Bob Jensen's Threads on Plagiarism Detection and Exam Cheating

Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Cartoon from Teachable Moments --- http://insidehighered.com/views/teachable_moments/cartoon0406

Comparison of Plagiarism Detection Tools --- http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/SER07017B.pdf
"Plagiarism Detection: Is Technology the Answer?" at the 2007 EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional Conference, Liz Johnson, Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, provided a chart comparing seven plagiarism detection tools: Turnitin, MyDropBox, PAIRwise, EVE2, WCopyFind, CopyCatch, and GLATT.

Combating Plagiarism: Is the Internet Causing More Students and Ministers to Copy 

Where is the line of ethical responsibility of using online services to improve writing?

Market for Admissions Essay "Consulting"

Should a doctoral student be allowed to hire an editor to help write her dissertation? 
If the answer is yes, should this also apply to any student writing a course project, take home exam, or term paper? 

This service from Google Answers is disturbing.  

The Center for Academic Integrity (CAI) 

Cheating Issues Somewhat Unique to Distance Education

Huge Cheating Scandals at the University of Virginia, Ohio, Duke, and Other Universities 

Cheating Across Cultures

Plagio-riffing 

New Kinds of Cheating

An Old Kind of Cheating 

Did Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz Plagiarize?

Social/Cultural Construction of Cheating

Ghost Students on Campus 

Professors Who Let Students Cheat 

Professors Who Plagiarize

Professors Who Fabricate Research Outcomes

Celebrities Who Plagiarize

Media Sources Who Let Journalists Cheat and Go Unpunished for Cheating
Plagiarism Goes Unpunished in the Liberal Press

In Defense of Cheating

MBAs most likely (among graduate students) to cheat and make their own rules 

54% of Accounting Students Admit to Cheating

Academic Fraud for Athletes  

Scientists Behaving Badly  

Copyright Issues and Concerns 

Also see
The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Undermines Public Access and Sharing 
(Included Copyright Information and Dead Link Archives)

Copyright and Deep Linking  

100 Cases of Cheating at the University of Virginia 

Where to Begin in When Trying to Detect Plagiarism 

Adventures in Cheating:  A guide to Buying Term papers Online

Plagiarism and 'Atonement'

Catching Cheaters with Their Own Computers

Guidelines for Copyrighted Material at Websites, Blackboard, and WebCT

Threads on the P2P, PDE, Collaboration, and the Napster/Wrapster/Gnutella/Pointera/FreeNet/BearShare/KaZaA/ --- 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

Also see Bob Jensen's threads on assessment at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

January 6, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

NEW JOURNAL COVERING PLAGIARISM IN THE UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY

The recently-launched, refereed INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR EDUCATIONAL INTEGRITY [ISSN 1833-2595] intends to provide a forum to address educational integrity topics: "plagiarism, cheating, academic integrity, honour codes, teaching and learning, university governance, and student motivation." The journal, to be published two times a year, is sponsored by the University of South Australia. For more information and to read the current issue, go to http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/journals/index.php/IJEI .

 

Update Messages 

Candidates attempting to cheat in an exam by writing on a part of their body must be reported to the chief invigilator immediately. Please speak to an exam attendant who will contact the student administration office. Keep the students under close observation to ensure that they do not attempt to erase the evidence. The chief invigilator will arrange for a member of staff with a camera to come to the exam room to photograph the evidence to present to the examinations offences panel.
Signs on the walls of Student Administration Office at Queen Mary College in London, as reported by Abbott Katz, "Inside Higher Ed, May 31, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/05/31/katz

A World Class Athlete With World Class Ethics That Will Impact Upon Future Generations
He speaks his mind --- and apologizes later.  He loves to party --- and doesn't care about winning.  Yet Bode Miller is poised to strike Olympic gold.  On the slopes with skiing's bad boy,.
Bill Saporito. As written on the cover of Time Magazine, January 23, 2006 --- http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1149374,00.html

Jensen Comment
Bode Miller is the best of the best in a sport where winners are determined by hundredths of a second on a stop watch.  His picture is on the cover of the January 23, 2006 edition of Time Magazine.  Although he's relatively unknown in his home country (U.S.A.), he's been an established hero in Europe where crowds chanted "Bode, Bode, . . . ." while he was on his way to winning the 2005 World Cup.  He's poised to become the Gold Medal hero in the 2006 and obtained recent U.S. notoriety due to a recent interview on Sixty Minutes (CBS television) in which he admitted that having fun is more important than winning and that he sometimes partied too much when skiing including a few instances when he was a bit tipsy or hung over when crashing down the slope at over 80 miles per hour.

Chagrined media analysts questioned whether the partying and outspoken Bode Miller was really a role model for our young people.  I contend that he is largely do to some things buried in the article in Time Magazine. After discussing his partying and independent nature, the article goes on to explain how Bode more than any other skier in history made a science out of the sport.  Most of his life has been spent studying and experimenting with every item of clothing and equipment, every position for every circumstance on the slopes, and the torques and forces of every move under every possible slope condition. That sort of makes him my hero, but what really makes him my hero is the following quotation that speaks for itself:

Last year, after tinkering with his boots, he discovered that inserting a composite --- as opposed to aluminum or plastic --- lift under the sole gave him a better feel on the snow and better performance.  Then he did something really crazy, he shared the information with everyone, including competitors.  His equipment team flipped, but in the Miller school of philosophy this makes complete sense.  Otherwise, he says, "I'm maintaining an unfair advantage over my competitors knowingly, for the purpose of beating them alone.  Not for the purpose of enjoying it more or skiing better.  To me that's ethically unsound."

One has to be reminded of the famous poem painted on the wall of my old Algona High School gymnasium:

For when the Great Scorer comes
To write against your name.
He marks -- not that you won or lost --
But how you played the game.
Grantland Rice --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantland_Rice

Setting a bad example for its students:  Plagiarized from Alabama A&M University
A federal judge on Friday blocked the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools from revoking the accreditation of Edward Waters College while the institution pursues a due process lawsuit against the association.  In December, the regional accrediting group said that it had revoked the Florida college's accreditation, citing documents Edward Waters officials had submitted to the association that appeared to have been plagiarized from Alabama A&M University, another historically black institution.
Doug Lederman, "Staying Alive," Inside Higher Ed, March 14, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/insider/staying_alive 

"Tolerance of Cheating: An Analysis Across Countries" --- http://www.indiana.edu/~econed/pdffiles/spring02/magnus.pdf 

Bob Jensen's threads on P2P file sharing are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

Forwarded by Chris Nolan on August 28, 2003

With a new academic year starting, I wanted to remind everyone of the following comprehensive webliography on plagiarism. Each entry is annotated, and each entry represents a document that is available on the Web:

http://www.web-miner.com/plagiarism 

This Web site also has other guides to ethics issues on topical areas that you might wish to share with faculty in other departments on your campus:

Anthropology Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/anthroethics.htm

Art Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/artethics.htm

Bioethics: http://www.web-miner.com/bioethics.htm

Business Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/busethics.htm

Ethics Case Studies: http://www.web-miner.com/ethicscases.htm

History Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/historyethics.htm

Journalism Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/journethics.htm

Research Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/researchethics.htm

Sociology Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/sociologyethics.htm

Bernie Sloan
Senior Library Information Systems Consultant, ILCSO
University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting
616 E. Green Street, Suite 213
Champaign, IL 61820
Phone: (217) 333-4895
Fax: (217) 265-0454
E-mail: bernies@uillinois.edu 

Combating Plagiarism:  Is the Internet Causing More Students to Copy --- http://library.cqpress.com/images/cqres/pdfs/color/cqr20030919C.pdf 

This is a very comprehensive CQ Researcher edition dated September 19, 2003

THE ISSUES

775   Has the Internet increased the incidence of plagiarism among students?
          Should teachers use plagiarism-detection services?
          Are news organizations doing enough to guard against plagiarism and other types of journalistic fraud?

BACKGROUND

782   Imitation Encouraged
         Plagiarism had not always been regarded as unethical.

784   Rise of Copyright
         Attitudes about plagiarism began to change after the printing press was invented.

785   'Fertile Ground'
         Rising college admissions in the mid-1800s led to more writing assignments--and more chances to cheat.

786   Second Chances
         Some journalists who were caught plagiarizing recovered from their mistakes.

CURRENT SITUATION

787   Plagiarism and Politics
         Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., is among the politicians who got caught plagiarizing.

787   'Poisonous Atmosphere'
         Some journalists say news organizations overreacted following the Jayson Blair affair.

788   Action by Educators
         U.S. schools have taken a variety of steps to stop plagiarism.

OUTLOOK

790   Internet Blamed
         Educators and journalists alike say the Internet fosters plagiarism.

SIDEBARS AND GRAPHICS

776   College Students Consider Plagiarism Wrong
         Ninety percent view copying as unethical.

777   How much Plagiarism?
         Plagiarism is probably on the rise, although it appears to have remained stable over the past 40 years.

779   Confronting Plagiarism Poses Risks
         Students sometimes challenge teachers who accuse them.

783   Chronology
         Key events since 1790.

784   Rogue Reporter at The New York Times
         Jayson Blair didn't fool everybody.

789   At Issue
         Should educators use commercial services to combat plagiarism?

FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

792   For More Information
         Organizations to contact.

793   Bibliography
         Selected sources used.

794   The Next Step
         Additional articles from current periodicals.


A Clever Way to Punish and Prevent Plagiarism

"Traffic School for Essay Thieves," by Paul D. Thacker, Inside Higher Ed, November 29, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/29/plagiarism

Having grown weary of punishing students for plagiarizing and advising other professors to fail them, too, Meg Files said that she had an epiphany during a random chat with a colleague at Pima Community College’s West Campus. The professor explained that he had recently gone to traffic school after receiving a ticket and that the course had actually improved his driving.

“So I thought, ‘Why can’t we have a parallel program for plagiarism?’ ” said Files, who chairs Pima’s English/journalism department.

Seizing on the idea, Files created a “traffic school for plagiarism,” aimed at altering the campus’s focus on catching and punishing students for turning in essays they didn’t write. Now students can seek academic rehabilitation instead of punishment by participating in a plagiarism program that contains five steps:

Files, who will be overseeing the program, said that it is too early to tell whether it will be successful. Only a few students have elected to sign up, and none have yet finished.

“My reaction is, good for them,” said Donald L. McCabe, founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity. McCabe, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers University, called Pima’s approach a good policy that cuts down the middle between two extremes: excessively punishing students for literary piracy, or ignoring them. McCabe said that his own research finds that plagiarism is slightly more common today than in previous decades and that honor codes help curb the problem.

However, current policies at most educational institution revolve around detection and punishment. A number of universities now use online products such as Turnitin.com to scan essays for stolen text.

While catching students and then failing them for copying does help to reduce plagiarism, McCabe said that it probably doesn’t provide the best results and may just teach students to be more careful when they cheat. “Now we are just teaching students how to avoid detection,” he said.

Instructing students how to correctly reference other work and instilling a sense of academic integrity in them is difficult, McCabe said, but is the best way to dissuade students from plagiarizing.

“I like the focus — the remedial aspect instead of just playing gotcha,” said John P. Lesko, editor of the new scholarly journal, Plagiary. Lesko pointed out that some students may not even know that plagiarism is a bad thing, and that copying is considered normal in some countries.

He noted that Carolyn Matalene, now professor emeritus of English language and literature at the University of South Carolina, noticed in the 1980s that students in China regularly pilfered lines from published pieces. “She found that copying was actually encouraged so that you would learn like the masters,” he said.

Files said that cultural differences in defining plagiarism also drove her develop the new program. “In some cultures, plagiarism isn’t bad,” she said. But she also found that the current policies at her institution were not going far enough. In the past, Pima tried to curb plagiarism by assigning original topics, which makes it more difficult for students to purchase an essay, and by emphasizing the writing process—outlining, drafting, revising—over delivering a finished product. Finally, faculty have been encouraging students to be confident and proud of their own writing. She calls these steps “prevention” and the new program a “cure” once plagiarism is found.

“I think it’s a worthwhile effort, but the motivation to plagiarize is huge,” said Colin Purrington, associate professor of evolutionary biology at Swarthmore College. Purrington became so concerned about the growing problem with plagiarism that he put up a complete Web site to address the issue a couple of years ago.

One of the resources he cites as a deterrent against plagiarism is an essay that a Swarthmore student wrote as a disciplinary measure after getting caught. The essay reads: “Plagiarism is undisputedly, a most egregious academic offense. Unfortunately, I found that out the hard way. I cannot even begin to describe how unpleasant the experience was for me.”

On his Web page, Purrington notes that the essay is nicely written and urges instructors to hand it out to students to generate discussion. But he also notes with some chagrin: “That person got caught again some years later.”

Question
who were at least two famous world leaders who plagiarized doctoral theses?

 

Answer
Two that I know of off the top of my head are Martin Luther King and Vladimir Putin. Doubts are raised that Putin ever read his thesis that plagiarized from a U.S. textbook. Iran's President Ahmadinejad allegedly plagiarizes, although I don't know if he plagiarized in his doctoral thesis --- http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2006/10/ahmadinejad_i_h.html
 

Harvard Novelist Says Copying Was Unintentional
Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore accused of plagiarizing parts of her recently published chick-lit novel, acknowledged yesterday that she had borrowed language from another writer's books, but called the copying "unintentional and unconscious." The book, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," was recently published by Little, Brown to wide publicity. On Sunday, The Harvard Crimson reported that Ms. Viswanathan, who received $500,000 as part of a deal for "Opal" and one other book, had seemingly plagiarized language from two novels by Megan McCafferty, an author of popular young-adult books.
Dinitia Smith, "Harvard Novelist Says Copying Was Unintentional," The New York Times, April 25, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/books/25book.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Her Publisher is Not Convinced
A day after Kaavya Viswanathan admitted copying parts of her chick-lit novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," from another writer's works, the publisher of the two books she borrowed from called her apology "troubling and disingenuous." On Monday, Ms. Viswanathan, in an e-mail message, said that her copying from Megan McCafferty's "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings," both young adult novels published by Crown, a division of Random House, had been "unintentional and unconscious." But in a statement issued today, Steve Ross, Crown's publisher, said that, "based on the scope and character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act." He said that there were more than 40 passages in Ms. Viswanathan's book "that contain identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure from Megan McCafferty's first two books."
Dinitia Smith, Publisher Rejects Young Novelist's Apology," The New York Times, April 26, 2006 --- Click Here

April 27, 2006 reply from Linda Kidwell, University of Wyoming [lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]

Unlike the purchase/pooling debate or derivatives, this one is something I know a fair bit about!

First, Harvard does not have an honor code, though they debated one in the 1980s. Nor does Harvard belong to the Center for Academic Integrity, despite the fact that most of the other Ivy Leagues, all the seven sisters except Radcliffe, and over 390 universities (including a few in Canada and Australia) do. That being said, the Harvard BUSINESS School does have a code, voted in overwhelmingly by its own students several years ago.

There is a tremendous variety in scope of honor codes. Some address only academic issues while others have broader coverage. I remember my senior year at Smith two fellow seniors were expelled during their final semester for putting sugar in the gas tank of another student. This was adjudicated under the honor code there. However other campuses would handle such a thing through their students affairs or residence life departments (or of course the police could be called in).

For those unfamiliar with honor codes, Melendez, McCabe & Trevino, and my papers have used these criteria for an honor code:

1. unproctored exams
2. some kind of signed pledge that students will not cheat
3. a peer judiciary
4. reportage requirements, i.e., students should not tolerate violations of academic integrity and have an obligation to report them

Any one or a combination of these criteria must be in place for a true honor code. McCabe's research has shown that honor codes cut cheating about in half.

The clearing house, if you will, for honor codes in place in the U.S. is the Center for Academic Integrity, at www.academicintegrity.org 

Now back to Bob's question, pretending it took place at a university with an honor code. Did this plagiarism take place in the context of coursework? I believe the answer in this case is no. Therefore it would depend on whether the honor code was written to encompass activities outside of class. Some codes would capture this incident under the general category of behavior that brings disrepute to the university (all sorts of things, including well-known athletes that behave in a drunken manner in public, debate teams that trash a hotel room, you name it). Others would have no jurisdiction in this case because it did not take place in class, nor did she do it as part of an organized university group or function.

Honor codes are a wonderful thing if students are socialized into accepting them early. They can really make cheating a major social gaffe, such that many students who might cheat elsewhere wouldn't take the risk. Perhaps this woman would not have committed this plagiarism if she had been at a university with an honor code culture. I still remember how unnerved I was (and perhaps how naive) when I was first a teaching assistant at LSU. I couldn't believe all the precautions, including leaving bags at the front, removing hats, spacing people apart, requiring photo identification on their desks, pacing the rows, etc. I had never even been proctored during an exam before, so it was really a culture shock!

I could go on and on, as this is a favorite topic of mine, but I'll save more for another day. :-)

Linda Kidwell

March 3, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

SCHOLARLY JOURNAL ON PLAGIARISM

In January the University of Michigan Scholarly Publishing Office launched a refereed online journal, PLAGIARY. The purpose of the journal is "to bring together the various strands of scholarship which already exist on the subject, and to create a forum for discussion across disciplinary boundaries." Papers in the first issues include:

-- "The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story"

-- "Copy This! A Historical Perspective On the Use of the Photocopier in Art"

-- "A Million Little Pieces of Shame"

Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification [ISSN 1559-3096] is available free of charge as an Open Access journal on the Internet at http://www.plagiary.org/ . For more information contact: John P. Lesko, Editor, Department of English, Saginaw Valley State University, University Center, MI 48710 USA; tel: 989-964-2067; fax: 989-790-7638; email: jplesko@svsu.edu 

 

"Technology and Plagiarism in the University: Brief Report of a Trial in Detecting Cheating," Diane Johnson et al., AACE Journal 12(3), 281-299 --- http://www.aace.org/pubs/AACEJ/dispart.cfm?paperID=24 

This article reports the results of a trial of automated detection of term-paper plagiarism in a large, introductory undergraduate class. The trial was premised on the observation that college students exploit information technology extensively to cheat on papers and assignments, but for the most part university faculty have employed few technological techniques to detect cheating. Topics covered include the decision to adopt electronic means for screening student papers, strategic concerns regarding deterrence versus detection of cheating, the technology employed to detect plagiarism, student outcomes, and the results of a survey of student attitudes about the experience. The article advances the thesis that easily-adopted techniques not only close a sophistication gap associated with computerized cheating, but can place faculty in a stronger position than they have ever enjoyed historically with regard to the deterrence and detection of some classes of plagiarism.

"Stolen Words," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, January 25, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/01/25/mclemee
But the topic of plagiarism itself keeps returning. One professor after another gets caught in the act. The journalists and popular writers are just as prolific with other people’s words. And as for the topic of student plagiarism, forget it — who has time to keep up?

It was not that surprising, last fall, to come across the call for papers for a new scholarly journal called Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification. I made a mental note to check its Web site again — and see that it began publishing this month.

One study is already available at the site: an analysis of how the federal Office of Research Integrity handled 19 cases of plagiarism involving research supported by the U.S. Public Health Service. Another paper, scheduled for publication shortly, will review media coverage of the Google Library Project. Several other articles are now working their way through peer review, according to the journal’s founder, John P. Lesko, an assistant professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University, and will be published throughout the year in open-source form. There will also be an annual print edition of Plagiary. The entire project has the support of the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan.

In a telephone interview, Lesko told me that research into plagiarism is central to his own scholarship. His dissertation, titled “The Dynamics of Derivative Writing,” was accepted by the University of Edinburgh in 2000 — extracts from which appear at his Web site Famous Plagiarists, which he says now gets between 5,000 and 6,000 visitors per month.

While the journal Plagiary has a link to Famous Plagiarists, and vice versa, Lesko insists that they are separate entities — the former scholarly and professional, the latter his personal project. And that distinction is a good thing, too. Famous Plagiarists tends to hit a note of stridency such that, when Lesko quotes Camille Paglia denouncing the poststructuralists as “cunning hypocrites whose tortured syntax and encrustations of jargon concealed the moral culpability of their and their parents’ generations in Nazi France,” she seems almost calm and even-tempered by contrast.

“It seems that both Foucault and Barthes’ contempt for the Author was expressed in some rather plagiaristic utterances,” he writes, “a parroting of the Nietschean ‘God is dead’ assertion.” That might strike some people as confusing allusion with theft. But Lesko is vehement about how the theorists have served as enablers for the plagiarists, as well as the receivers of hot cargo.

“After all,” he writes, “a plagiarist — so often with the help of collaborators and sympathizers — steals the very livelihood of a text’s real author, thus relegating that author to obscurity for as long as the plagiarist’s name usurps a text, rather than the author being recognized as the text’s originator. Plagiarism of an author condemns that author to death as a text’s rightfully acknowledged creator...” (The claim that Barthes and Foucault were involved in diminishing the reputation of Nietzsche has not, I believe, ever been made before.)

To a degree, his frustration is understandable. In some quarters, it is common to recite – as though it were an established truth, rather than an extrapolation from one of Foucault’s essays – the idea that plagiarism is a “historically constructed” category of fairly recent vintage: something that came into being around the 18th century, when a capitalistically organized publishing industry found it necessary to foster the concept of literary property.

A very interesting argument to be sure — though not one that holds up under much scrutiny.

The term “plagiarism” in its current sense is about two thousand years old. It was coined by the Roman poet Martial, who complained that a rival was biting his dope rhymes. (I translate freely.) Until he applied the word in that context, plagiarius had meant someone who kidnapped slaves. Clearly some notion of literary property was already implicit in Martial’s figure of speech, which dates to the first century A.D.

At around the same time, Jewish scholars were putting together the text of that gigantic colloquium known as the Talmud, which contains a passage exhorting readers to be scrupulous about attributing their sources. (And in keeping with that principle, let me acknowledge pilfering from the erudition of Stuart P. Green, a professor of law at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, whose fascinating paper “Plagiarism, Norms, and the Limits of Theft Law: Some Observations on the Use of Criminal Sanctions in Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights” appeared in the Hastings Law Review in 2002.)

In other words, notions of plagiarism and of authorial integrity are very much older than, say, the Romantic cult of the absolute originality of the creative genius. (You know — that idea Coleridge ripped off from Kant.)

At the same time, scholarship on plagiarism should probably consist of something more than making strong cases against perpetrators of intellectual thievery. That has its place, of course. But how do you understand it when artists and writers make plagiarism a deliberate and unambiguous policy? I’m thinking of Kathy Acker’s novels, for example. Or the essayist and movie maker Guy Debord’s proclamation in the 1960s: “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it.” (Which he, in turn, had copied from the avant-garde writer Lautreamont, who had died almost a century earlier.)

Why, given the potential for humiliation, do plagiarists run the risk? Are people doing it more, now? Or is it, rather, now just a matter of more people getting caught?

Given Lesko’s evident passion on the topic of plagiarism as a moral transgression – embodied most strikingly, perhaps, in his color-coded War on Plagiarism Threat Level Analysis – I had to wonder if the doors of [ital]Plagiary[ital] would be open to scholars not sharing his perspective.

Was it worth the while of, say, a Foucauldian to offer him a paper?

“It may be that I’m a bit more conservative than some scholars,” he conceded. But he points out that manuscripts submitted to Plagiary undergo a double-blind review process. They are examined by three reviewers – most of them, but not all, from the journal’s editorial board.

There is no ideological or theoretical litmus test, and he’s actively seeking contributions from people you might not expect. “I’m willing to consider articles from plagiarists,” he said.

That’s certainly throwing the door wide open. You would probably want to vet their work pretty carefully, though.

Cheating then versus now
What this means in evaluative practice is not only that the opportunities to cheat (just to continue to use this word) are enormously expanded. The nature of cheating itself changes accordingly — to the despair of every teacher, beginning with those who teach freshman composition. The very fact that “plagiarism” must be carefully defined there defers to the absence of what the dean in (the movie) School Ties refers to as a vacuum. (Could cheating even be punished — in his terms — if one has to begin by defining it?) It also testifies to the near-impossibility of judging a paper on SUV’s or gay marriage or God-knows-what that has been cobbled together out of Internet sources whose fugitive presence, sentence by sentence, is almost undetectable. Furthermore, to the student these sources may well be almost unremarkable, with respect to his or her own words. What is this business of one’s “own words” anyway? What if the very notion has been formed by CNN? How not to visit its site (say) when time comes to write? Most students will be unfamiliar with a theoretical orientation that questions the whole idea of originality. But they will not be unaffected with some consequences, no less than they are unaffected by, say, the phenomenon of sampling and remixing as it takes place in popular culture, especially fashion or music.  “Plagiarism” has to contend with all sorts of notions of imitation, none of which possess any moral valence. Therefore, plagiarism becomes — first, if not foremost — a matter of interpretive judgment. Cheating, on the other hand, is not interpretive in the same way (and, in the world of (the movie) School Ties, not “interpretive” at all). No wonder, in a sense, that test gradually has had to yield to text. It is almost as if the vacuum could not hold. By the present time, the importance of determining grades (in part if not whole) by means of papers acquires the character of a sort of revenge of popular culture — ranging from cable television to rap music — upon academic culture.
Terry Caesar, "Cheating in a Time of Extenuating Circumstances," Inside Higher Ed, July 8, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/07/08/caesar
 

Jensen Comment:  The 1992 movie School Ties focuses on cheating brought to light by an honor code that requires students to report seeing other students cheat.  It also focuses on education at a time when cheating was more severely punished, usually by expulsion from school.  In most colleges today, first-time offenders who get caught are generally placed on some type of probation.  At the same time most schools have modified their honor codes in this litigious society such that students are no longer required to report observed cheating of other students.  Many instructors view reporting of cheating as becoming too much of a hassle in terms of time and trouble when the student will not be severely punished in any case.  This leads to greater risk taking on the part of some students when it comes to cheating.  They are less likely to be detected and, if detected for the first time, the punishments are negligible relative to the rewards.  Such risk taking continues on when they are tempted to cheat as executives in business/government and the temptations to siphon off millions of dollars are great.

From T.H.E. Newsletter on November 17, 2004

With the crunch of midterms, finding time to write that history paper or analyze that Shakespeare poem may seem like an impossible feat.

But students will want to think twice before running to the Internet to download a paper in times of desperation, as UCLA renewed its license this year for the commonly used online anti-plagiarism service, Turnitin.com…

For the full story, visit: http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/articles.asp?id=30809 

Ministers should learn that it is much more acceptable if attribution of source material is given up front
Glenn Wagner was a successful mega-church pastor in Charlotte, N.C., until one of his elders heard a sermon on the radio that was identical to one he had heard from the pulpit. Mr. Wagner confessed that he had been preaching other people's sermons off and on for two years, including some he broadcast on Christian radio. He resigned from his ministry last fall. A similar case occurred after members of the National City Christian Church in Washington, D.C., found on the internet sermons that Alvin O'Neal, moderator of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and a celebrated preacher in that denomination, had preached. Mr. O'Neal apologized for his actions and remains in his ministry. A number of lesser-known ministers across the country have also been caught stealing sermons. Sometimes it makes the newspapers, but other times congregations or denominations handle the matter quietly.
Gene Edward Veith, "Word for word RELIGION: More and more pastors lift entire sermons off the internet—but is the practice always wrong?" World Magazine, April 22, 2005 ---
http://www.worldmag.com/subscriber/displayarticle.cfm?id=10576

Question
Where are your students going for help with term paper assignments?

Answer
One place might be the "Term Paper Research Guide" at http://www.findarticles.com/p/page?sb=articles_guide_termpaper&tb=art 

"Hi-tech answer to student cheats," BBC News, June 30, 2004 --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/tyne/wear/3852347.stm 

New measures to help detect cheating students are being demonstrated at a conference in Newcastle. 

A survey of around 350 undergraduates found nearly 25% had copied text from another source at least once.

A new service that can scan 4.5 billion web pages is now online so that lecturers can check the originality of the work submitted by students.

The software is being demonstrated at a meeting of the Plagiarism Advisory Service at Northumbria University.

'Originality report'

Student Tom Lenham said of the statistics: "That's a pretty modest interpretation of the situation at the moment.

"From my own experience and that of fellow students, it's a lot higher than that because it is not drummed into our heads from the start.

"Only more recently have we been told how to use the internet for referencing."

The Plagiarism Advisory Service says cheating is not a new phenomenon but the internet has led to concerns within the academic community that the problem is set to increase dramatically.

The service manager Fiona Duggan said: "The software has four databases that it checks students' work against and produces an originality report which highlights where it has found matches.

"It demonstrates where the student has lifted text from, and it also takes you to the source where the match was found."

The software has been developed in the USA and the Plagiarism Advisory Service hopes it will go some way to stamping out the practice.

Ms Duggan said: "There are other things that can be done, like the way you set assignments so each student has something individual to put into the assignment so it is not so easy to copy."

Questions
Should a doctoral student be allowed to hire an editor to help write her dissertation? 
If the answer is yes, should this also apply to any student writing a course project, take home exam, or term paper?

Answer
Forwarded by Aaron Konstam
"Academic Frauds," The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3, 2003 --- http://chronicle.com/jobs/2003/11/2003110301c.htm 

Question (from "Honest John"): I'm a troubled member of a dissertation committee at Private U, where I'm not a regular faculty member (although I have a doctorate). "Bertha" is a "mature" student in chronological terms only. The scope of her dissertation research is ambiguous, and the quality of her proposal is substandard. The committee chair just told me that Bertha is hiring an editor to "assist" her in writing her dissertation. I'm outraged. I've complained to the chair and the director of doctoral studies, but if Bertha is allowed to continue having an "editor" to do her dissertation, shouldn't I report the university to an accreditation agency? This is too big a violation of integrity for me to walk away.

Answer: Ms. Mentor shares your outrage -- but first, on behalf of Bertha, who has been betrayed by her advisers.

In past generations, the model of a modern academician was a whiz-kid nerd, who zoomed through classes and degrees, never left school, and scored his Ph.D. at 28 or so. (Nietzsche was a full professor at 24.) Bertha is more typical today. She's had another life first.

Most likely she's been a mom and perhaps a blue-collar worker -- so she knows about economics, time management, and child development. Maybe she's been a musician, a technician, or a mogul -- and now wants to mentor others, pass on what she's known. Ms. Mentor hears from many Berthas.

Returning adult students are brave. "Phil" found that young students called him "the old dude" and snorted when he spoke in class. "Barbara" spent a semester feuding with three frat boys after she told them to "stop clowning around. I'm paying good money for this course." And "Millie's" sister couldn't understand her thirst for knowledge: "Isn't your husband rich enough so you can just stay home and enjoy yourself?"

Some tasks, Ms. Mentor admits, are easier for the young -- pole-vaulting, for instance, and pregnancy. Writing a memoir is easier when one is old. And no one under 35, she has come to suspect, should give anyone advice about anything. But Bertha's problem is more about academic skills than age.

Her dissertation plan may be too ambitious, and her writing may be rusty -- but it's her committee's job to help her. All dissertation writers have to learn to narrow and clarify their topics and pace themselves. That is part of the intellectual discipline. Dissertation writers learn that theirs needn't be the definitive word, just the completed one, for a Ph.D. is the equivalent of a union card -- an entree to the profession.

But instead of teaching Bertha what she needs to know, her committee (except for Honest John) seems willing to let her hire a ghost writer.

Ms. Mentor wonders why. Do they see themselves as judges and credential-granters, but not teachers? Ms. Mentor will concede that not everyone is a writing genius: Academic jargon and clunky sentences do give her twitching fits. But while not everyone has a flair, every academic must write correct, clear, serviceable prose for memos, syllabuses, e-mail messages, reports, grant proposals, articles, and books.

Being an academic means learning to be an academic writer -- but Bertha's committee is unloading her onto a hired editor, at her own expense. Instead of birthing her own dissertation, she's getting a surrogate. Ms. Mentor feels the whole process is fraudulent and shameful.

What to do?

Ms.Mentor suggests that Honest John talk with Bertha about what a dissertation truly involves. (He may include Ms. Mentor's column on "Should You Aim to Be a Professor?") No one seems to have told Bertha that it is an individual's search for a small corner of truth and that it should teach her how to organize and write up her findings.

Moreover, Bertha may not know the facts of the job market in her field. If she aims to be a professor but is a mediocre writer, her chances of being hired and tenured -- especially if there's age discrimination -- may be practically nil. There are better investments.

But if Bertha insists on keeping her editor, and her committee and the director of doctoral studies all collude in allowing this academic fraud to take place, what should Honest John do?

He should resign from the committee, Ms. Mentor believes: Why spend his energies with dishonest people? He will have exhausted "internal remedies" -- ways to complain within the university -- and it is a melancholy truth that most bureaucracies prefer coverups to confrontations. If there are no channels to go through, Honest John may as well create his own -- by contacting the accrediting agencies, professional organizations in the field, and anyone else who might be interested.

Continued in the article.

Why not hire Google to write all or parts of her dissertation dissertation? (See below)

November 3, 2003 reply from David R. Fordham [fordhadr@JMU.EDU] 

Bob, there are two very different questions being addressed here.

