plagiarism in a university setting.' I got 1 point above passing for the paper. I went to the professor and told her she clearly didn't even read my proposal because it anyone who actually read it would have read that it WAS my own model. Being accused of plagiarism and not reporting it to anyone was a fun ordeal. There was no consequences because it wasn't reported but I have my dignity and fuck you for accusing me of plagiarism. I went to the head of the program who said he basically didn't care, the professor told him everything was fine. So I went to the dean of the school, who said the head of my program told him everything was fine. But nobody would actually read or listen to any feedback. Ruined my grade for that course and really made me dislike the university and their ridiculous resistance to any sort of feedback.
pjscott 16y ago
Former TA here. It's surprising how often I've heard people use "I didn't know we weren't supposed to plagiarize" as an excuse. It seems to be the first line of defense for people who were caught copying and pasting large portions of an assignment from the internet. Personally, I've stopped worrying about it. If people cheat themselves out of an education, that's unfortunate, but hard to avoid. Focus on doing the best job possible for the people who are there to learn; there aren't enough hours in the day to try to impose an education on unwilling people by force, and they'll hate you for trying.
evoltix 16y ago
This drawn-out diatribe irks me. You chose to teach at that school, so you should be familiar with the cheating/plagiarism policy. Should you not?
Havoc 16y ago
Wow thats the exact opposite to the environment I'm in. The lecturers in my department are pretty much omnipotent in that regard. If one of them were determined enough he/she could kill a students career in the field (accounting & auditing) completely & permanently. Student gets blacklisted at all universities providing that qualification country-wide for ethics violation of that nature. Its only for that qualification though not a complete blacklisting & the other departments aren't nearly as strict or powerful.

93 points by jtbigwoo 16y ago

A bit of an aside, but my wife spent the last 6 years teaching high school english and I was surprised to find that there's a number of interesting advancements in the anti-cheating industry. There are a number of anti-plagiarism services that she (and loads of other English teachers apparently) would submit students papers to. The papers are compared to other ones in the database and reports are popped out for ones that match. I appreciated the irony, since it's easy to argue that the internet has made it easier to cheat in the first place.

mithaler 16y ago
Yes, these were in use back when I was in high school (I graduated in 2005); I remember I wrote a paper in a history class about Winston Churchill, and it amusingly flagged the first sentence of it because it was just the basic biographical intro that's undoubtedly common to nearly any paper about him: "Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born XXX..." Thankfully it only marks parts of the paper, and the teacher was smart enough to realize it wasn't a real problem. Sadly though, these provide no defense against the multitude of shady for-profit services that write papers for hire that anyone can find by Googling "term paper".
- famousactress 16y ago
  But, the paper would have to be original.. Can you really get an original paper written at a price that's at least conceivable for a high school student to pay? Nuts. ...and yeah, the results of the plagiarism service were a bit soft, but I think it would notice and annotate if things were in quotations, or likely to be common enough to not be an issue. In fact, I think her department had a general 'score' that they'd considered serious enough to consider cheating, and a sentence or two lifted from the interwebs would get you a marked down grade.
  - Retric 16y ago
    It's vary easy to accidentally lift a sentence or idea if you do enough research and write something of length. Dropping a full grade for a short essay is reasonable but if you handing in 60+ pages it's rather harsh IMO.
    - dvdhsu 16y ago
      High school essays are generally not 60 pages.
    - famousactress 16y ago
      Oh yeah, sorry I should have been more specific.. for one, the papers are much shorter than that (this is high school).. also, when I said their grade was marked down, I just meant that they were penalized.. I don't know by how much.
  - bermanoid 16y ago
    Can you really get an original paper written at a price that's at least conceivable for a high school student to pay? It might be difficult, but that's not even the whole problem. Worse is that parents, who do have the money, will sometimes fund their students efforts to cheat (or even do it behind their backs). I've spent a long time as a tutor (SAT, GRE, subject tests, and most of the math/science courses at high school and college level) in a relatively affluent town, and I've been approached on a few occasions by parents that wanted me to help their kids cheat in various ways (including asking me to pose as their student and take the SAT for them, write college essays, do take home tests and homework assignments, etc.). It's by no means common; I've had hundreds of students and only a small handful of requests like this. But it does happen - never underestimate what some rich parents will do to buy their children success in spite of academic laziness!
  - Dove 16y ago
    Can you really get an original paper written at a price that's at least conceivable for a high school student to pay? Nuts. Oh, absolutely. I see 400-level programming and engineering homework assignments crop up on vworker from time to time; they go for about $15. And copywriting is way cheaper than that. High school english papers are what, five paragraphs? People pay about $1.50 for comparable web copy on Mechanical Turk.
- deleted 16y ago
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  - gamble 16y ago
    No reasonable person would require a citation for an easily verified, widely-known, uncontroversial fact like Churchill's birthday. You would need citations for every sentence if that was the standard.

