Get ready, British people. When people are paying tons of money for a diploma they are not going to want to be told they "failed" a so-called "class" and therefore haven't "proved" that they've received an "education" and therefore haven't "earned" the diploma and therefore their money has been wasted.
It's not cheating; it's "creative winning."
You can't work just one angle. You have to design cheat-resistant assignments, smoke out cheaters, educate students about cheating, and create a general culture that has a low tolerance for cheating.
We are going through a lot of this at my school right now. I might say more later.
I had some pretty shocking experiences with cheating last semester. (Some of it was quite dumb: Two of the students guessed the URL I was using to share solutions with the TAs and copied the code I'd written at two in the morning, down to naming variables things like "maurice".) This was either the first time I'd had the problem, or the first time I'd noticed, and it rather makes me dread the next year.
Some of it was quite dumb: Two of the students guessed the URL I was using to share solutions with the TAs and copied the code I'd written at two in the morning, down to naming variables things like "maurice".
It's a crazy coincidence, sure, but as it turns out they're both massive Steve Miller fans, and, well, now you see that it's perfectly innocent, I hope.
Damn you Sifu. Anyway:
Let pompatus equal maurice plus space cowboy plus gangster of love.
For essay-based assignments, you can be assured that Turnitin will detect most cases of plagiarism.
This seems like a rather hard claim to substantiate.
I'm reminded of the Brass Eye chart showing skyrocketing rates of "crimes we know nothing about"
I read this and thought he was putting too much of his own effort into the post-detection handling. Give them a zero, report them to whatever body monitors academic conduct, and make it that body's problem to do something about it besides detect and zero.
Best be cutting this out, friends: HG neither loves your peaches nor wants to shake your tree.
Naming variables is tricky. I still use very short names because when I started SAS didn't allow long names. The kids these days give variables names like "TheOneAboutMeasuringKneePainWhenStanding_DichotomizedIntoNoPain_Vs_anyPain_liketheanonymousreviewersuggested."
I read this and thought he was putting too much of his own effort into the post-detection handling. Give them a zero, report them to whatever body monitors academic conduct, and make it that body's problem to do something about it besides detect and zero.
Yeah, that's pretty much my position, having read the whole post now. Plus a declaration at the start of the course that there will be zero tolerance for plagiarism, and that there is a (supposedly) very strong plagiarism detector at work. That said, I do like his non-giving-up solutions.
Smartphones have sure made it easier to cheat doing crossword puzzles. I've taken to putting mine in another room to lessen the temptation.
I do the NYT crosswords on my iPhone. Curse you, technology!
10: I use short, cryptic variable names because I hate my future self.
Cheating will never be stopped. Legalization is the answer. Then you can tax it, and use the money to buy weed.
5,6: I thinking of "and his educated rodents", myself, but I would have been willing to listen to any such excuse. Instead I got to hear about about sick parents and court appointments in New York, etc., etc., ad nauseam. Oh, and there was the separate case of the one who said that submitting the exact same text (on a make-up assignment!) as their friend was an accident due to borrowing the friend's laptop while their own was broken, and really they had no idea how the name and date got changed while the rest was identical, and now they couldn't find their own work, wasn't that strange?
8: At least here, reporting the cheating student to the disciplinary body involves actually going through a quasi-judicial proceeding, which is (accidentally or on purpose) a massive time-sink for the teacher. I just gave people zeroes and sent copies of the evidence to their advisers.
I had the cheating incident with the kid I detested this past spring, and now he's been pestering about how far exactly was he from getting that D? I took some glee in telling him exactly how far away he was from getting that D.
15: I am reminded of an ex-roommate who once told a traffic cop "You mean I can park anywhere I want in Berkeley for only $90 a day? Cool!" (I am not sure the cop quite appreciated the way Mooki's mind works.)
17: Oh yes, I went through that with the mauricians. I wish I hadn't enjoyed it so much.
Smartphones have sure made it easier to cheat doing crossword puzzles. I've taken to putting mine in another room to lessen the temptation.
Do cryptic crosswords then. On your smartphone.
I never ever cheated and still feel guilt about not turning in the students who cheated by cooperating with each other during an unproctored calculus exam in high school. The teacher trusted us, and he let us down. (That would have been a perfectly sensible thing to do in my AP French lit class. There were 5 girls in the class and sort of 2 teachers. The teacher had been paralyzed from the neck down and would not have been much use as a proctor. We couldn't have written our exam essays together, and we were all pretty honest people. Besides, trying to cheat on those texts by finding essays (this was 1992) would have been more work for the reasonably bright people in that class than just sitting in class, skimming a couple and writing the exam.