The first deals with the revelation that “her dissertation research is ambiguous, and the quality of her proposal is substandard”.

The editing of a manuscript is a completely different issue.

The ambiguity of the research and the flaws with the proposal should be addressed far more forcefully than the editing issue!

Care should be used to ensure that the editor simply edits (corrects grammar, tense, case, person, etc.), and isn’t responsible for the creation of ideas. But if the editor is a professional editor who understands the scope of his/her job, I don’t see why editing should be an issue for anyone, unless the purpose of the dissertation exercise is to evaluate the person’s mastery of the minutiae of the English language (in which case the editor is indeed inappropriate).

Talk about picking your battles … I’d be a lot more upset about ambiguous research than whether someone corrected her sentence structure. I believe the whistle-blower needs to take a closer look at his/her priorities. A flag needs to be raised, but about the more important of the two issues.

David R. Fordham
PBGH Faculty Fellow
James Madison University

Where is the line of ethical responsibility of using online services to improve writing?

June 23, 2006 message from Elliot Kamlet [ekamlet@STNY.RR.COM]

Is it just me or is there a lack of, at least, shame.

http://www.thepaperexperts.com/aboutus.shtml 

Elliot Kamlet
Binghamton University

June 23, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Elliot,

I suspect that paying to have your writing edited, revised, and translated is as old as writing itself. Networking technology has simply made it faster, easier, and in many instances cheaper.  What is a problem is that a student who writes very badly may never be discovered in college if writing is required only for assignments outside the classroom. This speaks in favor of essay examinations along the way.

There is certainly nothing illegal about an editing service, and it would be tough to say outside editing is unethical except for assignments that require or request that the author's work must be entirely in his/her own words.

Of course this particular service in Canada may entail both editing and translating (from Canadian into English) --- just kidding.

If such a service also adds new content, then the ethical issues are very clear since the author might take credit for the new content where credit is not due. The author also takes a chance that the new content might be plagiarized.

I had a student some years ago that submitted a term paper that was plagiarized entirely from three separate sources (that I found with a Google search). In dealing with the student and his parents, I discovered that he was not aware that his AIS paper was plagiarized. He was a young CEO of one of his father's AIS companies. He (my student) hired one of his employees to write the paper. The employee actually plagiarized the work to be submitted in the name of my student.

The question in this case is what is worse --- plagiarizing from published sources or hiring the writing of the term paper? In either case, the rule infraction would get the student an F from me and a report of the incident to the Academic Vice President of the University.

Interestingly, the student approached me about five years later and asked if the time limit on his F grade had expired. He wanted to submit a new paper. I told him that F grades do not expire even after graduation.

Bob Jensen

June 23, 2006 reply from Ruth Bender [r.bender@CRANFIELD.AC.UK]

And for $62.65 you can buy "Plagiarism and Academic Integrity"

"Plagiarism is a constant concern in the academic world particularly in areas that involve a lot of research or term paper writing, such as English Literature. The Internet seems to be making plagiarism easier as are companies that specialize in academic research writing for hire. However, several experts believe that most plagiarism takes place because students do not fully understand how to perform proper scholarly research and integrate it into their own material. In the end, plagiarism seems to stem more from a lack of knowledge rather than a plot to undermine education."

Pages: 7

Bibliography: Content-Di source(s) listed

Filename: 22017 plagiarism and Academic Integrity.doc

Price: US$62.65

Ruth Bender
Cranfield School of Management
UK

June 23, 2006 reply from Joseph Brady [bradyj@LERNER.UDEL.EDU]

Years ago I too thought that dishonesty was caused by a lack of knowledge. The cure: tell students the general rule (don't take credit for the work of others) and how that rule applies in your course (give specific examples of how students could trip up). I work hard at the cognitive factor, going so far as to give a *quiz* on our honesty rules, in the first week of classes.

Experience can be a cruel teacher. I now think that most students are dishonest because it's easy to be dishonest and easy to get away with dishonesty. The problem is not a cognitive one. It's an ethical one, having a grounding in what is culturally acceptable at an institution.

It's not a problem in just English 101. Plagiarism is a serious issue in any course that involves computer-generated files. It's easy in any MIS or AIS course to copy someone else's application program and make some simple modifications to avoid detection. Students learn this right away. Actually, they have know this since high school or even earlier.

My primary concern as an educator is: are students learning? Surely this is obvious: those who are copying, are not learning. If only the small minority of students were at fault, I would not worry so much. But I think the problem is worsening rapidly. It's now possible to reach a tipping point: most of the class copying most of the time, so that not much is learned by the end of the semester. I actually had a section that came pretty close to that status last semester.

Students will not police themselves, at least not here, so I do not have a solution for the problem. It would be nice to have a utility (like turnitin.com) that would answer the question: "Was the contents of this Excel/Access/VB/etc file copied or imported from some other file?" You can no longer get the answer to that question reliably using Windows time stamping. One of my summer To-Do's is to write that program in VB, but I'll have to learn a lot about Windows file structures to do that, and I'll probably not have time to get to it.

Joe Brady
University of Delaware

June 25, 2006 reply from Robert Holmes Glendale College [rcholmes@GLENDALE.CC.CA.US]

It is inconceivable to me that anyone who has reached the college level would not know that copying a paper from any source (Internet, friend or ?) is cheating. When I hear the "I didn't think it was wrong" defense I assume I am talking to a liar as well as a cheater.

June 25, 2006 reply from Henry Collier [henrycollier@aapt.net.au]

I am more than a little vexed with this:

It is inconceivable to me that anyone who has reached the college level would not know that copying a paper from any source (Internet, friend or ?) is cheating. When I hear the "I didn't think it was wrong" defense I assume I am talking to a liar as well as a cheater.

There’s more than one cultural bias illustrated in the quote. Not everyone, fortunately, is embedded in the narrow and biased views of the writer.

Henry

June 26, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen

Throughout the world in modern times I think borrowing works without proper citation is considered unethical. In some parts of the world such as Germany there was (and possibly still is) an exception made for students where the work of the student was viewed as the work of the professor. I'm not certain about this exception in modern times, but some professors in the past purportedly put their names on entire books written by students without even acknowledging the students. Presumably these professors also kept the book royalties with clear consciences. I think this practice was more common in the physical sciences.

A exception which does still exist in modern times arises when a noted professor, often a senior researcher from a highly prestigious university, lends his/her name to a textbook to improve its marketing potential. I know of one instance in an accounting textbook with four authors where one of the authors wrote over 90% of the material and the other authors mostly lent their names and affiliations. I know of other instances where a senior professor from a huge program did very little of the writing of the textbook but greatly increased the chances that his university would provide sales of over 1,000 copies of the book each year. Such marketing ploys might be viewed as deceptive, although can it be called plagiarism when the principal author of possibly 100% of the writing encourages someone else to share in the "authorship credit?"

Something similar happens for journal articles to improve their chances for publication in a leading journal. There is also the even more common happening where one author who writes poorly did the research and wrote a very rough first draft. Then a highly skilled writer who does little or no research anymore performs a great editing service and receives full credit as a partner in the research. In this case the paper's editor may be getting far more credit for the "research" than is deserving.

See how complicated the question of authorship ethics becomes.

Bob Jensen

June 26, 2006 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]

>June 26, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen

>Throughout the world in modern times I think borrowing works without proper citation is considered unethical.

Bob, while this might hold true for academic work, it certainly does not seem to apply to the journalistic world, does it? (Think: WV Coal Mine Disaster; Think: Hurricane Katrina at the New Orleans Stadium; Think: any one of hundreds of other media screwups in the past few months where so-called "news" media reported a story as though the reporter were reporting first-hand facts when in reality the reporter was "copying" from an unreliable (and false) source, -- all without proper citation.

And in some instances, a few journalists are so unethical that they even go so far as to try to HIDE their sources and keep them secret! Talk about lack of proper attribution! Some even claim a constitutional right to do so! ;-)

And no, the citation of "a reliable source" is not proper citation; if you think it is, just try getting one of those past ANY reviewer for any decent journal! I can see it now: a bibliography containing sixteen entries of "A reliable source", "ibid".

On another note, I have it "from a reliable source" that in times past, (specifically the 16th century art world), it was not considered wrong to borrow works from other people without attribution. (My source here is the art curator at the Rubens House museum in Antwerp, Belgium.) Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony Van Dyke, and most of the other great "masters" of the art world back then ran studios to train young artists in the guild craft. The master would sketch a scene, the young artist would paint it, the master might touch up a little here and there, and ultimately would sign it, giving the student no recognition or attribution whatsoever. With the master's signature, the piece would sell handsomely, the master would pay the student a cut, and keep the rest. This was a widely known, and perfectly acceptable, practice of the day. There are dozens of Van Dykes, Rembrandts, Rubens, and other great works which show very little evidence of ever being touched by the person who signed the painting. Everyone of the day actually knew it, but it was an acceptable practice as long as the student was a student of the master. It was the master's name which sold the painting. Marketing, marketing.

Of course, to be realistic, I tend to agree with Robert Holmes. Most of the college students I encounter these days do know perfectly well that what they are doing is wrong in most cases, but plead ignorance and invoke the "cultural victim" mentality when caught. And when I do have the occasional student from another culture, I make an extra effort to clarify what is and is not acceptable. (I don't know what the culture is in Ghana, for example, but when caught, my Ghana student admitted knowing she had violated the honor code, in addition to violating the instructions clearly printed on the assignment.)

But as Carol pointed out, the chase, the hunt, the hiding, is all part of the game which some students see as being part of the "essence" of preparing for the real world: college.

signed,

---

(um, you were expecting a real signature here?)

---

The gadfly from JMU An unnamed source...

June 26, 2006 reply from Bernadine and Peter Raiskums [berna@GCI.NET]

In the doctoral program I am now pursuing on-line through Capella, the learners are provided with access to mydropbox.com and encouraged to submit their draft papers "to help with citation issues and improper source referencing. After submission, mydropbox.com will generate a plagiarism report within 24 hours ... for your personal use." I found the report to be very interesting in that it picked up something that had been published in a rather obscure journal which I had written myself last year!

Bernadine Raiskums, CPA, M.Ed. in Anchorage

The home page for mydropbox.com is at http://www.mydropbox.com/

Market for Admissions Essay "Consulting"

I wonder if admissions officers are puzzled when two or more essay submissions look suspiciously alike?

"B-Schools Take on Essay Consultants," by Rob Capriccioso, Inside Higher Ed, February 6, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/07/bschool

“Vault is collecting successful admissions essays for top MBA programs, including Wharton — and will pay $40 for each main essay (main personal statement greater than 500 words), and $15 for each minor essay (secondary essay answering a specific question less than 500 words) that we accept for our admissions essay section.”

That message, recently sent out from a top company that helps students get into business schools, is enough to irk even the most experienced admissions officers at some the nation’s leading business schools.

“Some of our admissions counselors have gotten outraged,” says Thomas R. Caleel, director of MBA admissions at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “We want students to be giving their real stories, not some ‘polished’ or even ‘over-polished’ versions of themselves.”

“Essays have to be meaningful per person,” he adds. “It might be helpful to see some successful essays, but in my mind, it might also be limiting. Someone might read one [of the consultant-produced essays] and think that their essays have to read the same way, in order to get in.”

Those sentiments are being expressed by an increasing number of business school officials who say that students shouldn’t have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to make themselves appear different than who they really are. While some officials plan to go on the offensive against firms that they find particularly egregious, others want to work more closely with consultants. Still others say that there is little they can do to prevent the phenomenon.

Deans at seven of the top American business schools are expected to address such issues at an upcoming gathering, according to a Monday report in The Boston Globe. In an effort to “remove the possibility of outside interference,” Derrick Bolton, director of admissions at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told the paper that deans are considering making students complete their essays under supervision, providing different essays to students in the same applicant pool, and conducting more interviews and follow-up with references.

While the proliferation of admissions consultants of various sorts has frustrated officials in undergraduate admissions as well, especially at elite institutions, the steps being considered by business schools could amount to a much more aggressive stance against the application-consulting industry.

“Part of getting the best candidates is for them to be themselves during the admissions process,” says Caleel. “We really want to get to know the real person who is applying.” Wharton’s business school dean, Patrick Harker, is expected to be part of the group that will meet to discuss consultant issues.

While Vault officials could not be reached for comment on Monday, Alex Brown, a senior admissions counselor at ClearAdmit, in Philadelphia, says that not all consulting firms function the same way. “Some businesses are bad,” he says, “but the bulk of us, that’s not the way we operate.”

Continued in article

 

This service from Google Answers is disturbing.  

Students can now pay to have their homework answered by experts.

Some claim using the Net to do homework shows that today's kids are resourceful. But a rise in content cribbed straight from online sources, like Google Answers, has teachers on alert.
"Thin Line Splits Cheating, Smarts," vy Dustin Goot, Wired News, September 10, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54963,00.html 

Most teachers wouldn't be surprised to hear that students have bribed friends or siblings to do their homework in exchange for a few bucks.

What might surprise them is that Google Answers sometimes takes school kids up on the offer.

Staffed by a cadre of 500-plus freelance researchers, the service takes people's questions -- for example, a calculus problem or a term paper topic -- and provides answers and links to information. Google charges a listing fee of 50 cents and, if someone comes up with a satisfactory response, the user pays that researcher a previously entered bid (minimum: $2).

Although Google Answers has a policy encouraging students to use the service as a study aid rather than a substitution for original work, several cases show that students often ignore this advice.

One student in Quebec, dismayed by a response that offered only background research for a paper on religion, pleads, "Make it into an essay, not just links and quotes. I need this asap PLEASE!!! 2500 words is the minimum."

While researchers are scrupulous enough not to churn out a completed term paper -- despite the Quebec student's $55 bid -- other potential homework questions, such as math or science problems, can be harder to identify. In some cases researchers acknowledge that a question looks like homework -- but they still provide the answer.

The dilemma faced by Google Answers researchers highlights a broader issue that vexes many educators around the country. Namely, where do you draw the line between appropriate and inappropriate uses of the Internet and how do you stamp out clear abuses such as cutting and pasting entire paragraphs into an essay?

The question first entered many educators' consciousness following a Kansas cheating scandal earlier in the year that made national headlines. At Piper High School, near Kansas City, a biology teacher failed 28 of 118 students for plagiarism on an assignment that consisted of collecting and gathering information about local leaves.

However, many students (and their parents) contended that there was nothing improper about the leaf descriptions they submitted, which had been lifted straight from the Internet. Others claimed it was unclear where proper citation was required.

Tamara Ballou, who is helping implement an honor code at her Falls Church, Virginia, high school, said that it is not uncommon for teachers and students to disagree on what constitutes academic dishonesty.

"We took a long time to define cheating," she said, noting that many kids felt it was acceptable to copy homework from each other or off the Internet if the assignment was perceived as "busy work."

"A lot of kids don't even know what (plagiarism) is," agreed Kevin Huelsman. "They say, 'Yeah, I did the work; I brought it over (from the Internet).'"

Continued at  http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54963,00.html 

See also:
•  Where Cheaters Often Prosper
•  Got Cheaters? Ask New Questions
•  Schools, Tech: Still Struggling

The Center for Academic Integrity (CAI) 

Faculty are reluctant to take action against suspected cheaters. In a 1999 survey of over 1,000 faculty on 21 campuses, one-third of those who were aware of student cheating in their course in the last two years, did nothing to address it. Students suggest that cheating is higher in courses where it is well known that faculty members are likely to ignore cheating.
Quoted from the research of Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University (founder and first president of CAI) --- See below

Academic honor codes effectively reduce cheating. Surveys conducted in 1990, 1995, and 1999, involving over 12,000 students on 48 different campuses, demonstrate the impact of honor codes and student involvement in the control of academic dishonesty. Serious test cheating on campuses with honor codes is typically 1/3 to 1/2 lower than the level on campuses that do not have honor codes. The level of serious cheating on written assignments is 1/4 to 1/3 lower.
Quoted from the research of Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University (founder and first president of CAI) --- See below

The Center for Academic Integrity (CAI) --- http://www.academicintegrity.org/ 

The Center for Academic Integrity is affiliated with the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Clemson University. We gratefully acknowledge their financial and programmatic assistance, as well as funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

CAI is a consortium of over 225 institutions who share with peers and colleagues the Center’s collective experience, expertise, and creative energy.

Benefits of membership include:

Research --- http://www.academicintegrity.org/cai_research.asp 

Research projects conducted by Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University (founder and first president of CAI), have had disturbing, provocative, and challenging results, among them the following:

Read about the honor codes of many colleges and universities --- http://www.academicintegrity.org/samp_honor_codes.asp 

Cheating Issues Somewhat Unique to Distance Education

July 30, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu] 

NEW BOOK OF ONLINE EDUCATION CASE STUDIES

ELEMENTS OF QUALITY ONLINE EDUCATION: INTO THE MAINSTREAM, edited by John Bourne and Janet C. Moore, is the fifth and latest volume in the annual Sloan-C series of case studies on quality education online. Essays cover topics in the following areas: student satisfaction and student success, learning effectiveness, blended environments, and assessment. To order a copy of the book go to http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/volume5.asp. You can download a free 28-page summary of the book from http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/vol5summary.pdf.

The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information, see http://www.sloan-c.org/.

COMBATING CHEATING IN ONLINE STUDENT ASSESSMENT

In "Cheating in Online Student Assessment: Beyond Plagiarism" (ONLINE JOURNAL OF DISTANCE LEARNING ADMINISTRATION, vol. VII, no. II, Summer

2004) Neil C. Rowe identifies "three of the most serious problems involving cheating in online assessment that have not been sufficiently considered previously" and suggests countermeasures to combat them. The problems Rowe discusses are:

-- Getting assessment answers in advance

It is hard to ensure that all students will take an online test simultaneously, enabling students to supply questions and answers to those who take the test later.

-- Unfair retaking of assessments

While course management system servers can be configured to prevent taking a test multiple times, there can be ways to work around prevention measures.

-- Unauthorized help during the assessment

It may not be possible to confirm the identity of the person actually taking the online test.

You can read the entire article, including Rowe's suggestions to counteract the problems, at http://www.westga.edu/%7Edistance/ojdla/summer72/rowe72.html.

The Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration is a free, peer-reviewed quarterly published by the Distance and Distributed Education Center, The State University of West Georgia, 1600 Maple Street, Carrollton, GA 30118 USA; Web: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/jmain11.html.

SOCIAL INTERACTION IN ONLINE LEARNING

Among the reasons Rowe cites (in the aforementioned paper) for cheating on online tests is that "students often have less commitment to the integrity of distance-learning programs than traditional programs." This lack of commitment may be the result of the isolation inherent in distance education. In "Online Learning: Social Interaction and the Creation of a Sense of Community" (EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY, vol. 7, no. 3, July 2004, pp. 73-81), Joanne M. McInnerney and Tim S. Roberts, Central Queensland University, argue that an online learner's feeling a sense of isolation can affect the outcome of his or her learning experience. The authors recommend three protocols to aid social interaction and alleviate isolation among online learners:

1. The use of synchronous communication

"Chat-rooms and other such forums are an excellent way for students to socialize, to assist each other with study, or to learn as part of collaborative teams."

2. The introduction of a forming stage

"Discussion on almost any topics (the latest movies, sporting results,

etc.) can be utilized by the educator as a prelude to the building of trust and community that is essential to any successful online experience."

3. The adherence to effective communication guidelines "Foremost among these guidelines is the need for unambiguous instructions and communications from the educator to the students involved in the course. To this end instructions regarding both course requirements and communication protocols should be placed on the course web site."

The complete article is online at http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/7_3/8.html.

Educational Technology & Society [ISSN 1436-4522] is a peer-reviewed quarterly online journal published by the International Forum of Educational Technology & Society and the IEEE Computer Society Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF). It is available in HTML and PDF formats at no cost at http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/.

The International Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS) is a subgroup of the IEEE Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF). IFETS encourages discussions on the issues affecting the educational system developer (including AI) and education communities. For more information, link to http://ifets.ieee.org/.

......................................................................

ONLINE COURSES: COSTS AND CAPS

Two articles in the July/August 2005 issue of SYLLABUS address the often-asked questions on delivering online instruction: "How much will it cost?" and "How many students can we have in a class?"

In "Online Course Development: What Does It Cost?" (SYLLABUS, vol. 17, no. 12, July/August 2004, pp. 27-30) Judith V. Boettcher looks at where the costs of online course development have shifted in the past ten years. While the costs of course development are still significant, estimating them is not an exact science. Boettcher, however, does provide some rules of thumb that program planners can use to get more accurate estimates. The article is available online at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9676.

 

In "Online Course Caps: A Survey" (SYLLABUS, vol. 17, no. 12, July/August 2004, pp. 43-4) Boris Vilic reports on a survey of 101 institutions to determine their average course cap for online courses. The survey also tried to determine what influences differences in setting caps: Does the delivery method used make a difference? Are there differences if the course is taught by full-time faculty or by adjuncts? Or if given by experienced versus inexperienced providers? Or by the level (undergraduate or graduate) of the course? The article is available online at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9679.

Syllabus [ISSN 1089-5914] is published monthly by 101communications, LLC, 9121 Oakdale Avenue, Suite 101, Chatsworth, CA 91311 USA; tel: 650-941-1765; fax: 650-941-1785; email: info@syllabus.com; Web: http://www.syllabus.com/. Annual subscriptions are free to individuals who work in colleges, universities, and high schools in the U.S.; go to http://subscribe.101com.com/syllabus/ for more information.

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education in general are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of distance education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

 

Huge Cheating Scandals at the University of Virginia, Ohio, Duke, and Other Universities

Cheating Scandal in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University
In the biggest cheating scandal ever at Duke University’s business school, 34 students are facing penalties for collaborating on exam answers, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported. Nine students face expulsion, while others face a range of penalties, including one-year suspensions from the MBA program.
Inside Higher Ed, April 30, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/30/qt
The ABC News account on May 1, 2007 is at http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3105733

"Duke MBAs Fail Ethics:  Test Thirty-four Fuqua School of Business students are accused of violating the school's honor code by cheating on an exam,"  by Alison Damast, Business Week, April 30, 2007 --- Click Here  

Cheating on the Rise

Business-school leaders have reason to be concerned. Fifty-six percent of graduate business students admitted to cheating one or more times in the past academic year, compared to 47% of nonbusiness students, according to a study published in September in the journal of the Academy of Management Learning & Education (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/24/06, "A Crooked Path Through B-School"). Donald McCabe, the lead author of the study and a professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School, says the large number of students implicated in the Duke case is above average. "It's certainly not the biggest, but it's one of the bigger ones," he says of academic scandals involving all kinds of students.

One of the larger cases in the past five years was a cheating scandal in a physics class at the University of Virginia in 2002. The school eventually dismissed 45 students and revoked three graduates' degrees. In 2005, Harvard Business School rejected 119 applicants accused of hacking the school's admissions Web site (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/9/05, "An Ethics Lesson for MBA Wannabes").

The Duke occurrence came to light in mid-March, when the professor for the class noticed some unusual consistencies among students' answers on the final exam and as well as on assignments given during the course.

Stiff Penalties

The students were brought before the school's Judicial Board and are facing a range of wide range of punitive measures, including expulsion. The board is made up of three faculty members, three students, and one nonvoting faculty chair who only votes in case of a tie.

Thirty-eight students were initially investigated, only four of whom were found not guilty of violating the honor code. (Of the 38 students, 37 were accused of cheating and one of lying.) Of the remaining 34 students, 9 will be expelled, 15 will be suspended for one year and receive an F in the class, and the remaining 9 will receive an F in the course. The penalties for the students will not go into effect until June 1, after which students will have 15 days to file an appeal. The school did not release the names of the students involved or name the professor.

Gavan Fitzsimons, a professor who is chair of the Fuqua Honor Committee, said in a written summary of the board hearings that the board spent several weeks "deliberating at length" the circumstances of the case. "It is my utmost hope that all of the individuals found guilty of violating our Honor Code will learn how precious a gift honor and integrity is," he wrote. "I know from my interactions with many of them that they will forever be changed by this experience."

Academic Pressures

The faculty and student body at Duke were informed of the committee's decision on the afternoon of Apr. 27, and the news spread throughout the campus and on Internet chat groups. Charles Scrase, Fuqua's student body president, was surprised by the charges: "The classmates I work with on a day-to-day basis are ethical, outstanding individuals," he says. "We're shocked that [cheating] could've occurred to this degree."

Sonit Handa, a first-year Fuqua student, suggests the students involved in this case might have been tempted to cheat because they wanted to ensure they did well in the class: "Duke is a hectic MBA business school, and employers want good grades, so there's a lot of pressure to do well."

The pressure, of course, is not confined to Duke. Many schools have policies that encourage an open dialogue on business ethics. Students at the Thunderbird School of Global Management sign a Professional Oath of Honor similar to doctors' Hippocratic Oath, while Penn State created an honor committee of students and faculty last year to help foster academic integrity on campus.

Codes Not Foolproof

One of the more recent examples is the new graduate honor court at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School. In January, the business school established a student-run honor court, a body devoted to investigating student violations of the honor code. Between 30 and 40 students, from the school's five MBA programs, are involved with the court, according to Dawn Morrow, a second-year MBA student who serves as the student attorney general for the court.

Before this, student honor code violations were dealt with through the graduate honor court system, which handled cases from other graduate programs. Morrow says that students have been eager to get involved with the honor court because they want to ensure that the school's values are upheld inside and outside the classroom. Rutgers' McCabe estimates that 50 to 100 colleges and universities have honor codes.

Schools with extensive honor codes, such as Duke, tend to have less cheating in general, McCabe says. Still, he says, it's not a foolproof measure. Business-school students are more competitive than other students, and some use cheating as a way to ensure they get ahead: "It's kind of like a businessperson who has the opportunity to embezzle money in the dark of night," says McCabe. "Sure it's more tempting, but we still expect them to be honest."

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
There are two broad types of student honor codes. The toughest one is where each student signs an oath to report the cheating of any other student. This is a rough code that, in my opinion, must be backed by a college commitment to back the whistle blowing student if litigation ensues in the very litigious society of the United States (where 80% of the world's lawyers reside.)

The second kind is a softer version where students are not honor bound to report cheating by run their own honor courts to dole out punishment recommendations for cheating reported by others, usually their instructors. This may actually result in harsher punishments than instructors would normally dole out. For example, professors often think an F grade is sufficient punishment. Honor courts may recommend more severe punishments such as in the Duke scandal noted above.

One problem with honor courts is that they are more of a hassle for instructors having to take the time to report details of the infraction to the court and then appear before the court as witnesses. An even more controversial problem is that the inherent right of an instructor to assign a course grade punishment for cheating is taken out of the hands of the instructor and passed on to the honor court. Instructors generally do not like to lose their authority and responsibility for assigning grades.

"Both Sides of Kenan-Flagler:  MBAs run around like frantic idiots but are courted by huge companies as rock stars. It is no surprise that this combination of frenzy and entitlement leads to cheating," by Danvers Fleury, Business Week, June 24, 2007
--- http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2007/bs20070624_280134.htm?link_position=link2 

I used to think poorly of Duke MBAs. As a UNC recruit, one of my fondest memories was Welcome Weekend, where all admitted students are invited to meet each other and figure out whether Kenan-Flagler is right for them. While attending, I wanted to see how advanced I was at the fine art of diagnosing who would be ill enough to choose Fuqua over Kenan-Flagler.

My first suspected victim used to be an engineer, had a GMAT of 770, and got into seven different schools. When asked about his interest in North Carolina, he said, "Oh the weather. It’s so nice," and then proceeded to sweat, nervously tic, and stare intently at me, playing the crack addict to my crack. Clearly he suffered from Fuquash: the inability to relate to humans.

Others were afflicted with Fuquardation, or arrogance and entitlement falling just short of Whartonitis. This could be diagnosed by simply asking them, "What do you do for a living?" Infected parties came just short of an elaborate PowerPoint presentation-style pitch followed by a monopolization of group conversation revolving around their pet horse and its food likes and dislikes.

Now, it turns out that these people did not go to Kenan-Flagler, but they also haven’t been among the numerous upstanding and well-balanced people I’ve met from Fuqua. Concern has been voiced over Duke MBA ethics; I heartily disagree. According to a recent survey, 56% of MBAs cheat, yet somehow Fuqua is the only MBA program that can catch them and then admit to it! To me, that seems more like an accomplishment and less like a scandal, and I hope you don’t fault them for it in your search.

At business school you learn to look at both sides of complicated situations, and accordingly in this post I’d like to share my positive and negative thoughts on the MBA as a whole, and the Kenan-Flagler experience in particular.

The MBA: Invaluable

My ability to manage time and stress has skyrocketed, and overall I think through problems in a broader and more insightful fashion. A lot of my gut instincts on management and decision-making have been reinforced, while compelling evidence has been provided through 360-degree feedback and interactive course work that other habits need to go.

As for the career benefits, I’ve seen English teachers turn into financiers in 12 weeks. The MBA is worth every penny to career-switchers and adds incredible value to folks who don’t have strong business backgrounds. Just as important, the size of my professional network quadrupled overnight and continues to grow daily.

The MBA: Dinosaur

MBA programs give you credibility, new skills, and a great network, but there are plenty of ways they could go about it better.

Most classes in most programs revolve around lecture and case studies; this is not going to continue to fly for the MTV generation. I fully understand how teachers feel that asking questions and discussing a shared case is interactive, but they clearly haven’t grown up in the highly immersive multimedia world that most echo boomers come from. Integrating real-time simulation into the classroom as well as experimenting with group participation could favorably affect learning.

Furthermore, the core economic principles that most programs teach come from a microeconomic and macroeconomic world where people are rational, systems are closed, and equilibrium is always reached. Considering how irrational people are and how open and dynamic our economy is, I can’t help but think we’re getting led astray, and books like The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker go a long way to confirming this fear.

Finally, I think programs create overload for overload’s sake while at the same time coddling students. MBAs run around like frantic idiots but are courted by huge companies as rock stars. It is no surprise that this combination of frenzy and entitlement leads to cheating. I think a less insular environment that is more integrated with the real world and local community would help students stay focused and balanced, making them less likely to make poor decisions.

Continued in article

"Are B-Schools Hiding the Cheaters?" by Alison Damast, Business Week, June 20, 2007
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2007/bs20070620_937949.htm

Want to know where business students are cheating? Many schools have honor codes, but it's not easy to find out when they're broken.

With the controversy surrounding the cheating scandal at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, a prospective business school student might be inclined to take a closer look at just how often cheating occurs at some top B-schools. But if you're of that mind, be prepared to encounter some roadblocks along the way.

This was what happened when BusinessWeek conducted an e-mail survey of our top 25 ranked graduate business schools in an effort to quantify how widespread cheating is among B-school students. It turned out to be a tougher task than we expected. We learned that business schools are reluctant to release data about cheating and, in some cases, refuse even to discuss it.

Back in May—shortly after Duke announced it was disciplining 34 students for ethical violations involving a test and classwork—we asked each of the top 25 how many students had been sanctioned for cheating or other ethical violations over the past 10 years. We requested a breakdown by school year, type of violation committed, and punishment handed down, if any. We also asked the school if they had an honor code and, if so, what their process was for dealing with students who violated it.

Handful of Cases Only

Out of the 25 business schools, only three—the University of Virginia, Duke, and the University of Chicago—were able to provide us with specific data about ethical violations among their B-school students. Fifteen schools provided us with information about their policy for dealing with ethics violations, but did not provide specific figures on cheating. And seven schools declined to provide any information (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/21/07, "Schools' Responses on Cheating Stats").

From the limited amount of information provided by the schools, there was no indication that cheating cases resulting in school disciplinary action were numerous at top B-schools. Chicago, for instance, said that it only had 25 disciplinary hearings over the past 13 years. All 25 resulted in sanctions, although only 11 were related to academic issues or misconduct. That's an average of less than one academic sanction per year during that period.

Schools such as New York University and Indiana University's Kelly School of Business said they just have a "handful" of cases each year, but declined to get more specific on the figures. And Virginia has had just a small number of cases in the past seven years that resulted in expulsions, according to online records kept by the school's honor committee.

Playing With Cheaters

Still, the unwillingness of a large number of top schools to provide data on cheating is bad news for a business school student who wants to get an accurate picture of how his classmates might conduct themselves while in school, said David Callahan, author of The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead.

"It seems to me like it is a piece of information you would want to know about the business school you are going to," Callahan said. "If you are an honest student, it puts you at a disadvantage to be in an environment with cheating because you're going to be working harder and losing out to people who are not playing by the rules."

Administrators at business schools offered a wide variety of reasons they were unable to disclose data on cheating; some said they simply didn't keep track of it, while others said they could not disclose it because of federal privacy laws. A handful said simply that cheating rarely, if ever, happens at their school.