yardie 16y ago

I came to this conclusion very late in the game. After working my ass off for 4+ years I realized the university honor code is basically toothless. Ohh, it will tell you a great story about all the things the university could do to you. But in the end it's not enforced or enforced so lightly that they shouldn't have bothered at all. It used to be that cheating was just about the worst thing you could do in college and the university went through great pains to remind you of that. Robbery, murder?! that's a local police matter. Cheat, and we'll keelhaul you on the quad.

danielford 16y ago
Keep in mind that when cheaters are discovered, we're required to maintain confidentiality. I've been tangentially involved in one situation where the professor went full out to give the student a failing grade and get her transcripts marked. I've also seen someone in my cohort get kicked out of the graduate school for doing it on the qualifying exam. On the other hand, I've also been involved in two situations where the individuals received a slap on the wrist. So your results may vary.
mithaler 16y ago
For what it's worth, at my college it was taken pretty seriously, and professors absolutely did have the power to fail students for it. The About page sadly doesn't say where he teaches beyond "Giant Public University in the South", which is unfortunate because, as cool as this blog may be, I would never want to send any of my hypothetical future children there.

ejames 16y ago

I can't say that I find this particular blog post that interesting. "Teacher applies firm standards, which a spineless administration then undermines" is a well-worn subject if you have spent time reading about education, and this particular post is not a strong introduction if you haven't. The site design, on the other hand, will probably stick with me for a while: a background theme of a Soviet-style propaganda poster where the beaming People's Workers triumphantly brandish gin and tacos. It's distracting and the text is hard to read, but I will probably never forget this site's URL. Sometimes there's value in picking something out of left field and just running with it.

bdhe 16y ago
> I can't say that I find this particular blog post that interesting. "Teacher applies firm standards, which a spineless administration then undermines" is a well-worn subject if you have spent time reading about education, and this particular post is not a strong introduction if you haven't. I find this subject very interesting. Could you point me to some, in your opinion, strong introductions?
- gyardley 16y ago
  'The Five-Year Party' by Craig Brandon is a decent, well-written book, by a former professor at Keene State University in New Hampshire.
- ejames 16y ago
  I'll have to go back through my reading list to see what I recommend - I've been following education issues to some extent for a long time, long enough that I remember reading better articles but not where I found them. It's a bit much for me to write up on my coffee break, but I'll try and get back to this. Please shoot me an email (in my profile) if I forget to write it up.
  - ejames 16y ago
    There's basically three categories where this problem shows up: grade inflation, cheating, and discipline. Grade inflation is most relevant to colleges, discipline only matters for levels of schooling with mandatory attendance, and cheating cuts across all levels. However, the same issue is in common: In theory, there are standards applied to students, and it is an important priority to distinguish between students who meet the standards and students who don't. In practice, the administration does not necessarily care about applying the standards rigorously. I think the following two articles are a good introduction to grade inflation as a topic: "Can Untenured Faculty Members Stop Grade Inflation?" - Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Untenured-Faculty-Members/45518/ http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Untenured-Faculty-Members/4... "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" - The Atlantic Monthly, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-basement-of-the-ivory-tower/6810/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-b... It can also be useful to read up on business schools, because a business major is not an "academic" subject; more than any other major, the students are looking explicitly for a credential that boosts their income, and don't care about the subject material. The book "Ahead of the Curve" (http://www.amazon.com/Ahead-Curve-Harvard-Business-School/dp/B001RNOPLY/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302987751&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.com/Ahead-Curve-Harvard-Business-School/dp...) is a well-written appraisal of the Harvard B-School and includes chapters specifically on both grade inflation and cheating. Going through these publications and/or following the notes and recommended reading therein can lead to more involved reading on the topic. Articles in the Atlantic Monthly are always a good starting point. The fundamental issue: If an institution of learning punishes students for cheating, or failing classes, or behaving badly, then somebody, somewhere must have both the authority to do so and the goal of exercising said authority. But often, nobody wants to be that person, or the authority is conflicted, or the goal is given less priority than the goal of making money/quota.