Princeton has unproctored exams and an honor code. How much cheating do they have there?
A separate question I have relates to a sort of grade grubbing question. If a student doesn't do as well on an exam as s/he'd like to and asks for feedback so that s/he can do better the next time, how would you respond? I can think of at least one German-born Professor who might have said to a C+ student, xxx might get you a B and to a B student, "I want full coverage of the basic material plus a thoughtful and original comment for an A-. You're not smart enough to do that." This was in law, and he was required to have a fairly strict curve so that may have played into it.
Princeton has unproctored exams and an honor code. How much cheating do they have there?
Seeing as Princeton is one of the greatest collection of bastards on the face of the earth (in a mortal struggle with Duke, with the out-of-state portion oF UVA nipping at its heels), my guess is, a "lot."
I was thinking that. A lot of my unofficial exams, say, ones for classes that were called "tutorials," so listed in the catalogue, but not scheduled until everyone showed up at the beginning of the semester, weren't strict about having the retirees proctor. They were generally shorter. I actually didn't go to one, because I thought that the test was the next day. I only found out, because I ran into another professor in the department who told me that I'd missed it. I was so anxious, but they let me take it the next day.
having the retirees proctor
Due to budget cuts, the giant army of proctoring seniors has gone the way of the shrimp and smoked salmon at all receptions. Which honestly is just as easy for the instructors, if you were planning to show up for the exam anyway.
I'm not sure if it happened at the same time they got rid of the hired proctors, but they don't make a seating chart of the examinees any more, either. Guess they don't care about cheating!
Instead I got to hear about about sick parents and court appointments in New York, etc., etc., ad nauseam. Oh, and there was the separate case of the one who said that submitting the exact same text (on a make-up assignment!) as their friend was an accident due to borrowing the friend's laptop while their own was broken, and really they had no idea how the name and date got changed while the rest was identical, and now they couldn't find their own work, wasn't that strange?
What happens to a professor who verbally abuses students who come up with this crap? I can't imagine the rage I would feel. I'd rather institute a policy where you get a D for cheating and a 0 for insulting my intelligence.
1: at no point in my university career was I ever warned not to cheat; as far as I know, no anti-cheating precautions were ever taken (essays were submitted in hard copy, so it would have been difficult to check for plagiarism); I never heard the slightest hint of anyone having been caught cheating. This entire story is completely alien to me.
When I was educated in the UK (a couple of decades ago now), approximately 90% of the credit for the degree was based on written exams which were strictly invigilated. Cheating was very hard under those conditions: it was easier to learn the material.
Why don't US universities award their degrees based largely on work done under exam conditions? Awarding degrees largely on the basis of unsupervised answers to same questions as last year, done according to "honor codes", is just asking for trouble.
Trust, but verify!
(Maybe a lack of preparation at high school levels means students can't handle written exams? In the UK, students take written exams several times a year throughout high school, so by the time they get to university they know what's going to be required of them.)
In the UK, students take written exams several times a year throughout high school
Americans can't sit for OWLs.
29: There was that woman at Oxford in the late 90's who tried to cheat on her exams by saving information on a laptop. She got caught, of course, and thrown out of school, but who knows whether someone else didn't try the same thing and succeed.
29.1 is also true. Though many universities are shifting to continuous assessment.
27: What happens to a professor who verbally abuses students who come up with this crap? A good question, but I prefer not to find out.
29: The class I taught last semester was computationally-intensive data analysis. There's very little of that they can do in an hour with pencil and paper. (I do not want to test knowledge of theory, or clever calculation tricks.) The ideal would be to make them explain their analyses to me, in person, after they had done them; this is not practical with 70 students, and I am expecting 100 next year.
Americans can't sit for OWLs.
Too fat to fit in the desks.
Jesus, this shit pisses me off. At one of my schools, when I caught plagiarists and attempted to apply the school's own newly-devised no-tolerance plagiarism policy by turning them in to the administration, the administration came back to me saying that I am obviously a really mean person who doesn't want this sweet innocent young thing to become a doctor like her parents want for her. What will satisfy my bloodlust without giving the poor dear an F? They acted like they were bargaining with a psychopath.