Continued in article

D-Schools Are Also Cheating
The Southern Illinois University dental school, which is affiliated with the Edwardsville campus, is withholding grades of all first-year students, because of questions raised about the academic merit and integrity of the students. A university spokesman declined to provide details, citing the need to preserve confidentiality and the presumption of innocence, but said that all 52 first-year students would be interviewed as part of the inquiry. Ann Boyle, dean of the dental school, issued a statement: “This matter raises questions about the integrity and ethical behavior of Year I students and is, therefore, under investigation. We will follow our processes as outlined in our Student Progress Document to resolve the situation as quickly as we can.” KMOV-TV quoted students at the dental school, anonymously, as saying that the investigation concerned students who had tried to memorize and share information from old exams that instructors let them see, so the students did not consider the practice to be cheating. The Southern Illinois incident follows two other scandals this year involving professional school cheating: one at Duke University’s business school and one at Indiana University’s dental school.
Inside Higher Ed, June 27, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/27/qt

Dental School Alleged Cheating at Loma Linda University, New York University, and UCLA
The American Dental Association is investigating allegations of possible cheating by students at four dental schools on an exam that leads to licensure for dentists, the Los Angeles Times reported. The probe involves students at Loma Linda University, New York University, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California.
Inside Higher Ed, November 14, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/14/qt

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

Plagiarism News
An investigative committee is pushing for the dismissal of Don Heinrich Tolzmann, who teaches history and works as a librarian at the University of Cincinnati, The Enquirer reported. A panel there found duplications between Tolzmann’s book The German-American Experience and a text written in 1962. Tolzmann strongly denies wrongdoing, which was first alleged in an H-Net review. At Ohio University, which has been dealing with charges of plagiarized master’s theses, the institution announced that graduates accused of plagiarism would face hearings to determine the status of their degrees, the Associated Press reported.
Inside Higher Ed, August 25, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/24/qt

Question
Will these engineering graduates take down their diplomas and return them to Ohio University?

Ohio University has sent letters to more than 50 people who earned master’s degrees with material believed to be plagiarized, asking them to return their degrees, rewrite their theses, or demand a hearing, The Athens News reported. In May the university found “rampant and flagrant plagiarism” among some graduate students in its mechanical engineering department.
Inside Higher Ed, July 19, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/19/qt

A Professor's Lawsuit Against Ohio University
Jay Gunasekera, a professor who supervised the work of some of the 37 Ohio University master’s graduates found to have plagiarized parts of their theses, is suing the university for defamation, saying that his role has been distorted, the Associated Press reported. University officials — who have released detailed reports on the alleged plagiarism — told the AP that they would contest the suit.
Inside Higher Ed, August 14, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/14/qt

An earlier November 26, 2001 segment called "Cheating Scandal at U. of Virginia," --- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/11/26/national/main319035.shtml 

Eight University of Virginia students have left school for plagiarism, and a student committee is preparing to investigate 72 more alleged honor code violations in what has become the school's biggest cheating scandal in memory.

Since May, 148 students have been accused of copying term papers in Professor Lou Bloomfield's introductory physics course. Bloomfield referred the students to the university honor committee after a homemade computer program detected numerous duplicated phrases in his students' work during the past five semesters.

"That was a real shock," said Thomas Hall, chairman of the honor committee, whose staff has been under enormous pressure to finish its investigation before graduation this May. "The largest number of accusations I'd seen from any one professor was maybe five."

Sixty Minutes aired an update with Mike Wallace on November 10, 2002 --- http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/main3415.shtml  
At the time I am writing this early in the morning on November 11, CBS has not yet posted the update version at its Website.

Here are some of the highlights I noted while watching Mike Wallace's update last night

Question:
How many students have been expelled from the University of Virginia over the approximate period of one year and how many are still awaiting a decision on whether or not they will be expelled due to Honor Code violations at the University of Virginia?

Answer:
The number is now up to 40 students expelled with 120 others still awaiting a decision as to their fate.  I might note that this is after the scandal made national headlines almost a year ago when eight students were expelled.

Question:
What is the most absurd claim made by a UVA student interviewed on campus by Mike Wallace?

Answer:
That faculty investigations of honor code violations are violations of trust that students have in faculty when students sign the honor code.  Students are led to believe that faculty will not snoop into cheating even if there is evidence of such cheating.

Question:
What is the most innovative way students are cheating in examinations using water bottles?

Answer:
Write crib notes in microscopic print on the back of a label pasted to the outside of a water bottle.  The print becomes magnified when looking through the water on the opposite side of the label.

Question:
What is an earlier CBS 48 Hours show in which the School Board of a high school overturned the grades of a biology teacher who failed students for cheating by downloading their main project papers from the Internet?

Answer:
Plagiarism Controversy Engulfs Kansas School --- http://www.edweek.org/ew/newstory.cfm?slug=29piper.h21 

It all started with a 10th grade biology project about leaves. But the dust-up over the handling of a student-plagiarism incident in the normally tranquil Kansas City, Kan., suburb of Piper doesn't appear likely to subside any time soon.

So far, the teacher at the center of the controversy, Christine Pelton, has resigned. Another teacher resigned last month in support, and several others are contemplating whether they want to stay with the 1,300-student district. The latest casualty is Michael Adams, the principal at the 450- student Piper High School, who announced last month that he would resign at the end of the school year. He cited "personal and professional" reasons, but added in an interview: "You can read between the lines."

In addition, the district attorney has filed civil charges against the district's seven-member school board, accusing the members of violating the Kansas open-meetings law last December when they reduced the penalties for the 28 students accused of plagiarism. And three board members now face a recall drive.

"All of us have gotten tons of hate mail, from all over the country," said Leigh Vader, the Piper school board's vice president. "People are telling us we're idiots and stupid. ... Moving on—I think that's the goal of everyone."

But that may be difficult. The dispute, which has drawn national attention, will return to the national spotlight in May, when the CBS newsmagazine "48 Hours" is expected to air an investigative report on the Piper plagiarism case.

"For a lot of people," said David Lungren, the president of the Piper Teachers Association, "the feeling is we can debate the decision to death or figure out what we need to do to move on. If we can all agree that this did not work out well for us, what could we figure out to prevent this from occurring again?"

Question:
What is the major conclusion drawn by commentators of on all of these CBS shows about cheating?

Answer:
That a rapidly-growing proportion students no longer consider cheating a bad thing to do as long as you don't get caught.  And their parents do not consider cheating a bad thing and will even go to school officials and even court to defend against punishments for cheating.

Question:
What are the most popular sites for term papers?

Answer 1:  SchoolSucks.com --- http://www.schoolsucks.com/ 
Note that this site purportedly has a minimum of 250,000 hits per day according to the November 10, 2002 Sixty Minutes show.

Need a Paper

Welcome back to School Sucks!! Ya ready?
Time to get out those dusty notebooks, the whoopie cushions, the notes you got from the kid who took the same classes last year and get your asses back to school!

We're ready.

We got a new site for you. A chat room so you can talk homework with students from all over the world. Message boards, games and polls. If you sign up, you can send instant messages.

We're giving a $250 high school scholarship this semester. But you have to prove that you're not an A student to participate!

Let us know what you think and keep spreading the word:

School Sucks!

Answer 2 --- Termpapers R Us --- http://www.termpapersrus.com/ 

Do you need help and need it fast? Then you have found THE BEST SITE on the entire Internet.  Our guarantee to you... is that you will find what you need on this site and you will find it fast.... if it isn’t in our database of more than 25,000 sample term papers, essays, and research studies, then we will write one for you just as fast as you need it.

Try a keyword search through our database of more than 25,000 sample term papers, essays, and research studies... if you can't find something on your topic... then we will write one for you just as fast as you need it. Take advantage of the expertise and wealth of talent that the staff of researchers and writers have to offer at TermpapersRus.com.... They work around the clock 24 hours per day... 7 days per week... 365 days per year and do nothing but assist students with their term projects and research reports.... NO matter what the topic ..nor the time of day.. TermpapersRus is always available to assist you with all your writing needs.    

"Term Papers ‘R’ Us"! ..we assist students with Term papers... and we are THE BEST! 

Check the Termpapersrus.com database -- RIGHT NOW!! -- and you’ll see what we mean.... there are more than 25,000 example term papers listed there ...and they are all available for immediate delivery by email, fax or Federal Express!  ...each of the thousands of papers in the Term Papers ‘R’ Us database cost only $[] per page and the bibliographies are FREE??!! ...this straight-forward-no-hassle rate allows 
Term Papers ‘R’ Us to help you become "Term Papers ‘R’ Me!" Need it FAST!! then simply place a "RUSH ORDER" and receive it even faster ...
in ONLY a few hours!!! 
Click here to ORDER NOW!!

TermPapersRUs.com  is so confident in the quality of our work... that we offer you the unique opportunity to actually preview excerpts from a paper (for FREE) in order to see if it offers the appropriate direction for your research and studies.

 Didn't find anything in our database??

NO PROBLEM!!!! You can have one of the research writers complete a customized example paper for you.... and this way we can show you the very best techniques for writing your own paper and you'll learn how to approach any topic.  All customized research is ONLY $19.95 per page with a FREE bibliography and a guaranteed completion date!!  So search our database NOW.. or you can Click HERE or the purple balloon for Custom research... either way you'll have TermpapersRus.com quality staff to show you the way for all of your writing needs!!!  

Answer 3 (Some others mentioned on the May 12 Sixty Minutes show)

CheatHouse.com --- http://www.cheathouse.com/ (Free papers)

PaperWizards.com --- http://www.paperwizards.com/ 

Question:
The bottom-line question posed to the two young spokesmen for the School Sucks service on the Web was Mike Wallace's question:  Who besides students downloads papers from School Sucks?

Answer:
Professors wanting to pad their resumes and annual performance reports.  

Bob Jensen's conclusion:  Listening to the above revelation that some professors are using the same cheat sites as students will not not exactly help convince students that this is a wrong thing to do in education and in society.  But then again, students and their professors get even more cynical about cheating morality as they watch leaders in corporate governance, auditing firms, churches, charities, and government being accused daily of massive frauds and influence peddling.

Hi Dan,

Now let's wait a minute on the "Wait a minute"  If your entire future rides on getting an A in a course, you might be tempted to crib for competitive advantage.  Or you may be a geek who just takes clever cheating up as a challenge.

As Rchard Sansing pointed out, if you print on the back of the label of a water bottle and paste it back on the bottle, your can read it easily in magnified print from the other side of the bottle.  It is not necessary to reverse the printing.  However, if you want to use a mirror up a pant leg or skirt, you may need to reverse the printing.

It is pretty easy to get small print.  Simply try Font Size 8 in MS Word.

As far reading backwards is concerned, dyslexics have an advantage if the print is not reversed.

I am told that MW Word “has a somewhat hidden backward printing feature.”
--- http://www.euronet.nl/users/mvdk/wordprocessors.html
I’ve not been able to find it, but I’m certain that if anybody could find it, it would be my students.

Actually a somewhat better approach would be to type whatever you want, paste in whatever graphs and tables you want, capture the screen, then reduce the size to whatever it takes to fit inside the water bottle, and then create a mirror image in your graphics or MS Word software.  However, you may want to wear a special kind of spectacles for magnification.  You can read the following in the Help file of MW Word:

Create a mirror image of an object

  1. Click the AutoShape, picture, WordArt, or clip art you want to duplicate. 
  2. Click Copy and then click Paste 
  3. On the Drawing toolbar, click Draw, point to Rotate or Flip, and then click Flip Horizontal or Flip Vertical. 
  4. Drag and position the duplicate object so that it mirrors the original object. 

Note   You may need to override the Snap-To-Grid option to position the object precisely. To do this, press ALT as you drag the object.

Bob Jensen

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Stone [mailto:dstone@UKY.EDU]
Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2002, 5:04 A.M.
Subject: Wait a minute....

Now help me out here friends....

I've been bothered since I first heard about this...

If I write on a water bottle in tiny print and then read through the water, the print will be bigger but it will be BACKWARDS.  A middle of the night experiment confirms this.  Would it really be that helpful to have a tiny print, written-backwards cheat sheet?????? I doubt it.

My point is that the media may be "over the top" in reporting some of the evidence on the cheating problem in today's University.  Yes I believe there is a cheating scandal, but to paraphrase from Charlotte's Web, "people believe anything that they read."  Let's not make this mistake.

Best,

Dan Stone
Univ. of Kentucky

Look Before and After You Make an Accounting Term Paper Assignment

I did not expect there to be too many accounting term papers at the term paper mills.  This turns out to be naive.  For example, there are over 200 papers on some very interesting accountancy topics at http://www.termpapersrus.com/ 
Include the following in your search:

SchoolSucks.com --- http://www.schoolsucks.com/ 

Termpapers R Us --- http://www.termpapersrus.com/ 

CheatHouse.com --- http://www.cheathouse.com/ (Free papers)

PaperWizards.com --- http://www.paperwizards.com/ 

Moral of Story --- Check out what the term papers have available on the topic you assign to your class.

Possible Assignment:  Have students critique a term paper mill product.

The Web puts answers to most questions -- not to mention ready-made term papers -- at students' fingertips. One educator says it's time to assign work that truly makes kids think. 

"Got Cheaters? Ask New Questions," by Dustin Goot, Wired News, September 10, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54996,00.html 

Jamie McKenzie has spent his whole career trying to get schools "to ask better questions." But now that he preaches better questions as an antidote for rampant Internet plagiarism, a lot more teachers are listening.

In the professional development seminars he gives, McKenzie said, 60 to 80 percent of teachers cite cases of plagiarism in their classrooms. A more formal study, conducted by a professor at Rutgers University, found that more than half of high school kids "have engaged in some level of plagiarism on written assignments using the Internet."

According to McKenzie, however, students aren't solely to blame for this trend. Many assignments teachers give, he said, are conducive to cheating. "It is reckless and irresponsible to continue requiring topical 'go find out about' research projects in this new electronic context," McKenzie wrote in a 1998 article in "From Now On," an online educational journal he edits.

Instead, teachers must distinguish between trivial research and meaningful research, which asks kids to "analyze, interpret, infer or synthesize" material they have read.

Patti Tjomsland said that in Washington's Mark Morris High School, where she serves as a media specialist, the standard book report of the old days does not even exist anymore. Instead, teachers favor compare-and-contrast essays or personal opinion pieces asking students what they would do in a certain situation. Content for these kinds of essays, Tjomsland explained, is not readily available online.

McKenzie hopes that more schools will follow Mark Morris High's example. "A lot of concern (about plagiarism) is translated into more careful scrutiny," he said. "I would like to see the concern translated into better assignments."

March 29, 2002 message from Glen L. Gray [vcact00f@CSUN.EDU] 

Information Week had an interesting article that says that teens are developing bad "work" habits that may cause them problems at work--e.g., plagiarism.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020307S0005 

Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA 
Department of Accounting and Information Systems 
California State University, Northridge 18111 Nordhoff Street 
Northridge, CA 91330-8372 818.677.3948 
glen.gray@csun.edu  
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f 

A Message on January 17, 2002 from Ceil Pillsbury [ceil@UWM.EDU] 

Last month I posted a message regarding six accounting majors who had cheated in my class. Thank you for the responses with ideas about teaching ethics. It turned out that six other accounting majors had cheated in a different class and my original concern grew so much that I decided to take at look at the literature on academic misconduct (Thank you to Bob Jensen his usual helpful links).

Essentially, the research says that the problem is far more widespread than professors want to acknowledge (and business students are among the worse cheaters). BUT the literature also indicates that academic misconduct can be significantly reduced by raising student awareness of the issues through class discussion, signed honor codes, and having students know that real enforcement with significant penalties is occurring. Given Enron, and the significant fallout which is going to occur, I think it is very easy to tie the need for academic integrity into the need for professional integrity.

Along these lines I am attaching three documents I have prepared which I will be using in my class from now on. I have had several students review these documents with positive feedback. I would also appreciate any feedback you have.

My plan is to lecture about ethics and then to have students read the letter on the need for academic and professional integrity. After that there is an ethics worksheet for the students to complete and an honor code for them to sign.

I sense that I do not speak for myself alone when I say that my classes have become so packed with trying to cram in the ever burgeoning standards that I haven't paid nearly enough attention to ethics in the last few years. If anyone shares that concern and finds the attached materials may be of help please feel free to make any use of them desired.

I also now have an easy to use cheating software program from the University of Virginia that was used to catch 122 Physics students plagiarizing. It is available free of charge at

http://www.plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu 

Regards,

Ceil

Ceil's documents are also available at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/cheating/ 

The 100 Cheating Scandals at the University of Virginia --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Virginia

But they know enough about U.S. culture to sue
Hopefully Duke made all of its MBA students sign that they understood the honor code

"Cheating Across Cultures," by Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, May 24, 2007 --- http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/24/cheating

When Duke University found 34 first-year business school students guilty of collaborating on a take-home test late last month, officials announced a variety of penalties: Pending appeals, nine of the Fuqua School of Business M.B.A. students would be expelled, 15 would receive a one-year suspension and a failing grade in the required course, nine would simply fail the class and one would fail the assignment alone.
Not surprisingly, some of the students are contesting their sentences. This week, a Durham lawyer who’s filed appeals on behalf of 16 of the students cried foul to the Associated Press, arguing that all nine of the expelled students were from Asian countries, and that the students in question failed to fully understand the honor code and the judicial proceedings.

Excuses, excuses? Maybe; maybe not. Regardless, the complaints serve to spotlight some of the particular challenges inherent in addressing issues of academic integrity involving international students, many of whom come to American colleges with different conceptions of cheating. As the number of international students has increased in recent years — and the number of academic misconduct incidents involving international students has risen accordingly — educators have increasingly embraced the need to address academic integrity concerns proactively, recognizing in their actions the various cultural influences that can help cause one to cheat.

“These issues come up in unusual ways. It doesn’t mean there isn’t cheating in China [for instance]. There is,” says Sidney L. Greenblatt, senior assistant director of advising and counseling at Syracuse University and an expert on China (he’s currently writing an essay for a collection on cultural aspects of academic integrity, and has co-authored a publication on “U.S. Classroom Culture” highlighting these issues). “People present false credentials to the American embassy and corruption in the system is about what it is here.”

Continued in article

Spotted: a new trend called plagio-riffing
Students are growing lazier about the whole process of copying, not even bothering to change fonts in a cut-and-paste excerpt or otherwise disguise their tracks. When asked why he inserted an entire page printed in Black Forest Gothic in a paper written in Courier, a student in freshman composition expressed surprise: “If you start changing things, that’s cheating, right?” The path of least resistance continues, often refreshingly low-tech. A Psychology 200 instructor reported a student handing in a Xerox of an article with the author’s name whited out and her own inserted. “I did the best I could,” confessed the student. “I didn’t have my laptop with me, and I was in a hurry.” . . . Spotted: a new trend called plagio-riffing, where students get together and mix and match five or more papers into one by sampling and lifting choice paragraphs to the beat of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” (plagiarized from “He’s So Fine”).
David Galef, "Report from the Academic Committee on Plagiarism," Inside Higher Ed, June 10, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/06/10/galef

Blackboard and the company that owns Turnitin, the popular plagiarism-detection service, have settled their patent dispute, agreeing not to sue one another, Washington Business Journal reported. Blackboard announced in July that it was adding a plagiarism-detection feature to its course management system.
Inside Higher Ed, August 24, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/24/qt

Comparison of Plagiarism Detection Tools --- http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/SER07017B.pdf
"Plagiarism Detection: Is Technology the Answer?" at the 2007 EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional Conference, Liz Johnson, Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, provided a chart comparing seven plagiarism detection tools: Turnitin, MyDropBox, PAIRwise, EVE2, WCopyFind, CopyCatch, and GLATT.

August 24, 2007 message from Ed Scribner [escribne@nmsu.edu]

Bob,

The New Mexico State University Library is hosting a new website on plagiarism issues. The site, available at http://lib.nmsu.edu/plagiarism , contains both faculty and student resources.

Ed

New Kinds of Cheating

Hacking into a professor's computer to change grades of 300 students
Two students at California State University at Northridge have been charged by state authorities with illegally hacking into a professor’s computer account to change their grades and the grades of nearly 300 students, the Los Angeles Times reported. The students told authorities that they thought the professor was unfair.
Inside Higher Ed, July 26, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/26/qt

July 28, 2006 Update
Two students each face up to a year in jail for a prank that involved hacking into a professor's computer, giving grades to other students and sending pizza, magazine subscriptions and CDs to the professor's home. Chen, 20, and Jennifer Ngan, 19, face misdemeanor charges of illegally accessing computers. The pair, both students of California State University, Northridge, are scheduled to be arraigned Aug. 21.
"Students Face 1 Year in Jail for Hacking," PhysOrg, July 28, 2006 --- http://physorg.com/news73239464.html

 

Honesty may be the best policy, but it's important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.
George Carlin as quoted by Mark Shapiro at http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-11-25-06.htm

 

 

Question
What should you ban when students are taking examinations? Baseball caps? iPods?

Banning baseball caps during tests was obvious - students were writing the answers under the brim. Then, schools started banning cell phones, realizing students could text message the answers. Nick d'Ambrosia, 17, holds up his iPod inside a classroom at Mountain View High School in Meridian, Idaho Friday, April 13, 2007. In Idaho, Mountain View High School recently enacted a ban on iPods, Zunes and other digital media players. Some students were downloading formulas and other cheats onto the players, although none were ever caught.
Rebecca Boone, PhysOrg, April 27, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news96865353.html

 

"The Infinite Mind" program on Cheating

 

Email message on November 15, 2006 from Reams, Richard [rreams@trinity.edu]

I heard the program Monday night on KSTX, and some of you may find it interesting, especially the first 30 minutes or so that focuses on academic cheating. Here’s the link: http://www.lcmedia.com/mind452.htm 

RR
---------------------------------------------------

Richard Reams, Ph.D.
Assistant Director
Counseling Services
Trinity University
One Trinity Place
San Antonio, Texas 78212-7200
215 Coates University Center
www.trinity.edu/counseling 

**************************

In this hour, we explore Cheating. Four out of five high school students say they've cheated. More than half of medical school students say the same thing. Even The New York Times has cribbed from somebody else's paper. Is everybody doing it? Guests include Dr. Howard Gardner, professor in Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-director of a large-scale research study called the GoodWork Project; renowned primate researcher Dr. Frans de Waal, professor of psychology at Emory University; Dr. Helen Fisher, research professor in the department of anthropology at Rutgers University and author of Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray; and country music group BR5-49, who perform the Hank Williams classic, "Your Cheatin' Heart."

Host Dr. Fred Goodwin begins with an essay in which he explores some of the reasons why attitudes toward cheating seem to be more permissive than ever. He mentions "moral relativism" in elite education; a media culture that end up making celebrities of high-profile cheaters like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass; and the construction of elaborate laws and rules to codify and enforce moral behavior, which sends the implicit message, "if it's legal, it's ethical."

Cheating among students is rampant. Four out of five high school students admit to having cheated at some point. Why is it so common? And why don't more students speak out? To begin today, we hear from Mary Weed Ervin. She is now a freshman at Duke University, but when she was a senior in high school in Virginia, she caught her classmates cheating and did something about it, despite the consequences.

After catching students in her AP Biology class cheating, she told the teacher. Her classmates treated her as if she were the bad guy. She felt even her friends would not stand up for her, since they continued to hang out with the kids who cheated and others who outright shunned her. She was insulted by some kids and, after one party, she was even worried she might be attacked. As a result, she stopped doing normal senior activities, and she felt very alone. At the end of the year, though, she was awarded "Senior of the Year" by her peers, so she knows a lot of her classmates must have supported what she did, even though they never said so.

Then the Infinite Mind's Devorah Klahr reports on cheating in schools. Remember when cheating meant looking over your friend's shoulder? Well, not anymore. Today, many students use technology to cheat. In addition to buying term papers off the Internet, they use cell phones, text messaging, and digital computers, sometimes in elaborate schemes to outwit teachers. "I’m just using my technology to my advantage pretty much," says one high school cheater. "They gave me all the tools to do it and I’m just using it to help myself. Because my parents expect me to have good grades."

To catch these cheaters, teachers are realizing they, too, have to become more tech savvy. Lou Bloomfield, a professor at The University of Virginia, created "copyfind," a computer program to catch cheaters. And many schools use an even larger search engine called turnitin.com, which scans term papers against a large database, ensuring that writing is original and not plagiarized. At the University of Pennsylvania, Michele Goldfarb directs the office of student conduct. She investigates suspicious looking papers. She remembers a term paper that was especially obvious. "The faculty member thought the paper was unusually sophisticated for the student," Goldfarb says, "… use of words like, 'the pock marked landscape' and 'the steep sided hollows.' Undergraduates do not talk that way, do not write that way.”

Educators seem to agree that teaching integrity is the only way to stop cheating. Nobody's going to win this technology arms race. Elizabeth Kiss is a professor of political science at Duke University and a board member of the Center for Academic Integrity. At the beginning of the semester, she tells her students to look up at the ceiling and think about the trustworthiness of the architect who designed the structure and the builders who built it. "So I get them to think about the ways we depend every day on the honesty of other people. And when people aren't trustworthy, others get hurt."

Next, Dr. Goodwin interviews the distinguished developmental psychologist and neuropsychologist Dr. Howard Gardner. He's a professor in Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-director of a large-scale research study called the GoodWork Project. Perhaps best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, he's the author of eighteen books and hundreds of articles. Most recently, he co-authored the book Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet. A new book, Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work will be out in February, 2004.

For The GoodWork Project, Dr. Gardner has been interviewing people working in different fields -- science, journalism, and theater -- about good work, which he defines as excellent and ethical. Everyone he spoke to knows the difference between what is ethical and what is not, but the disturbing thing is how many people said they cannot afford to do the right or honest thing if they want to get ahead in their careers. He says there is a tension between the people they want to be and the people they think they need to be to succeed.

He says that scientists -- geneticists, in particular -- had the easiest time doing good work, since everyone wanted the same thing from them, and there was plenty of money and support for their work. Many said they felt their only limitation was their own abilities. Journalists, on the other hand, were in a very different situation. They felt pulled in many directions -- to work faster, to cut corners, to be more sensational ("if it bleeds, it leads") -- and, as a result, it was difficult to do good work. As an example, Dr. Gardner discusses the Jayson Blair case at The New York Times. Blair was caught fabricating elements in stories, submitting receipts for trips he never took, and, ultimately, plagiarizing. But, even before these things were discovered, he had numerous corrections in his stories. Dr. Gardner says the problem was that he was not chastised, but promoted. He did not have any kind of deep mentoring -- in which someone conveys the larger purpose of the work, explains why it is important not to cut corners, and provides regular support.

In contemporary society, particularly with the Internet, there are many ways to get around doing your own work. He says being ethical requires a good, old-fashioned conscience -- even though we might be able to get away with cheating, we need to be able to stop ourselves because we knows it's wrong and because we would not want to live in a world where everyone cheated. In such a world, we would not be able to trust anyone or anything.

To contact Dr. Gardner, please write to: Dr. Howard Gardner, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 201 Larsen Hall, 14 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138. Or visit www.pz.harvard.edu/Research/GoodWork.htm

To order Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet, click here.

Believe it or not, cheating - and feeling cheated - is not unique to humans. Even monkeys want to be treated fairly. Dr. Goodwin interviews primate researcher Dr. Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of many books, including The Ape and the Sushi Master and, his latest, My Family Album: Thirty Years of Primate Photography.

Dr. de Waal discusses two different kinds of cheating found in primates. The first, deception, is generally seen only in the great apes, who are our closest relatives and capable of the highest levels of cognition. He says that in one chimp colony, in which lower ranking males were not allowed to court females, he saw one openly inviting a female to mate (which he does by showing her an erection). At that moment, the alpha male rounded the corner, and the lower-ranking male covered his penis with his hands -- hiding the evidence of his wrongdoing. Dr. de Waal has also seen a chimp try to disguise his nervousness in front of a rival. Chimps show nervosity by baring their teeth, and this chimp used his fingers to press his lips together over his teeth. This kind of behavior requires that the animal be aware of how others perceive him or her. Chimps end up distrusting other chimps who often deceive -- they develop methods for detecting cheaters. All this requires high-level thinking.

Dr. de Waal then discusses the other kind of cheating -- being shortchanged. He describes a recent study he and a student, Sarah Brosnan, conducted with capuchin monkeys. They set up a bartering system with the monkeys, in which they would give the monkeys pebbles, and then the monkeys would exchange the pebbles for cucumber pieces. Alone, a monkey would do this over and over again, until the cucumber was gone. They then put two monkeys next to each other, and, in exchange for the pebbles, they gave one of them a cucumber slice and the other a grape, which is much better. The monkey getting the cucumber seemed to have a very strong emotional reaction. He threw the pebbles out of the cage, wouldn't accept the cucumber, and basically refused to participate in the experiment. Dr. de Waal says this illustrates that monkeys have a sense of fairness. In cooperative societies (whether monkeys or humans), individuals need to make sure that they are not doing more work than others for the same reward, or the same work for less reward. He says economists have studied this in humans, since the reactions can seem irrational -- for example, a person who was perfectly happy making $40,000 a year may get very upset and quit her job if she realizes a co-worker doing the same job is making $80,000. He believes his work with the monkeys may give us clues to the evolution of the emotions behind this sort of reaction.

To contact Dr. de Waal, please write to: Dr. Frans de Waal, C. H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior, Department of Psychology, 325 Psychology Building, Emory University, 532 N. Kilgo Circle, Atlanta, GA 30322. Or visit http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/

To order My Family Album: Thirty Years of Primate Photography, click here.

Next, we turn our attention to a different kind of cheating -- adultery. In a special performance just for The Infinite Mind, the country music group BR5-49 performs what may be the ultimate anthem for spurned lovers -- Hank Williams' "Your Cheatin' Heart."

To find out more about BR5-49 or order a CD, please visit http://www.br549.com/.

It's hard to get an accurate picture of how common adultery is -- surveys estimate it occurs in anywhere from 15 to 80% of all marriages. Why do so many people do it? And has technology redefined cheating? Dr. Goodwin speaks with Dr. Helen Fisher, a research professor in the department of anthropology at Rutgers University. She's the author of Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. Her new book Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love will be out in early 2004. Dr. Fisher has joined us previously for shows on Romance and Sexual Attraction.

Dr. Fisher says that she has studied societies all over the world, and, in all of them, people cheat. Because it seems to be so universal, she believes there must have been some kind of evolutionary payoff. Looking back to our ancestors, she guesses that since, in Darwinian terms, children are the way we spread our lineage to future generations, a man who cheated might have doubled the number of his genes getting passed on while a woman who cheated might have either received more resources for her babies or increased the genetic variety of her offspring. While none of this was conscious, of course, it would result in the genes for this kind of behavior being passed on. Dr. Fisher says that monogamy is not a common reproductive strategy in animals -- it only occurs in species where both parents are needed to rear the young. But even among birds, in which most species form pair bonds, there is "cheating." DNA testing shows 10% of birds' offspring are not biologically related to the supposed father.

Dr. Fisher then discusses what she believes are three different circuits in the brain -- one for the sexual drive, one for romantic love, and one for attachment. She think these developed to serve different functions. The sex drive evolved so that we would go after anything at all; romantic love evolved to focus our mating energy on one person, and therefore be more efficient; and attachment evolved so that we could tolerate the individual we are with, at least long enough to raise one child. These systems often interact (i.e. at the start of a relationship, we generally feel both sexual attraction and romantic love), but they don't always interact, and that's where adultery comes in. We can feel attachment for one person while we feel romantic love for another. This does not mean, however, that we are destined to cheat. Dr. Fisher says the part of the brain that makes us human is the prefrontal cortex -- where we make decisions.

In response to a caller, Jon, who is involved in a very serious email relationship with a married woman, Dr. Goodwin and Dr. Fisher talk about how technology is allowing people today to be more secretive about their affairs (hence all the services advertising they'll catch your cheating spouse). Another caller, Sheila, says that she thinks that any email relationship (like Jon's) or serious office friendship that takes time and energy away from a spouse is cheating. She asks what the costs are to a marriage, even with this kind of cheating, which is not sexual. Dr. Fisher says the costs are enormous -- instead of building a relationship, you're undermining it. Ultimately, all three people will get hurt. And although a spouse who is cheated on may get over the betrayal, he or she will never forget it. She concludes by saying she thinks forming an attachment to another person is the most ornate and worthwhile single thing that the human animal can do.

To contact Dr. Fisher, please write to: Dr. Helen Fisher, Department of Anthropology, Ruth Adams Building, 131 George Street, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1414. Or visit http://anthro.rutgers.edu

To order Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray, click here.

Finally, commentator John Hockenberry wonders, just what defines cheating these days? He says, "In the landscape of American culture, you can find cheating all over the map. Cheating is that place between triumph and immorality, between out of the box thinking and exploitation of the unsuspecting. The cheat-free similarly inhabit a murky place between naïve stupidity and sainthood."