gyardley 16y ago

Most universities in America are currently structured so that the students who want to learn can learn, and the students who don't want to learn can coast along between parties for four years. Giving low grades, failing students, assigning a lot of mandatory homework, making the minimum that's required remotely challenging, giving students more than a slap on the wrist for any infraction -- all of that drives away the coasting students, and that's bad for enrollment. If this professor continues to fuss over this, all he's going to do is botch his chance at tenure.

bdhe 16y ago

This is just an anecdote, but I've heard that even if some professors strongly suspect cheating, since the system involves so much red tape and leaves the professor with little power, it is simply not worth pursuing it and ending up losing upwards of half a day. This means, professors, whose free time is already perilously low have all the incentives in the world not to pursue students who cheat, which only makes it that much easier for them to get away with it.

bhickey 16y ago

As a teaching assistant I occasionally came across cheaters. Dealing with them can be a very painful process. In one case students were plagiarizing homework assignments. The instructor invited the accused into his office and presented them with the evidence. He gave them the option of withdrawing from the course or going before a dean. They elected to withdraw. There was some ugly personal fallout from this incident.

pbjorklund 16y ago

Cheating leads to a F, what the heck is that about? At my university, in Sweden, cheating means suspension (that includes plagiarism) for up to 10 weeks. Just last week 5 different cases got 8 weeks each..

RK 16y ago
Wouldn't suspension lead to failing as well? (assuming you're not allowed to withdraw from your courses) I believe where I did my bachelor's, the standard punishment for willful cheating was failing the course, one semester's suspension, and a permanent note in your academic record.
- Fargren 16y ago
  Not necessarily. At my college, attendace is not required for passing. As long as you do well in all your exams and pass all practical your assignements (two or three each quarter), you are ok. So suspension would bw tough but not and automatic fail. That said, at my college cheating means you are probably expelled, and I'm not aware of suspension as a punishment for anything.

robobenjie 16y ago

My school (Stanford) the teachers were required to leave the classroom during tests and we were supposed to use the honor system. I never cheated and I don't know anyone who did. Maybe his sarcastic comment at the end has more truth in it than he meant. People tend to live up to expectations. If you prevent cheating by having a person who's job it is to catch you then you feel like if you don't get caught you have won. On the other hand if you are expected not to cheat because it is not what a honorable person does, then if you cheat it is because you have failed.

pingswept 16y ago
I was a TA at your school (Stanford). I like that policy, but I also witnessed cheating firsthand. Specifically, I graded a take-home midterm exam where 3 students handed in the same bizarrely wrong answer. The students received penalties on that test, but no other disciplinary action was taken. This was in the mechanical engineering department in a graduate level mechatronics course (that I suspect you've taken). If I were making the rules, those students would be out of the university the same day. There is no shortage of smart people who would love to attend Stanford, especially the engineering school. I have no idea why enforcement is so disgracefully lax. In the electrical engineering department, I regularly had classmates ask me if we could "compare answers" on homework problem sets. Sometimes (rarely), this was for a genuine goal of education-- if your answer is wrong, you want to know that so you can figure out the right answer. More often, it was clueless people trying to collect answers from multiple other people. Drove me up the wall.
- Confusion 16y ago
  In my experience (another school, another country), it was usually allowed to take a take-home exam together with others. The understanding was that the exams are sufficiently hard, that students smart enough to pass do not allow others to freeload and that working together with other smart students teaches important skills in addition to a better understanding of the subject. The same goes for homework problem sets: me and two others would usually first solve them ourselves to the best of our ability and then compare answers, which was always an educational experience; the more so when no one had successfully solved the problem on their own or when it took someone a while to convince the other two their (identical) solutions were wrong.

Jd 16y ago

Fairly useless unless you know the institution in question, how widespread the problem is, and whether or not it has been worsening. My personal observation is that many of the structure in question is oriented specifically towards jocks who are recruited for their brawn and not brains and are expected to spend much more time building muscle than exercising their noggins. Given that my personal observation is limited to an ivy league institution, I'd imagine this would be all the more so at a large public institution in the American South, in which sports are probably considered more important than book smarts. Moreover, many of the recruits (coming from impoverished inner-city schools where they are moved from grade to grade regardless of their performance) are likely completely incapable of performing basic algebra, let alone the sort of math they would be expected to do in standard university level courses. In other words, this sort of behavior is entirely expected given the nature of these institutions and probably is a fixture in them, likely neither worsening nor improving.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
In my experience, football players usually get special incompletes. Basically, what happens is that if they are in danger of failing a class, the coach demands that they do a lot of practices during the game. They then get an incomplete and get to retake the course.