At the other school, it's understood that students sometimes plagiarize, and they have a process for dealing with it in which the faculty member's job is not threatened. You just turn in the stuff to admin, and they set up a meeting with the student to discuss how to avoid plagiarism in the future. If it happens again, the student is eventually expelled. An F for the course is the minimum punishment.
The big problem with the no-tolerance policy is that it tends to make the primary distinction not based on the extensiveness of the cheating, but on whether the student claims she "had no idea" that copying existing work on the topic and pasting it into her paper is plagiarism. When I explained to admin that we spent several days discussing the plagiarism policy, and what plagiarism is, and that it was a major topic of class discussion, and there was even a quiz (all of which was mandated for this course by this very administration, who wrote the plagiarism policy), they harrumphed that I sure had covered my ass, hadn't I?
Under such circumstances, especially for adjuncts, it is a thousand times easier just not to check for plagiarism.
Oh, and the semester after this shit went down, I had another plagiarist, who, this time, plagiarized the first (ungraded) draft of an earlier paper, and gave some bizarre excuse about how she turned in the wrong draft, but because it wasn't the final draft and I was shy about dealing with admin now, I just had a long meeting with her and explained why exactly she had to write her own work. Of course her final paper was mostly plagiarized. So I turned her into admin. Again, she said she--whoopsy daisy--had once again turned in the wrong draft of her paper, but when she got back to her computer in two weeks she'd be able to turn in the "right" version. I explained the situation to admin and they responded that it sounded like maybe she was on vacation or something, with her family, and that we should wait for her to turn this correct version in, though it did seem like that might somehow in some way be a little unfair but what is fair in life?
When I was educated in the UK (a couple of decades ago now), approximately 90% of the credit for the degree was based on written exams which were strictly invigilated. Cheating was very hard under those conditions: it was easier to learn the material.
That said, plagiarism was/is rife on certain courses. Law in particular, at my college. Coursework was routinely copied off the previous year(s). Not that it made any difference to their final degrees.
I would probably have copied essays/maths problem-solving if it had occurred to me. Why didn't I ever think of that??? Though no, it wouldn't have improved my degree.
35 makes me weep and seethe. 36 makes me wonder if the final paper was acceptable anyway.
I had various tedious cheating-by-copying problems last term, partly because of the way the department computer lab is set up. (Windows machines, a single lab-user login, it leaves Monday's work on the disk for Wednesday's students to find.) Eventually many of the students seemed convinced that my hacker-fu was subtle and inescapable. Of course, wily cheaters would have feigned that fear also.
Unfortunately, the take of my fellow TA was that no-one not a wily hacker could understand all this. I never did, I think, convince him that warez would make it easy to change any file properties; and I didn't want to end up teaching the medium-wily students to hunt for warez.
I was also kind of fond of the joke that's made about some fields (Economics being a frequent target): You don't have to change the questions, because in economics we change the right answers every year!
Cosma: I'm not sure that exams have to be restricted to one hour, or completed in pen and paper. Why not run the examination over a whole day in a computer lab?
Obviously this would expensive to set up and administer, and precautions would have to be taken against exam-takers bringing in forbidden materials (sealing the USB ports and disconnecting the network, for starters).
So it would be costly troublesome. But on the other hand, it sounds like rampant plagiarism and cheating is also costly and troublesome; and if many courses had exams of this type, then the costs could be shared.
Lurker here, but I wanted to share an experience at my [largish, national] law firm. I've only once seen a basically instantaneous firing of an attorney, and it was for plagiarism in a firm publication of an online source written by a lawyer at another firm. The person was out the door within hours of confirmation.
I suppose the law, with its citation-heavy practice, might be a little less forgiving of this sort of thing (?). But the linked prof's experience, bolstered by all the anecdotes here about a total lack of admin support, seem not just distressing but bizarre. If we view education as any sort of training ground for the workforce -- which at the very least you'd think they'd be shooting for at a top-10 business school -- then enforcing the professional rules materially less strictly than they'll be enforced in real life seems like a disservice to everyone.
Under such circumstances, especially for adjuncts, it is a thousand times easier just not to check for plagiarism.
Someday, there will be a version of The Wire set in academia.
10, 14: if you really hate your future self, use long descriptive variable names, then rewrite the code a little bit or repurpose it for another task, so that the variable names are no longer descriptive of what the variable contains.
44: I have colleagues who keep sending me updated datasets where all of the variables are named just slightly differently each fucking time.