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

 


Cheating On Ethics Test at Columbia University
Cheating is not unheard of on university campuses. But cheating on an open-book, take-home exam in a pass-fail course seems odd, and all the more so in a course about ethics. Yet Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism is looking into whether students may have cheated on the final exam in just such a course, “Critical Issues in Journalism.” According to the school’s Web site, the course “explores the social role of journalism and the journalist from legal, historical, ethical, and economic perspectives,” with a focus on ethics.
Karen W. Arenson, "Cheating on an Ethics Test? It’s ‘Topic A’ at Columbia," The New York Times, December 1, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/nyregion/01columbia.html

 

And educators are blaming everybody but the cheaters for cheating

 

"Malaise," by Peter Berger, The Irascible Professor, November 25, 2006 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-11-25-06.htm

Thirty-seven summers ago Jimmy Carter spoke to the nation about our "crisis of spirit." His address became known as his "malaise" speech, even though he never actually used that word. Webster defines malaise as an "indefinite lack of health" or "vague sense of mental or moral ill-being." In order to grapple with problems like the energy crisis and unemployment, President Carter called on us to examine our outlook and our priorities.

Public schools have been staggering through their own crisis for more than a generation. Part of the blame rests directly on culprits we can see at school: bankrupt education theories and assorted follies like self-esteem, whole language, and enfeebled classroom discipline. The roots of the problem also extend to our homes and civic institutions and appear as children from single-parent families, drug use, and crime.

These are all issues we should address, but we're also suffering from an underlying malaise of unsound priorities and entitlement that's less visible but just as destructive to American education. Here are a few symptoms of our ill-being.

There's nothing new about classroom troublemakers. They've been disrupting other people’s education since before chalk was invented, but today we don't call them troublemakers. Instead, we obfuscate and invent syndromes for what they do. We say they're "behaviorally challenged." We turn their conduct into ailments like "oppositional defiance disorder." According to the psychologist who coined this syndrome, when kids with ODD have tantrums and refuse to do what they're told, they aren't "using coercion or manipulation to get what they want." They're just the victims of their own "inflexibility" and "poor frustration tolerance."

ODD isn't alone in the pantheon of euphemistic, exculpatory conditions. Horn-blasting, tailgating, and obscene gestures are no longer just unsafe, obnoxious driving. They’re not even "road rage" anymore. They're evidence of "intermittent explosive disorder." Remember that the next time some driver cuts you off and treats you to a one-fingered salute.

IED also causes "temper outbursts," "throwing or breaking objects and even spousal abuse," although "not everyone who does those things is afflicted." How do you tell the difference? Apparently, IED outbursts are characterized by "threats or aggressive actions and property damage" that are "way out of proportion to the situation," as opposed presumably to threats, aggressive actions, and property damage that aren't way out of proportion to the situation.

According to researchers, a recently administered questionnaire determined that IED afflicts sixteen million Americans. Fortunately for the rest of us who have to endure IED tantrums and assaults, they aren't "bad behavior." They're "biology."

Critics frequently charge that too many high school graduates aren't prepared for college. The new bad news is that too many college graduates aren't prepared for life. Universities are responding with "life after college" programs. These "transition courses" in what officials term "real life" skills teach college students everything from "managing their credit cards" and "paying taxes" to "making a plate of pasta" and "choosing a bottle of Chardonnay."

We're not talking about second-rate institutions. Alfred University's cooking program includes lessons in "boiling water." Across the continent Caltech awards three credits for its kitchen survival course. Sympathetic experts explain that today's college seniors "lack practical skills because they spent their teens more preoccupied than previous generations with racking up the grades, SAT scores, and activities needed to get into top colleges."

That’s ridiculous. My 1960s high school peers and I lived and died by our permanent records. Claiming that college admissions suddenly became competitive is like arguing that today's youth need extra self-esteem because they live under a nuclear threat, a popular rationalization that conveniently ignores the fact that little kids like me spent the 1950s hiding under our desks.

According to the Los Angeles Times, "preparing meals" ranks high among parents' and students' "major concerns." This begs two questions: Why aren't the concerned parents teaching these skills, and is learning how to boil water and pay your bills really what universities are for?

While they may be lost in the kitchen, students are proving themselves adept in other endeavors. Aided by cell phones and the Internet, cheating is on the rise at public schools and colleges. In a Rutgers survey, ninety-seven percent of students polled admitted to cheating in high school. Even allowing for the notorious inaccuracy of student polls, the figure is alarming.

Still more alarming, cheating has its champions among education reformers. One enlightened Northwestern University professor blames schools when students copy answers, purchase term papers, and steal exams. He's outraged that students can't copy each other's work during tests. He endorses plagiarism and objects when a student "receives no credit" for a paper just because it "was written by somebody else." "No wonder", he fumes, that students "feel compelled to lie" and put their own names on work they've "found."

He encourages "honest copying" where students get credit for copying other people's work as long as they put the real author's name on it. The professor maintains that allowing this species of larceny would "reinforce the correct behaviors." Instead of being "punished," the copier should be "rewarded" for "knowing where to seek the information." In short, we need to "recognize cheating for the good that it brings."

He's not the only advocate of cheating out there. The Educational Testing Service's "teaching and learning" vice president puts the blame for cheating on tests squarely on the tests themselves and the schools that give them. She holds that it’s "small wonder" that students "attempt to affect the outcomes" by cheating. She argues that until we allow kids to "assist each other" during tests, we're "inviting a culture of cheating."

Let's review. Psychologists are declaring obnoxious, antisocial behavior a disease. Colleges are teaching adults to boil water. And educators are blaming everybody but the cheaters for cheating.

Sounds like a malaise to me.

Peter Berger

 

Recent Examples of Cheating from "Cheating:  Everybody's Doing It," by Gay Jervey, Readers Digest, March 2006, pp. 123-124:

In trading simulations students cheat just like real-world traders
At the end of the semester, the number of students in a simulated trading room who were caught in misconduct or misusing information for insider trading was significantly higher than at the beginning. The students said, "You taught us how to do it," Buono recalled. "For those of us who've spent our careers teaching this, it's been a disappointing time," said Buono, who has taught at the Waltham, Mass., college for 27 years. "Some of the most renowned names in the corporate world are now jokes at cocktail parties. And they were led by graduates of our business programs. "That made a lot of us sit up and rethink the approach of what we're doing."
"Business Profs Rethinking Ethics Classes," SmartPros, June 19, 2006 --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/x53572.xml 

Question
What's the newest outsourcing trend in student cheating?
This could not possibly happen in the United States (Ha! Ha!)

Answer
In a unique twist to outsourcing from Britain to India, students in British universities have been paying computer professionals in India to complete their course assignments for a fee. The newly recognised trend, operating mainly through the Internet, has been dubbed as "contract plagiarism" by British academics who have tracked such malpractices. It is more in vogue among students enrolled in IT courses in British universities.
"British students outsourcing assignments to India," The Times of India, June 14, 2006 --- Click Here

 

Another Question
If students are outsourcing their assignments, where are they spending their time?

University of Chicago Cocktail Parties for Educational Purposes: Don't get drunk or hit on the women
On Friday afternoon at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, students are streaming towards their weekly dinner with deans and fellow classmates -- all 500 of them. This is just one of the GSB's many social events throughout the year. They include corporate-sponsored cocktail hours, formal dinners, mock receptions, and theme parties. While these gatherings may sound like fun, they also serve a weighty purpose -- getting students a good job. In fact, for those outside B-school, the experience may sound like a little too much fun. After all, this is school, not a vacation. But there's a lot to be learned from the socializing. It's an opportunity to network and scope out your B-school buddies — and competitors." Careers are a focal point of student socializing and networking," says Stacey Kole, deputy dean of Chicago's full-time MBA program.
"The Art of the Schmooze," Business Week, June 12, 2006 --- Click Here

"Legalized 'Cheating': Text-messaging answers. Googling during exams. In the Internet age, some schools have a new approach to cheating: Make it legal," by Ellen Gamerman, The Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2006; Page P1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113779787647552415.html?mod=todays_us_pursuits

Twas a situation every middle-schooler dreads. Bonnie Pitzer was cruising through a vocabulary test until she hit the word "desolated" -- and drew a blank. But instead of panicking, she quietly searched the Internet for the definition.

At most schools, looking up test answers online would be considered cheating. But at Mill Creek Middle School in Kent, Wash., some teachers now encourage such tactics. "We can do basically anything on our computers," says the 13-year-old, who took home an A on the test.

In a wireless age where kids can access the Internet's vast store of information from their cellphones and PDAs, schools have been wrestling with how to stem the tide of high-tech cheating. Now, some educators say they have the answer: Change the rules and make it legal. In doing so, they're permitting all kinds of behavior that had been considered off-limits just a few years ago.

The move, which includes some of the country's top institutions, reflects a broader debate about what skills are necessary in today's world -- and how schools should teach them. The real-world strengths of intelligent surfing and analysis, some educators argue, are now just as important as rote memorization.

The old rules still reign in most places, but an increasing number of schools are adjusting them. This includes not only letting kids use the Internet during tests, but in the most extreme cases, allowing them to text message notes or beam each other definitions on vocabulary drills. Schools say they in no way consider this cheating because they're explicitly changing the rules to allow it.

In Ohio, students at Cincinnati Country Day can take their laptops into some tests and search online Cliffs Notes. At Ensign Intermediate School in Newport Beach, Calif., seventh-graders are looking at each other's hand-held computers to get answers on their science drills. And in San Diego, high-schoolers can roam free on the Internet during English exams.

The same logic is being applied even when laptops aren't in the classroom. In Philadelphia, school officials are considering letting kids retake tests, even if it gives them an opportunity to go home and Google topics they saw on the first test. "What we've got to teach kids are the tools to access that information," says Gregory Thornton, the school district's chief academic officer. " 'Cheating' is not the word anymore."

The changes -- and the debate they're prompting -- are not unlike the upheaval caused when calculators became available in the early 1970s. Back then, teachers grappled with letting kids use the new machines or requiring long lines of division by hand. Though initially banned, calculators were eventually embraced in classrooms and, since 1994, have even been allowed in the SAT.

Of course, open-book exams have long been a fixture at some schools. But access to the Internet provides a far vaster trove of information than simply having a textbook nearby. And the degree of collaboration that technology is allowing flies in the face of some deeply entrenched teaching methods.

Grabbing test answers off the Internet is a "crutch," says Charles Alexander, academic dean at the elite Groton School in Massachusetts. In the college world, where admissions officers keep profiles of secondary schools and consider applicants based on the rigor of their training, there are differing opinions. "This is the way the world works," says Harvard Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis, adding that whether a student was allowed to search the Internet for help on a high-school English exam wouldn't affect his or her application.

Though it might not ultimately factor into a student's acceptance at University of Pennsylvania, Lee Stetson, dean of undergraduate admissions there, has a different take. "The definition of what's cheating has been changing, and fudging seems to be the way of the world now," he says. "It's not an encouraging sign."

At High Tech High International, a charter school in San Diego, kids in Ross Roemer's 10th-grade humanities class are allowed to scan the Internet during some tests; earlier this week, they looked up what scholars had written about Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" while they were writing their essay exams.

Mr. Roemer says students' essays are better informed when they can compare their ideas with what others have written. But he acknowledges that traditionally an approach like this would be against the rules. "You'd have to rip up their test and call their parents," he says. But at this school, which is funded partly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he says there's no sense fighting technology: "You can't ignore it. You have to embrace it."

When the Kent School District in Washington decided last year to create a technology "school within a school" at Mill Creek Middle, where there'd be a 1-to-1 ratio of kids to computers, parents quickly began pushing to get their kids accepted. Now, teachers say letting kids look up answers online helps show they can find and analyze information then synthesize it into a cohesive argument.

In Bonnie Pitzer's case, teacher Becky Keene says using the Internet helped the seventh-grader, but in the end, she aced the test because she demonstrated she could also use the word in a sentence. "I want the kids to be able to apply the meaning, not to be able to memorize it," says Ms. Keene.

Continued in article

 

The techniques vary: Camera phones can be used to create high-tech cheat sheets, letting students call up photos of key notes they took back in the dorm. A student also could surreptitiously send a photo of his answers to a friend sitting in the same classroom during an exam.
Marlon A. Walker (see below)

 

"High-Tech Cribbing: Camera Phones Boost Cheating," by Marlon A Walker, The Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2004, Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109477285622714263,00.html?mod=gadgets%5Flead%5Fstory%5Fcol 

Diann Baecker thought it was odd that a student in one of her language classes had left his cellphone flipped open during a test -- until she started grading the exams.

The assistant professor at Virginia State University in Petersburg noticed that the student, and his neighbor, had used identical language to answer an essay question. She deduced that one student must have taken a picture of his neighbor's essay with his camera-equipped phone and then copied the answer onto his own test using the image on the phone's screen.

These days, Prof. Baecker tells students to put their phones under their desks, along with their books and backpacks. "The picture phone is the new thing" for cheating, she says. "Technology just makes it a lot easier. They're not leaning over their neighbor's shoulders anymore."

A small but growing number of students are using camera phones to cheat, according to students and educators across the country. The techniques vary: Camera phones can be used to create high-tech cheat sheets, letting students call up photos of key notes they took back in the dorm. A student also could surreptitiously send a photo of his answers to a friend sitting in the same classroom during an exam.

Continued in the article.

Forwarded by Helen Terry

Check this out. 

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/10/19/cellphonejammers.ap/index.html  partial quote: In four Monterrey churches, Israeli-made cell phone jammers the size of paperbacks have been tucked unobtrusively among paintings of the Madonna and statues of the saints. The jarring polychromatic din of ringing cell phones is increasingly being thwarted -- from religious sanctuaries to India's parliament to Tokyo theaters and commuter trains -- by devices originally developed to help security forces avert eavesdropping and thwart phone-triggered bombings. In Italy, universities started using the blockers after discovering that cell phone-savvy teenagers were cheating on exams by sending text messages or taking pictures of tests.

Use of a cell phone for purposes of cheating during an examination would seem to be an obvious problem.  It just never dawned on me until I witnessed it in a men's room on December 15, 2001.  It was the beginning day of final examinations.  I did not have my final examinations scheduled until the following week.  However, I listened in while a student quite obviously was asking questions on a cell phone and then waiting for answers.

Leaving books and crib notes in a bathroom or hallway is a common problem.  The cell phone idea, however, just had never dawned on me.  This could be a particular problem on makeup exams.  How often have you made a student leave books and notes in your office and then put the student alone in a room to take a test?  Have you ever thought about that tiny cell phone that might be in a pocket?

I suspect the next best thing is having a buddy with books and a computer hidden in one of the stalls such that it is not necessary to make a phone call to the buddy.

Reply from Rohan Chambers [rchambers@CYBERVALE.COM] 

How about this.....

Some students use cell phones as calculators, and.....during the examination they send text messages to each other!

Rohan Chambers 
Lecturer in Auditing and Finance School of Business Administration 
University of Technology, Jamaica

Reply from Andrew Priest [a.priest@ECU.EDU.AU] 

Hi

We ban cell (mobile) phones from exam rooms and an invigilator goes with student to the men's/women's room so as to minimise this risk. However, I have often noticed some invigilator waiting outside the toilet facility rather than discreetly inside.

Regards, 
Andrew

 

Reply from Christine Kloezeman [ckloezem@GLENDALE.CC.CA.US] 

I too bought 52 hand held calculators from Pic and Save for the use in all my classes. Last semester I found a student using her palmtop that had all the notes. I have a container that keeps them in the division office so others can use them. The bathroom trick has been very well used this semester so I told them for the final they had to take care of business. I like the comment about when they leave the room they have finished the test.

I do this to be fair to those 60% that will not cheat. I have even been thanked by the students because they felt studied hard and it wasn't fair to have student get good grades without learning.

I like the idea of re-developing an honor code. Many times we need to revisit these areas with the students.

I wish there was a site we could develop that would keep the instructors on top of the current cheating techniques. It's like having teenagers. You can save a lot of problems by being aware of the things they are trying to pull. Anybody know of a site like that. I know I will visit it before each test.

Hi Christine,

I have updated a site concerning how students plagiarize at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm 

I am also trying to build up the above site for cheating on examinations. I hope others will send me great ideas on how to cheat.

Bob Jensen rjensen@trinity.edu 

Reply from Patricia Doherty [pdoherty@BU.EDU]

What bothers me about all this is the lengths to which we all go to prevent cheating. It is, as a faculty member here described it, another "1% solution" in that for the very few who would really cheat, we spend huge amounts of our time, and restrict those who wouldn't cheat anyway. I used to have someone accompany people to the rest room, but we frequently have so few proctors that I cannot spare anyone, and began to feel silly about it, so now I do random checks. I had never thought of the cell phone thing. I do know that the graphing calculators provide ample opportunity to cheat, so we have resorted to buying, as a department, 400 cheap calculators, which we pass out for each exam, then collect. That restricts that avenue.

We used to check ID, have not recently. So yesterday (yes, Saturday) while grading I found a "fake" exam. Really irritated me that someone would waste our time that way, and I plan to investigate further after we have grades in, with little hope of success.

We give case exams in managerial, which are harder to cheat on. And we do allow a page of handwritten (no photocopies or printed) notes. I always question how far I am willing to go to prevent cheating, and where I just say, if you are that clever, go ahead, you'll get your "reward" someday.

Reply from Patricia Doherty [pdoherty@BU.EDU]

What bothers me about all this is the lengths to which we all go to prevent cheating. It is, as a faculty member here described it, another "1% solution" in that for the very few who would really cheat, we spend huge amounts of our time, and restrict those who wouldn't cheat anyway. I used to have someone accompany people to the rest room, but we frequently have so few proctors that I cannot spare anyone, and began to feel silly about it, so now I do random checks. I had never thought of the cell phone thing. I do know that the graphing calculators provide ample opportunity to cheat, so we have resorted to buying, as a department, 400 cheap calculators, which we pass out for each exam, then collect. That restricts that avenue.

We used to check ID, have not recently. So yesterday (yes, Saturday) while grading I found a "fake" exam. Really irritated me that someone would waste our time that way, and I plan to investigate further after we have grades in, with little hope of success.

We give case exams in managerial, which are harder to cheat on. And we do allow a page of handwritten (no photocopies or printed) notes. I always question how far I am willing to go to prevent cheating, and where I just say, if you are that clever, go ahead, you'll get your "reward" someday.

For the final exam, I was assigned two class rooms across the hall from each other. I went from one classroom to the other, trying to be random in my timing. I was later told that one gal in the class room would slide her foot (no stocking) out of her loafer and flip open the textbook as soon as I left the room. She was able to turn the pages of the book with her toes. Oh, she did write answers on her exam the old-fashioned way--pencil held firmly in hand. But what she did with her feet was remarkable.

No one was willing to take the effort to testify about her actions when I suggested running her academic dishonesty through the system. so I had to let it pass without prosecution.

Dave Albrecht

David,

At the end of the course, you should have sent her the following message:

This little piggy went to market, 
This little piggy stayed home, 
This little piggy turned the notebook pages, 
This little piggy cried F,F,F all the way home.

Bob

I teach only graduate students. And I give exams only to the MBA introductory accounting students. For MAcc students I grade based solely on written case reports and class participation.

This year I decided to switch to open book exams for the MBA students. They can refer to the textbook, their laptop (for lecture notes), and to a calculator. They can also leave the room to use the rest room facilities without limitation. I tell them only that they can't talk to their class mates or use a cell phone to call for outside help (a la Regis Philbin).

I use a combination of multiple choice and short problems on the exam - about 40% the latter. However, most of the questions require careful analysis and not just rote memory. Overall, I found that the test scores and final grades this year were virtually the same as last year. The students perceived that I made the exams harder this year in order to compensate for the open book nature. I don't think that is really the case although I do create entirely new questions every year.

I recognize that most of the messages about this point (if not all of them) probably relate to undergraduate students so my experience may not be relevant. But I decided early in my short to date teaching career that a cheater hurts mainly him/herself and all the policing in the world is not likely to catch the most creative practitioners. Communicating a sense of trust seems to have worked well for me.

Denny Beresford 
University of Georgia

Message from Rohan Chambers [rchambers@CYBERVALE.COM] 

I would recommend the following to limit cheating during examinations, particluary for large groups e.g. 40 - 300 ( Here in :Jamaica, at the country's two leading Universities we may have up to 300 students doing the same final exam!) : 

1. Employ invigilators (proctors) with a student to invigilator ratio of about 25 to 1. 

2. Designate specific restrooms and have them checked both prior to and after the exam (even before and after each student's : visit). Have a proctor accompany students to the door of the restroom. 

3. Have ancilliary items handy i.e drinking water, cups, napkins and aspirins ( especially for those who suddenly develop an : "headache" during the exams). 

4. Have all cellphones turned off and left in school bags or left outside of the exam room. 

5. Lend the students University calculators. 

6. Have students remove all headgear. 

7. Ban all digital watches! 

8. Do not allow any pre-written notes into the exam room :

Currently, we do all except 3, 5 & 7 in our School.

Reply from Jim Richards Down Under

Hi Rohan, 
I have been following the thread on cheating with interest. It is good to hear that it does not just happen at my University.

My comment concerns number 8. A number of others have suggested that allowing students to take one page of handwritten notes into an exam is good as it requires them to do some revision and make choices about what they will fit on the one page.

Several colleagues have tried this but it caused a headache for the invigilators as students first tried to use photocopy reductions before we specifically added that it must be handwritten. That of course means that they now write in very small handwriting to get the maximum amount allowed on the page.

It also means that the academic who specifies such a requirement must attend the exam and do the check. The invigilators do not do it. It has to be done while the students are doing the exam so you need help from colleagues unless you want to spend all of the exam time checking the sheets, particularly if they all sit the exam in the same room at the same time.

Cheers.

Jim Richards 
Murdoch University 
South Street MURDOCH 6150 AUSTRALIA

 

Reply from John Rodi

The unfortunate part is that this is a poor use of scare resources. I believe that cheating is a matter of ethics and if you cheat you don’t have ethics. Ethics are taught at an early age and the mechanism for justifying the behavior develops at the same time. I am reminded of the student who was blatantly cheating in during one of my final exams. He had simply opened his textbook on the desk and was looking for answers. Several students pointed this out to me and I told them that I was aware of what was happening. They didn’t understand what I why I wasn’t stopping the student.

At the end of the exam I told the student that he was getting an F for a grade on the final exam since I had observed him cheating during the entire examination. He replied with remorse—right. Wrong. He said to me, “If you knew I was cheating why didn’t you stop me so that I wouldn’t have had to waste all this time!” I was advised that he may have had a case had he protested, because I could have been accused of providing him with an opportunity to cheat. I wish that I had made up this story.

John Rodi
El Camino College

Watch Out for Wrist Devices

This is getting ridiculous.  In addition to banning cell phones during examinations, should we ban wrist watches?

Karen Waldron reminded me of Fossil's PDA --- http://www.edgereview.com/ataglance.cfm?Category=handheld&ID=337 
Students can store crib notes and read them from a wrist watch.

And don't forget that there are cell phones that can be worn on the wrist just like a watch --- http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,19264,00.html 

"U-Md. Says Students Use Phones to Cheat Text Messaging Delivers Test Answers," by Amy Argetsinger, The Washington Post, January 25, 2003 --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40227-2003Jan24.html 

The University of Maryland is investigating 12 students for allegedly using their cell phones to dial up all the right answers during fall exams.

The students are accused of using the "text messaging" functions on their phones or pagers to receive silent messages from friends who had access to answer keys for the tests, campus officials said yesterday.

It is the latest wrinkle in the continuing struggle between technology and academic integrity. Though quick to jump on the Web and embrace the laptop, schools across the country have been confronted with the problem of students using those very tools to plagiarize essays from the Internet. At Maryland, as at many other colleges, faculty members were stunned a few years ago to discover that some students were using the same high-end calculators required for many advanced math tests to retrieve stored information during exams.

But the use of cell phones "was a new one for us," said John Zacker, the university's director of student discipline.

The accusations prompted university administrators to send a memo to faculty members yesterday advising them to monitor the use of cell phones and other electronic devices during exams.

The incident also highlights an apparent generation gap in technology savvy on campus. While students by and large expressed no surprise that cell phones could be used for illicit purposes, Zacker said it simply had not occurred to most faculty.

Zacker said the accused students are suspected of exploiting a common practice at College Park, in which professors post answer keys outside their offices after giving an exam so that students can immediately calculate how they did.

Some professors, he said, have gotten in the habit of posting the keys while students are still taking the exam, assured that students would not be able to see the answers until they had turned in their tests and left the proctored classroom.

It is unclear exactly how the accused students may have cheated, Zacker said. But preliminary investigations suggest that they may have arranged to have friends outside the classroom consult the keys and call in the answers.

In some cases, professors had posted answer keys on their Web sites, and officials believe that students may have used cell phones equipped with Web browsers to look up the answers themselves, while still in the exam room.

The memo, from Provost William W. Destler, also advised faculty not to post answer keys until well after an exam is completed.

Zacker would not say which professors or departments had reported the recent accusations or whether all 12 cases came from the same course.

The University of Maryland has worked to bolster a culture of academic integrity in recent years, including the institution of a new honor pledge that students are urged to sign on their work. The student-run Honor Council will rule on the cases in coming weeks. First-time offenders at Maryland generally receive a failing grade for the course with a marker on their transcripts indicating that cheating was involved, but additional offenses can merit suspension or expulsion.

Donald L. McCabe, a professor at Rutgers University who has studied academic dishonesty, said he had heard of other instances of students across the country using a cell phone to cheat.

Though technology has made it easier for students to cheat -- and possibly harder for professors to detect it -- McCabe does not believe that it has tempted more students to cheat. However, he said it may have increased "the frequency with which cheaters cheat."

"Ten years ago, you'd hear about students using hand signals or tapping with pencils on their desk," he said. "Things like this are displacing that. You don't have more cheaters, just more ways to cheat."

From Yahoo Picks of the Week on August 26, 2002

Pirated Sites --- http://www.pirated-sites.com/ 

Ever find yourself on a web site that looks virtually indistinguishable from another? This site showcases such online indiscretions, making "side-by-side comparisons of web sites that are suspected of borrowing, copying or stealing copyright-protected content, design or code without permission." Many web designers have taken unfathomable liberties with their online filching -- some companies even do it twice. Pirated Sites uses a cool pop-up window script that makes it easy to compare web sites large and small. If you think you've run across a site that has been hit by web-style biters, don't hesitate to submit the URLs of the pirate and the victim. And if the moral isn't clear, we'll repeat it: Do Not 


Plagiarism Alternatives
In a trend that should delight amoral entrepreneurs everywhere, sales of online term papers are picking up as the school year approaches.
"Where Cheaters Often Prosper,: by Joanna Glasner, Wired News, August 26, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54571,00.html 

The history of the Internet is filled with stories about companies that tried to make a positive change in the world and ended up failing miserably.

And then there are online term-paper sites. Despite inspiring nothing but scorn from educators, purveyors of collegiate prose are finding life on the dark side of online commerce quite lucrative.

"They're the only ones besides casinos or porn really making money on the Internet," said Kenny Sahr, founder of SchoolSucks.com, a free homework site that makes money posting ads for fee-charging term paper providers. If his advertising customers are any indication, Sahr said, online term-paper mills are weathering the dot-com bust remarkably well.

With the new school year about to begin, research paper companies are gearing up for peak season. It appears academicians' attempts to eradicate these hotbeds of plagiarism have done little to stifle their growth.

SchoolSucks is no exception. Although the 6-year-old site hasn't made him rich, Sahr says it does provide enough money "to pay for my habits" and doesn't require full-time work. He runs the site with a staff of two, each working out of their homes and periodically holding meetings on a beach in Tel Aviv, where the operation is based.

Sahr attributes the site's longevity largely to the fact that it gets its material for free, mostly through submissions from students. This keeps the cost of running the business quite low.

SchoolSucks draws about 10,000 unique visitors on a typical day and has been growing steadily, Sahr said.

Meanwhile, traffic to competing sites isn't slowing either.

"I don't think we've had a year so far where we haven't grown," said Jared Silvermintz, college student and co-founder of Genius Papers. The site, which Silvermintz started as a junior in high school six years ago, charges $20 for a one-year subscription to a soon-to-be-upgraded database that he says will contain more than 40,000 papers

Conatinued at http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54571,00.html  

Message from Curtis Brown on April 26, 2002

I saw an interesting idea on one web site ( http://www.plagiarism.com/ ). They offer a product that takes a student essay, replaces every fifth word with a blank, and then asks the student to fill in the blanks. Depending on how many they get right and how long it takes them, the program calculates a "Plagiarism Probability Score." They want $300 for this, but it would take only a few minutes to write a program that would delete every fifth word, and it might be an interesting way to get a sense for the likelihood that a paper was plagiarized if you couldn't find the source. I don't know that it would be any more effective than simply asking the student to explain key passages in the paper, though.

Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm 

Hi Ceil,

I am back from Iowa and am finally catching up on a mountain of email.

The ethics video vignettes that I used to use were from the IMA. I cannot find links to these older videos, but you might look into http://www.imanet.org/Content/About_IMA/EthicsCenter/ResourcesandArticles/resources2.htm 

I cannot seem to locate the IMA videos in my mountain of videotapes at the moment, but I do recall that those particular IMA vignettes were quite good.

The latest FASB video called "Financially Correct" might be useful in the area of ethics, especially in light of the Enron scandal --- http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/fasb/news/fc_video.pdf 

You might also download the AICPA video that plays on a computer with some surprisingly sophisticated technology --- http://www.aicpa.org/stream/indrulewebcast/index.html# 

Hope this helps.

Bob

-----Original Message----- From: Ceil Pillsbury [mailto:ceil@uwm.edu] Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 3:30 PM To: 'Jensen, Robert '; 'AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU ' Subject: RE: Cheating at the University of Minnesota

I am sorry to say that I have had first hand experience this semester with cheating. I had six students in one class all make copies of homework that needed to be submitted by email. All they did was Cut and Paste and send it from their own accounts. They didn't even bother to read the homework or they clearly would have seen the obvious typos! I am even sorrier to say that now that I have started asking other professors I think there may be a much bigger problem with cheating among accounting majors than anyone realizes. Since we are putting out future professionals this causes great concern! I am now working on an Ethics lecture to start my Auditing class off with next semester and wonder two things:

--Does anyone have any neat ideas (materials) to get ethical points across?

--Does anyone remember a video (I think it was made by Andersen) that had example vignettes in it. I seem to remember seeing a video that had a segment on eating hours and pressure to manage earnings.

Reply from George Lan

I know about the video by Arthur Andersen (then) on ethics with 5 or 6 vignettes. One of the vignette is entitled " The Order" and I use it and some of the other vignettes from time to time in my class. I only have a copy of that video which someone gave to me but Andersen should probably still have copies. There is a manual that comes with it. Andersen use an ethical framework to analyse ethical dilemmas, which consists of several steps (facts, issues, stakeholders, ethical principles, alternatives, recommendations...)The key is to think through carefully the ethical dilemma. Some students find ethics issues interesting but I've heard some students commenting that "they hate ethics."

I still find the story of ZZZZ Best (in "Cooking the Books" video) has much appeal to the students, perhaps because Barry Minkow was then a very young guy. I've heard he has a degree in religion now???

I also use a case prepared by AAA, "The CEO retires" which looks at the many ways that accounting can be creatively used to increase the compensation of the CEO in his golden years and the pressure placed on subordinates to go along.

I believe in the "Nuremberg Principle" i.e. doing something unethical or illegal because you are ordered to do so does not absolve you from blame; however, real life ethical situations are very often like this comment at the bottom of an accounting cartoon " Dammed if I do, Dammed if I don't." I've also heard that just as people become more risk averse as they get older, they also believe less in ethics. (Not from any study that I know about).

My two cents worth,

George Lan 
University of Windsor

Reply from Scott Bonacker, 

This thread lead me to think of what is the meaning of "ethics" and "morality", and through that I found a website for American Sign Language interpreters which discusses in part their responsibility in their roles.

http://asl_interpreting.tripod.com/ethics/jg1.htm 

Representational faithfulness is certainly important in that arena, and if an allegory would be useful then this might serve.

Scott Bonacker, 
CPA McCullough, Officer & Company, 
LLC Springfield, Missouri moccpa.com 

A Clever Way to Stop Some Types of Cheating 

Hossein Nouri [hnouri@TCNJ.EDU] 

I am assigning a comprehensive take-home problem to my managerial accounting course. In order to force students to do the problem at least by themselves, I am giving different versions of the problem. I prefer students to do the problem using spread sheet. However, I am concerned that one student creates the formula for all parts of the problem on the spread sheet and other students just plug-in the numbers and hand it to me. Do you have any suggestion how this can be avoided? Most of our students use the college's labs to do their assignments, with few using their own computers.

Hossein Nouri, PhD, CPA, CFE 
Accountancy Program School of Business 
The College of New Jersey 
P.O.Box 7718 Ewing, NJ 08628-0718 Tel. (609)771-2176 
Fax (609)637-5129 Email: hnouri@tcnj.edu 

Reply from Elliot Kamlet [ekamlet@BINGHAMTON.EDU] 

Write a macro (or get MIS people to help) to require that the students enter their name as soon as they open the spreadsheet. That name should then be placed in some cell someplace and the column hidden, and in addition the name should appear in some prominent place (say cell A1), then the macro should disable itself. You will know where the name is and can find it when they submit the project. Then just match names.