_delirium 16y ago

I've noticed less bureaucratic outcomes in the cases I've observed, but that might be good luck. If it's especially blatant, such as a student turning in an essay that is on the internet, the informal procedure is that the professor says, "this essay was clearly on the internet, you didn't write it, you get an F on it". The student could insist on a formal process (which is probably required), but the outcome of a formal process could result in them being suspended or expelled entirely, so if the evidence is solid, is probably not a good gamble. Admittedly a bit trickier when it isn't a piece of paper like that. Personally it doesn't bother me that much, because the problems I'm worried about fixing in education have more to do with learning than the value of degrees. If people who want to learn aren't supported as well as they could be, or are even actively discouraged/demotivated, then that's a big problem and something teachers/lecturers/professors need to worry about. If people who never wanted to learn are getting degrees they don't deserve, meh, I guess that's bad, but we pay administrators to worry about PR things like the university's image, so let them come up with a policy to deal with it (or fix admissions to let in fewer such students). There's even a few cases of opinionated smart kids cheating because they don't find the assignments helpful, in which case I don't even really care about them doing so (and maybe even care more about whether we can fix the assignments instead), though admittedly that isn't the common case.

hammock 16y ago

What does this rant have to do with the honor system? I don't appreciate the author throwing mud at a great self-governing system used in many schools by invoking its name when it's not even relevant here.

orky56 16y ago

For better or worse, this is the same of type of action schools take on major offenses. In universities, first possession of marijuana or underage drinking is dealt with a warning and perhaps community service. In the real world, there are real consequences for these actions as well as plagiarism. I guess college tuition is really just an insurance policy for crimes?

icegreentea 16y ago
To some extent, that's an acknowledgement to the reality that colleges and universities aren't just a place/time to learn, but also be exposed to new things, and 'trying shit out'. Basically, universities are this bizarre bubble between childhood and the 'real world', where bizarre halfway rules apply. I'm pretty sure it's been seen that way for quite a while. It's also pragmatic. If you handed out 'real' punishment to everyone, they would be so brain boggling drowned in paperwork (this is also ignoring the serious drop in enrollment). Honestly, with drinking and drugs, the universities' goal is really to a) make sure no one gets hurt on campus and b) make sure they never actually have to punish anyone. The hope is that the 'warning' scares the kids off enough so they go about their drinking and doping in a smarter way so they hopefully won't be caught again. And for what it's worth (this completely depends on location I guess... at least here in Waterloo), if you're caught underage drinking, or smoking pot pretty much anywhere by anyone who isn't a police officer, you're likely to just have your stuff confiscated, a stern talking to, and kicked out on the threat of calling the popos. It's just way easier that way for everyone.
redthrowaway 16y ago
"Major offenses...first possession of marijuana or underage drinking..." That's what qualifies as major? I don't give a damn if my classmates drink and blaze; I do care if they cheat and implicitly lower the value of my degree in the process. Then again, nobody at my school cares about liquor or pot, so I guess it's hard to compare it to schools that view either as an actual issue.
- orky56 16y ago
  I'm just saying from an objective, legal perspective. Some of these universities are public so you would think they would more strongly enforce the law. When you're really young, you get a lot of lenience based on your age. In college, I'm not really sure why you would get an excuse? If it's about finding yourself, then it's just temporary and artificial. Whatever you thought you knew no longer applies once the "rules" change. /rant

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tom_b 16y ago

For another point of view, as long as we are slinging ancedotes . . . My wife teaches a large, but graduate level, seminar. Every semester, a small number of students are caught blatantly plagiarizing sources in papers. These cases are required to be handed over to a student-staffed and managed honor court. In every case that has been handed over to them, the student-staffed and managed honor court has failed the student.