Sometimes you're don't really mean to cheat: it just comes off that way to everybody else.
Deprecated is a good pseud. Stick around!
35 & 36 nail it for me. University admin doesn't want to know, it's a potential big problem for them so therefore you professor are at fault for letting this happen or at best a pita for making them deal with it.. The big exception to this in my experience was Baruch/CUNY where the line of students to get in was long and the administrative staff people who were the first step in the process -- most of them real up-by-their-own-bootstraps middle-aged women -- had absolutely zero tolerance for anything. Their attitude was pretty much "do it right or get the hell of the way for someone else who will."
For what it's worth, I have been told by people who work in British academia that you can easily catch a stupid plagiarist, because of the sudden lurches and changes in style. Sections of the essay will be very well written. Linking passages between the sections will be terrible.
Though I hadn't heard of this particular software being used, still, they say that a smart plagiarist is actually very hard to detect.
Johann Hari seems to have been a very smart plagiarist who was eventually caught at it (he used to interview people, take bits and pieces from stuff they'd written already, or good quotes from previous interviews, and paste them all together to make it look like a good interview he'd done) because an obscure left-wing blogger who'd apparently memorised the whole of Negri on Negri read Johann Hari's interview of Antonio Negri and realised that the lengthy and erudite remarks Negri was making were actually direct quotes from their favourite book. There was a great hashtag for a while on Twitter, #interviewsbyhari, until the Murdoch thing got more interesting than mocking a successful young journalist who got caught cheating.
Could you tell if I'd copied this comment from somewhere else?
For what it's worth, I have been told by people who work in British academia that you can easily catch a stupid plagiarist, because of the sudden lurches and changes in style. Sections of the essay will be very well written. Linking passages between the sections will be terrible.
Though I hadn't heard of this particular software being used, still, they say that a smart plagiarist is actually very hard to detect.
Johann Hari seems to have been a very smart plagiarist who was eventually caught at it (he used to interview people, take bits and pieces from stuff they'd written already, or good quotes from previous interviews, and paste them all together to make it look like a good interview he'd done) because an obscure left-wing blogger who'd apparently memorised the whole of Negri on Negri read Johann Hari's interview of Antonio Negri and realised that the lengthy and erudite remarks Negri was making were actually direct quotes from their favourite book. There was a great hashtag for a while on Twitter, #interviewsbyhari, until the Murdoch thing got more interesting than mocking a successful young journalist who got caught cheating.
Could you tell if I'd copied this comment from somewhere else?
Yes, 50 clearly duplicates a prior post.
42 raises good points. Of course:
If we view education as any sort of training ground for the workforce -- which at the very least you'd think they'd be shooting for at a top-10 business school -- then enforcing the professional rules materially less strictly than they'll be enforced in real life seems like a disservice to everyone.
See comment 1.
29 Why don't US universities award their degrees based largely on work done under exam conditions?
Maybe because exam conditions suck. Especially in math classes. I was always happy to get a take-home exam, even if it was crazy difficult, because at least I had time to think things through carefully.
For subjects that can lend themselves to it, an old fashioned paper and pen test is still difficult to cheat at.
'Cheat now, bastard. You've got 4 hours and 3 essays to write, in this numbered booklet. And it'll be marked by tweed-clad bastards who hate you and your entire generation.'
I don't think I'd cope in a US educational institution if the stories from academics here are representative. Particularly, as mentioned above, being openly treated like an idiot by one's students.
re: 45
Heh. I supply templates for data to curatorial/academic staff to complete, which have a specific order and field names, and every single fucking time they re-order them and rename the fields. Even when explicitly instructed not to.
For subjects that can lend themselves to it, an old fashioned paper and pen test is still difficult to cheat at.
Indeed, I keep having that thought. I don't particularly regret at this point not having slogged all the way through academia to the point of a faculty position (if I'd even found one): when I was in college, we handwrote essay exams in blue books, a booklet. Even in grad school, qualifying exams were handwritten in 4 hours by all but one of us, who was permitted to type his on a computer because his handwriting was truly indecipherable. You might have been able to plagiarize papers throughout the course of the semester, I suppose, but it was otherwise truly difficult to cheat.
in a mortal struggle with Duke, with the out-of-state portion oF UVA nipping at its heels
Oh, hush. Plenty of the in-state students are insufferable, too.