They can still get around it but some who cheat will probably get caught.

Elliot Kamlet

Reply from Gadal, Damian [DGADAL@CI.SANTA-BARBARA.CA.US] 

Here is some Visual Basic to accomplish your spreadsheet task (NOTE: you have two options you can try):

: Put this into the "ThisWorkbook" : folder.

Dim strGenName As String Private Sub Workbook_Open()

done = False While Not done strGetName = InputBox( _

prompt:="Please enter your name.", _

Title:="UserName")

done = True

Wend

Sheets("Sheet1").Range("A1").Value = strGetName 'Option 1: Put name into a hidden sheet

Sheets("Sheet2").Range("A1").Value = strGetName

Worksheets("Sheet2").Visible = xlVeryHidden 'Option 2: Put name into a hidden cell

Sheets("Sheet1").Range("A2").Value = strGetName

Rows("2:2").Hidden = True End Sub

May 2, 2002 message from Reams, Richard [rreams@trinity.edu] 

In the May/June 2002 issue of the Journal of College Student Development, a major journal of Student Affairs professionals, Scanlon & Neumann report findings from a survey of 698 students on six campuses regarding Internet plagiarism. Here are a few highlights:

· 24.5% reported plagiarizing online sometimes to very frequently (19% sometimes and 9.6% often or very frequently). This percentage, the researchers concluded based on longitudinal data on plagiarism, does NOT indicate a sharp increase in plagiarism over the past three decades, although the percentage “should be cause for concern.” · Although 8.3% self-reported purchasing papers from online paper mills sometimes or often/very frequently, 62.2% PERCEIVED that their peers patronize paper mill sites sometimes or often/very frequently. Similarly, although 8% self-reported cutting and pasting text from the Internet often/very frequently, 50.4% PERCEIVED that their peers do so. This gross misperception is a contextual factor that probably encourages some students to plagiarize. (This same contextual factor underlies the social norms marketing [a.k.a. misperception correction] campaign that I’ve undertaken for several years regarding the incongruity between students’ exaggerated perceptions of alcohol use vs. actual alcohol use.)

Some of you may want to see the entire journal article. Because the library does not subscribe to the Journal of College Student Development [Diane Graves, may I suggest the library subscribe?], I’m putting a copy on reserve under my name so interested faculty and staff can have access to it.

Collegially yours, 
Richard Reams

An Old Kind of Cheating

The first edition of New Bookmarks in Year 2002 featured sites where you can either purchase research papers or download them for free. Since many of you are grading or have just graded term papers, I thought it might be of interest to show how sophisticated these papers are becoming --- cheating is becoming more difficult to detect.

For example, note the index on the left margin at http://www.a1-termpaper.com/wom-gen.shtml 

I clicked on Business to obtain the index at http://www.a1-termpaper.com/bus-idx.shtml 

I then clicked on Accounting and obtained the listing at http://www.a1-termpaper.com/bus-acc.shtml 

In the first Year 2002 edition of New Bookmarks, I will relay a study by a student who used this and other services, sometimes paying as much as $90 for papers and then examining the grades and comments written by professors. For an advance view of this study, see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#SethStevenson 

Note that most term papers are not free online and, therefore, will not show up in Web search engines unless some student was required by his instructor to put his or her term paper online.

You might be able to detect cheating in a search engine if the clueless student did not even bother to change the title of the paper (which can be found using search engines.)

"Teachers fight against Internet plagiarism," by Kimberly Chase, The Christian Science Monitor,
March 2, 2004 --- http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0302/p12s01-legn.html 
On www.research-assistance.com , for example, students can browse an alphabetical list 
of categories - Cuba, evolution, or racism, just to name a few - to find the paper of 
their choice. For $136, a frantic high school or college student can download a 19-page 
paper on "Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt." It can be faxed for $9.50 or delivered 
overnight for $15.

"Cheating soars, but 'it's all right'," by Dave Newbart, The Chicago Sun Times, July 25, 2004 --- http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-cheat25.html 

When Bill was unsure of the answer to a question in a finance exam last year, he sent a text message on his cell phone to a friend who was also taking the test. The friend sent him the correct answer.

When Lisa wasn't sure she could remember mathematical formulas for an accounting exam, she stored them in a calculator with its own memory, and then used them to help complete the test.

Bill, 21, and Lisa, 22, both of whom asked that their real names not be used, study business at DePaul University, which has seen a tenfold increase in reported cases of cheating in the past five years.

"We like to think our students are more committed than most, but they are not saints, either,'' said Charles Strain, the school's associate vice president for academic affairs.

Chicago area schools, from community colleges to universities such as Northwestern, are also concerned about an increase in cheating.

"It's rampant,'' said Peg Lee, president of Oakton Community College in the northern suburbs. "It's everywhere.''

Cheating these days comes with an added twist -- new technology, which in some cases makes it so easy that students don't even believe what they are doing is wrong. From cutting and pasting text from a Web site into a term paper to using cell phones or personal data assistants equipped with wireless Internet access to search for answers while taking a test, technology is becoming a partner in dishonesty.

And because of increased competition to get into top colleges and graduate schools, students say they are under more pressure than ever to get good grades, leading them to cheat more.

Nationally, more than one in five students admits to cheating on a test in the past year, according to a survey last year of 14,000 students at 23 schools (including one in Illinois) by the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University. More than half admit to cheating on a paper.

If you include minor forms of cheating -- such as working on an assignment with another student when that's not allowed or asking a student who already took a test what was on it -- three quarters of all students admit to doing so.

Don McCabe, the center's founder and a management and global business professor at Rutgers, said the actual number of cheaters is likely higher because his data is self-reported.

Every indication is that the problem is growing. Surveys of high school students by the Josephson Institute of Ethics in California found that 74 percent said they cheated on an exam in 2002, up from 61 percent a decade ago.

The fastest growing form of cheating, McCabe said, is taking information from the Internet and passing it off as the student's own work.

"Students are more liberal in their interpretation of what's permissible and what's not,'' he said.

Indeed, neither Bill nor Lisa felt bad about cheating. Lisa said she did it because professors put too much pressure on students by making some tests or assignments weigh too heavily on an overall grade.

Continued in the article

"Honesty and Honor Codes," by Donald McCabe and Linda Klebe Treviño, Academe, January/February 2002 --- http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/02JF/02jfmcc.htm 

Students cheat. But they cheat less often at schools with an honor code and a peer culture that condemns dishonesty.

A recent editorial in the Cavalier Daily, the University of Virginia’s student newspaper, opened with the statement, "The honor system at the university needs to go. Our honor system routinely rewards cheaters and punishes honesty." In the wake of a highly publicized cheating scandal in an introductory physics course at the university, it was easy to understand the frustration and concern surrounding Virginia’s long-standing practice of trusting students to honor the university’s tradition of academic integrity.

We could not disagree more, however, with the idea that it’s time for Virginia or any other campus to abandon the honor system. We believe instead that America’s institutions of higher education need to recommit themselves to a tradition of integrity and honor. Asking students to be honest in their academic work should not fall victim to debates about cultural relativism. Certainly, such recommitment seems far superior to throwing up our hands in despair and assuming that the current generation of students has lost all sense of honor. Fostering integrity may not be an easy task, but we believe an increasing number of students and campuses are ready to meet the challenge.

Did Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz Plagiarize?
Dr George Gheverghese Joseph from The University of Manchester says the 'Kerala School' identified the 'infinite series'- one of the basic components of calculus - in about 1350. The discovery is currently - and wrongly - attributed in books to Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz at the end of the seventeenth centuries. The team from the Universities of Manchester and Exeter reveal the Kerala School also discovered what amounted to the Pi series and used it to calculate Pi correct to 9, 10 and later 17 decimal places. And there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Indians passed on their discoveries to mathematically knowledgeable Jesuit missionaries who visited India during the fifteenth century. That knowledge, they argue, may have eventually been passed on to Newton himself. Dr Joseph made the revelations while trawling through obscure Indian papers for a yet to be published third edition of his best selling book 'The Crest of the Peacock: the Non-European Roots of Mathematics' by Princeton University Press.
"Indians predated Newton 'discovery' by 250 years ," PhysOrg, August 14, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news106238636.html

Social/Cultural Construction of Cheating

September 23, 2006 message from Selsky, John (USF Lakeland [jselsky@lakeland.usf.edu]

Bob, Amazing website on cheating and plagiarism! This (attachment) may be of interest:

<<cheating-JMI2000.pdf>> I've been meaning to write additional stuff on student cheating but haven't had the time.

Regards, John Selsky

Dr. John W. Selsky
Director, Business Division
Associate Professor of Management
University of South Florida-Lakeland
3433 Winter Lake Road Lakeland, FL 33803 USA +1-863-667-7718
jselsky@lakeland.usf.edu

September 24, 2006 message from Bob Jensen to the AECM

John Selsky sent me a copy of a published paper focused on cheating:

John W. Selsky "Even we are Sheeps": Cultural Displacement in a Turkish Classroom
Journal of Management Inquiry 2000 9: 362-373.

See http://jmi.sagepub.com/content/vol9/issue4/ 

What may be of interest to you is that the above paper may be downloaded free if you download it before September 30. My download link was http://jmi.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/9/4/362
Even though John sent me a copy, I checked out this download alternative so I could pass this along to you.

This is a very interesting paper on the social/cultural construction of cheating.

Bob Jensen

 

Question
Why did the University of Missouri rename its basketball arena?

Answer (forwarded by Debbie Bowling)

"Wal-Mart heir returns degree amid cheating claims," iWon News, October 21, 2005 --- http://snipurl.com/iWonOct21

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Wal-Mart heiress Elizabeth Paige Laurie has surrendered her college degree following allegations that she cheated her way through the school.

The University of Southern California said in a statement that Laurie, 23, "voluntarily has surrendered her degree and returned her diploma to the university. She is not a graduate of USC."

The statement, dated September 30, said the university had ended its review of the allegations concerning Laurie.

Laurie's roommate, Elena Martinez, told a television show last year that she was paid $20,000 to write term papers and complete other assignments for the granddaughter of Wal-Mart co-founder Bud Walton. Wal-Mart is the world's biggest retailer. The family could not be reached for comment.

Following the allegations, the University of Missouri renamed its basketball arena, which had been paid for in part by a $425 million donation from the Lauries and was to have been called "Paige Sports Arena."

Continued in article

From Infobits on November 29, 2001

"Forget About Policing Plagiarism. Just Teach" (THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, vol. 48, issue 12, November 16, 2001, p. B24) by Rebecca Moore Howard, associate professor of writing and rhetoric, and director of the writing program, at Syracuse University.

Howard argues that "[i]n our stampede to fight what The New York Times calls a 'plague' of plagiarism, we risk becoming the enemies rather than the mentors of our students; we are replacing the student-teacher relationship with the criminal-police relationship. Further, by thinking of plagiarism as a unitary act rather than a collection of disparate activities, we risk categorizing all of our students as criminals. Worst of all, we risk not recognizing that our own pedagogy needs reform. Big reform." The article is online to CHE subscribers at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i12/12b02401.htm 

I can't buy this argument. It would bother my conscience too much to give a higher grade to a student that I strongly suspect has merely copied the arguments elsewhere than the grade given to a student who tried to develop his or her own arguments. How can Professor Howard in good conscience give a higher grade to the suspected plagiarist? This rewards "street smart" at the expense of "smart." It also advocates becoming more street smart at the expense of real learning.

I might be cynical here and hope that Professor Howard's physicians graduated from medical schools who passed students on the basis of being really good copiers of papers they could not comprehend.

What is not mentioned in the quote above is the labor-union-style argument also presented by Professor Howard in the article.  She argues that we're already to overworked to have the time to investigate suspected plagiarism.  Is refusing to investigate really being professional as an honorable academic?

Student Plagiarism, Faculty Responsibility,
A review by two Ohio University officials has found “rampant and flagrant plagiarism” by graduate students in the institution’s mechanical engineering department — and concluded that three faculty members either “failed to monitor” their advisees’ writing or “basically supported academic fraudulence” by ignoring the dishonesty. The report by the two-person review team called for the dismissal of two professors, and university officials said they would bring in a national expert on plagiarism to advise them.
Doug Lederman, "Student Plagiarism, Faculty Responsibility," Inside Higher Ed, June 1, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/01/plagiarism

June 2, 2006 reply from Linda Kidwell, University of Wyoming [lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]

Bob's post reminded me of an interesting article I recently read:

Woessner, M.C. (2004). "Beating the house: How inadequate penalties for cheating make plagiarism an excellent gamble." PS: Political Science & Politics, 37 (2): 313 – 320.

His article is interesting in two ways. First, he argues that "it is unethical for faculty to knowingly entice students to plagiarize by promoting policies that actually reward dishonesty." He maintains that we may entice our students by anything from active neglect to ineffective enforcement, and he even throws in some Biblical support from Leviticus: You shall not place a stumbling block before the blind.

Second, he uses expected value functions to illustrate how ineffective policies make it an excellent gamble for students to plagiarize, using different combinations of probabilities of being caught, severities of punishment, and weighting of plagiarized assignments. I fault the paper for assuming all students are value neutral, in that he does not include any factor for the cost of compromising your standards (internal social control in some studies) or, for that matter, the benefit of going along with the crowd (culture conflict theory in others).

Nonetheless, if we assume away any moral or ethical component to the decision to cheat, he demonstrates that unless probabilities of detection are high due to vigilence and penalities are severe (F in the course, not just on the assignment), students have a strong incentive to cheat.

So back to Bob's post, Woessner certainly implies that the faculty are at least as culpable as the students when massive cheating such as that in the engineering department at Ohio University takes place.

I'm not sure I agree on an individual student level, but it's food for thought.

Linda

June 2, 2006 message from John Brozovsky [jbrozovs@VT.EDU]

Faculty are only culpable if you accept the premise that students are inherently amoral. If our accounting students are amoral then Enron is the tip of the iceberg as they will all behave the same way in a similar circumstance (you would have to assume they are just waiting on the ideal time to pull shenaigans).

[We do have a fairly decent honor code with reasonable penalties for those judged guilty by a jury of their peers (4 students 1 faculty member). The peers are typically very willing to find for guilt in the juries I have served on.]

John

June 3, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

Trinity University adopted an honor code that has a student court investigate cheating and assess penalties. The students are more apt to be tougher on cheating students.

But for faculty it has been a little like rape in that the hassle involved in reporting it discourages the reporting in some suspected instances of cheating (in truth I've not made a formal study of this).

On several occasions in the past (before the new Honor Code) I've simply flunked the student and reported the incident to the Academic Vice President who maintained a file of reported incidents and could, for repeat offenders, inflict more serious punishments. Now faculty must appear in "court." More significantly, the authority to sign the F grade for cheating is thereby taken out of the hands of the faculty member responsible for grades in a course.

Bob Jensen

June 2, 2006 reply from Jagdish S. Gangolly [gangolly@INFOTOC.COM]

I have been following this thread with some interest.

Medical schools have a pompous ceremony for orientation for all entering students. It is usually called "white coat" ceremony.

While the pomp and circumstance at such a ceremony is incidental, the main objective is to make sure that the students are being inducted into a noble and learned profession, that their behaviour after should be different, that they have responsibilities that transcend averything else, life is precious, their ethical behaviour determines the future of the profession, etc., etc.,,,

In my own department, I have for a long time suggested that we desperately need something like that. This is especially important to accounting, since unlike medical schools that get mature adults (22-30+ years old), we get juveniles who are less worldly experienced and more prone to making wrong choices simply because they are younger (if one agrees with Kohlberg).

The question is, what do we do in such a pompous but solemn ceremony? What do we call it? Where is our equivalent of the Hippocratic oath?

I reproduce below both the classic oath and the modern oaths below. May be we can come up with one of our own.

Jagdish

____________________________________________________
Hippocratic Oath -- Classical Version

"I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfil according to my ability and judgment this oath and this covenant:

To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art - if they desire to learn it - without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral instruction and all the other learning to my sons and to the sons of him who has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken an oath according to the medical law, but no one else.

I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.

I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work.

Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons, be they free or slaves.

What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself, holding such things shameful to be spoken about.

If I fulfil this oath and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored with fame among all men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite of all this be my lot."

Translation from the Greek by Ludwig Edelstein. From The Hippocratic Oath: Text, Translation, and Interpretation, by Ludwig Edelstein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1943. ____________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________ Hippocratic Oath—Modern Version

"I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.

I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.

I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help."

Accounting Instructor Catches UW Students Cheating --- http://www.smartpros.com/x38003.xml 

Apr. 29, 2003 (Associated Press) — As many 60 University of Wisconsin accounting students apparently cheated on take-home exams, school officials say.

The students were told to take the midterm tests individually but some worked in groups, accounting department chairman John Eichenseyer said.

The instructor had allowed the students to take the tests home so they could attend a presentation April 2 by Sherron Watkins, the Enron employee who blew the whistle on its questionable accounting practices.

Students who had done their own work told the instructor they had heard about widespread cheating on the test, Eichenseyer said this week.

The instructor, whom Eichenseyer declined to name, made all students retake the test and it turned out many didn't know the material.

Many students have admitted cheating since the instructor confronted them, Eichenseyer said. Students who did much worse on the in-class test will get that score as their grade for the test.

University of Vermont Scientist Admits to Cheating
On a rainy afternoon in June, Eric Poehlman stood before a federal judge in the United States District Court in downtown Burlington, Vt. His sentencing hearing had dragged on for more than four hours, and Poehlman, dressed in a black suit, remained silent while the lawyers argued over the appropriate sentence for his transgressions. Now was his chance to speak. A year earlier, in the same courthouse, Poehlman pleaded guilty to lying on a federal grant application and admitted to fabricating more than a decade’s worth of scientific data on obesity, menopause and aging, much of it while conducting clinical research as a tenured faculty member at the University of Vermont. He presented fraudulent data in lectures and in published papers, and he used this data to obtain millions of dollars in federal grants from the National Institutes of Health — a crime subject to as many as five years in federal prison. Poehlman’s admission of guilt came after more than five years during which he denied the charges against him, lied under oath and tried to discredit his accusers. By the time Poehlman came clean, his case had grown into one of the most expansive cases of scientific fraud in U.S. history.
Jeneen Interlandi, "An Unwelcome Discovery," The New York Times, October 22, 2006 --- Click Here 

Question
Did this chemistry professor cheat?

A former graduate student of the State University of New York at Binghamton has filed a $202-million lawsuit against the institution and four of its current and former faculty members, contending that his former dissertation adviser appropriated and published the results of two experiments he conducted without including him as a co-author, a local newspaper, the Press & Sun-Bulletin, reported.
"Former Graduate Student at SUNY-Binghamton Says Professor Stole His Work," The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 21, 2007 --- Click Here

If this is correct, it is incredible and is contrary to the principles most follow. What Stealing intellectual property is common for staff members at universities, who must write articles for their supervisor to either take the lead or take sole ownership. There were three complaints of this at my institution, and the university was able to sweep the dirt under the rug and the abuse of power continues. Of the three, there are a myriad of stories of many more. What is shocking is that some of these instances are documented by the conference sessions available online and the original author’s submission! Perhaps staff members should realize that even if your work is University property, it is not your supervisors. Is there legal action here since the intellectual property belongs to the employer for at-will staff? Shame on leadership who allow academic dishonesty to prevail by supervisors, and yet publicly demand integrity in the classroom!
The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 21, 2007 --- Click Here

 

Bob Jensen's threads on Appearance Versus the Reality of Research Independence and Freedom are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ResearchIndependence

 

Celebrities Who Plagiarize

Question
who were at least two famous world leaders who plagiarized doctoral theses?

 

Answer
Two that I know of off the top of my head are Martin Luther King and Vladimir Putin. Doubts are raised that Putin ever read his thesis that plagiarized from a U.S. textbook. Iran's President Ahmadinejad allegedly plagiarizes, although I don't know if he plagiarized in his doctoral thesis --- http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2006/10/ahmadinejad_i_h.html

 

It's not clear that Vladimir Putin even read his own thesis
Large parts of an economics thesis written by President Vladimir Putin in the mid-1990s were lifted straight out of a U.S. management textbook published 20 years earlier, The Washington Times reported Saturday, citing researchers at the Brookings Institution. It was unclear, however, whether Putin had even read the thesis, which might have been intended to impress the Western investors who were flooding into St. Petersburg in the mid-1990s, the report said. Putin oversaw the city's foreign economic relations at the time.
"Putin Accused of Plagiarizing Thesis," Moscow Times, March 27, 2006 --- http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/03/27/011.html
Jensen Comment
What's interesting about this news item is that it was published in Moscow. This would not have happened in the old Soviet Union.

Martin Luther King Jr. has been accused of widespread plagiarism, including parts of his doctoral thesis --- http://www.martinlutherking.org/thebeast.html

Other celebrity plagiarists --- http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/in_our_opinion/plagiarism.htm

After this book was reviews by Oprah, my wife made me order it. Backorder is actually the case since Amazon could not get immediate copies after the Oprah show. Now there are charges flying about concerning plagiarism.

"Analysts: Seinfeld's defense rings hollow:  Wife claims she never saw cookbook she's accused of plagiarizing," WorldNetDaily, November 2, 2007 --- http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=58467

Jerry Seinfeld's wife's claim that she never saw the cookbook she's accused of plagiarizing rings hollow against market-research practices in the book-publishing industry, analysts say.

The author of "The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids' Favorite Meals" charges that Jessica Seinfeld stole the theme of her book and at least 15 recipes when she wrote a remarkably similar book, "Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food," that appeared several months later.

"I have never seen or read this other book," Seinfeld said.

Her husband, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, Monday defended his wife in an appearance on CBS' "Late Show With David Letterman."

"My wife never saw the book, read the book, used the book," he insisted.

But publishing analysts point out that book agents scour the market before a book is formally proposed to rule out competing titles. And book editors and publishing boards conduct even more stringent market research before offering writers a contract.

"There's no way they missed 'Sneaky Chef,'" said a senior editor with a major New York publishing house, who wished to remain anonymous.

In fact, Seinfeld's publisher HarperCollins had access to the original manuscript of "Sneaky Chef" almost six months before signing her to a contract. Its author, Missy Chase Lapine, submitted her 139-page book proposal with 31 recipes and 11 purees twice to HarperCollins – once in February 2006 without an agent and again with an agent in May 2006.

HarperCollins signed Seinfeld one month later, in June 2006.

Lapine says that after her publisher, Running Press, contacted HarperCollins, the cover of "Deceptively Delicious" was changed from the one featured in a promotional brochure. In the title, the word "sneaky" was replaced with "simple."

Jerry Seinfeld called Lapine, former publisher of "Eating Well" magazine, a "wacko."

The comic's wife's cookbook has climbed to the top of the New York Times and Amazon bestsellers lists thanks in large part to an Oct. 8 appearance on the "Oprah" show. Lapine says she and her publicists pitched Oprah's producers five times without success.

Host Oprah Winfrey and the Seinfelds are close, and she has a role in Jerry Seinfeld's new animated film, "Bee Movie."

Also, Jessica Seinfeld reportedly gave Winfrey 21 pairs of rare designer shoes valued at some $20,000.

During the World Series last week, Jerry Seinfeld appeared in a Hewlett Packard TV spot promoting the HP notebook in which he plugs not only his movie but also his wife's book. Thumbing through a digital image of "Deceptively Delicious," he remarks, "My wife wrote a cookbook. She is a genius"

 

Authoring Ethics or Lack Thereof

Question
How do prestigious professors plagiarize in textbook "authoring" without even knowing it?

"Schoolbooks Are Given F’s in Originality," by Diana Jean Schemo, The New York Times, July 14, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/books/13textbook.html

The language is virtually identical to that in the 2005 edition of another textbook, “America: Pathways to the Present,” by different authors. The books use substantially identical language to cover other subjects as well, including the disputed presidential election of 2000, the Persian Gulf war, the war in Afghanistan and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

Just how similar passages showed up in two books is a tale of how the largely obscure $4 billion a year world of elementary and high school textbook publishing often works, for these passages were not written by the named authors but by one or more uncredited writers. And while it is rare that the same language is used in different books, it is common for noted scholars to give their names to elementary and high school texts, lending prestige and marketing power, while lesser known writers have a hand in the books and their frequent revisions.

As editions pass, the names on the spine of a book may have only a distant or dated relation to the words between the covers, diluted with each successive edition, people in the industry, and even authors, say.

In the case of the two history texts, the authors appeared mortified by the similarities and said they had had nothing to do with the changes.

“They were not my words,” said Allan Winkler, a historian at Miami University of Ohio, who wrote the “Pathways” book with Andrew Cayton, Elisabeth I. Perry and Linda Reed. “It’s embarrassing. It’s inexcusable.”

Wendy Spiegel, a spokeswoman for Pearson Prentice Hall, which published both books and is one of the nation’s largest textbook publishers, called the similarities “absolutely an aberration.”

She said that after Sept. 11, 2001, her company, like other publishers, hastily pulled textbooks that had already been revised and were lined up for printing so that the terror attacks could be accounted for. The material on the attacks, as well as on the other subjects, was added by in-house editors or outside writers, she said.

She added that it was “unfortunate” that the books had identical passages, but said that there were only “eight or nine” in volumes that each ran about 1,000 pages.

Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, a nonprofit group that monitors history textbooks, said he was not familiar with this particular incident. But Mr. Sewall said the publishing industry had a tendency to see authors’ names as marketing tools.

“The publishers have a brand name and that name sells textbooks,” he said. “That’s why you have well-established authorities who put their names on the spine, but really have nothing to do with the actual writing process, which is all done in-house or by hired writers.”

The industry is replete with examples of the phenomenon. One of the most frequently used high school history texts is “Holt the American Nation,” first published in 1950 as “Rise of the American Nation” and written by Lewis Paul Todd and Merle Curti. For each edition, the book appeared with new material, long after one author had died and the other was in a nursing home. Eventually, the text was reissued as the work of another historian, Paul S. Boyer.

Professor Boyer, emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, acknowledged that the original authors had supplied the structure of the book that carries his name. But he said that as he revises the text, he adds new scholarship, themes and interpretations. He defended the disappearance of the original authors’ names from the book, saying it would be more misleading to carry their names when they had no say in current editions.

“Textbooks are hardly the same as the Iliad or Beowulf,” he added.

Richard Blake, a spokesman for Harcourt Education, a division of Holt, said none of the editors involved in the extended use of the Todd and Curti names were still with the company. But he said that now “all contributors and reviewers on each edition are listed in the front of the book,” and that naming new principal authors depended largely on the extent of their contributions.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
What also happens in authoring of textbooks for basic courses in accounting is that a senior professor at a huge-market college is added largely for purposes of gaining an adoption in his/her university or community college. The actual contribution of that professor to the book is somewhat as questionable as when some prestigious authors lend their names to a basic textbook where a lesser-known "co-author" wrote most of the book.

Professors Who Plagiarize

In one of the rare surveys conducted about plagiarism, two University of Alabama asked 1,200 of their colleagues if they believed their work had been stolen.  A startling 40 percent answered yes.
Thomas Bartlett and Scott Smallwood, "Professor Copycat," The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 17, 2004, Page A8.
The number of articles in this particular issue of the Chronicle make it a must reference for anybody studying plagiarism by college faculty.

In Germany and other parts of Europe, professors get credit for passages or even entire works written by their students citing the original author and, in most cases, without giving any form of credit whatsoever.  The work of the student, including that student's writing, is deemed the property of his or her professor.  Although this practice is not ver botten in Europe, it is considered unethical in North America.  But is does happen on this side of the globe and is sometimes not punished as heavily as plagiarism if the original writer is a student assistant.  
See Thomas Bartlett and Scott Smallwood, "Mentor vs. Protégé," The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 17, 2004, Page A14


Plagiarism: Judge Posner Builds a Reputation Cutting and Pasting Opinions Written by Others
THE club of people accused of plagiarism gets ever larger. High-profile members include Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Kaavya Viswanathan — of chick-lit notoriety — and now even Ian McEwan, whose best-selling novel “Atonement” has recently been discovered to harbor passages from a World War II memoir by Lucilla Andrews. Plagiarism is apparently so rife these days that it would be extremely satisfying to discover that “The Little Book of Plagiarism,” by Richard A. Posner, has itself been plagiarized. The watchdogs have been caught before. The section of the University of Oregon handbook that deals with plagiarism, for example, was copied from the Stanford handbook. Mr. Posner, moreover, is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a law professor at the University of Chicago who turns out books and articles with annoying frequency and facility. Surely, under deadline pressure, he is tempted every now and then to resort to a little clipping and pasting, especially since he cuts members of his own profession a good deal of slack on the plagiarism issue. In the book he readily acknowledges that judges publish opinions all the time that are in fact written by their clerks, but he excuses the practice on the ground that everyone knows about it and therefore no one is harmed. What he doesn’t consider much is whether a judge who gains a reputation for particularly well-written opinions or for seldom being reversed — or, for that matter, who is freed from his legal chores to do freelance writing — doesn’t benefit in much the same way as a student who persuades one of the smart kids to do his homework for him.
Charles McGrath, "Plagiarism: Everybody Into the Pool," New York Times Book Review, January 6 2007 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/education/edlife/07books.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Jensen Comment
My question is why it is so inconvenient for Judge Posner to add citations to his plagiarisms?

 

 

"Faculty Theft," by Carolyn Foster Segal, Inside Higher Ed, November 6, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/11/05/segal

Thus, just as the final decision regarding Glenn Poshard, president of Southern Illinois University (yes, he plagiarized; no, he won’t be fired) was setting off yet another round of blogging, I found myself starting the day with The Great Gatsby and ending with Oedipus Rex, thus neatly pairing a novel in which “Everybody lies” (the line is Gregory House’s, although it might easily be Nick Carraway’s) and a play in which the tragic hero — driving the plot toward his own destruction — argues that “the truth must be made known.”

About a year or so ago, I put out a call at an online forum for tales about faculty plagiarists. What was driving my interest was the sneaking suspicion that in the case of plagiarism, colleges often have a double standard: one standard for students and another for faculty and administrators. If it is sometimes amusing (note that I said sometimes — more often it is disheartening and aggravating) to listen to the excuses that students will argue in defense of their cheating ways, it is nothing less than appalling to hear a tenured administrator plead that he wasn’t adequately schooled in the meaning of plagiarism or to listen to a faculty member justify her appropriation of another’s work under the headings of forgetfulness, ignorance, or the impossibility of original thought in the 21st century. If one has already committed one egregious act — that of stealing — is it surprising that he or she would attempt to lie his or her way out of it? And most appalling of all is how many instances of faculty plagiarism are simply left alone by administrators.

My correspondents in the forum answered my query with examples of faculty plagiarists great and small: some offenders had been outed and severely penalized; still other perpetrators of the crime had triumphed with no punishment at all. A number of forum participants advised against becoming involved in bringing any sorts of charges, and, based on the sagas of revenge cited by several individuals, this began to seem like very good advice.

Formal grievances filed against them, bad teaching schedules, being shrouded by other departmental members, seeing no recourse but to leave: These are some of the repercussions not for faculty members who cheat, but for those who uncover the evidence. Having once or twice stolen the good work of others, some plagiarists’ line of defense is to go after the good names of those who cried “foul.”

Plagiarism, I was beginning to understand, was only part of the story. This fact was reinforced for me by one of the final postings (readers having already begun to move on to other forums and forms of discontent). Why not, my anonymous source proposed, broaden the topic to faculty theft? Why not indeed? As the writer — a veteran of academe, who gave me permission to quote his response — pointed out:

“Plagiarism” is a somewhat narrowly-understood term — i.e. the verbatim incorporation of another’s words without acknowledgment — and the more general defining principle, theft, sometimes gets lost in the parsing. I would argue that other academic thefts — in particular the hijackings of ideas, proposals, (co-)credit, publishing opportunities, support funds, courses, students, lab space — are equally — if not more pernicious.

The writer was indeed correct: plagiarism is just one category of the theft that’s practiced within the halls of academe. I’ve also observed that individuals rarely commit one isolated act of thievery — there’s usually a pattern. And to my generous correspondent’s catalog, I would add the losses of time, concentration, reputation, joy, and friendships with colleagues.

What explains the lists above? Is it simply, as in the maxim attributed to Henry Kissinger, that university politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small? Do academic departments breed this behavior, or is there something in the makeup of the offender that led him or her to choose — and abuse — this line of professional work? In an outside, follow-up e-mail, my anonymous correspondent continued: “I think you will find that the most egregious serial offenders in academe fall under the DSM-IV category of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.... The essence of the disorder is an inability to distinguish between substance and grandiose facade.”

