4 ms·
How about making a game out of it. A game where cheating is permitted but punishment is administered with more granularity. Let the students know that all assig
by dkokelley 15y ago
How about making a game out of it. A game where cheating is permitted but punishment is administered with more granularity. Let the students know that all assignments are submitted to TurnItIn. Let them also have a look at what you see on TII. Whenever a student's plagiarism threshold is above 50%, their actual score gets docked by 1-(percentage plagiarized). So if a student submits an A paper (say, 93%), but it turns out it was 70% plagiarized, the new grade with cheating penalty becomes .93*(1-.7) = 28%. Smart students will quickly realize that any cheating will at least cut their possible grade in half.
I'm not sure this will work, but people have strange behavioral motivations and incentives. It reminds me of the daycare that wanted parents to not pick up their kids late (as employees had to remain to watch the children). Their solution was to impose a penalty for any extra time over the scheduled pickup time. On the surface, you would think this helped, but instead it had the opposite effect. Parents now understood that it was OK to leave their kids longer because they were being charged for it, whereas before there was a social stigma of arriving late and inconveniencing the daycare center.
With students, it's possible that making plagiarism acceptable on the surface with well-defined penalties may have the desired (and opposite) effect of reducing total cheating.
Also, couldn't the grading structure be established in such a way that it is impossible to pass the class without knowing the material demonstrated through exams? If the only (or most significant) portion of the grade comes through reports and take-home, cheater-friendly exercises, then the grade structure would seem to be broken. Cheating on the homework should only hurt the students, since they won't be able to cheat on the tests, and obviously haven't learned the material enough to do the homework on their own.