lutorm 16y ago
Another anecdote: my wife's teaching a class at MIT now, and they have problems with homeworks being basically copied from the MIT OpenCourseWare web site, which apparently contains the solution to pretty much any problem given in any of the previous years' classes. I'm actually genuinely troubled by what to think of this unfortunate intersection between unprecedented access to information and requiring students to do work beyond Googling...
T-hawk 16y ago
I also went to a college with a student-adjudicated honor system. It really does work, because the students actually have the better incentive for applying discipline. They're the ones that will be competing with the scoundrels for class ranking and job hiring. But what's the incentive for the administration to cost itself a tuition payer? Of course, it is possible for the honor court to go too far and be prejudiced against peer students out of sheer competitiveness, but it would seem that happens rarely enough to make it the lesser of evils if a factor at all.

michaelochurch 16y ago

The penalty for cheating should be: you fail the course in which you cheated and withdraw from all others. You're immediately suspended. You can't get back into the college until you've logged 12 months of gainful employment in "the real world". (Military service counts.) Yes, the real world. Where you can do nothing wrong and get fired for looking at a powerful person the wrong way, and where people actually struggle. Ok, so get out there and have that experience. Now you know (a) that you're very privileged, as a college student, and (b) you have no right to complain about the unfairness of an 'F' for cheating; it's not unfair. Once you've learned that lesson, welcome back but don't fucking do it again.

elechi 16y ago
Privileged? Ha. What a odd way of putting it. In what way is going to school a privilege? It's almost expected for everyone to go to a college/university nowadays. In what way is a college student privileged? If you get caught cheating in a class, fail him or her in THAT CLASS. Mention it in their academic report, so that other teachers in the university are aware, and they the teachers themselves can decide whether or not they want that particular individual in their classroom.
- Dove 16y ago
  A college student is privileged in that they have the free time to learn, all day every day. They may not realize how special this is until they decide, at thirty while supporting a family, that they want another degree -- and they do it via night classes, working eight hours a day and studying four, and it takes a decade.
  - elechi 16y ago
    I don't want to get too pedantic, and this may be beginning to get off-topic, and for that I apologize. But your example still isn't one of a privilege. What your example shows is that it is easier to concentrate on one thing instead of two or three things. Is time really free if you're choosing to just concentrate on one thing? Joke all we want that being a student is a job, but in most ways it is a job. Maybe not as strict as one, but if you're doing it properly, it should be as consuming as one.

gerner 16y ago

I was on one of these academic integrity hearing boards as a student representative at Cornell. In my experience the board was strongly in favor of failing students outright and adding a notation to their academic record. It's not as bad as expelling them from the university. But it's not like it was some softball slap on the wrist either. And the cases we were presiding over were not simple. We had a case where a student started a test early, as the exams were being handed out, but before everyone got a copy, and we took that as a serious violation of academic integrity (this student was not completely failed out of the course.) Our objective was not at all to "mildly scare the students until they Learn Their Lesson and then let them off the hook."

Tangaroa 16y ago

I had a professor who told the class to cheat. He justified it by saying that anyone in the real world today can go online and get help for any problem they have. Another unspoken reason is that he would not cover the material he would test us on, which was not in the book either, so allowing cheating would cut down on student complaints and let him do less work. I complained about it and nothing happened since he was tenured and close to retiring. One might say he already did.

atacrawl 16y ago

At my school, before every test and on every major assignment, each student had to write out the school's written Honor Code and then sign it, serving as a contract through which they could nail you to the wall if you got caught cheating.

scott_s 16y ago

Some universities have very strict punishments for cheating - sometimes including kicking students out of the school, permanently. Having due process in place in order to ensure that those punishments are meted out fairly is a good thing.

WalterBright 16y ago

At Caltech, we had an honor system. Proctoring of exams was not allowed. Most exams were take home, even though they had strict time limits (normally 3 hours). Once you opened the test, you had 3 hours to finish it, but since you were in your dorm room it was entirely and deliberately left up to your integrity. Tests were typically open book and open note. Some other characteristics: 1. Professors were not allowed to take attendance or base any part of the grade on attendance. 2. Homework was graded, but that grade had no influence on the course grade. Students were encouraged to use any resource, collaberation, etc., to understand and do the homework correctly. 3. Grades were based on exam scores. Policy was that if you could pass the exams, you got credit for the course even if you never showed up for class. In essence, the university treated us like adults. They provided an opportunity to get a first class education, and if you didn't take full advantage of that, that was your problem. The students liked this state of affairs immensely, and if you did cheat (and thereby threaten the honor system) you would be ostracized. Peer pressure can be extremely effective. I don't know anyone who cheated. For example, I know one student who, 1 hour into a 3 hour exam, fell asleep. He woke up a couple hours later, and finished the exam anyway. But he told the professor what had happened, and the professor was very sorry but he had to fail the student. The student was not angry about this, he blamed himself and took responsibility.