If that’s the case, then a proposal regarding the faculty self-evaluation form at my college would be of even less use that it originally appeared to be. Several years ago, a provost and subcommittee of the curricular/academic policy committee suggested that we add a question involving a statement of ethics: Faculty members would be asked to describe and assess in detail their ethical performance. The introduction of this question provoked a lively debate. The conundrum it posed was similar to that of the sink-or-swim test for witchcraft. If a faculty member composed a lengthy screed on his/her ethical behavior, wasn’t he/she protesting too much? If, on the other hand, a faculty member refused to answer the question, was that an indication that he/she was in fact guilty of unethical behavior? Wasn’t the question an insult to anyone striving to live a moral, ethical life? And finally, what would a serial offender do with this opportunity? How likely was it that a faculty member who had misbehaved would seek atonement on the front page of the yearly self-evaluation?

As for what constituted unethical behavior, our discussion never reached the heights or depths of plagiarism. The one example that I can recall went something like this: If you bring cookies for your students on the day that they fill out the course evaluations, is that ethical? It’s certainly food for thought — and we reflected on that dilemma for a bit, while gazing at the plates of cookies that are always provided for faculty meetings. (We were, in fact, ahead of our time, at least on this issue — see “Sweetening the Deal” and the accompanying commentary on Inside Higher Ed.)

The question on ethics was cut from the faculty evaluation forms — not for any philosophical reason but because the subcommittee had neglected to follow the procedure for such revisions that is mandated by the faculty handbook. When the topic surfaced several months later, there was general agreement that just as the students must follow an honor code, so too do faculty members everywhere have an implicit code. We all know, however, that there is no honor among thieves.

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

 

Media Sources Who Let Journalists Cheat and Go Unpunished for Cheating

Plagiarism Goes Unpunished in the Liberal Press

"Slate Attacks Plagiarizing Journalists," by Todd Huston, NewsBusters, July 30, 2007 --- Click Here

Slate is no tool of the "vast right wing conspiracy," for sure (and neither is its parent company the Washington Post), so it is pretty amazing to see a Slate contributor take his fellow liberal journalists to task in so stark a manner. But, for once, Slate is dead right on this one, folks. The "Journalism" biz never takes their plagiarizing miscreants to task and never makes them pay, but Jack Shafer sure did last Friday.

This time Shafer's ire is leveled at writer Michael Finkel who is famous for having invented a story that appeared in National Geographic about the slave labor of a small boy purportedly living on an Ivory Coast cocoa plantation. Yet here he is getting work once again in the MSM as if he was trustworthy and professional.

Shafer rips Finkel to pieces saying at one point, "If I had the constitution of a hanging judge, which I don't, I'd have sent Finkel directly to the gallows for his [slave story] lies."

But, more important than his ripping of writer Finkel, Shafer gives us a great reference to a study that proves that hardly any writer caught stealing others' words or making stories up out of whole cloth ever gets held to account in the MSM.

Despite its self-image as a profession that excommunicates and banishes those who violate its ethical codes, journalism routinely grants its miscreants second chances. For example, a 1995 Columbia Journalism Review piece about plagiarism documented the low price Nina Totenberg, Michael Kramer, Edwin Chen, Fox Butterfield, and 16 other journalists paid after being accused of nicking the words of other writers.

Author Trudy Lieberman found that nearly all of them were still in the business, and some of them had even kept their original jobs. As it turns out, not many publications force journalists to pay their debts to their profession and their readers. Often, they don't even send the bill.

If this doesn't prove that the media cares more about the agenda and the message than the truth, what does? And, if it doesn't prove that, it certainly proves that the word "professional" should never appear in conjunction with "journalism", nor that what they present should be trusted in any way.

In the past, Jack Shafer has claimed to be of a libertarian viewpoint and he has written about the failings of the media, so this attack on journalism isn't too far out of the ordinary, at least for him. Still, what he has to say here is something that we should see more often. On the other hand, maybe wide reporting on plagiarism in the media is something we should see less of because the media would consider truth and originality as an important concept?

Well, we can dream, can't we?

 

"In Defense of Cheating," by Donald A. Norman, UBIQUITY, vol. 6, issue 11, April 5-12, 2005 --- http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i11_norman.html
(Dr. Norman is a well-known computer scientist and author who often challenges common thinking --- http://www.jnd.org/ )

In a recent issue of Ubiquity, Evan Golub examined the implications for cheating of allowing students to use computers during examinations (Golub, E. (2005). PCs in the classroom & open book exams. Ubiquity, 6(9). http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i9_golub.html )

I was disturbed by Golub's article because the emphasis was on cheating by students and possible counteractive measures. Never did he ask the more fundamental questions: What is the purpose of an examination; Why do students cheat? Instead, he proposed that faculty become police enforcers, trying to weed out dishonest behavior. I would prefer to turn faculty into educators and mentors, guiding students to use all the resources at their disposal to solve important problems.

Golub takes as a given our current educational methods that test by requiring students to prove that they can regurgitate the information presented in class without assistance from others (although, thankfully, he does allow them to consult books, reference notes, and even internet sources). But in real life, asking others for help is not only permitted, it is encouraged. Why not rethink the entire purpose of our examination system? We should be encouraging students to learn how to use all possible resources to come up with effective answers to important problems. Students should be encouraged to ask others for help, and they should also be taught to give full credit to those others. So, the purpose of this contribution to Ubiquity is to offer an alternative approach: to examine the origins of cheating, and by solving the root cause, to simultaneously reduce or eliminate cheating while enhancing learning. (This essay is adapted from an unpublished posting on my website: In defense of cheating, www.jnd.org)

Continued in article

MBAs most likely (among graduate students) to cheat and make their own rules

Question
Where is academic cheating most likely to take place on campus?

May 6, 2007 message from Donald Ramsey [dramsey@UDC.EDU]

For those who missed it, here is the URL for a report that ran yesterday on NPR, identifying MBA students among the most common cheaters. Very disturbing.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10033373 

Do you remember the old days of the CPA exam, with partitions on the tables between candidates?

Donald D. Ramsey, CPA,
Department of Accounting, Finance, and Economics,
School of Business and Public Administration,
University of the District of Columbia,
Room 404A, Building 52 (Connecticut and Yuma St.), 4200 Connecticut Ave., N. W., Washington, D. C. 20008.
(202) 274-7054.

"MBAs most likely to cheat," India Times, September 22, 2006 --- http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2018004.cms

BOSTON: Graduate business students in the United States and Canada are more likely to cheat on their work than their counterparts in other academic fields, the author of a research paper said on Wednesday.

The study of 5,300 graduate students in the United States and Canada found that 56 per cent of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the past year, with many saying they cheated because they believed it was an accepted practice in business.

Following business students, 54 per cent of graduate engineering students admitted to cheating, as did 50 per cent of physical science students, 49 per cent of medical and health-care students, 45 per cent of law students, 43 per cent of liberal arts students and 39 percent of social science and humanities students.

"Students have reached the point where they're making their own rules," said lead author Donald McCabe, professor of management and global business at New Jersey's Rutgers University. "They'll challenge rules that professors have made, because they think they're stupid, basically, or inappropriate."

McCabe said it's likely that more students cheat than admit to it.

Jensen Comment
Since lawyers have a worst reputation for lack of integrity later in life, this begs the question of where lawyers go bad if it's not in law school. Any suggestions?

D-Schools Are Also Cheating
The Southern Illinois University dental school, which is affiliated with the Edwardsville campus, is withholding grades of all first-year students, because of questions raised about the academic merit and integrity of the students. A university spokesman declined to provide details, citing the need to preserve confidentiality and the presumption of innocence, but said that all 52 first-year students would be interviewed as part of the inquiry. Ann Boyle, dean of the dental school, issued a statement: “This matter raises questions about the integrity and ethical behavior of Year I students and is, therefore, under investigation. We will follow our processes as outlined in our Student Progress Document to resolve the situation as quickly as we can.” KMOV-TV quoted students at the dental school, anonymously, as saying that the investigation concerned students who had tried to memorize and share information from old exams that instructors let them see, so the students did not consider the practice to be cheating. The Southern Illinois incident follows two other scandals this year involving professional school cheating: one at Duke University’s business school and one at Indiana University’s dental school.
Inside Higher Ed, June 27, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/27/qt

54% of Accounting Students Admit to Cheating
SmartPros, August 31, 2007 --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/x58970.xml


Accounting majors are just as likely to cheat in college as other business students, according to a new study.

The academic study -- titled Do Accounting Students Cheat? A Study Examining Undergraduate Accounting Students' Honesty and Perceptions of Dishonest Behavior -- surveyed 569 undergraduate business majors, including 294 undergraduate accounting students, from seven universities in Georgia, Mississippi and Texas.

The study set out to find out if students who were accounting majors were as likely to cheat or act in an academically dishonest manner as were students with other business majors.

The authors of the study, David E. Morris of North Georgia College & State University, and Claire McCarty Kilian of the University of Wisconsin at River Falls, found that 54 percent of the accounting students they surveyed admitted to cheating, compared to 52 percent of business majors overall.

The study also found significant disagreement among accounting majors as to what constitutes dishonest behavior. Students were asked to review case studies and report if the individuals involved engaged in dishonest behavior. In three of the case studies, students disagreed on what constituted cheating or academically dishonest behavior. Interestingly, there was also disagreement among the accounting educators who reviewed the case studies.

Finally, 82 percent of accounting students who admit cheating in college also said they cheated in high school.

A copy of the questionnaire distributed to the students is available in the final report.

MBAs most likely (among graduate students) to cheat and make their own rules --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#MBAs

Academic Fraud for Athletes

"Academic fraud runs rampant at major universities," by Mike Finger, San Antonio Express-News, September 2, 2003 --- http://news.mysanantonio.com/story.cfm?xla=saen&xlb=200&xlc=1058365&xld=200 

The first time a coed casually walked up to him, introduced herself and offered to do his homework, it would have been natural for Terrance Simmons to be taken aback.

When he learned that his basketball coach at Minnesota, Clem Haskins, was being forced out as a result of massive NCAA rules violations, Simmons understandably could have been shocked.

And when he read this spring about another seemingly endless string of new academic fraud cases — involving people who somehow didn't learn from the 1999 scandal that was supposed to be a national wake-up call — one might have expected Simmons to be a bit dismayed.

But he wasn't.

None of it surprised him.

Because the way Simmons sees it, he knew the kind of world he was getting into from the very beginning.

He remembers sitting in his family's living room in Louisiana as a prized high school recruit. He remembers college coaches — "and we're talking about coaches from major universities," he said — giving him all kinds of reasons to join their programs.

Most of all, he remembers many of those recruiters making it quite clear that scholastic integrity wasn't exactly their top priority.

"They didn't come right out and say I didn't have to go to class," Simmons said, "but it wasn't very hard to read between the lines."

Likewise, it doesn't take many code-breaking skills to figure out that academic fraud has become a scourge of epic proportions in major college athletics.

In the past four years alone, the NCAA has doled out punishment nine times for academic infractions, ranging from grade tampering to improper use of tutors. That number doesn't even include all of the schools involved in the latest outbreak.

In the span of just a few weeks at the end of last season, the men's basketball teams at Fresno State, Georgia and St. Bonaventure all removed themselves from postseason play amid reports of fraud.

Those scandals were followed by accusations of similar violations at Fairfield and Missouri. The possibility of academic infractions hasn't been ruled out at Baylor, where the basketball program is already under intense scrutiny after the alleged murder of a player, the ensuing cover-up and the resignation of coach Dave Bliss.

Simmons, who graduated from Minnesota with a degree in communications and economics and wasn't involved in the violations that occurred while he played for the Golden Gophers, thinks the frequency of reported similar transgressions will grow before it subsides.

Continued in the article

Forwarded by Diane Graves

Copyright issues and concerns:

"…Not every use, even every educational use, is likely to be defined as fair use. Higher education institutions need to develop up-to-date, reliable, consistent, and clear copyright related standards for use. "Who uses what" and "how they use it" have become pressing issues, in large part because new media sources and the emergence of the Web allow for the widespread dissemination of material. As such, they raise the stakes considerably from the days when distribution was limited to students physically enrolled in classes.

Institutions must accompany these standards with a campaign to energize and educate the community about copyright, an issue that is complex and often seems as though it should be someone else's problem. Faculty, staff, and students should know when they can use material under "fair use," when they must obtain permission (and how to obtain it), and when and how they can obtain alternative sources of the material (e.g., through commissioned works or from the public domain.).

Institutions must decide how much and what kinds of risks are worth taking with regard to use. …. Institutions that take a liberal position regarding fair use risk exposing themselves to litigation and the financial costs associated with it.

Regardless of the specific position taken regarding fair use, institutions need to nurture a culture of compliance with copyright law. This culture requires education and resources. If a coherent use policy is created but faculty, staff, and students lack access to the resources needed to comply (e.g., easy copyright clearance, alternative sources for copyright material, help finding things in the public domain), the policy will be ignored.

Excerpted from: James Hilton, "Copyright Assumptions and Challenges," EDUCAUSE Review, November/December 2001, pp.48-55.

Helpful web sites:

Friends of Active Copyright Education: http://www.law.duke.edu/copyright/face/ 

Copyright Clearance Center: http://www.copyright.com/ 

Copyright Management Center at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (Includes link to Fair Use Checklist) http://www.iupui.edu/~copyinfo/ 

CREDO: Copyright Resources for Education Online (Columbia University) http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/text_version/projects/copyright/ILTcopy0.html 

Also see
The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Undermines Public Access and Sharing 
(Included Copyright Information and Dead Link Archives)

"Scientists behaving badly," by Jim Giles , Nature, March 4, 2004 --- http://www.nature.com/nsu/040301/040301-9.html 

They lie, they cheat and they steal. Judging by the cases described by a group of medical journal editors, scientists are no different from the rest of us.

Last week's annual report1 of the Committee on Publishing Ethics details the misdemeanours that the group of journal editors grappled with in 2003. Although the number of cases - 29 - is tiny compared with the tens of thousands of papers published in medical journals every year, the cases cover a wide range of unethical activity, from attempted bribery to potential medical malpractice.

Many of the tricks will be familiar to schoolchildren. Two complaints concern cases where researchers were accused of copying someone else's work. When editors investigated, they agreed that the papers were almost identical versions of previously published material, and that plagiarism was the most likely explanation.

Confronted with the evidence, researchers behind one paper insisted that their paper contained only 5% overlap with the original. Another author, when eventually reached by mobile phone, admitted some similarities; but at that point the call ended abruptly.

Duplicate publication, where the same paper is printed twice in different journals to boost publication records, is the most common offence, accounting for seven of 29 cases. This fits with previous studies of the practice.

A 2003 survey of opthalmology journals estimated that at least 1.5% of all papers are duplicates2. Some researchers seem to have perfected the art: a study released last month identified two papers that had each been published five times3.

Compulsory action

Conflicts of interest also rear their head in the report. One journal ran a paper on passive smoking from authors who omitted to mention that they had received funding from the tobacco industry. Further probing revealed that the author had received tobacco company money throughout his career and even lobbied for the industry.

In cases where the misconduct concerns medical treatments, the report becomes more disturbing. The editors discuss several studies where medical procedures were run by researchers who did not have proper ethical clearance.

One paper revealed that blood samples were taken from healthy babies to set up a control group for a study. This was a painful procedure that the paper's authors later said wouldn't normally be sanctioned for research purposes. The nature of their ethical approval for the procedure was never cleared up.

When confronted with such issues, journal editors usually contact the researchers' employers or ethics committees, who may take action. But this is not compulsory.

The publishing committee wants to formalize this course of action in a code of ethical conduct for editors. It has published a draft of such a code alongside its report, and a final version should be ready in the next few months. The committee wants all editors of medical journals, including its 180 or so members, to sign up to the code and agree to be bound by the associated disciplinary procedures.

Such a code should clarify editors' duties. It should also make clear, if it is not already, which activities are inappropriate. The report describes one bid to persuade an editor to accept a manuscript, in which an anonymous caller offered to buy 1000 reprints of the published paper. "And," the caller added, "I will buy you dinner at any restaurant you choose."

 

Wow Multimedia Site

An Award Winning Copyright Website --- http://www.benedict.com/ 
Includes MP3 Audio, MPEG Video, an online service for obtaining a copyright for your Website materials, and advice for copyrights of software.

This portal provides real world, practical and relevant copyright information for anyone navigating the net. Launched on May Day '95, the Copyright Website strives to lubricate the machinations of information delivery. As spice is to Dune, information is to the Web; the spice must flow. Or, if you prefer another metaphor, take the blue pill and I'll show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes...

The University of Virginia has expelled one student for plagiarism after a computer program caught him in the act. More than 100 cases are still pending 
"Plagiarist Booted; Others Wait," by Katie Dean--- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,45802,00.html 

One student has been expelled, and more than 100 cases of plagiarism remain to be resolved at the University of Virginia after a physics professor used a computer program to catch students who turned in duplicate papers, or portions of papers that appeared to have been copied.

The school's student-run Honor Committee spent the summer investigating a fraction of the cases, and will continue to do so through the fall semester.

The committee's work has been slow over the summer break since many students are away. Thomas Hall, chairman of the committee, said he hopes to complete the remaining investigations by the end of October, and finish the trials by the end of the fall semester

 

See also:
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism 
Program Catches Copycat Students
Catching Digital Cheaters
Cheaters Bow to Peer Pressure
New Toys for Cheating Students
Get schooled in Making the Grade

The first thing I recommend trying if you find a somewhat unique phrase in a document that you think was plagiarized in whole or in part is as follows:

If the above steps fail, then look into the options discussed below.

Reply from Roger

As is increasingly common, NTU has a subscription to the full text version of ABI-Inform. We have several other full text databases as well, but ABI-Inform is the database that our students seem to use. This database is a more productive source of information for students to prepare their essays or to plagiarise. If I suspect that a portion of an essay has been lifted directly from elsewhere, I search the ABI-Inform database in much the same way as Bob recommends searching Google.

BTW, last semester I used Eve 2.2 but found it a complete waste of time. It just seemed to sit there and think for hours on end, giving no feedback on its progress. Very frustrating. This time around, I'm going to convert all Word documents to text to see if that speeds things up, and then just let Eve work overnight.

Roger Debreceny [rogerd@NETBOX.COM] 

February 10, 2007 message from Mark McCrohon

Dear Bob,

I have developed a plagiarism detection tool called DOC Cop that may be of interest to you and your colleagues.

DOC Cop does NOT take ownership or copyright of your material. It does not retain your material beyond the time it takes to generate your report.

DOC Cop is lightning fast:

* When processing documents, DOC Cop scans a document of up to 500 words against the web in minutes.

* When processing a corpus, DOC Cop scans one million words, a thousand thousand-word documents or Homer's Odyssey against Joyce's Ulysses within 20 minutes.

DOC Cop is on the web at http://www.doccop.com  and processes your material free of charge.

Featuring:

* 8-hour turnaround
* Create and submit your own corpus
* Detailed reports
* Entirely web based, no installation necessary
* Exclude repetitious text (e.g. the question itself)
* Include your own material (e.g. lecture notes)
* Online support * SSL Security (128 Bit)

Thank you very much for your consideration of DOC Cop.

Sincerely, Mark McCrohon
DOC Cop Plagiarism Detection
ABN: 97 815 799 245
doccop@doccop.com 

* DOC Cop Plagiarism Detection guarantees that no submission is copied, retained elsewhere, passed on to others or sold. DOC Cop Plagiarism Detection guarantees to delete every submission once processing is complete.

* Mark McCrohon developed software for the Department of Economics, the Department of Accounting and Business Information Systems and the Teaching and Learning Unit in the Faculty of Economics and Commerce at The University of Melbourne from 1998 to 2005.

Throughout 2006, Mark devoted himself to the development and deployment of DOC Cop Plagiarism Detection.

Software Strives to Spot Plagiarism Before Publication
After a series of damaging newspaper scandals involving plagiarism in recent years, a new piece of software looks to help editors stop wrongdoers before their articles go to print. The LexisNexis data collection service has introduced CopyGuard, a program aimed at exposing plagiarists or spotting copyright infringement. According to John Barrie, chief executive of iParadigms, the company that developed the program with LexisNexis, CopyGuard can generate a report that calculates the percentage of material suspected of not being original, highlights that text and pinpoints its possible original source, all within seconds.
Tania Ralli, "Software Strives to Spot Plagiarism Before Publication," The New York Times, September 5, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/technology/05plagiarism.html

September 2, 2004 message from  Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu] 

INTELLECTUAL HONESTY IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE

"[T]echnology also adds new vistas to in-class cheating. Cell phones and PDA's provide a platform to share real time text messaging, adding a new angle to a note tossed not only from one side of a room to another, but also from one side of the campus or further beyond. With programmable calculators, PDA's and other handheld intelligent devices, students can store notes, access websites, send e-mail, or grab ready-made formulas to ease calculations. Camera phones have also been reported as potential devices for cheating by scanning a test’s contents for later review. No gum wrapper or note tucked into a sleeve can compare to the storage and intelligence of these devices."

In the conference paper "Intellectual Honesty in the Electronic Age" (presented at the University of Calgary) John Iliff and Judy Xiao, College of Staten Island, CUNY, give an overview of why students cheat and provide several ways, including technological solutions, for preventing cheating. The paper is available online at http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/~jiliff/iliff_xiao.htm 

See also:

"Combating Cheating in Online Student Assessment" CIT INFOBITS, July 2004 http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitjul04.html#3 

For more information about the annual University of Calgary's Best Practices in e-Learning Online Conference, held August 23-27, 2004, go to http://elearn.ucalgary.ca/conference/ 

Newspapers, attorneys and police use software that detects writers who steal content, as "text piracy" threatens to become the next digital windfall for attorneys.
"Electronic Snoops Tackle Copiers," by Randing Dotinga, Wired News, April 2, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,62906,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html 

New markets are finally opening up for plagiarism-detection software, a mainstay of academia that has struggled to expand its reach beyond term papers.

The scandal-plagued newspaper industry is considering whether to adopt the technology to crack down on copycats, while the New York Police Department is testing it as an investigative tool.But experts say the biggest potential market might be the publishing industry, which one day may find itself coping with the same kind of piracy that bedevils movie makers and music producers.

Some law firms are already using one type of technology "to essentially troll the Internet for the next Stephen Ambrose," said plagiarism-detection software developer John Barrie, referring to the late historian accused of peppering his bestsellers with snippets stolen from other people's work.

Barrie, whose privately held iParadigms company reports annual revenue of $10 million, is trying hard to woo new clients beyond its 3,500 current customers. Every college and university in the United Kingdom has already signed on for the service.

At campuses from the University of California to the University of Florida, students must submit term papers to iParadigms' Turnitin, a service that checks their content against huge databases of books, websites and other students' term papers.

Turnitin, by far the most popular brand of plagiarism-detection software, charges universities $1,000 for a license and an annual fee of 60 cents per student.

The software has had its share of critics, including students who worry about submitting their work to a giant database without compensation or recognition of their copyrights.

Some prestigious universities, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford, refuse to adopt the software. Meanwhile, students at universities with honor codes point out that there's no sense in pledging to be honest if administrators and professors figure some of them are lying.

"It raises all kinds of funny issues in that sense," said Rutgers University professor of management Donald McCabe, who studies college cheating and thinks schools should emphasize plagiarism prevention instead of trying to bust plagiarists.

Barrie, however, claimed the copyright concerns are overblown, and earlier this year told Court TV that students could still "take their Macbeth essay to the market and make millions."

News coverage of Turnitin has fallen over the last few years after its debut in the late 1990s, but the latest batch of journalism scandals has resurrected the media's interest.

First, The Hartford Courant newspaper in Connecticut announced it would consider using the technology after Turnitin software discovered that the president of a state university campus had plagiarized some of an op-ed commentary from three sources, including The New York Times, which suffered its own plagiarism scandal last year during the notorious Jayson Blair affair. (The university president later resigned.)

April 1, 2005 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

COMPUTERS IN THE CLASSROOM AND OPEN BOOK EXAMS

In "PCs in the Classroom & Open Book Exams" (UBIQUITY, vol. 6, issue 9, March 15-22, 2005), Evan Golub asks and supplies some answers to questions regarding open-book/open-note exams. When classroom computer use is allowed and encouraged, how can instructors secure the open-book exam environment? How can cheating be minimized when students are allowed Internet access during open-book exams? Golub's suggested solutions are available online at http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i9_golub.html

Ubiquity is a free, Web-based publication of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), "dedicated to fostering critical analysis and in-depth commentary on issues relating to the nature, constitution, structure, science, engineering, technology, practices, and paradigms of the IT profession." For more information, contact: Ubiquity, email: ubiquity@acm.org ; Web: http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/ 

For more information on the ACM, contact: ACM, One Astor Plaza, 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036, USA; tel: 800-342-6626 or 212-626-0500; Web: http://www.acm.org/

"Probing for Plagiarism in the Virtual Classroom," by Lindsey S. Hamlin and William T. Ryan, Syllabus, May 2003 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7627 

Virtual learning in higher education has seen enormous progress in both public and private universities. Has the growth of online education made it difficult for educators to ensure that the student who earns the credit for the course is the one who actually did the work?

Colleges venturing into online education face a great deal of scrutiny among educators over the question of academic integrity. They often assume that Internet technology and online classrooms provide students with new and easier ways to cheat. However, the potential for cheating in online courses is about equal to that in traditional courses. In fact, with the Web sites and software now available, educators have a better ability to detect and battle plagiarism and cheating in virtual and traditional classrooms alike. And various online assessment tools, assignments, and activities available within a virtual course, including threaded discussions, chats, quizzes, and group presentations, are by their very nature a deterrent to cheating.

Virtual vs. Traditional Cheating
Unfortunately, cheating has always existed and will continue as long as there is temptation to do so. In 2002, 47 students at Simon Frasier University turned in nearly the same economics paper. According to a 1999 study conducted by the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, of 2,100 students surveyed on 21 campuses across the country, about one-third of the participating students admitted to serious test cheating, and half admitted to one or more instances of serious cheating on written assignments.

(Portion of article not quoted here)

Selected Anti-Plagiarism Sites

 

Plagiarism.org
Self-described "online resource for educators concerned with the growing problem of Internet plagiarism."
www.plagiarism.org and www.turnitin.com

Plagiarized.com
"The Instructors Guide to Internet Plagiarism."
www.plagiarized.com

EVE (Essay Verification Engine)
A downloadable application that performs complex searches against text, Microsoft Corp. Word files, and Corel Corp. WordPerfect files.
www.canexus.com

The Center for Academic Integrity
An association of more than 225 institutions that provides a forum for identifying and promoting the values of academic integrity.
www.academicintegrity.org

What is Plagiarism?
Guidelines from the Georgetown University Honor Council.
www.georgetown.edu/honor/plagiarism.html

Avoiding Plagiarism
Guidelines from the Office of Student Judicial Affairs at the University of California, Davis.
http://sja.ucdavis.edu/avoid.htm

Detecting Plagiarism
Plagiarism.org maintains a database of thousands of digitally "fingerprinted" documents including papers obtained from term paper mills. When an instructor uploads a student's paper to the site, the document's "fingerprint" is cross-referenced against the local database containing hundreds of thousands of papers. At the same time, automated Web crawlers are released to scour the rest of the Internet for possible matches. The instructor receives a custom, color-coded "originality report," complete with source links, for each paper. For a fee, this service will detect papers that are entirely plagiarized, papers that include plagiarism from different sources, or papers that have bits and pieces of plagiarized text.

Web-based Internet detection services, both fee-based and non-fee-based, are on the rise. Many educators would find this growth positive. However, a March 2002 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that two plagiarism-detection Web sites, PlagiServe.com and EduTie.com, appeared to have ties to Web sites that sell term papers to students. Apparently, the company that was checking student papers for plagiarism was also selling those same papers through its term paper mill. Although the allegations were denied by both companies, the possible conflict of interest is a reminder to educators to be cautious in submitting student papers to unsubstantiated sites.

Many software companies have developed innovative programs for detecting plagiarism. Glatt Plagiarism Services Inc. produces the Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program, which eliminates every fifth word of the suspected student's paper and replaces the words with a blank space. The student is asked to supply the missing words. The number of correct responses, the amount of time intervening, and various other factors are considered in assessing the final Plagiarism Probability Score. This program is based on Wilson Taylor's (1953) cloze procedure, which was originally used to test reading comprehension.

Educators may also find the more popular Internet search engines to be a useful tool in plagiarism detection. Google, Yahoo!, Excite, AskJeeves, HotBot, GoTo, AltaVista, and MetaCrawler are just a few of the search engines that can aid an instructor in detection.

When an instructor suspects a student of copying text or notices an inconsistency in a student's writing style, he or she can enter the suspected phrase into the search engine. The search engine will return a listing of all Web sites that contain an exact match of the entered text. Instructors can broaden their results by searching a few different search engines. A simple search can summon up more than 50 sources for papers that students can copy and present as their own, according to a New York Times report. If a student copied text from the Internet, there is a good possibility that the instructor will locate the source by using an Internet search engine.

Deterring Cheating
Maintaining academic integrity is a challenge for educators in both the traditional and virtual classroom. Although it is nearly impossible to eliminate cheating in either type of classroom, educators can deter it by using the tools available to them. Instructors who advise their students that writing samples will be collected, term papers will be filtered through plagiarism-detecting software, pop quizzes will be given throughout the semester, and weekly participation in the discussion boards is a class requirement are setting up a virtual environment that will deter cheating.

Continued in the article.

I am forwarding this interesting message forwarded by the Reference Librarian at Trinity University.

Note in particular the quote:

"But since students often get their material through a Google search, it makes sense that that's a first port of call in detection."

Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

Bob

-----Original Message-----
From: Nolan, Chris
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 7:34 PM
 To: Jensen, Robert Subject:
FW: Instructions for Google as Plagiarism Checker

Bob,

I thought you might find this interesting...

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Edward J. Leach [mailto:leach@LEAGUE.ORG] 
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 4:19 PM
To: COLLIB-L@ns1.WOOSTER.EDU 
Subject: Re: Instructions for Google as Plagiarism Checker

Along that same line, the course below is one of the many sessions on this topic being presented at the 2002 Conference on Information Technology.

http://www.league.org/2002cit/index.html

Say It Isn't So: Plagiarism in the Digital Age Participants in this interactive, hands-on session explore the prevalence of plagiarism in academia and learn ways in which modern technology can be used to commit and deter plagiarism. Strategies for preventing plagiarism, such as designing effective assignments, as well as strategies for detecting plagiarism, such as using free and commercial detection services, will be examined. Real-life examples are used, including opportunities to identify problem assignments that might trigger student plagiarism, guidelines for providing assignments that reduce the likelihood of plagiarism, and a comparison of plagiarism detection services. This session will benefit anyone involved in assigning and grading students' written work, as well as those educators involved in enforcing academic honesty policies.

Carla Levesque, Librarian; Melisandre Hilliker, Head Librarian, St. Petersburg College, FL

-----Original Message-----
From: mchijiok@GUILFORD.EDU
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 2:02 PM
To: COLLIB-L@ns1.WOOSTER.EDU 
Subject: Re: Instructions for Google as Plagiarism Checker

It's amazing how often a specific phrase produces results. Very often the suspicion of plagiarism is triggered by an usual phrase using terminology and/or constructions that would not be expected from a particular student. Several of our faculty have in fact had great success with a well-chosen Google search (using a "[string]" + [word] search in the basic search mode). That doesn't mean that old-fashioned means aren't still relevant. In one case last year, the professor recognized the writing and pulled the book from the shelf. But since students often get their material through a Google search, it makes sense that that's a first port of call in detection.

Our faculty development committee is sponsoring a panel next week that includes representation from the Academic Dean's Office, the Library, the Academic Skills Center, honor board, and classroom faculty who have worked on designing personalized assignments that make plagiarism difficult. I'll be sharing a handout with a lot of wisdom from librarians (all fully cited, of course!)

It's another example where a partnership between librarians and classroom faculty pays off.

Mary Ellen Chijioke Director,
Hege Library Guilford College
5800 W. Friendly Ave. Greensboro, NC 27410
Phone: (336) 316-2129 Fax: (336) 316-2950 mchijiok@guilford.edu

"Charles T. Kendall"
To: COLLIB-L@ns1.WOOSTER.EDU 
Subject: Re: Instructions for Google as Plagiarism Checker
Sent by: COLLIB-L <COLLIB-L@ns1.WOO STER.EDU>

The specific programs would be more precise, but I think what some professors are doing is just to type a chosen phrase from a suspect paper into Google to see if the search pulls up a hit.

On 26 Sep 2002 at 16:14, paul wiener wrote:

> I'd be interested too. My guess is that it's impossible. There are > specific programs written for tracing plagiarized material. I know > Google can point you to them.

-- <ckendall@sterling.edu>
Charles T. Kendall, Director of Library Services
Mabee Library Sterling College (125 West Cooper) P.O. Box 98 Sterling Kansas 67579 Telephone: 620-278-4233 Fax: 620-278-4414

"Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?" T.S. Eliot, "The Rock," Chorus 1.

"Plagiarism: IT-Enabled Tools for Deceit?" by Phillip D. Long, Syllabus Magazine, January 2002, Page 8 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=5916 

The other day, a call came in to a faculty support team from an instructor with what has become an increasing concern: a paper submitted for a class assignment didn’t seem representative of the student’s prior work. Red flags were raised. Was this a case of plagiarism? How could the professor check?

