When Did Cheating [on college campuses] Become an Epidemic?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
As a physics undergrad and grad student we were always permitted and encouraged to work on our problem sets together. Most of my memories of classes revolve around sitting in a room full of sleep deprived classmates trying to finish our problems at about 2am.
In contrast, a friend of mine teaches physics at a university in the UK and is prohibited by the university plagiarism code from letting his students collaborate on homework. He thinks it's insane, but he has no choice. Even if he explicitly allows his students to work together, they can still be found guilty of cheating...
Different academic cultures I guess.
I realize this isn't a very popular viewpoint. It's much more socially acceptable to say "kids today are under all this pressure" or "kids today are lazy," depending on how much you want to blame them. The question is framed in terms of how much the students are wrong, not whether they are wrong.
Academia has developed rules / guidelines for what is acceptable in their circles. Who is to say this arrangement is fair / equitable / maximally conducive to development of new ideas?
Throughout 90% of civilized history, we've operated under a much more culturally lax attribution system than the one practiced by today's professors. Why is the new system good and the old system bad?
And the workforce operates under a more lax set of attribution rules as well. You can ask for help on a mailing list or grab some BSD source code at your day job, but God help you if you do that in CS1 class.
To be clear, I think there are a lot of other causes to "cheating", which is really an umbrella term. There are individuals who steal others work to the point of actually not knowing how to do it. That does happen, but I'm not convinced that kind of cheating happens any more than it ever has.
But if you need grab that BSD code in CS1, you sure as hell won't understand it. The other thing is that we can roughly equate "being caught for cheating" as "being fired for incompetency" in the workplace, so while the workforce has more lax attribution rules, the reason those attribution rules are there at university is intended to prevent the firing later on.
Having TA'd undergrads in a first year programming course (with GameMaker for a CS Game Design degree), the ones that hit trouble are the first ones that run to the Internet for help. They then cut and paste the code, don't understand it (they don't even realize that variables will need changing), and their coursework grades will suffer considerably. Sadly, it's only then that they come to the TA.
FWIW, my 2¢ says that the reason cheating is more rampant is because there are a lot more students who just don't want to be there; they've arrived at university because "that's what you do." They don't put effort into learning, because they're not learning for any life value, as soon as they have the degree certificate the major could have been anything.
That said, it could be worse in the US than it is now. When I lived in New Zealand, the incidence of cheating amongst foreign (read: Asian) students was a source of great alarm, the figures were pretty stratospheric. It was partly cultural, as they were never taught that it was a big deal to not copy verbatim someone else's work, and it was partly because they didn't care at all, they'd been sent there to learn English and get a degree from an English speaking school. How they reached that point was academic (pun unintended).
That's my point; it's impossible to really "cheat". You can copy and paste things off the internet, which violates the artificial rules of academia, and everybody gets all uptight about it, but you still have to know enough to google "declare array", which means you've mastered effectively all the actual concepts of the course. What's left is merely syntax. Which is rote memory.
I know how to declare an array in a dozen languages only because I do so hourly. Testing this is trivia. Yet everybody does.
I did a BA in Political Science in the States, and every single teacher was very concerned about cheating... at the same time they were giving out multiple choice tests/quizzes and assigning small paper assignments which were similar for everyone.
I then did a study abroad program in Holland, where nobody was truly concerned about cheating. Grades were based on group presentation of literature in class, class discussion, an a big final paper who's topic you developed with the teacher (and then presented). Final exams, if they even existed for the course, were long-essay format.
You can't do that with every subject, but there's no reason why your students should be able to text quiz answers to each other or re-use another students paper... there shouldn't be any multi-choice quizzes and papers should be individually developed by students with the teacher.
Needless to say I went back to NL for my next degree.
Since I was bring paid about $1250 CDN a month and was trying to finish my PhD, I didn't press the matter. Still, it seemed as though students didn't want what likely would have benefitted them. (Or perhaps they knew how to play the current system to get passing grades...)
Then I went to a college that had an honour code that they took seriously enough that we were allowed to take our tests in our dorm rooms or where and whenever (within a reasonable period) we wanted. They were often timed, and or had other specific rules, but it was up to us to follow them. No one checked.
This respectful attitude was such a breath of fresh air that I stopped cheating immediately.
That is my opinion, and the experience you shared is yours only. I think, much does depend on what you are expected to do and what you consider yourself is right to do, but when it is so easy and there is no accountability at all, considering that a first class degree is so much different from a third class degree in the work place, why on earth would you not find the answers from the book and take a day or even week.
Think about it. In the business world, people are far more likely to zone out on presentations given by people who'd rather not be presenting - so why would the classroom be any different?
From the one side is the perspective that school is a burden. That tests, assignments, and homework are a trial to be endured until you are rewarded with your certification of official recognized smart-ness. That the student-teacher interaction is an adversarial relationship between authority figure and child.
From another perspective comes the idea that school is an opportunity. That tests, assignments, and homework represent the cobblestones on the road you must travel to acquire knowledge. That the student-teacher interaction is a cooperative relationship between mature, adult peers.
Increasing demand for degrees partly due to the rise in credentialism in the work-force combined with prolonged immaturity (professional, personal, financial) in young adults has combined to assault the quality of education from both sides, leading toward the former perspective becoming increasingly dominant. Through such forces the acquisition of knowledge transforms into the plodding repetition of busywork and finally into little more than a monetary transaction. At this point we are already well past the stage where the average quality of a college education has degraded to shamefully dismal levels, it is only now that the signals are becoming too obvious for us to continue ignoring it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_madrasahs_in_con...
No one was allowed to practice medicine unless they passed an exit exam, also first university to take attendance.
I find cheating reprehensible and am a conscientious objector, but when professors and teachers gave me busywork I came up with my own solution.
I didn't do it.
I got good grades in high school - never had less than a 3.4 or so at a well regarded high school - but in some classes I simply wouldn't do 50% of the work. Instead, I would go up to the teachers and say "I don't understand why you're asking me to do this."
Most of the time...possibly as a function of small class sizes...they gave me other assignments.
Students have to understand that a lot of teachers aren't sure what's best. Good ones will acknowledge that. Great ones will let you just play around with the material.
Man, I wish I had thought of that.
I am generalising wildly here, of course.
[1] And to be clear, I think universities as a whole should take up the fight. When an institution keeps handing out degrees to anyone who pays tuition it devalues the college overall.
It's harder to teach people to have faith in themselves in harder, sharper, less forgiving economic times.