mentat 16y ago
"In essence, the university treated us like adults." The funny thing is that most adults aren't "treated like adults" if your intention is to compare this with working conditions. There are very few jobs that don't care about attendance at all and only care if you get the project done right and on time. I'm not saying it should be this way but rather just that it is. It could be because most jobs don't employ everyone who is of the same high quality of character as you relate.

nathanb 16y ago

FWIW, Google spelunking reveals this university to be the University of Georgia, whose policies I would have expected to be better than that. However, public state schools do have to deal with a lot of pressure from the state to not expel taxpayers and stuff like that, which is unfortunate and wrong.

ubertaco 16y ago

Allow me to give the other side of such a story. When I was 16, I took English 101 at a local college (joint enrollment, wanted to get it out of the way for my college undergraduate degree). While there, I was, to my surprise, the top of my class. My grade average was 102 (the professor gave a maximum of 105 on each paper) and I'd had two papers read in class as exemplary. Unfortunately, my professor was also staunchly politically-polarized, and would frequently spark political debates in class and use absurd examples for things that did not need to be politicized ("when citing a credible source, such as CBS, use this format. Non-credible sources, such as Fox News, or White House press releases [George W Bush was sitting president at the time] will not be accepted."). In one such discussion, the professor took a very difficult-to-support stance (I do not recall the substance now; this was in 2006) with which I and most of the class disagreed. However, as often happens in classroom settings, I wound up as unofficial "spokesman" for the general class consensus. The next assignment was the final paper, worth ~25% of my grade. I was given an F due to plagarism. When asked for proof, the professor highlighted a few sentence fragments here and there as "copied directly" (without stating the source from which these fragments were allegedly copied) and full paragraphs as "too far above [my] ability to be [my] original work." Her reasoning was that, on the whole, my paper "sounded more like a seasoned journalist than a mere college pre-freshman," so it was obviously plagarized despite any substantial lack of proof. Because there was no system of appeals, the F stood, and my overall grade for the class dropped to a B. Simply because the professor disliked my political stance.

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ohashi 16y ago
I had a similar situation at grad school. I turned in a proposal (what ultimately was my thesis proposal). I had created my own model and it was described as such in the text. I got accused of plagiarizing my own model because I didn't cite a source. The comment was 'it is as if you are claiming to have invented it yourself.' approximately. The next line of feedback was something to the tune of 'This is what some might consider plagiarism in a university setting.' I got 1 point above passing for the paper. I went to the professor and told her she clearly didn't even read my proposal because it anyone who actually read it would have read that it WAS my own model. Being accused of plagiarism and not reporting it to anyone was a fun ordeal. There was no consequences because it wasn't reported but I have my dignity and fuck you for accusing me of plagiarism. I went to the head of the program who said he basically didn't care, the professor told him everything was fine. So I went to the dean of the school, who said the head of my program told him everything was fine. But nobody would actually read or listen to any feedback. Ruined my grade for that course and really made me dislike the university and their ridiculous resistance to any sort of feedback.

pjscott 16y ago

Former TA here. It's surprising how often I've heard people use "I didn't know we weren't supposed to plagiarize" as an excuse. It seems to be the first line of defense for people who were caught copying and pasting large portions of an assignment from the internet. Personally, I've stopped worrying about it. If people cheat themselves out of an education, that's unfortunate, but hard to avoid. Focus on doing the best job possible for the people who are there to learn; there aren't enough hours in the day to try to impose an education on unwilling people by force, and they'll hate you for trying.

evoltix 16y ago

This drawn-out diatribe irks me. You chose to teach at that school, so you should be familiar with the cheating/plagiarism policy. Should you not?

Havoc 16y ago

Wow thats the exact opposite to the environment I'm in. The lecturers in my department are pretty much omnipotent in that regard. If one of them were determined enough he/she could kill a students career in the field (accounting & auditing) completely & permanently. Student gets blacklisted at all universities providing that qualification country-wide for ethics violation of that nature. Its only for that qualification though not a complete blacklisting & the other departments aren't nearly as strict or powerful.