Faculty fear of plagiarism is, sadly, legitimate. Web sites continue to proliferate offering term papers, short essays, and reports of one sort or another at anywhere from $7 to $30 per page. Their increasing availability certainly suggests there is a market.

While we condemn submitting the words of others in place of one’s own, we fail to look at why this happens. The answer is not so simple. Some of the transgressions collected under the plagiarism banner include failure to attribute the source of an extensive quotation, not formally recognizing the originator of an idea, using phrases of others without indicating so with quotation marks, and, of course, wholesale downloading of term papers. Some transgressions are omissions, others a failure to understand the ethics of copyright.

No faculty member should tolerate a downloaded paper. There are software tools that can help. Send the text of a student’s paper to one of a number of services that will search the Internet for matches. A handful are free, but the majority, like the paper sites, are commercial ventures, and their effectiveness varies. Depending on the sophistication of the comparison tool, subscription paper sites may be inaccessible. But they assuage some faculty anxiety and catch those students whose laziness extends not just to writing the paper but to the method of procuring it.

How do they work? Most rely on statistically based vocabulary cross-checking and comparison of structural recurrences in text passages. For example,  www.turnitin.com  uses a plagiarism-checking algorithm that appears to rely on word similarity or identity. This assumes that most students will not bother to make wholesale lexical or structural changes to the material they copy.

Other services develop a digital “fingerprint” that is used to search across a wider swath of possible Web sources. But they do so at a cost of their own. The submitted papers may be added to the plagiarism-checking databases, violating the student’s intellectual property rights in the process.

Plagiarism isn’t limited to text, however. The increasing complexity of software programs makes it harder to detect the use of computer code copied from one program and inserted into another. Alex Aiken at the University of California, Berkeley, has developed an open source software program for comparing software code for similarity ( www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html ).

Continued at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=5916

Term Papers on the Web
 

Anti-Plagiarism Sites and Resources
Selected Anti-Plagiarism Sites

Plagiarism.org Self-described “online resource for educators concerned with the growing problem of Internet plagiarism.” www.plagiarism.org  and www.turnitin.com 

Plagiarized.com “The Instructors Guide to Internet Plagiarism.” www.plagiarized.com 

PaperBin.com A commercial service that checks student papers against its paper database. It bills itself as a plagiarism-prevention service. www.paperbin.com 

HowOriginal.com A free service that checks a 1K chunk of text against Internet resources for plagiarism. Written samples are not added to their database. www.howoriginal.com 

EVE (Essay Verification Engine) A downloadable application that performs complex searches against text, Microsoft Corp. Word files, and Corel Corp. WordPerfect files. www.canexus.com 

PlagiServe A free site that checks against paper mill sites to find copied text. www.plagiserve.com 

Anti-Plagiarism Resources

The Center for Academic Integrity An association of more than 225 institutions that provides a forum for identifying and promoting the values of academic integrity. www.academicintegrity.org 

What is Plagiarism? Guidelines from the Georgetown University Honor Council. www.georgetown.edu/honor/plagiarism.html 

Avoiding Plagiarism Guidelines from the Office of Student Judicial Affairs at the University of California, Davis. http://sja.ucdavis.edu/avoid.htm 

 

Chris Nolan forwarded the following link to turnitin.com --- http://www.turnitin.com/services.html 
I did link to this previously in my New Bookmarks to www.plagiarism.org, but you should also know about turnitin's expanded portfolio of services:.

Turnitin.com is the educational branch of the Internet company iParadigms, Inc., which was founded in 1997 by a group of UC Berkeley computer scientists and researchers concerned with the growing problem of intellectual property theft in the Internet. They developed a series of new, algorithm-based pattern matching techniques able to turn any text document into a virtual 'digital fingerprint', which, with the help of a series of automated web robots, could then be used to track sensitive information online. iParadigms is presently using these technologies to help a variety of organizations protect their intellectual property, ranging from patents and other proprietary information to every form of digital media. More information on iParadigms can be found at our corporate website, www.iparadigms.com .

Since the researchers who developed the technologies at the heart of iParadigms were teachers as well, it seemed the next logical step to apply those technologies to help ensure that their own students were not abusing Internet resources and submitting work taken from sites in the Web. Initial tests in large classes at UC Berkeley produced disturbing results: in one large class it was found that 45 out of 320 students-- approximately 15%-- had turned in papers either partially or completely lifted from one or more sites online. Subsequent tests at other institutions produced similar results, and a very recent test conducted at UC Berkeley has confirmed that the problem, unfortunately, is only getting worse. We at Turnitin.com  are alarmed at the downward trend in academic honesty that has accompanied the growth of the Internet, and feel our service provides invaluable assistance to educators and students seeking to reverse this trend and ensure a level playing field for all students. Additional information on these tests, in addition to detailed analyses of the various techniques employed by digital plagiarists, can be found at our informational site, www.plagiarism.org .

Our aspiration at Turnitin.com is, ultimately, to provide a whole portfolio of services designed to tap the Internet's potential as a unique educational resource. We do not see ourselves as a 'policing force' intent on punishing students, nor as a barrier to students wishing to make full use of the educational possibilities the Internet provides. Conversely, we also understand-- if the Internet is ever to reach its full potential as an educational tool-- that certain controls need to be implemented to ensure that this foreseeably limitless resource remains an asset rather than a detriment to learning. The first step is already being taken by the numerous subscribers to Turnitin.com around the world. We intend to further this process by expanding our services in the coming months to include a digital archiving system for the efficient storage and retrieval of academic documents, and in the near future plan to launch a sophisticated, online classroom management system available to all Turnitin.com subscribers. A final goal will be to open our vast and growing database of papers to members of the entire academic community, where it will serve as a forum for both teachers and students to exchange their ideas freely and without risk of theft. This final goal, however, is only realizable in an Internet environment insured against intellectual property theft in any of its many forms; as such we encourage any educator concerned with the deterioration of academic integrity in our institutions to help us realize this goal and become a member of the Turnitin.com educational community.

Reply from John D Tongren [jtongren@COACTIVECONNECTION.COM] 

I've found http://turnitin.com/  very useful...

John

 

March 10, 2003 message from Barbara Scofield [scofield_b@UTPB.EDU] 

I have used the trial subscription to www.turnitin.com and was pleased with the report provided.

I understand that each document submitted is added to their database, so it should provide student-to-student checks as well as a check against other sources.

Barbara W. Scofield, PhD, CPA
Coordinator of Graduate Business Studies
The University of Texas of the Permian Basin
4901 E. University
Odessa, TX 79762

A University of Virginia professor uses a self-written computer program to catch students who plagiarize term papers. Over 100 students are being investigated and may be expelled. --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/school/0,1383,43561,00.html 

A professor at the University of Virginia has nabbed 122 students for plagiarism using a computer program he wrote himself.

Louis Bloomfield, who teaches an introductory-level physics course called "How Things Work," wrote the program after he "heard rumors that papers were coming in more than once."

Update from Syllabus Web on May 21, 2001

Computer Programs Detect Plagiarism

A computer program, designed by University of Virginia physics Professor Louis Bloomfield, searches for similar phrasing of six consecutive words or more in student papers. He ran 1,500 term papers submitted by e-mail over the last few years through the program and found 122 had suspiciously similar wording, including 60 papers that were nearly identical. If found guilty of plagiarism, the students who turned in the papers could be expelled or stripped of recently awarded degrees from the school. Computer science professors are using software pro- grams to identify suspiciously similar strings of code in programming assignments. The Measure of Software Similarity (MOSS) program gained wide use after its creator, the University of California, Berkeley's Alex Aiken, distributed it free to fellow programming professors around the world in 1997. Another service, http://www.turnitin.com , takes a digital fingerprint of the student's paper, then scans the Internet and the group's own database looking for matches, highlighting passages that match and providing links to the online source. Another service, http://www.findsame.com , scans the Web for matching sentences or whole documents, instead of just keywords.

See also:
New Toys for Cheating Students
Phony Degrees a Hot Net Scam
Catching Digital Cheaters
Get schooled in Making the Grade

My  links on plagiarism in my Bookmarks are as follows --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

Check out an article on Wired that covers the problem and an interesting set of counter-plagiarism tools and sites.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,33021,00.html 

"Busting the New Breed of Plagiarist," by Michael Bugeja at http://awpwriter.org/bugeja1.htm 

The Berkeley plagiarism-detection program ---  Go to  http://www.plagiarism.org/  Also see
 http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9911/21/plagerism.detective/index.html 

Proven Results. Our proprietary plagiarism detection algorithms* have successfully been used in multiple classes at U.C. Berkeley and abroad.

Powerful Methods. Our computational processes for 'finger-printing' papers and determining degrees of originality will detect plagiarism.

Speed. We can 'finger-print' and evaluate thousands of papers each day.

Extensive Database. Our extensive and growing database of term papers will deter your students from plagiarizing other work.

Easy To Use. We make every effort to customize the service's web page so that our plagiarism deterring technology is a non-technical seamless addition to your classes.

Increases Quality. Instructors report that the quality of their students' work increases when they know that manuscripts will be checked for originality.

Increases Student Morale. Students themselves report that unchecked cheating and plagiarism by others undermines their own efforts and educational enthusiasm.

The purpose of this service is to insure that term papers, essays, and manuscripts, which are submitted as a requirement for a university or college course, are never plagiarized. This means that papers will never again be recirculated/recycled every year, that papers will not be copied from one class and used for a different class, that papers from one university will not find their way to another university course, and that papers acquired from the Internet will NEVER be used to fulfill a course requirement.

An instructor registers his/her class with Plagiarism.org. Each instructor then requests that her/his students upload their term papers or manuscripts to the Plagiarism.org web site.

Each student in the instructor's course accesses the Plagiarism.org web site.

From the web site students can upload their work into our database designed specifically for their particular class. Students can also access information regarding plagiarism and information concerning intellectual property.

Our proprietary technology converts each manuscript into an abstract representation; essentially, we 'finger-print' each paper.

Each term paper submitted for a class requirement is statistically checked against a database of other manuscripts collected from different universities, classes, and from all-over the Internet. Only cases of gross plagiarism are flagged. This means that papers using some identical quotes or papers written on similar topics will NEVER be flagged as unoriginal.

A report is then emailed (or mailed) to the instructor detailing the degrees of originality for each paper checked with Plagiarism.org.

The fees, which I find reasonable for this remarkable service, are described below:

Our offer is simple. To insure that only interested parties use our service there is a one-time, $20.00 (US) fee to create an account with us. This account can be used to upload 30 different manuscripts. We will email you a link to a confidential webpage containing an exact numerical analysis of each manuscript's originality. If any manuscripts were plagiarized you will know. After an account has been created, there will be a small charge of $0.50 for every manuscript, after 30, subsequently analyzed.

The links below were provided in T.H.E. Journal, September 1999, pg. 50.

Acceptable Use Policy Links

We require our students to submit all their assignments in word then run a program called EVE against them - this searches the web for Internet plagiarism and provides a nice report with an x% plagiarised as well as the plagiarised content shown in red, together with the web references. Refer http://www.canexus.com/eve/index.shtml 

Trust this may be useful

Regards
Rodger Jamieson, University of NSW [R.Jamieson@UNSW.EDU.AU]

Hi all,

Food for thought....

Larry Crumbley (an accounting professor) started the "The Society for A Return to Academic Standards" (SFRTAS -- http://www.bus.lsu.edu/accounting/faculty/lcrumbley/sfrtas.html ) several years ago. The organization's primary goal is to "Provide information and support for a return to academic standards in higher education." More specifically, "SFRTAS encourages research on faculty pander pollution, dysfunctional aspects of student evaluations of teaching (SETs), misuse of SET data by administrators, dishonesty of students on SETs, invalidity of SET information, denial of due process from use of SET, defamation, impression management, post-tenure reviews, disappearing tenure, and reasons for grade inflation."

Best,

Dan Stone, 
Gatton Endowed Chair of Accounting, 
Univ. of Kentucky, Von Allmen School of Accountancy, 355 Business & Economics, 
Lexington, KY 40506-0034 * 
internet: dstone@pop.uky.edu, 
www : http://gatton.uky.edu/GattonPeople/People/DepartList/AccDeptList/AccFac/accf ac_14.html   
phone: 859-257-3043, fax: 859-257-3654, office: 355LL Business & Economics

"Colleges clamp down on cheaters," by Karen Thomas, USA TODAY, June 14, 2001 --- http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/june01/2001-06-11-cheaters-sidebar.htm

In a 1998 survey by Who's Who Among American High School Students, 80% of college-bound high schoolers admitted they'd cheated at least once. According to an ongoing survey of college students by McCabe, three out of four confess to having cheated at least once. His new survey of 4,500 high school students suggests cheating is even more significant there: 9th- through 12th-graders told McCabe that teachers are "clueless" about how easy cheating has become with new technologies, and 97% of high schoolers admit to "questionable" activities, with more than half having copied from the Net without citing the source.

"Professors need some help in determining if papers are downloaded from the Web," says James Sandefur, honor chair at Georgetown. He was introduced to some software offerings this school year and successfully convinced university administration it was needed schoolwide in the coming year. "We'll have forums over the summer to discuss whether all student work should be scanned for plagiarism or whether it will be up to each professor."

To students competing for academic opportunities, says McCabe, cheating "becomes a question of fairness. 'Someone else is getting away with it, so to keep up my GPA, I need to do it, too,' " he says.

And it exists equally among challenged students and gifted ones. "I really hate sending an e-mail to the dean about plagiarism," says UCLA professor Steve Hardinger. He's among the university's first instructors to test an anti-plagiarism Web service before it goes into schoolwide use this fall. "Some have been A-students, good participants in class, everything you want to see. Then they do this. It's very disappointing."

Paging through test answers

With advancing technologies such as the Net and wireless electronic devices, students admit to sharing test answers and homework assignments via e-mail, message boards and alphanumeric pagers (example: 1C2A3C4B). The growth of computer-based testing (the first pilot groups took SATs online early this year, and two states now administer high-school assessments via PCs) adds a challenge: How do you deal with students proficient in computer-hacking skills?

Clemson, Babson College, the University of North Carolina and several private high schools in Houston are among 19 schools to test out new cheat-proof exam software this spring. Secureexam, by Software Secure, allows students to take tests on exam-room computers or their own laptops, while blocking them from other files or programs, such as a Web browser or e-mail. All 19 schools plan to implement the program this fall.

Educational Testing Services, which administers national tests including Advanced Placement exams, is more concerned with ensuring test-takers are who they say they are at computer-based testing centers. ETS is installing digital cameras, so that student photographs become a permanent part of the test record. The company this year field-tested iris scans for ID purposes in six centers. "It worked very well," says Ray Nicosia, director of test security at ETS.

Still, the easiest and most pervasive form of cheating among students is cutting and pasting term papers directly from Web sites, including dozens of businesses that sell term papers online. Boston University tried in 1998 to shut down nearly 10 term-paper mills used by students; the suit was dismissed in federal court. University attorney Robert Smith says BU still plans to refile the suit at the state level.

Other schools are getting aggressive on campus with students, with software and services designed to detect plagiarized text. "Not only do we wish to battle plagiarism," says UCLA's Hardinger, "but also we'll be letting students know we're using the service, and we'll nip it in the bud — just don't do it."

Patrolling for purloined passages

Columbia University is among schools testing new software that automatically generates and permanently embeds Web addresses as footnotes every time students use information from the Net for school reports.

This summer, textbook giant McGraw-Hill will begin distributing that software free (Hyperfolio, by LearnTech) to all K-12 schools that use its texts. "It enables teachers and students to take advantage of online content responsibly and teaches quality research on the Internet," says LearnTech's Amy Satin.

These technologies are also "great teaching tools," says McCabe, who adds that "a lot of plagiarism turns out to be unintentional." Information technologies are blurring the lines between public information and intellectual property in need of annotation.

As today's high schoolers move to college, he says, the problem will escalate. Students who use the Net freely as a research tool have "defined their own rules and will take them to college." His ongoing study suggests that in two to three years, "unless schools get aggressive," cheating will dramatically increase.

Turnitin.com is the most widely used of several anti-plagiarism services; others include EVE (Essay Verification Engine), Integriguard and AbleSoft's rSchool Detective. Turnitin founder John Barrie says that during term-paper season the service checks about 6,000 papers daily, comparing them against more than 2 billion Web sites, 250,000 student papers on file and a growing database of books and encyclopedias.

More than 30% of papers tested turn out to be less than original, and more than 75% of those are plagiarized from the Net. A 10-page paper takes about 30 seconds to scan and is returned to the user with questionable text color-coded and sourced.

Rather than student policing, Barrie envisions his service as a preventive measure. "We're not out to catch students cheating," he says. "We're out to deter them from cheating."

Columbia University developed software that automatically footnotes Internet sources while students are writing papers.

TurnItIn --- http://www.turnitin.com/

Welcome to Turnitin.com, the world's leading resource for educators and students concerned with the deterioration of academic integrity in our schools. Our service makes it easy to find out if any homework assignment, essay, or research paper has been copied or paraphrased from the Internet, and ensures that students are getting the most out of their education. We also offer several other unique features, including an online Peer Review service, Digital Archiving, and an upcoming Online Grading System.

 
Click to the right to take a look at one of our Originality Reports, which make determining the originality of any paper a breeze. You can also visit the services section of our site to learn more about our other innovative features.

 
    Turnitin.com is currently helping high school teachers and university professors everywhere bring academic integrity back into their classrooms. Our system is already being used in almost every institution in the country, and a large number of universities all over the world. We encourage any educator who values academic honesty to help us take a stand against online cheating and become a member of the Turnitin.com educational community.

 

Intellectual Property Rights (Copyrights, Patents, Plagiarism, etc.)
IP @ The National Academies http://ip.nationalacademies.org/

From Internet content protection to human gene patenting, IP rights in many forms have emerged from legal obscurity to public debate. This website serves as a guide to the Academies' extensive work on Intellectual Property and a forum to discuss ongoing work.

Some professors blame the Internet for the rise in student plagiarism. Whether or not the Net has inflated this age-old problem, the biggest wave of new cheaters may still be yet to come  http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,45803,00.html 

"Cheating's Never Been Easier," by Kendra Mayfield, Wired News, September 4, 2001

But while some educators view the Internet as the greatest plagiarism tool since the copy machine, others say that the Web hasn't had a major impact in the rise in cheating -- yet.

"My research suggests the Internet is not yet responsible for a dramatic increase in the number of students who cheat but is responsible for a more-than-trivial increase in the amount of cheating done by those who do cheat," McCabe said.

In a survey of 4,500 students at 25 high schools, McCabe found that over half of the students admitted they have engaged in some level of plagiarism on written assignments using the Internet.

But the number of self-described "new cheaters" who use the Internet is relatively low, McCabe said. He estimates that 5 to 10 percent of students who had not previously engaged in some form of plagiarism from written sources have been attracted by the Internet.

That number is expected to grow as students who grew up using computers in high school enter college.

"The problem is obviously greater in high school, and this does not bode well, in my view, for colleges," McCabe said. "Students growing up with the Internet as a research tool are going to find it hard to change behaviors they acquire in elementary and high school when they reach college. At least in terms of plagiarism, I would predict that cheating is likely to increase at the college level."

The rise in Internet plagiarism can be partially attributed to the ease of downloading essays from online term-paper sites, such as SchoolSucks.com and The Evil House of Cheat.

But cut-and-paste plagiarism -- by students who don't attribute sources -- may be an even greater problem than commercial term-paper mills.

In McCabe's high school survey, 52 percent said they had copied a few sentences from a website without citing the source, while only 15 said they had submitted a paper obtained in large part from a term-paper mill or website.

While technology has made it easier for students to cheat, it has also made it easier for teachers to detect cheating.

Some faculty turn to search engines such as Google where they type in key phrases to determine the original source of suspicious essay content.

Others use online plagiarism-detection tools such as Turnitin.com, CopyCatch and the Essay Verification Engine.

Business is booming for Turnitin.com's founder John Barrie, who calls his service "the ultimate deterrent" and "the next-generation spell-checker."

The service digitally fingerprints test papers and analyzes them against an internal database of course papers and millions of other Internet sources, providing an originality report to instructors within 24 hours.

The prospect of being caught submitting papers to multiple classes is often enough to deter any undergrad from cheating, Barrie said.

"Every high school student, when going to college, will have to face us," Barrie said.

Turnitin.com has over 20,000 registered users in 20 countries. In addition to high-profile universities such as Duke and Rutgers, the entire University of California system has signed up to use the service.

"By Christmas, we'll have just about every university in California signed up," Barrie said.

Recently, incidents of digital plagiarism have gained national attention.

The University of Virginia recently expelled one student after a physics professor used a computer program to catch 130 students who turned in duplicate papers.

"If cheating is that bad in the school with the No. 1 honor code in the country, it begs the question: What's it like at our school?" Barrie said.

"Administrators haven't the slightest idea what's going on. Students are using the Net as a 2 billion-page searchable, cut-able encyclopedia."

Honor code schools that use plagiarism-detection software are often met with student backlash.

The rest of the article is at  http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,45803,00.html

See also:
Plagiarist Booted; Others Wait
Program Catches Copycat Students
Catching Digital Cheaters

From Syllabus News on September 4, 2001

Duke to Combat Plagiarism

Duke University, in an effort to stop Internet plagiarism, has purchased a license for its faculty to use turnitin.comóa Web site that seeks to determine whether papers had been plagiarized. The new database, available at turnitin.com, will be available to instructors who have probable cause to suspect plagiarism.

For more information, visit http://www.trainingtrack.com.

"Term Paper Mills, Anti-Plagiarism Tools, and Academic Integrity," by Marie Goark, EDUCAUSE Review, September/October 2001, pp. 40-48 --- http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm.html  

Figures from around the country are drawing attention to the issues of cheating, plagiarism, and academic integrity:

At the University of Virginia, 122 students were accused of cheating on term papers in introductory physics; half may face expulsion or loss of degrees awarded in earlier years. Footnote 1

Cases of suspected cheating and plagiarism at Amherst College averaged five a year from 1990 to 1998 but increased to sixteen in 1999 and nineteen in 2000.  Footnote 2

Reported occurrences of academic dishonesty at the University of California-Berkeley doubled between 1995 and 1999. Footnote 3

In a recent survey conducted by Donald McCabe, founder of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, 72 percent of high school students reported one or more instances of serious cheating on written work, and 15 percent of students reported submissions of papers obtained "in large part" from a term paper vendor or Web site.  Footnote 4

A study by the Center for Academic Integrity found that almost 75 percent of college students own up to some form of academic dishonesty.  Footnote 5

At Penn State, despite the fact that faculty had discussed the consequences of cheating with 63 percent of the students surveyed, 17 percent of the students said they had cheated on tests and 44 percent said they had cheated on class assignments.  Footnote 6

The amount of cheating appears to be increasing. For example, at medium-to-large universities, the percentage of students who said they collaborated on assignments even though it was not permitted increased from 11 percent in a 1963 survey to 49 percent in 1993. For thirty-one small-to-medium institutions, unpermitted collaboration increased from 30 percent to 38 percent between 1990 and 1995.  Footnote 7

Furthermore, the ease with which information can be copied from the Web and the emergence of term paper vendors or "mills" on the Internet are likely adding to the growing problem of plagiarism. For example, a neuro-biology professor at the University of California-Berkeley found that 45 of 320 students in his class had plagiarized at least part of their term paper from the Internet. Nearly 15 percent of his students plagiarized even after they had been warned that he would use anti-plagiarism technology.  Footnote 8

In a recent survey commissioned by Knowledge Ventures, an education technology company, more than 90 percent of academic administrators and faculty interviewed said that academic integrity is an issue on their campus. Most were unable to pinpoint the extent of the problem, the source of the problem, or whether specific departments or student groups were more at risk. In addition, of those who stated that academic integrity is an issue, 83 percent said that it has become more of an issue over the last three to five years, primarily due to the use of the Internet as a research tool. Compounding the effects of the Internet are difficulties in providing violations and a reluctance to report violators.  Footnote 9

 

Term Paper Mills

Term paper mills existed long before the Internet. Companies who sell term papers have advertised on campus and in magazines such as the Rolling Stone for several years (Footnote 10).  With the advent of Internet technology, though, the number of places where papers are available has grown and the ease with which papers can be obtained has increased. Some of these Web sites are operations set up by students while others are for-profit ventures.

At term paper mills, students can directly purchase pre-written papers. Some sites offer free services or make money through advertising. Others act as an exchange--a student must submit a paper to get a free paper. Most term paper mills charge a fee, ranging from about $5 to $10 per page. Students may pay an additional fee for immediate e-mail delivery (e.g., $15). Other sites will write a customized paper for a much higher fee.

In most states, it is illegal to sell papers that will be turned in as student work (Footnote 11).  Thus many for-profit sites post disclaimers saying that the information should be used only for research purposes and should not be submitted as a student's own work. The companies will bill a student's credit card using an unrecognizable company name.

Experts estimated that more than 70 term paper mills were in operation in early 1998, up from 28 at the beginning of 1997 (Footnote 12).   There is no current estimate of the number of sites, although some lists of Internet paper mills are maintained by academic groups (e.g., www.coastal.edu/library/mills2htm ). These sites attract secondary school students as well as college and university students. They are also not exclusive to the United States.

The growing number of term paper mill sites on the Web attest to their popularity among students.

AP Business wire reports that traffic to these sites exceeds 2.6 million hits per month.

Cheater.com has 72,000 members and is growing by a few hundred per day.

With 9,500 papers in its database, the Evil House of Cheat reports 4,000 visitors a day.

Schoolsucks.com, which claims 10,000 visits to its site per day, reports being profitable "from Day1."  Footnote 13

 

Institutional Attitudes toward Academic Dishonesty

Although academic dishonesty is believed to have increased in the last two decades, it is not clear that the number of infractions reported by professors has risen as well. In a survey of 800 faculty members who were asked why they ignored possible plagiarism violations, professors cited inadequate administrative support as a primary factor. Footnote 14

Research by Donald McCabe has indicated that there is an inverse correlation between the rate of plagiarism and the emphasis on academic integrity by institutions or instructors (Footnote 15).   Thus a growing number of institutions are addressing academic integrity through honor codes, pledges, and discussions of ethics. One political science professor at Oakton Community College, for example, gives his students a six-page letter spelling out his expectations of them, as well as his obligations to them. In the first page he asks: "Would you want to be operated on by a doctor who cheated his way through medical school? Or would you feel comfortable on a bridge designed by an engineer who cheated her way through engineering school? Would you trust your tax return to an accountant who copied his exam answers from his neighbor?"  Footnote 16

Once an instructor suspects plagiarism, it can be a laborious process proving that plagiarism has actually taken place. Instructors may need to comb through old papers and primary and secondary resources and compare the suspicious paper to these sources. Tracking down a student's sources and proving plagiarism can take days. Those who have used an automated plagiarism tool cite the streamlined process as one of the primary advantages of the tool. But most important, papers plagiarized from the Internet and identified by an anti-plagiarism tool often provide an open-and-shut case.

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTES:

1. Diana Jean Schemo, "U of Virginia Hit by Scandal over Cheating," New York Times, May 10, 2001.

2. "Cheating Is Up at Amherst College, Data Suggest," Chronicle of Higher Education, May 11, 2001, A11, http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i35/35a01103.htm  (accessed July 12, 2001).

3. "Cheating Thrives on Campus, As Officials Turn Their Heads," USA Today, May 21, 2001.

4. Donald L. McCabe, "Student Cheating in American High Schools," May 2001, www.academicintegrity.org/index.asp   (accessed July 12, 2001).

5. See http://www.academicintegrity.org/cai_research.asp  (accessed July 12, 2001).

6. See <http:www.sa.psu.edu/sara/pulse/academic.shtml> (accessed July 12, 2001).

7. See www.academicintegrity.org/cai_research.asp  (accessed July 12, 2001).

8. Verne G. Kopytoff, "Brilliant or Plagiarized? Colleges Use Sites to Expose Cheaters," New York Times, January 20, 2000.

9. This survey was conducted in February 2001 by PricewaterhouseCoopers on behalf of Knowledge Ventures.

10. Peter Applebome, "On the Internet, Terms Papers Are Hot Items" New York Times, June 8, 1997.

11. Ibid; see also Ronald B. Standler, "Plagiarism in Colleges in USA," www.rbs2.com/plag.htm#anchor333347    (accessed July 15, 2001).

12. John N Hickman, "Cybercheats: Term Paper Shoping Online," New Republic 218, no. 12 (March 23, 1998): 14, http://www.www2.bc.edu/~rappleb/Plagiarism.htm  (accessed July 23, 2001).

13. Kendra Mayfield, "Catching Digital Cheaters," Wired News, February 29, 2000, http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,33021,00.html  (accessed July 12, 2001).

14. "Why Professors Don't Do More to Stop Students Who Cheat," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 1999.

15. "New Research on Academic Integrity: The Success of 'Modified' Honor Codes," College Administration Publications, www.collegepubs.com/ref/SFX000515.shtml  (accessed July 12, 2001).

16. Bill Taylor, "Integrity--Academic and Political: A Letter to My Students" 
http://www.academicintegrity.org/pdf/Letter_To_My_Students.pdf     (accessed July 12, 2001).

For the remainder of the article, go to http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm.html

Ghost Writing

Question
How easy is it to hire out term paper and other assignments?
Ghost Writers in the Sky

"At $9.95 a Page, You Expected Poetry?" by Charles McGrath, The New York Times, September 10, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/weekinreview/10mcgrath.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Well, no, she won’t — not if she’s enterprising enough to enlist Term Paper Relief to write it for her. For $9.95 to a page she can obtain an “A-grade” paper that is fashioned to order and “completely non-plagiarized.” This last detail is important. Thanks to search engines like Google, college instructors have become adept at spotting those shop-worn, downloadable papers that circulate freely on the Web, and can even finger passages that have been ripped off from standard texts and reference works.

A grade-conscious student these days seems to need a custom job, and to judge from the number of services on the Internet, there must be virtual mills somewhere employing armies of diligent scholars who grind away so that credit-card-equipped undergrads can enjoy more carefree time together.

How good are the results? With first semester just getting under way at most colleges, bringing with it the certain prospect of both academic and social pressure, The Times decided to undertake an experiment in quality control of the current offerings. Using her own name and her personal e-mail address, an editor ordered three English literature papers from three different sites on standard, often-assigned topics: one comparing and contrasting Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Orwell’s “1984”; one discussing the nature of Ophelia’s madness in “Hamlet”; and one exploring the theme of colonialism in Conrad’s “Lord Jim.”

A small sample, perhaps, but one sufficient, upon perusal, to suggest that papers written to order are just like the ones students write for themselves, only more so — they’re poorly organized, awkwardly phrased, thin on substance, but masterly in the ancient arts of padding and stating and restating the obvious.

If they’re delivered, that is. The “Lord Jim” essay, ordered from SuperiorPapers.com, never arrived, despite repeated entreaties, and the excuse finally offered was a high-tech variant of “The dog ate my homework.” The writer assigned to the task, No. 3323, was “obviously facing some technical difficulties,” an e-mail message explained, “and cannot upload your paper.” The message went on to ask for a 24-hour extension, the wheeziest stratagem in the procrastinator’s arsenal, invented long before the electronic age.

The two other papers came in on time, and each grappled, more or less, with the assigned topic. The Orwell/Huxley essay, prepared by Term Paper Relief and a relative bargain at $49.75 for five pages, begins: “Although many similarities exist between Aldous Huxley’s ‘A Brave New World’ and George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ the works books [sic] though they deal with similar topics, are more dissimilar than alike.” That’s certainly a relief, because we couldn’t have an essay if they weren’t.

Elsewhere the author proves highly adept with the “on the one hand/on the other” formula, one of the most valuable tools for a writer concerned with attaining his assigned word count, and says, for example, of “Brave New World”: “Many people consider this Huxley’s most important work: many others think it is his only work. This novel has been praised and condemned, vilified and glorified, a source of controversy, a subject for sermons, and required reading for many high school students and college undergraduates. This novel has had twenty-seven printings in the United States alone and will probably have twenty-seven more.”

The obvious point of comparison between the two novels is that where Orwell’s world is an authoritarian, police-state nightmare, Huxley’s dystopia is ostensibly a paradise, with drugs and sex available on demand. A clever student might even pick up some extra credit by pointing out that while Orwell meant his book as a kind of predictive warning, it is Huxley’s world, much more far-fetched at the time of writing, that now more nearly resembles our own.

The essay never exactly makes these points, though it gets close a couple of times, declaring at one point that “the two works vary greatly.” It also manages to remind us that Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair and that both he and his book “are misunderstood to this day.”

Continued in article

Related

Term Paper From Go-Essays (September 9, 2006)

Essay From Term Paper Relief (September 9, 2006)

 

Jensen Comment
I wonder what it might take to have a research paper written and published so a poor professor can get a better raise or maybe even tenure? At worst it could give that professor with writer's block a booster paper that can be embellished. Think of the possibilities. Maybe us retired professors should hire out, but certainly not for ten bucks per page. This is only idle speculation since absolutely no instructor wants a term paper on FAS 133. Sigh!