Grading in-class exams has got to be utterly thankless, though. Not only does the handwriting create problems, but even the bright students will turn in formulaic crap.
like an idiot
So judgy. It's not their fault you just don't get it.
41: That would be ideal; my department does something like that for one of the master's degree qualifying exams. (Plus, we trust the graduate students more.) But, like I said, I had 70 students undergraduate students this year and will have 100 next year. I will not get that kind of resources.
57: Yes, this. Plus, I know, from having worked with them, that there certainly are people who learn and understand the material, but are very apt to just choke in that sort of situation. Really I'm coming to think that there is no good solution when the student/teacher ratio gets much above 15.
I'm trying to come up with a data-fuzzing solution for some of our assignments, preferably without changing anything "really important". There are difficulties.
60: Set a random number for each student based on the last four of their SSN, their IQ (estimated by yourself), or the last digits of the DOW on the date of their birth or something.
A gas mantle & Geiger-Müller tube would be better show. At the least, lava lamps.
Someday, there will be a version of The Wire set in academia.
"You follow the citations, and you get emeritus professors and department heads. You follow the research grants, and you don't know where the fuck you gonna end up."
"Baker, let me let you in on a little secret: the TA on his beat is the one true dictatorship in America. We can give a guy a D, flunk him for real, or say fuck it and drink ourselves to death in a secluded corner of the library and our fellow TAs will cover us. No one - I mean no one - tells us how to waste our class!"
Somewhere I heard an aphorism that goes "The first time something is written, we call it originality. The second time, plagiarism. The third time, lack of originality. The fourth time, drawing from the common stock. The fifth time, research."
I get that school administrations have incentives not to crack down on cheating, like in comment #1, but surely a teacher could mark plagiarized work with a 0 with impunity as long as he or she is reasonably careful about it, right? Or do administrations even hobble that? Ouch.
Also, does anyone have a link that works for the link in the original post? It just says "page not found" to me. The blog is still there, but apparently the post we're interested in isn't.
Yes, he seems to have taken the post down. Here's the cache:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zlciYW0MwtIJ:behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-will-never-pursue-cheating-again.html+%22why+I+will+never+pursue+cheating+again%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&source=www.google.co.uk
As re: 55, I did midterms and finals in blue books for history classes as late as 1997 (and math exams were generally handwritten because undergraduates weren't expected to know TeX). I presume that stuff is all on laptops by now.
I did midterms and finals in blue books ca. 2008/9.
For sample, the indefinite article wasn't yet invented.
I did midterms and finals in blue books for history classes as late as 1997 (and math exams were generally handwritten because undergraduates weren't expected to know TeX). I presume that stuff is all on laptops by now.
Not at Heebie U! But that's probably redundant wrt the current top post.
I used to fill bushels of blue books with pained scrawl. I wonder if I ever drove a grader to tears, whether of rage or despair. Certainly several professors and TAs complained, after the fact.
In retrospect, it was very inconsiderate not even to try to improve my handwriting, particularly when I had at least one grandparent's very nice italic script as an example.
The local university bookstore was still selling blue books at exam time this year, but now they're called green books, because grouping the same paper under a cover that's green saves turtles.
Personally, I love the certainty-indexed handwriting in bluebooks: "Field was founded in 18?? on the principles of asku;fdhd sduf a;sfjhds ; sdf."
Everything was in blue books in my last two years of professional school (UCB), except when I took a law class. Don't know what the undergrads are doing these days.
Don't know what the undergrads are doing these days.
It's a mystery to me, but apparently it allows for a great deal of cheating.
59: 57: Yes, this. Plus, I know, from having worked with them, that there certainly are people who learn and understand the material, but are very apt to just choke in that sort of situation.
You mean some students are likely to choke in a timed-exam situation? That's true.
I pondered this after having written 55: in retrospect, how did I or any of us ever do that? Write fairly cohesive, coherent, intelligent essay answers in a blue book, minimizing any crossing-out (no delete key), with a time limit and without really knowing what questions would be coming at us. I admire my younger self, I guess. In retrospect, it seems like a difficult thing to have done well.
This is late, but at my institution history students still take blue book exams and write in class essays without the aid of the computer. As did I at my undergrad institution. Then again, it's history.
I think there are a lot of problems with having a class solely based on in-class test situations, particularly with writing-heavy exams and students who come to English as a second language. It's really frustrating when you have a student who you know knows the material and can write a decent paper with enough time to edit, but can't write a passable essay in 50 minutes because of their language skills.