September 10, 2006 reply from Alexander Robin A [alexande.robi@UWLAX.EDU]

The existence of term paper writing services is evidence that the students don't see value in the process of writing the paper other than to have it done and get a grade. Presumably, there is value in creating a term paper or they should not be assigned.

But such assignments and student attempts to circumvent them point to the fundamental problem with the entire educational system: it ignores a fundamental reality that people learn when they want to learn and are excited and/or curious about what they are learning. Schools, through the use of forced assignments, lockstep classes rewards and punishments methodically extinguish young people's natural curiosity so that by the time they reach college, where I taught, I found that the desire to learn for its own sake was almost entirely absent in most students. Thus the popularity of finding various "easy ways" to get assignments done.

Obviously, changing this situation will require a massive effort and a dramatic change in mindset about education. I don't expect to see it in my lifetime.

Robin Alexander

September 10, 2006 reply from Elliot Kamlet [ekamlet@STNY.RR.COM]

I think a more fundamental question comes from the students - who are in one sense our customers. In speaking to a group of students, I observed that education is an unusual commodity. The less we supply, the happier our customers are. If a professor cancels class, no one says it's unfair since they paid for a full semester of classes.

A student observed that perhaps the customer does not want the education - just the course credit (with a A grade) leading to a degree.

Elliot Kamlet
Binghamton University

September 10, 2006 reply from MacEwan Wright, Victoria University [Mac.Wright@VU.EDU.AU]

I second Elliot's view. Students who fail will spend more time and effort on persuading the system it is all a ghastly mistake than they do on attempting to pass. I recently had a student complain that I told him to come to my office prepared to convince me that he should be given a pass in a subject. Then when he attended, he was asked questions about the subject. This was unfair.

The only good news is that the ghosts appear to be as bad as the students, and this despite the "Written by PhD's "A"s guaranteed advertising. The potential legal implications are interesting.

Best wishes,
Mac Wright

Forwarded by Bob Overn

Adventures in Cheating:  A guide to Buying Term papers Online, by Seth Stevenson
Posted Tuesday, December 11, 2001, at 11:04 AM PT

Students, your semester is almost over. This fall, did you find yourself pulling many bong hits but few all-nighters? Absorbing much Schlitz but little Nietzsche? Attending Arizona State University? If the answer is yes to any or (especially) all these questions, you will no doubt be plagiarizing your term papers.

Good for you. You're all short on time these days. Yes, it's ethically blah blah blah to cheat on a term paper blah. The question is: How do you do it right? For example, the chump move is to find some library book and copy big hunks out of it. No good: You still have to walk to the library, find a decent book, and link the hunks together with your own awful prose. Instead, why not just click on a term paper Web site and buy the whole damn paper already written by some smart dude? Que bella! Ah, but which site?

I shopped at several online term paper stores to determine where best to spend your cheating dollar. After selecting papers on topics in history, psychology, and biology, I had each paper graded by one of my judges. These were: Slate writer David Greenberg, who teaches history at Columbia; my dad, who teaches psychology at the University of Rhode Island (sometimes smeared as the ASU of the East); and my girlfriend, who was a teaching assistant in biology at Duke (where she says cheating was quite common). So, which site wins for the best combination of price and paper quality? I compared free sites, sites that sell "pre-written papers," and a site that writes custom papers to your specifications.

Free Sites A quick Web search turns up dozens of sites filled with free term papers. Some ask you to donate one of your own papers in exchange, but most don't. I chose one from each of our fields for comparison and soon found that when it comes to free papers, you get just about what you pay for.

EssaysFree.com:
From this site I chose a history paper titled "The Infamous Watergate Scandal." Bad choice. This paper had no thesis, no argument, random capitalization, and bizarre spell-checking errors, ”including "taking the whiteness stand" (witness) and "the registration of Nixon" (resignation). My judge said if they gave F's at Columbia, well ... Instead, it gots a good old "Please come see me."

BigNerds.com:
Of the free bio paper I chose from this site, my judge said, "Disturbing. I am still disturbed." It indeed read less like a term paper than a deranged manifesto. Rambling for 11 single-spaced pages and ostensibly on evolutionary theory, it somehow made reference to Lamarck, Sol Invictus, and "the blanket of a superficial American Dream." Meanwhile, it garbled its basic explanation of population genetics. Grade: "I would not give this a grade so much as suggest tutoring, a change in majors, some sort of counseling " OPPapers.com: This site fared much better. A paper titled "Critically Evaluate Erikson's Psychosocial Theory" spelled Erikson's name wrong in the first sentence, yet still won a C+/B- from my dad. It hit most of the important points:   ”the problem was no analysis. And the citations all came from textbooks, not real sources. Oddly, this paper also used British spellings ("behaviour") for no apparent reason. But all in all not terrible, considering it was free. OPPapers.com, purely on style points, was my favorite site. The name comes from an old hip-hop song ("You down with O-P-P?" meaning other people's ... genitalia), the site has pictures of coed babes, and one paper in the psych section was simply the phrase "I wanna bang Angelina Jolie" typed over and over again for several pages. Hey, whaddaya want for free?

Sites Selling Pre-Written Papers There are dozens of these.  I narrowed it down to three sites that seemed fairly reputable and were stocked with a wide selection. (In general, the selection offered on pay sites was 10 times bigger than at the free ones.) Each pay site posted clear disclaimers that you're not to pass off these papers as your own work. Sure you're not.  AcademicTermPapers.com: This site charged $7 per page, and I ordered "The Paranoia Behind Watergate" for $35. Well worth it. My history judge gave it the highest grade of all the papers he saw a B or maybe even a B+. Why? It boasted an actual argument. A few passages, however, might set off his plagiarism radar (or "pladar"). They show almost too thorough a command of the literature.

My other purchase here was a $49 bio paper titled "The Species Concept." Despite appearing in the bio section of the site, this paper seemed to be for a philosophy class. Of course, no way to know that until after you've bought it (the pay sites give you just the title and a very brief synopsis of each paper). My judge would grade this a C- in an intro bio class, as its conclusion was "utterly meaningless," and it tossed around "airy" philosophies without actually understanding the species concept at all.

PaperStore.net: For about $10 per page, I ordered two papers from the Paper Store, which is also BuyPapers.com and AllPapers.com. For $50.23, I bought "Personality Theory: Freud and Erikson," by one Dr. P. McCabe (the only credited author on any of these papers. As best I can tell, the global stock of papers for sale is mostly actual undergrad stuff with a few items by hired guns thrown in). The writing style here was oddly mixed, with bad paraphrasing of textbooks which is normal for a freshman side by side with surprisingly clever and polished observations. Grade: a solid B.

My other Paper Store paper was "Typical Assumptions of Kin Selection," bought for $40.38. Again, a pretty good buy. It was well-written, accurate, and occasionally even thoughtful. My bio judge would give it a B in a freshman class. Possible pladar ping: The writer seemed to imply that some of his ideas stemmed from a personal chat with a noted biologist. But overall, the Paper Store earned its pay.

A1 Termpaper (aka 1-800-Termpaper.com): In some ways this is the strangest site, as most of the papers for sale were written between 1978 and '83. I would guess this is an old term paper source, which has recently made the jump to the Web. From its history section, I bought a book report on Garry Wills' Nixon Agonistes for $44.75, plus a $7.45 fee for scanning all the pages the paper was written in 1981, no doubt on a typewriter. Quality? It understood the book but made no critique a high-school paper. My judge would give it a D.

I next bought "Personality as Seen by Erikson, Mead, and Freud" from A1 Termpaper for $62.65 plus a $10.43 scanning fee. Also written in 1981, this one had the most stylish prose of any psych paper and the most sophisticated thesis, but it was riddled with factual errors. For instance, it got Freud's psychosexual stages completely mixed up and even added some that don't exist (the correct progression is oral-anal-phallic-latency-genital, as if you didn't know). Showing its age, it cited a textbook from 1968 and nothing from after 69 (and no, that's not another Freudian stage, gutter-mind). Grade: Dad gave it a C+. In the end, A1 Termpaper.com was pricey, outdated, and not a good buy.

With all these pre-written papers, though, it occurred to me that a smart but horribly lazy student could choose to put his effort into editing instead of researching and writing: Buy a mediocre paper that's done the legwork, then whip it into shape by improving the writing and adding some carefully chosen details. Not a bad strategy.

Papers Made To Order PaperMasters.com: My final buy was a custom-made paper written to my specifications. Lots of sites do this, for between $17 and $20 per page. PaperMasters.com claims all its writers have "at least one Master's Degree" and charges $17.95 per page. I typed this request (posing as a professor's assignment, copied verbatim) into its Web order form: "A 4-page term paper on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Investigate the semiotics of the 'addicted gaze' as represented by the mysterious film of the book's title. Possible topics to address include nihilism, figurative transgendering, the culture of entertainment, and the concept of 'infinite gestation.' "

This assignment was total hooey. It made no sense whatsoever. Yet it differed little from papers I was assigned as an undergrad English major at Brown.  After a few tries (one woman at the 800 number told me they were extremely busy), my assignment was accepted by Paper Masters, with a deadline for one week later. Keep in mind, Infinite Jest is an 1,100-page novel (including byzantine footnotes), and it took me almost a month to read even though I was completely engrossed by it. In short, there's no way anyone could 1) finish the book in time; and 2) write anything coherent that addressed the assignment.

I began to feel guilty. Some poor writer somewhere was plowing through this tome, then concocting a meaningless mishmash of words simply to fill four pages and satisfy the bizarre whims of a solitary, heartless taskmaster (me). But then I realized this is exactly what I did for all four years of college and I paid them for the privilege!

When the custom paper came back, it was all I'd dreamed. Representative sentence: "The novel's diverse characters demonstrate both individually and collectively the fixations and obsessions that bind humanity to the pitfalls of reality and provide a fertile groundwork for the semiotic explanation of addictive behavior." Tripe. The paper had no thesis and in fact had no body:  ”not one sentence actually advanced a cogent idea. I'm guessing it would have gotten a C+ at Brown ”maybe even a B-.  If I were a just slightly lesser person, I might be tempted by this service. One custom paper off the Web: $71.80. Not having to dredge up pointless poppycock for some po-mo obsessed, overrated lit-crit professor: priceless.

Infinite Jest Introduction Wallace's fictional narrative Infinite Jest is an epic approach to the solicitous and addictive nature of humanity. The novel's diverse characters demonstrate both individually and collectively the fixations and obsessions that bind humanity to the pitfalls of reality and provide a fertile groundwork for the semiotic explanation of addictive behavior. Although Wallace may have actualized the concept of the "addicted gaze" to the literal or physical response to the viewing of Incandenza's coveted film the Entertainment [Infinite Jest], it is manifested symbolically throughout the novel in thedistractions of its characters.

Nihilism

It would appear that Wallace has chosen society's most frequently rejected and denounced individuals as the vehicle for the narrative search for and preservation of the ultimate fix, which is illustrated by the obsession for Incandenza's film. At the same time and despite their diversity and distinctions, these individuals will ultimately represent the inextricable and covert characteristics of nihilistic behavior.  School-aged malcontents, drug addicts and the physically challenged all attempt to get a hold of a copy of the film and experience its pleasures at any cost.

Ironically, it was the film maker James Incadenza's habit to regularly observe the depravation of Boston's crowded street milieus, where "everyone goes nuts and mills, either switching or watching" (620). It is not surprising therefore that he should develop a film that would be perceived as the panacea to the entertainment addictions of the masses.

Figurative Transgendering

Wallace devotes a substantial amount of space to the illustration of the contradictions of gender, where the adoption of gender behavior or symbols contrary to the character's true gender can be analyzed. The occasion of Hugh Steeply in drag as he met with Marathe to discuss the emergence of the Entertainment's cartridge may have served the literal purpose of the agent arriving incognito however his devotion to applying feminine mannerisms appear to go above and beyond the call of duty (90). In spite of his practice, Marathe nevertheless describes Steely's appearance as "less like a women than a twisted parody of womanhood" (93).

Wallace also presents the steroid-driven objectives of a number of the female tennis player's like Ann Kittenplan. "who at twelve-and-a-have looks like a Belorussian shot putter" (330). It may be fair to assume that their desire to acquire a manly physique is not entirely confined to the advantages it offers on the tennis court. In his notes, Wallace suggests that the "gratification of pretty much every physical need is either taken care of or prohibited" by the tennis academy (984). Clearly, the administration of steroids or any other drug of choice is prohibited by the ETA considering the wide scale purchase of "clean" urine for the academy's drug testing.

An Endless Jest

Perhaps the most significant example of the addicted gaze is demonstrated not so much in the stationary and fixated attention to satisfying one's obsession but in the demand for the continuous pursuit of it. The halfway house/rehab center, Ennet House, represents the often ineffectual and delusional pursuit of ridding oneself of addiction. A clear example of the deceptive environment of rehab is demonstrated by Lenz's use of cocaine while at the facility. For many of the residents like Lenz, the limitations at Ennet House are often so unbearable that its residents are driven to the use of drugs in order to preserve their sanity. Ironically, Lenz's stash of cocaine works as a contrived temptation that undermines any true potential for ridding himself of his addiction.

Conclusion

Wallace's Infinite Jest is a chaotic amalgam of humanity and the similarly depraved behaviors that they demonstrate in the pursuit of amusement and satisfaction. Although the restrictions to their attainment are clearly represented by the physical entities of the Academy, the Ennet House and the wheelchair, they are also fostered by them.

If Incandenza's "Accomplice" is any indication of the content of the Entertainment, it only reinforces the contention that human nature includes the inherent desire to not only view the depravity and debauchery of human behavior but even more, to participate in it. There is little to ponder why so many of Wallace's characters must depend on their mind and body altering drugs of choice, if not to influence how they are viewed by others then at the very least to make more palatable their own perceptions of self.

John L.'s monologue delivered at one of the AA meetings illustrates the destructive implications of either reasoning: "all the masks come off and you all of a sudden see the Disease as it really is and see what owns you, what's become what you are (347).

References

Nihilism. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [online] Available
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/n/nihilism.htm .

Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1996.

Reply from Linda Kidwell [lak@NIAGARA.EDU]

The latest string of commentary on cheating brings us to an obvious but difficult solution. We must do our best, in conjunction with students themselves, to change the cheating culture. Don McCabe, who does so much research on this issue, once wrote that 20% of students will never cheat, 20% will cheat regardless of the consequences, and the remaining 60% can be molded through peer pressure, discussion of academic integrity, honor codes, and the like. Thus we can't do much to stop the creativity of cheaters with cell phones, but we can work on developing and supporting a culture on campus that makes cheating socially unacceptable. Only this way can we really have an impact on cheating.

Those who are interested in the subject of cheating and how to work toward a campus culture that embraces academic integrity should visit the website of the Center for Academic Integrity, at http://www.academicintegrity.org .

I have personally tried to encourage discussions of this nature on my campus through a student project, wherein groups in my auditing class write proposals for an honor code on campus. I have found that this really stimulates discussion and even deep thought on these issues. It also gets them thinking about what type of behavior will be acceptable for them as future accountants. If you are interested, I wrote a paper on the subject: "Student Honor Codes as a Tool for Teaching Professional Ethics" in the Journal of Business Ethics, 2001. And the good news is that this project is having a meaningful impact on campus: Development of an honor code has just been incorporated into the university 5-year plan.

Finally, let me solicit some interest in a fabulous conference for students every year. The National Conference on Ethics in America is held annually on the campus of West Point. Students from 75 universities (including but definitely not limited to the service academies) come together for four days to discuss academic integrity, changing the culture on their campuses, and preparing for being ethical business people after graduation. They are mentored in small groups by faculty for two days and CEOs for one day. I have been fortunate enough to participate as a mentor for the past three years, and I always come away very hopeful and refreshed.

The NCEA organizers are always looking for ways to get new universities involved in the conference. They pay all expenses except travel, and there is no registration fee. There is an annual limit of 2 students per college, but prior year participant schools are always invited back. Students stay for four days on campus, and all meals are provided. Because the campus is regimented for the cadets, there is study time for those who have to miss a few days of classes. If you believe students from your campus would benefit from attending this conference, please e-mail me directly, and I will pass your name on to West Point's Center organizers. I can't tell you what a difference this has made for my students who have attended. Again, let me know if you would like your college involved by e- mailing me directly.

Linda Kidwell, Ph.D.
Niagara University

New Tack Against Term Paper Providers
Wednesday, a new front was opened in the campaign. Lawyers for a graduate student named Blue Macellari filed a lawsuit in federal court in Illinois alleging that three Web sites that sell term papers made a manuscript she had written available without her permission. She is charging the owner of the sites (as well as the sites’ Internet service provider) with copyright infringement, consumer fraud and invasion of privacy, among other things.
Doug Lederman, "New Tack Against Term Paper Providers," Inside Higher Ed, September 2, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/09/02/papers

"Plagiarism and 'Atonement'," by Eugene Volokh, The Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2006; Page A18 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116588497688347029.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep

Two nurses, both aspiring novelists, helped tend British soldiers during World War II. Briony, the protagonist of Ian McEwan's award-winning novel "Atonement," is fictional. The late Lucilla Andrews is real: She became an author, pioneering romantic "hospital fiction," and also wrote a memoir of her war years. Therein lies the latest plagiarism scandalette to hit the news, sparked by an article in the British press. To be a credible character in a historical novel, Briony had to do the things wartime nurses did, and see the things they saw. It is no surprise that Mr. McEwan read Andrews's book when researching his own; and several passages from his book strongly resemble passages from her memoir.

"Our 'nursing' seldom involved more than dabbing gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on cuts and scratches, lead lotion on bruises and sprains," wrote Andrews (to give one example). "In the way of medical treatments, she had already dabbed gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut, and painted lead lotion on a bruise. But mostly she was a maid," wrote Mr. McEwan.

Plagiarism? Legally actionable? Ethically reprehensible? Bad manners? Or good research, needed to produce accurate historical fiction?

Plagiarism is easy to condemn but often hard to define. This is partly because the legal rules differ sharply from the ethical ones, and the ethical rules in scholarship, journalism and fiction differ from each other. And it is partly because the rules for using the facts uncovered by writers of history -- whether memoirists, historians or contemporaneous journalists -- must be different from the rules for using the original phrases that the writers created.

Let's start with the law. It generally bans not plagiarism as such, but rather copyright infringement. (Trademark law might play a role in extreme plagiarism cases, but not in the typical ones.) And copyright infringement is both broader and narrower than what most people see as "plagiarism."

For instance, an author can be held liable under copyright law even when he credits the original source from which he copies. The law concerns itself more with protecting authors' ability to profit from their works than with ensuring credit where credit is due. So if I translate Mr. McEwan's novel into Russian without his permission, trumpeting Mr. McEwan's authorship and saying that I am merely the translator, I am a copyright infringer, though not a plagiarist.

On the other hand, an author is not liable for copying the facts that others have discovered, regardless of whether he gives credit. Copyright law doesn't give authors exclusive rights to facts, because such a monopoly would undermine debate, scholarship and literature. If I write a scholarly legal article that uses without attribution historical facts uncovered by another scholar, my failure to attribute is a serious ethical breach -- but not copyright infringement.

So on to professional ethics, which properly differs depending on the profession. Academics have the most stringent obligations. If I write an academic work using, without attribution, facts uncovered by another historian, I commit two sins: First, I falsely claim originality for my own work. Second, I wrongly deny a scholar credit that is important to the scholar's reputation. The academic must therefore scrupulously attribute those facts that others have uncovered, and the long and heavily footnoted format of academic books and articles makes this easy.

But the rules for newspaper articles that mention historical matters are different. Such articles usually don't claim originality of historical research; no reader would assume that snippets of history in an article about modern-day Iraq stem from the journalist's own archival research. The articles do not generally deny historians due professional credit: Scholars get professional respect chiefly based on other scholars' use of their work, not based on citations by reporters. And because space is short, and good journalism often relies on multiple historical sources, newspaper articles can't be expected to acknowledge each historian whose work the journalist used.

The rules for novels are in between. Novelists are similar to journalists, but they do have space at the end of the book to briefly acknowledge the historical works on which they rely, without distracting from the novel's flow. If you've relied substantially on another's work, acknowledging this is the kind thing to do. Omitting the acknowledgment probably isn't unethical; it's not a lie, or the denial of the credit needed for success in the original author's profession. But it isn't very nice.

Yet what about copying not just facts, but also another author's words, either literally or in a close paraphrase? Would a general acknowledgment at the end of the book be enough to justify this? Or is such copying impermissible, at least unless you expressly note it using quotation marks, or by writing "as Lucilla Andrews said"? In academic work, the answer is simple: Quote the original, and insert a footnote at the place you quote it. But what about a novel?

A historical novel, to be accurate, must borrow those words needed to accurately reproduce the historical facts, even when the facts were uncovered by others. If nurses treated ringworm by dabbing gentian violet on it, that's what they did, and novelists must be able to say so. Nor can a novelist note the borrowing using quotation marks and footnotes, as they would interrupt the novel's flow. Writers who strive for factual accuracy must thus remain free to closely paraphrase the factual accounts of others.

On the other hand, when the historian or memoirist depicted the facts in a colorful way that she herself created, the particular words shouldn't be copied, at least without express acknowledgment. A historical novelist is responsible for creating his own colorful descriptions.

So where does this leave Mr. McEwan? Likely not guilty on any of the counts, if the account in the newspaper that first broke the story (the Nov. 26 Daily Mail) is thorough. Mr. McEwan borrowed facts, and those words that accurately described the facts. He is not guilty of copyright infringement, or of taking another's original expression without specific notation. And while he did rely on Andrews's autobiography, his acknowledgments page noted being "indebted" to Andrews and her book. Any such acknowledgment could always be made more prominent; but it appears to have been prominent enough.

More broadly, we should recognize that not all use of another's words requires detailed acknowledgment. Words represent facts; and facts, once revealed, are there to be used, including in novelists' unfootnoted prose.

Mr. Volokh is a professor of law at UCLA School of Law.

 

 

"Catching Cheaters with Their Own Computers:  Anti-cheating hardware could keep online game players honest," MIT's Technology Review, July 3, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19005/?a=f .

Researchers at Intel are working on a system that could make it much harder to cheat at online games. Unlike current software-based anti-cheating technology, Intel's Fair Online Gaming System would be built into a player's computer, in a combination of hardware, firmware, and software.

Since the early days of video games, players have cheated. Some players tried altering the game's programming, for example, to give themselves benefits such as infinite lives or infinite ammunition. When large groups of people began playing shared games online, these cheats--which seemed harmless in single-player games--became a cause for concern, especially since many of them allow players to make devastating attacks on others.

Too many cheaters in an online game can destroy the group atmosphere that makes online gaming fun, says Mia Consalvo, an associate professor at Ohio University who researches cheating in video games. Although game developers and third-party specialists are always working to combat cheaters, the problem has continued. Some cheaters simply want to wield more power, while others are lured by prize money offered in tournaments.

Gamers can opt to play on servers that block those who haven't installed anti-cheating software. Such software scans a player's computer and alerts other players if it detects cheats. But anti-cheating software can only catch cheats once they become known: like antivirus software, it works by scanning for things that look like known cheats, and the list of cheats requires constant updating.

Intel's researchers say that their system would work without needing updates. By watching at the hardware level for cheating strategies, the system should be able to detect current and future cheats, says Intel research scientist Travis Schluessler.

For example, the system would go after input-based cheats, in which a hacker feeds the game different information than he enters through the keyboard and mouse. A cheater playing a shooting game might use an input-based cheat known as an aimbot, for example, to point his guns automatically, leaving him free to fire rapidly, and with deadly accuracy. Schluessler says that the Fair Online Gaming system's chip set would catch an aimbot by receiving and comparing data streams from the player's keyboard and mouse with data streams from what the game processes. The system would recognize that the information wasn't the same and alert administrators to the cheat. In tests, Schluessler says, the system ran without slowing the play of a game.

In addition to input-based cheats, Schluessler says that the system would go after network-data cheats that extract hidden information from a game's network, such as the location of other players, and display it to the cheater. Intel's system would also target cheats that attempt to disable anti-cheating software. Schluessler says the goal isn't to replace anti-cheating software but to strengthen and augment it.

Tony Ray, president of Even Balance, which makes the anti-cheating software PunkBuster, says this type of system could go a long way toward addressing continuing problems with cheaters. "There are a couple of things that can only be done properly with hardware," he says. "These are things we expend considerable effort in addressing with software ... Having real-time hardware verification that PunkBuster has not been compromised in memory after loading would go a long way toward thwarting even the best private hack authors."

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on edutainment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment

Blackboard and the company that owns Turnitin, the popular plagiarism-detection service, have settled their patent dispute, agreeing not to sue one another, Washington Business Journal reported. Blackboard announced in July that it was adding a plagiarism-detection feature to its course management system.
Inside Higher Ed, August 24, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/24/qt

Comparison of Plagiarism Detection Tools --- http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/SER07017B.pdf
"Plagiarism Detection: Is Technology the Answer?" at the 2007 EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional Conference, Liz Johnson, Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, provided a chart comparing seven plagiarism detection tools: Turnitin, MyDropBox, PAIRwise, EVE2, WCopyFind, CopyCatch, and GLATT.

August 24, 2007 message from Ed Scribner [escribne@nmsu.edu]

Bob,

The New Mexico State University Library is hosting a new website on plagiarism issues. The site, available at http://lib.nmsu.edu/plagiarism , contains both faculty and student resources.

Ed

 

Guidelines for Copyrighted Material on Websites and Blackboard

This message if from the Director of the Trinity University Library.

I’m afraid to open it, so please direct all your questions to Diane or CUNY Baruch.

Bob Jensen

-----Original Message----- 
From: Graves, Diane J. 
Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 9:22 AM 
To: Trinity Faculty 

A number of you have asked about the legal use of copyrighted material on your websites and Blackboard courses. I just learned about this site, prepared at the CUNY Baruch College, which will help. It’s an interactive guide in a flow chart format that shows the steps you need to take to use copyrighted media in teaching. It’s very easy to follow.

http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/tutorials/copyright/ 

Both the library and IMS are providing links to this guide from our sites, but you might find it helpful to review it now and bookmark it for later use.

Diane

Diane J. Graves, Professor & University Librarian
Elizabeth M. Coates Library, Trinity University
One Trinity Place, San Antonio, TX 78212

Bob Jensen's threads on the education-unfriendly DMCA are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright 

Update Messages

January 6, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

NEW JOURNAL COVERING PLAGIARISM IN THE UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY

The recently-launched, refereed INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR EDUCATIONAL INTEGRITY [ISSN 1833-2595] intends to provide a forum to address educational integrity topics: "plagiarism, cheating, academic integrity, honour codes, teaching and learning, university governance, and student motivation." The journal, to be published two times a year, is sponsored by the University of South Australia. For more information and to read the current issue, go to http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/journals/index.php/IJEI .

September 2, 2004 message from  Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu] 

INTELLECTUAL HONESTY IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE

"[T]echnology also adds new vistas to in-class cheating. Cell phones and PDA's provide a platform to share real time text messaging, adding a new angle to a note tossed not only from one side of a room to another, but also from one side of the campus or further beyond. With programmable calculators, PDA's and other handheld intelligent devices, students can store notes, access websites, send e-mail, or grab ready-made formulas to ease calculations. Camera phones have also been reported as potential devices for cheating by scanning a test’s contents for later review. No gum wrapper or note tucked into a sleeve can compare to the storage and intelligence of these devices."

In the conference paper "Intellectual Honesty in the Electronic Age" (presented at the University of Calgary) John Iliff and Judy Xiao, College of Staten Island, CUNY, give an overview of why students cheat and provide several ways, including technological solutions, for preventing cheating. The paper is available online at http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/~jiliff/iliff_xiao.htm 

See also:

"Combating Cheating in Online Student Assessment" CIT INFOBITS, July 2004 http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitjul04.html#3 

For more information about the annual University of Calgary's Best Practices in e-Learning Online Conference, held August 23-27, 2004, go to http://elearn.ucalgary.ca/conference/ 

 

HOT TOPIC: Technology and Cheating

Seventy percent of the 12- to 17-year-olds who participated in an ABCNEWS Primetime poll say at least some of their peers cheat on tests, with roughly 33% admitting that they themselves have cheated. Two in three students say that at least some students have handed in homework or papers copied from another student or downloaded from the Internet. Technology appears to make cheating easier. Take our InstantPoll: http://news.techlearning.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/egsJ0FHYLa0E2V0B7Kk0AV

to tell us what you think about technology and cheating. Read more about the Primetime poll and news special at http://news.techlearning.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/egsJ0FHYLa0E2V0CV820Al

 

March 19, 2004

After you read the continued support from the faculty Senate, you begin to sympathize with this 40-year academic professor and president of a college until you read the final paragraph  below (that paragraph is weird!).

"College President Is Retiring After Claim He Plagiarized," The New York Times, March 19, 2004 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/education/20retire.html?ex=1080622800&en=d10eeb1abea4af59&ei=5070 

A Connecticut college president facing claims that he plagiarized material for an op-ed column published in The Hartford Courant announced his retirement on Friday.

Richard L. Judd, 66, has been president of Central Connecticut State University in New Britain since 1996 and has worked at the school for 40 years.

His retirement was announced four days after William Cibes, the chancellor of the state university system, issued a report concluding that Mr. Judd had plagiarized from three sources in an opinion column he wrote for The Hartford Courant that was published on Feb 26. In the report, obtained by The Associated Press, Mr. Cibes called the actions a "clear, unacceptable case of plagiarism."

Mr. Judd apologized this week to the university's faculty Senate, which recommended that he keep his job. In a letter Friday to Lawrence D. McHugh, chairman of the university's trustees, Mr. Judd cited health concerns as the reason for his retirement, which is effective on July 1.

"I am doing so after careful consideration of my personal responsibilities and of my family and in regard to my health," he wrote. "It has been my honor and privilege to serve Central Connecticut State University over the past 40 years."

Mr. Judd was hospitalized on Wednesday after collapsing in his office. He had been scheduled to meet with the trustees on Friday to discuss the plagiarism allegation, but that meeting was postponed because of Mr. Judd's health.

Mr. Cibes's investigation found that the op-ed article, about the prospects for peace in Cyprus, included unattributed verbatim phrases from an editorial in The New York Times, a Web site of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and an article published in a London newspaper, The Independent on Sunday.

Using the material without attribution violated the university's policy on plagiarism, Mr. Cibes said.

Mr. Judd had an earlier run-in with university officials in March 2002, when he was reprimanded by the board after his arrest on charges of impersonating a police officer two months earlier. The board voted to express its "displeasure" with Mr. Judd, who admitted he used the oscillating headlights on his state car to pull over a motorist he believed was speeding.

Message from Janet Flatley on January 14, 2002

To my colleagues:

Respected historian Stephen Ambrose admits that he copied, word-for-word, from an earlier book by historian Thomas Childer. He said the copying was "inadvertent."

Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Joseph Ellis admitted, after he was caught in the deception, inventing a Vietnam War record . Tim Johnson, manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, also claimed a war record where none existed.

George O'Leary held a dream job as coach of Notre Dame for only 5 days; he was fired after revelations that he had lied on his resume.

Do you know what bothers me most about the above vignettes? Not so much that they happened - human beings have lied since Adam & Eve and nothing has changed since then. What bothers me is the follow-on stories that begin, "well, yes, but ..."

He's a great historian. He's a winning author and popular professor. He should only be judged on how well the team plays.

Now we learn that Andersen sent out a memo ordering employees to destroy Enron-related workpapers. The question, of course, is when the memo was delivered - before or after the subpoenas?

If it turns out that Andersen ordered a CYA (possibly illegal) destruction of substantive papers, I hope no one in the profession offers a "yes, but ..." and a learned discussion on the amount of unnecessary paperwork generated during an audit.

But given the state of American ethics, I can't say I'll be surprised if that's what happens.

Janet Vareles Flatley

COPYRIGHT AND "DEEP-LINKING" TO ONLINE CONTENT

From CIT Infobits on June 26, 2002

When you provide a direct link to an online article for a course that bypasses the content owner's homepage, you are practicing "deep-linking." Some online publishers are threatening legal action against websites that engage in deep-linking, saying that it violates copyright law. Whether or not deep-linking falls within fair use for educational purposes remains to be seen. In "'Deep-linking' Flap Could Deep-Six Direct Links to Relevant Content for Students" (by Corey Murray, ESCHOOL NEWS, June 11, 2002) several intellectual property lawyers give their thoughts on this question. The article is available on the Web (by way of deep-linking) at http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=3789 

eSchool News is published monthly by eSchool News Communications Group, 7920 Norfolk Avenue, Suite 900, Bethesda, MD 20814 USA; tel: 800-394-0115; fax: 301-913-0119; email: info@eschoolnews.com ; Web: http://www.eschoolnews.com /

For the record, eSchool News encourages educators to link directly to articles and other information posted on their website.

Bob Jensen's links on these matters can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm