Bob Jensen's Threads on Plagiarism Detection and Exam Cheating

Plagiarism --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
Plagiarism Law and Legal Definition --- http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/plagiarism/
Also see http://www1.law.umkc.edu/academic/plagiarism.htm

Video on the Ghost of Plagiarism Past
Et Plagieringseventyr --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwbw9KF-ACY

Jagdish Gangolly clued me in on this link
Tom Lehrer on the great Russian mathgematician Lobachevsky:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNC-aj76zI4&feature=related

Where to Begin in When Trying to Detect Plagiarism and Cheating

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.
2010 Update: "Top 10 Tools to Detect Plagiarism Online"

The New Culture of Cheating: What if everything you learned about fighting plagiarism was doomed to failure?

Psychology of Cheaters vs. Non-cheaters

Combating Plagiarism: Is the Internet Causing More Students and Ministers to Copy
Includes a module on dissertation plagiarism.

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

Market for Admissions Test Questions and Admissions Essay "Consulting"

Ease of Finding Test Banks and Solutions Manuals

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 was disturbing until Google shut it down.

The Center for Academic Integrity (CAI)

Racial Divide: Are their differences in cheating by race?

Cheating Issues Somewhat Unique to Distance Education

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

Cheating Across Cultures (Foreign Countries That Cheat)

Plagio-riffing

New Kinds of Cheating

My Project Files Got Corrupted (it used to be that the files just got lost)

Old Kinds of Cheating

Did Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz Plagiarize?

Social/Cultural Construction of Cheating

Ghost Students on Campus

Smile Professor, You're on Candid Camera

Professors and Teachers Who Let Students Cheat

Professors Who Plagiarize/Cheat

Professors Who Fabricate Research Outcomes and Research Reviews

Colleges That Cheat

Journal Editors' Reactions to Word of Plagiarism? Largely Silence

Celebrities Who Plagiarize/Cheat

Foreign Countries That Cheat (There is no such thing as international copyright law)

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 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics

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 and Dissertations Online (What's a "virgin prostitute?" in this context?)

Plagiarism and 'Atonement'

Catching Cheaters with Their Own Computers

Guidelines for Copyrighted Material at Websites, Blackboard, and WebCT

Resume Lies

Center for Academic Integrity --- http://www.academicintegrity.org/

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

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

Bob Jensen's threads on controlling online cheating --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline

Bob Jensen's threads on onsite versus onsite assessment --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline

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

The New Culture of Cheating

Plagiarism --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
Plagiarism Law and Legal Definition --- http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/plagiarism/
Also see http://www1.law.umkc.edu/academic/plagiarism.htm

"Damien Hirst in plagiarism row – does it really matter?," by Ben East, The National, September 12, 2010 ---
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100912/ART/709119970

"Academic Cheating in the Age of Google: In high school and college, cheating is an epidemic. To contain it, the author proposes a few simple rules, including an end to the take-home test," by Michael Hartnett. Business Week, January 13, 2011 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jan2011/bs2011015_632563.htm?link_position=link3

The students are in their seats, and the test has begun.

And so has the cheating.

BlackBerrys and iPhones need just a couple of taps of the keypad to offer the right answers. It doesn't matter whether the subject is math, social studies, science, English, or a foreign language. Information is available at your fingertips, just as advertised.

Indeed, we have to face a simple fact about students today: As technology has evolved to provide a vast wealth of information at any time, anywhere, cheating has never been easier.

In the good old days, cheating was a simple affair and as a result not too difficult to track down, like the time a girl with limited English skills in one of my high school English classes handed in a terrifically written, sophisticated short story. She copied, word for word, Shirley Jackson's story "Charles," except for changing the title character's name. I guess she thought I wouldn't have a chance hunting down the story once she cleverly renamed her story "Bob." Alas, catching a cheater is not so easy any more.

Smartphone Photos

A few years ago, students would write the answers on the inside labels of water bottles they brought into tests. Today we have students photographing the tests from their phones in an earlier period of the day, so that students in subsequent periods could know the questions before they walk into the classroom.

Now catching the cheaters requires a level of vigilance and research better suited for the corridors of the National Security Agency than the cluttered desk of a humble teacher.

Today, students wouldn't have to rely merely on CliffNotes to provide them with handy, if highly unoriginal, commentaries on Hamlet. They have other choices, including study guides from SparkNotes, PinkMonkey, ClassicNotes, and BookRags, as well as a seemingly endless supply of articles online from both paid and unpaid sources. Just Google "Hamlet Essay," and you'll receive a listing of 1,460,000 results, the first page of which is teeming with free essays.

Sure, you can track down some of the cheaters by typing in an excerpt of their essays on the very same Google search engine to discover the source. And such websites as Turnitin.com, which checks student papers against a massive archive of published and unpublished work for signs of plagiarism, can also be useful. But the available materials are so vast, and the opportunities for students to create hybrid papers so easy, that students are now one step ahead, especially since underground networks of materials are constantly cropping up, concealed from the peering eyes of teachers.

Fonts of Duplicity

Of course, even in this technological age, some students are so lazy they won't even bother to match the font and the type size for one section of an assignment to another, as they indiscriminately cut and paste material from assorted websites. A Spanish teacher I know once told me of a student who handed in an essay she clearly plagiarized from a website. Unfortunately, the girl could not explain why her essay was written in the Catalan language as opposed to Spanish.

Yet, we can't count on incompetence. Many students are so wily and crafty that they've learned to mask their cheating to impressive levels. Some can find answers on handheld devices while looking you straight in the eye or appearing to be in deep, philosophical contemplation; others plagiarize from a dizzying array of sources and cover their trail with vigilance worthy of a CIA operative.

Continued in article

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

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

Jensen Comment
I became discouraged with take home exam when one of my students paid to outsource taking of the examination to an agent. If the agent had not plagiarized it would've been impossible to catch his boss (the enrolled student). Most of my take home examinations, however, were only a small portion of the grade and the heavily-weighted final examination was not a take-home examination. I think all courses, including online courses, should have a monitored final examination. There are ways of dealing with this in distance education courses ---

Bob Jensen's thread on cheating ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

Ideas for Teaching Online --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Ideas
Also see the helpers for teaching in general at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

"Penn State Cracks Down on Plagiarism," by Allison Damast, Business Week, February 3, 2011 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/feb2011/bs2011022_942724.htm?link_position=link1

"Plagiarism, Profanity, Fraud, and Design," by Josh Keller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 4, 2011 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/crosstalk-plagiarism-profanity-fraud-and-design/34119?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Plagiarism: A study of 24 million college papers by Turnitin, which makes plagiarism-detection software, finds that college students are most likely to lift copy from Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, and Slideshare. The study counted all suspiciously similar language and did not consider whether students cited the sources they lifted from. Via the Scholarly Kitchen, where Phil Davis noted some of the study’s limitations.
Profanity: A Web site promoting Oberlin College co-created by its social media coordinator, Why the F*** Should I Choose Oberlin?, drew varied reactions and plenty of attention last week. The site, which notes it is not officially affiliated with Oberlin, collects profanity-laced quotes about why Oberlin is great. Georgy Cohen interviews the co-creator, Ma’ayan Plaut, who says she has “tacit and unofficial approval” from her boss. On Higher Ed Marketing, Andrew Careaga says his inner 15-year-old thought the site is brilliant, but his 51-year-old “shook his jaded head.”

Fraud: Educause offers advice on how colleges can respond to a Dear Colleague letter from the U.S. Department of Education that asks colleges to limit student-aid fraud in online programs.

Design: Keith Hampson argues that good design will play an increasingly important role in the college student experience as college move online. “Somehow, though, digital higher education—both its software and content—has managed to remain untouched by good design. Design is not even on the agenda,” he says.

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

"High-Tech Cheating Abounds, and Professors Bear Some Blame," by Jeffrey Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/High-Tech-Cheating-on-Homew/64857/

Question
What if everything you learned about fighting plagiarism was doomed to failure?

"It’s Culture, Not Morality: What if everything you learned about fighting plagiarism was doomed to failure?" by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, February 3, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/02/03/myword

What if everything you learned about fighting plagiarism was doomed to failure?Computer software, threats on the syllabus, pledges of zero tolerance, honor codes — what if all the popular strategies don’t much matter? And what if all of that anger you feel — as you catch students clearly submitting work they didn’t write — is clouding your judgment and making it more difficult to promote academic integrity?

These are some of the questions raised in My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture, in which Susan D. Blum, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, considers why students so frequently violate norms that seem clear and just to their professors. The book, about to appear from Cornell University Press, is sure to be controversial because it challenges the strategies used by colleges and professors nationwide. In many ways, Blum is arguing that the current approach of higher education to plagiarism is a shock and awe strategy — dazzle students with technology and make them afraid, very afraid, of what could happen to them.
But since there isn’t a Guantanamo Bay large enough for the population that plagiarizes, Blum wants higher education to embrace more of a hearts and minds strategy in which academics consider why their students turn in papers as they do, and the logic behind those choices.

The book arrives at a time that many professors continue to voice frustration over plagiarism. Academic blogs are full of stories about attempting to deal with copying. Services such as Turnitin have grown in popularity to the extent that it is processing more than 130,000 papers a day, while Blackboard has added plagiarism detection features to its course management systems. At the same time, however, particularly in the world of college composition, there has been some backlash against the law enforcement approach, with professors saying that they fear they are missing a chance to teach students about how to write through too much emphasis on fear of detection.

Those who want to understand the ideas in the book may want to note the title; it’s no coincidence that Blum wrote about college “culture,” and not “ethics” or “morality.” And while she did use “plagiarism” in the title, she faults colleges and professors for failing to distinguish between buying a paper to submit as your own, submitting a paper containing passages from many authors without appropriate credit, and simply failing to learn how to cite materials. Treating these violations of academic norms the same way is part of the problem, she writes.

If you find yourself thinking that Blum is advocating surrender, that’s not correct. Her book doesn’t advocate waving a white flag, but a new kind of campaign against plagiarism. And in an interview, Blum said that she includes warnings against plagiarism on her syllabuses, has devoted time trying to track down evidence against a student she was convinced had copied work, and has felt anger and betrayal at students who turned in work that wasn’t original.

“That’s how I felt when I first started looking into this topic,” she said. “I was really hurt when I felt students didn’t show respect for the assignment. I felt a tension between really liking my students as individuals and that they didn’t take academic work as seriously as I wanted them to.... I felt it was a battle. It was ‘How can I make them care?’ “

Blum’s book is based on her research on the way colleges try to prevent plagiarism and the way students view college, knowledge and the writing process. Many of the ideas come from the 234 undergraduates at Notre Dame who participated in in-depth interviews. The students were given confidentiality and the procedures for the interviews were approved by Notre Dame’s institutional review board. While Blum makes clear where she did her research, she calls the institution “Saints U.” in the text, with the goal of having readers focus less on Notre Dame and more on higher education generally.

While the book doesn’t claim that Notre Dame students are broadly representative of those in higher education, she suggests that these students do give an accurate portrayal of attitudes at competitive, residential colleges. Blum originally planned a similar study at a less competitive college, but didn’t have time to finish it. She said she thinks there may be some differences in attitudes, as part of the dynamic at elite institutions is a student expectation about earning A’s and succeeding in everything — an expectation that she said may not be present elsewhere.

In terms of explaining student culture, Blum uses many of the student interviews to show how education has become to many students more an issue of credentialing and getting ahead than of any more idealistic love of learning. She quotes one student who admits that he sounds “awful,” in describing decidedly unintellectual reasons for going to college and excelling there. “I think that knowledge is important to me, and to feel like I’m ahead of the game in a sense is important to me. And to move on the next step, whatever it is .. is also important.”

Students looking for the “next step” may not care as much as they should about actual learning, Blum suggests.

Then there is the student concept — or lack thereof — of intellectual property. She notes the way students routinely ignore messages from colleges and threats of legal action to share music online, in violation of business standards of copyright. As with plagiarism, she notes, the student generation has embraced an entirely different concept of ownership, and students who would never shoplift feel no hesitation about downloading music they haven’t purchased.

And she notes how much students love to quote from pop culture or other sources — feeling pride in working into conversation quotes they never invented — in a way previous generations wouldn’t have done.

“Student norms contrast with official norms not just because of this proliferation of quoting without attribution, but because students question the very possibility of originality. They often reveal profound insights into the nature of creation and demonstrate a considered acceptance of sharing and collaboration,” Blum writes. At the same time, she notes, students are less likely than previous generation to distinguish between formal and informal writing (think of the importance, to students, of instant messages). And rules about attribution are seen as silly.

Continued in article

"Far From Honorable," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, October 25, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/25/online-students-might-feel-less-accountable-honor-codes

Much of the urgency around creating a “sense of community” in online courses springs from a desire to keep online students from dropping out. But a recent paper suggests that strengthening a sense of social belonging among online students might help universities fight another problem: cheating.

In a series of experiments, researchers at Ohio University found that students in fully online psychology courses who signed an honor code promising not to cheat broke that pledge at a significantly higher rate than did students in a “blended” course that took place primarily in a classroom.

“The more distant students are, the more disconnected they feel, and the more likely it is that they’ll rationalize cheating,” Frank M. LoSchiavo, one of the authors, conjectured in an interview with Inside Higher Ed.

While acknowledging the limitations inherent to a study with such a narrow sample, and the fact that motivations are particularly hard to pin down when it comes to cheating, LoSchiavo and Mark A. Shatz, both psychology professors at Ohio University's Zanesville campus, said their findings may indicate that meeting face-to-face with peers and professors confers a stronger sense of accountability among students. “Honor codes,” LoSchiavo said, “are more effective when there are [strong] social connections.”

Honor codes are not, of course, the only method of deterring cheating in online courses. The proliferation of online programs has given rise to a cottage industry of remote proctoring technology, including one product that takes periodic fingerprint readings while monitoring a student’s test-taking environment with a 360-degree camera. (A 2010 survey by the Campus Computing Project suggests that a minority of institutions authenticate the identities of online students as a rule.)

But LoSchiavo said that he and Shatz were more interested in finding out whether honor codes held any sway online. If so, then online instructors might add pledges to their arsenal of anti-cheating tools, LoSchiavo said. If not, it provides yet an intriguing contribution to the discussion about student engagement and “perceived social distance” in the online environment.

They experimented with the effectiveness of honor codes in three introductory psychology courses at Ohio University. The first course had 40 students and was completely online. These students, like those in subsequent trials, were a mix of traditional-age and adult students, mostly from regional campuses in the Ohio University system. There was no honor code. Over the course of the term, the students took 14 multiple-choice quizzes with no proctoring of any kind. At the end of the term, 73 percent of the students admitted to cheating on at least one of them.

The second trial involved another fully online introductory course in the same subject. LoSchiavo and Shatz divided the class evenly into two groups of 42 students, and imposed an honor code -- posted online with the other course materials -- to one group but not the other. The students “digitally signed the code during the first week of the term, prior to completing any assignments.” The definition of cheating was the same as in the first trial: no notes, no textbooks, no Internet, no family or friends. There was no significant difference in the self-reported cheating between the two groups.

In a third trial, the professors repeated the experiment with 165 undergraduates in a “blended” course, where only 20 percent of the course was administered online and 80 percent in a traditional classroom setting. Again, they split the students into two groups: one in which they were asked to sign an honor code, and another in which they were not.

This time, when LoSchiavo and Shatz surveyed the students at the end of the term, there was a significant difference: Students who promised not to cheat were about 25 percent less likely to cheat than were those who made no such promise. Among the students who had not signed the code, 82 percent admitted to cheating.

LoSchiavo concedes that this study offers no definitive answers on the question of whether students are more likely to cheat in fully online courses. Cheating is more often than not a crime of opportunity, and containing integrity violations probably has much more to do with designing a system that limits the opportunities to cheat and gives relatively little weight to those assignments for which cheating is hardest to police.

“The bottom line is that if there are opportunities, students will cheat,” he said. “And the more opportunities they have, the more cheating there will be, and it is incumbent upon professors to put in a system that, when it’s important, cheating will be contained.”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I think universities like Trinity University that expanded their honor codes to include student courts are generally happy with the operations of those honor codes. However, Trinity has only full time students and no distance education courses.

One thing that I hated giving up was grading control. For most of my teaching career I gave F grades to students who seriously cheated in my courses. Under the revised Trinity Honor Code, instructors can no longer control the granting of F grades for cheating.

When I was a student at Stanford the Honor Code included a pledge to report cheating of other students. I think most universities have watered down this aspect of their honor codes because, in this greatly increased era of litigation, student whistle blowers can be sued big time. Universities may continue to encourage such whistle blowing, but they no longer make students sign pledges that on their honor they will be whistleblowers if they do not want to bear the risk of litigation by students they report.

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm

Cheating Partly Attributed to the Down Economy’s Need for Higher Grades (especially in engineering and computer science)
"Stanford finds cheating — especially among computer science students — on the rise," by Lisa M. Krieger, San Jose Mercury News, February 7, 2010 --- http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_14351156?nclick_check=1

Allegations of cheating at Stanford University have more than doubled in the past decade, with the largest number of violations involving computer science students.

In 10 years, the number of cases investigated by the university's Judicial Panel has climbed from 52 to 123.

Stanford, one of only 100 U.S. campuses with an "honor code," established its code in 1921 to uphold academic integrity by prohibiting plagiarism, copying work and getting outside help. Penalties for violations include denied credit for a class, a rejected thesis or a one-quarter suspension from the university. Students also pledge to report cheaters and do honest work without being policed.

"There's been a very significant increase," although the vast majority of the school's 19,000 students are honest, said Chris Griffith, chief of the Judicial Panel. More men are reported than women, and more undergraduates than graduates.

"Some of it is due to an increase in dishonesty," she said, "while some is due to an increase in reporting by faculty."

The findings came from new data presented by Griffith at a meeting of Stanford faculty at the academic senate. Although computer science students represent 6.5 percent of Stanford's student body, last year those students accounted for 23 percent of the university's honor code violators.

"My feeling is that the most important factor is the high frustration levels that typically go along with trying to get a program

to run," said computer science professor Eric Roberts, who has studied the problem of academic cheating. He noted that most violations involve homework assignments rather than exams.

"The computer is an unforgiving arbiter of correctness," he said. "Imagine what would happen if every time you submitted a paper for an English course, it came back with a red circle around the first syntactic error, along with a notation saying: 'No credit — resubmit.' After a dozen attempts all meeting the same fate, the temptation to copy a paper you knew would pass might get pretty high. That situation is analogous to what happens in computing courses."

A common computer science violation occurs when students work as a team to complete an assignment, even though the rules stipulate that work must be done individually.

Also common: students obtaining someone else's code and submitting that version, after making simple edits to disguise the work. They find copies by rooting through discarded program listings taken from a recycling bin, or checking machines in public clusters to see whether previous students left solutions lying around.

"People know exactly what they're doing," Roberts said. "One student took code out of the 'recycle bin' of a laptop, changed the name of the original author and used it in six of the seven files that were submitted."

As for the problem of cheating, Stanford is by no means alone. Roberts noted that the largest cheating episode in the history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took place in a 1991 course titled "Introduction to Computers and Problem Solving," when 73 of 239 students were disciplined for "excessive collaboration."

Today, to reveal similarities in code, Stanford computer professors use a program called MOSS (Measure Of Software Similarity). That software is boosting the number of discovered violations.

Other violations, although fewer, were found in the departments of biology and Introduction to the Humanities. Art history had only one violation.

Universitywide, 43 percent of violations at Stanford involved "unpermitted collaboration," where students submit work that was not done independently. About 31 percent involved plagiarism, using Internet-based work that was not cited. Another 11 percent involved copying work; 5 percent, receiving outside help; 5 percent, representing others' work as their own and 5 percent, assorted violations.

The Judicial Panel's report also noted that cheating was uncommon in professional schools, such as law and medicine.

"When you're in professional school at Stanford, it is foolish to cheat. If you pass, there will be good job opportunities," said law student Eric Osborne.

"That is not as true for undergraduates in the engineering and computer science fields," said Osborne, "where in this economy, there is a lot of drive to get into grad school."

Jensen Comment
I would also think that there is motivation to cheat in MBA programs and law schools where the job markets are bleak.

Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal: Yeah Right!
Although I admire Professor Fish, I don't quite share his views on plagiarism. And even if you share his views, this may not protect you or your students from the thunderbolts of wrath that sometimes strike plagiarists --- such thunderbolts as loss of job, loss of a degree (yes your prized college degree can be withdrawn), your publications may be withdrawn, you can be sued for your life savings, and you may face a lifetime of disgrace.

The scarlet letter "P" around your neck is serious business and becomes even worse with a record of addiction. Of course there are examples of plagiarists who are highly regarded in spite of their plagiarism, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Vladimir Putin ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Celebrities

"Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal," by Stanley Fish, The New York Times, August 9, 2010 ---
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/plagiarism-is-not-a-big-moral-deal/?scp=1&sq=Plagiarism&st=cse

During my tenure as the dean of a college, I determined that an underperforming program should be closed. My wife asked me if I had ever set foot on the premises, and when I answered “no,” she said that I really should do that before wielding the axe.

And so I did, in the company of my senior associate dean. We toured the offices and spoke to students and staff. In the course of a conversation, one of the program’s co-directors pressed on me his latest book. I opened it to the concluding chapter, read the first two pages, and remarked to my associate dean, “This is really good.”

But on the way back to the administration building, I suddenly flashed on the pages I admired and began to suspect that the reason I liked them so much was that I had written them. And sure enough, when I got back to my office and pulled one of my books off the shelf, there the pages were, practically word for word. I telephoned the co-director, and told him that I had been looking at his book, and wanted to talk about it. He replied eagerly that he would come right over, but when he came in I pointed him to the two books — his and mine — set out next to each other with the relevant passages outlined by a marker.

He turned white and said that he and his co-author had divided the responsibilities for the book’s chapters and that he had not written (perhaps “written” should be in quotes) this one. I contacted the co-author and he wrote back to me something about graduate student researchers who had given him material that was not properly identified. I made a few half-hearted efforts to contact the book’s publisher, but I didn’t persist and I pretty much forgot about it, although the memory returns whenever I read yet another piece (like one that appeared recently in The Times) about the ubiquity of plagiarism, the failure of students to understand what it is, the suspicion that they know what it is but don’t care, and the outdatedness of notions like originality and single authorship on which the intelligibility of plagiarism as a concept depends.

Whenever it comes up plagiarism is a hot button topic and essays about it tend to be philosophically and morally inflated. But there are really only two points to make. (1) Plagiarism is a learned sin. (2) Plagiarism is not a philosophical issue.

Of course every sin is learned. Very young children do not distinguish between themselves and the world; they assume that everything belongs to them; only in time and through the conditioning of experience do they learn the distinction between mine and thine and so come to acquire the concept of stealing. The concept of plagiarism, however, is learned in more specialized contexts of practice entered into only by a few; it’s hard to get from the notion that you shouldn’t appropriate your neighbor’s car to the notion that you should not repeat his words without citing him.

The rule that you not use words that were first uttered or written by another without due attribution is less like the rule against stealing, which is at least culturally universal, than it is like the rules of golf. I choose golf because its rules are so much more severe and therefore so much odder than the rules of other sports. In baseball you can (and should) steal bases and hide the ball. In football you can (and should) fake a pass or throw your opponent to the ground. In basketball you will be praised for obstructing an opposing player’s view of the court by waving your hands in front of his face. In hockey … well let’s not go there. But in golf, if you so much as move the ball accidentally while breathing on it far away from anyone who might have seen what you did, you must immediately report yourself and incur the penalty. (Think of what would happen to the base-runner called safe at home-plate who said to the umpire, “Excuse me, sir, but although you missed it, I failed to touch third base.”)

Golf’s rules have been called arcane and it is not unusual to see play stopped while a P.G.A. official arrives with rule book in hand and pronounces in the manner of an I.R.S. official. Both fans and players are aware of how peculiar and “in-house” the rules are; knowledge of them is what links the members of a small community, and those outside the community (most people in the world) can be excused if they just don’t see what the fuss is about.

Plagiarism is like that; it’s an insider’s obsession. If you’re a professional journalist, or an academic historian, or a philosopher, or a social scientist or a scientist, the game you play for a living is underwritten by the assumed value of originality and failure properly to credit the work of others is a big and obvious no-no. But if you’re a musician or a novelist, the boundary lines are less clear (although there certainly are some) and if you’re a politician it may not occur to you, as it did not at one time to Joe Biden, that you’re doing anything wrong when you appropriate the speech of a revered statesman.

And if you’re a student, plagiarism will seem to be an annoying guild imposition without a persuasive rationale (who cares?); for students, learning the rules of plagiarism is worse than learning the irregular conjugations of a foreign language. It takes years, and while a knowledge of irregular verbs might conceivably come in handy if you travel, knowledge of what is and is not plagiarism in this or that professional practice is not something that will be of very much use to you unless you end up becoming a member of the profession yourself. It follows that students who never quite get the concept right are by and large not committing a crime; they are just failing to become acclimated to the conventions of the little insular world they have, often through no choice of their own, wandered into. It’s no big moral deal; which doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that plagiarism shouldn’t be punished — if you’re in our house, you’ve got to play by our rules — just that what you’re punishing is a breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe.

Now if plagiarism is an idea that makes sense only in the precincts of certain specialized practices and is not a normative philosophical notion, inquiries into its philosophical underpinnings are of no practical interest or import. In recent years there have been a number of assaults on the notion of originality, issuing from fields as diverse as literary theory, history, cultural studies, philosophy, anthropology, Internet studies. Single authorship, we have been told, is a recent invention of a bourgeois culture obsessed with individualism, individual rights and the myth of progress. All texts are palimpsests of earlier texts; there’s been nothing new under the sun since Plato and Aristotle and they weren’t new either; everything belongs to everybody. In earlier periods works of art were produced in workshops by teams; the master artisan may have signed them, but they were communal products. In some cultures, even contemporary ones, the imitation of standard models is valued more than work that sets out to be path-breaking. (This was one of the positions in the famous quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in England and France in the 17th and 18th centuries.)

Arguments like these (which I am reporting, not endorsing) have been so successful in academic circles that the very word “originality” often appears in quotation marks, and it has seemed to many that there is a direct path from this line of reasoning to the conclusion that plagiarism is an incoherent, even impossible, concept and that a writer or artist accused of plagiarism is being faulted for doing something that cannot be avoided. R.M. Howard makes the point succinctly “If there is no originality and no literary property, there is no basis for the notion of plagiarism” (“College English,” 1995).

That might be true or at least plausible if, in order to have a basis, plagiarism would have to stand on some philosophical ground. But the ground plagiarism stands on is more mundane and firm; it is the ground of disciplinary practices and of the histories that have conferred on those practices a strong, even undoubted (though revisable) sense of what kind of work can be appropriately done and what kind of behavior cannot be tolerated. If it is wrong to plagiarize in some context of practice, it is not because the idea of originality has been affirmed by deep philosophical reasoning, but because the ensemble of activities that take place in the practice would be unintelligible if the possibility of being original were not presupposed.

And if there should emerge a powerful philosophical argument saying there’s no such thing as originality, its emergence needn’t alter or even bother for a second a practice that can only get started if originality is assumed as a baseline. It may be (to offer another example), as I have argued elsewhere, that there’s no such thing as free speech, but if you want to have a free speech regime because you believe that it is essential to the maintenance of democracy, just forget what Stanley Fish said — after all it’s just a theoretical argument — and get down to it as lawyers and judges in fact do all the time without the benefit or hindrance of any metaphysical rap. Everyday disciplinary practices do not rest on a foundation of philosophy or theory; they rest on a foundation of themselves; no theory or philosophy can either prop them up or topple them. As long as the practice is ongoing and flourishing its conventions will command respect and allegiance and flouting them will have negative consequences.

This brings me back to the (true) story I began with. Whether there is something called originality or not, the two scholars who began their concluding chapter by reproducing two of my pages are professionally culpable. They took something from me without asking and without acknowledgment, and they profited — if only in the currency of academic reputation — from work that I had done and signed. That’s the bottom line and no fancy philosophical argument can erase it.

Jensen Comment
The really sad fact about professors who plagiarize or otherwise cheat is that their employers may be tougher on student plagiarists than on faculty plagiarists ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize

"Admissions Weakness Exposed at Oxford University in the United Kingdom," Inside Higher Ed, February 8, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/08/qt#219531

The case of a first-year student at the University of Oxford, apparently admitted courtesy of a high school and testing record he didn't earn, has led to increased scrutiny of the admissions system there, Times Higher Education reported. The student in question reported 10 A-grade A-level exams, a notable accomplishment in the British system -- except that it was false. A teacher's recommendation was also forged. The Times Higher reported that the student, who has been suspended, was admitted through a program for applicants who are not sponsored by schools, and that questions have been raised by critics about whether such applicants' materials receive enough scrutiny.

June 12, 2010 message from Keith Weidkamp

From: Keith Weidkamp [mailto:weidkamp@surewest.net]
Sent: Saturday, June 12, 2010 7:26 PM
To: Jensen, Robert
Subject:

Hello Professor Jensen

I have followed ACEM and the many daily contributions for over two years. On two occasions I have commented back to individual professors. My name is Keith Weidkamp and I am a retired Professor of Accounting at Sierra College in Rocklin California. For over 20 years I have worked with Professor Leland Mansuetti, and for the past five years also with Professor Perry Edwards, developing, testing, and also publishing web-based practice sets, homework problems, study and review packets for Principles, Financial, Managerial, and Intermediate Accounting. We have with limited advertising and a few conference presentations added many schools to our adoption list. Texas A & M, Clemson, Trinity, Chicago, Mary Harden Baylor, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and many other smaller colleges and universities currently use one or more of our software products

As recently as yesterday and quite often over the last few months there have been comments and information regarding cheating and plagiarism. Over the past two years we have been working on and have developed and tested two web-based systems for Accounting practice sets and for Accounting homework that virtually eliminates the copying of work, and answers to questions and project examinations.   In our first presentation a month ago at the National TACTYC Convention in Phoenix, as the word got out regarding our new algorithmic products and software, we had over 50 Four-year and Two-year schools, from across the country ask for more information and an on-line demonstration.

Our new web-based software has added new opportunity to control a problem that has been an unfortunate issue to deal with for many years. While realizing that AECM is not a place to advertise, since the focus of AECM is Accounting Education and Multi-Media, I am asking you what you would recommend I do to get this information out to our large group professors as an informational item.

Attached you will find two information documents that outline our two new Algorithmic products. We have now two algorithmic practice sets and a full set of algorithmic topical problems (25 topics). Both of these products have the same key features.

On all practice sets each student starts with a different set of beginning balances. A unique set of check figures is available for each student user. Answers to key questions at the mid-point and at the end of the project, are different for each student.    With a single click an Instructor can view the work file of any student. With two clicks an instructor can print a copy of the student's graded examination showing their answers and the correct answers for that student.

On the Accounting Coach homework and/or study software, there are 25 topics for a student to choose from. Students are provided unlimited practice and Teacher Help screens for every topic and sub-topic. Every homework assignment ends with a short 5-8 minute algorithmic examination. This exam is scored and the grade automatically entered into the instructor grade book.   A well-prepared student can complete a topic assignment in 15-20 minutes. A student needing more assistance can continue the algorithmic practice and retake the algorithmic examination as many times as necessary to achieve a satisfactory score.

Special Features of this Software:

1. Cheating and copying others work is eliminated.

2. All student work is automatically graded and the score recorded into the instructor

    grade book.

3. Each practice set and problem has unlimited opportunity for practice, assistance,

      reinforcement and learning.

4. Student clerical time as well as homework and practice time is significantly

     reduced.

5. Instructor grading and recording time is almost completely eliminated.

6. Direct on-line support is provided from the Professor Authors!

The three authors of this software have a combined classroom experience of over 75 years. They use this software daily in their classes. Over 500 students use this software each semester at their school.

The new web-based software, with all of the special improvements not possible in a CD version, has eliminated all publishing, shipping, and markup costs.   All products can be purchased via PayPal for just $19.95 per student copy.

June 13, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Keith,

I am forwarding your message to the AECM, because I think what you’ve accomplished is probably valuable to some instructors although not to the extent that I buy into your claim that “cheating and copying others’ work is eliminated.”

Your pedagogy is very limited in that it does not allow for creative solutions that differ from your templates. This is why some instructors assign term papers rather than practice sets. But term papers both increase and decrease opportunities to cheat.

And you’ve not eliminated advanced forms of cheating.

For one thing, students have very clever ways of communicating with one another and with answer files ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#NewKindOfCheating

In very large classes, it is often possible for surrogate students to pretend to be somebody else.

Adopters of Your Practice Sets May Have a False Sense of Security
You’re assuming that clever students (possibly advanced students) will not write answer templates such as Excel workbooks that are archived (e.g., in a fraternity’s database). Those templates may be just as efficient in finding solutions as your own answer templates that you use for grading purposes.

It has long been a practice of case-method teachers to recycle cases with changed numbers and sometimes even changed contexts and assumptions. However, students still find value added in having archives of the solutions answers of former versions of a case. This is one of the things that makes case method teaching very frustrating. It’s almost imperative to continually use new cases rather than recycled cases.

Seeking Creative Solutions Both Increases and Decreases Opportunities to Cheat
I defy anybody or any software from detecting all forms of plagiarism. Out of trillions upon trillions of pages of writings in history, a student can simply type in a sentence or a paragraph or an entire page of writing that has a 99% probability of being detected.

Unless somebody, like Tournitin, archives student term papers and problem solutions, plagiarism detection has more than a 99% chance of failing. For example, if a student writes an unpublished essay at Florida International that is never archived anywhere except in one professor’s brain, I defy you to detect its plagiarism in unpublished term papers elsewhere in the world.

Turnitin and other plagiarism services attempt to archive unpublished writings so that such works are not so easily plagiarized ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Detection

Even Turnitin cannot archive more than a miniscule fraction of writings that have never been digitized.

The Best Way to Prevent Cheating
The real trick for professors is to assign unique projects where finding works or people to plagiarize will be an education in and of itself. For example, if I assign a project on accounting for contango swaps in Iceland I’ve eliminated 99.99999999999% of writings that can be safely plagiarized in a student term project at the University of Southern California. And I defy you to find a term paper writing service that will take this project on at reasonable prices. Of course there is an epsilon chance of finding something or somebody to plagiarize, but like I said doing this may be an education in and of itself. And I think cheating on this project will be more difficult than writing an Excel workbook for solution templates to your practice cses.

Bob Jensen

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

Where does responsibility for plagiarism stop?
Is a sole author responsible for the plagiarism of assistants?
Are all co-authors responsible for the plagiarism of one of the co-authors?
Is a student responsible for plagiarism caused by the student's hired assistant?
(one of Bob Jensen's former students offered this line of defense)

Ward Churchill, who is suing the University of Colorado at Boulder to get his job back, admitted on Tuesday that portions of a book he edited and wrote parts of were plagiarized, but he said he wasn't responsible for doing so, 9 News reported. "Plagiarism occurred," Churchill said in reference to the writings. But Churchill (who prefers to be called "Doctor" Churchill) said that others who were involved in the project did the plagiarizing and that he was unaware of it. Churchill has generally not admitted that any plagiarism occurred in his work, arguing that minor errors have been stretched by the university to fire him for his controversial political views. University of Colorado officials also asked Churchill on Tuesday why he had indicated that he wanted to be called "Dr. Churchill" when he has only a master's degree. Churchill responded that he has an honorary doctorate and asked the lawyer, "You wish to dishonor it?" The Denver Post noted that while there were some sharp exchanges in the testimony, much of it was detailed discussion of sources and the details of scholarly writing, and that the judge had to call a recess at one point when a juror appeared to be having difficulty staying awake.
"Churchill: 'Plagiarism Occurred' (But He Didn't Do It)
Jensen Comment
If Doctor Churchill pursues this babe-in-the woods line of defense it seems to me he should name the plagiarists who led him on.

One of the most liberal academic associations is the highly liberal Modern Language Association. However, even the MLA could not muster up a vote critical of the firing of Ward Churchill by the University of Colorado.
While material distributed by those seeking to condemn Churchill’s firing portrayed him favorably, and as a victim of the right wing, some of those who criticized the pro-Churchill effort at the meeting are long-time experts in Native American studies and decidedly not conservative.
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, December 31, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/31/mla

Question
What does a leading Native American scholar think of Ward Churchill's scholarship and integrity?

And this was the judgment of Churchill's academic peers. UCLA professor Russell Thornton, a Cherokee tribe member whose work was misrepresented by Churchill, said "I don't see how the University of Colorado can keep him with a straight face," calling his material on smallpox a "fabrication" of history, and accusing him of "gross, gross scholarly misconduct." Real American Indian history, he told the Rocky Mountain News, is vitally important, not "a bunch of B.S. that someone made up." R.G. Robertson, author of Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian and another scholar who has accused Churchill of misrepresenting his work, says that he's "happy that [he was fired], that he's been found out, and by his peers—meaning other university people—and been called what he is, a plagiarizer and a liar." Thomas Brown, a professor of sociology at Lamar University who has also investigated Churchill's smallpox research, said his work on the subject is "fabricated almost entirely from scratch."
Michael C. Moynihan, "Ward of the State: Why the state of Colorado was right to sack Ward Churchill," Reason Magazine, August 1, 2007 --- http://www.reason.com/news/show/121682.html

A huge factor in the granting of tenure to Ward Churchill was purportedly his affirmative action claim of being Native American.
Bob Jensen's threads on Doctor Churchill, the "Cherokee Wannabe" who most likely does not have drop of Native American blood, are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm

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

Differences Between Students Who Cheat Versus Students Who Don't Cheat

"Study Examines The Psychology Behind Students Who Don't Cheat," Science Daily, August 18, 2008 --- http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080817223646.htm

While many studies have examined cheating among college students, new research looks at the issue from a different perspective – identifying students who are least likely to cheat.

The study of students at one Ohio university found that students who scored high on measures of courage, empathy and honesty were less likely than others to report their cheating in the past – or intending to cheat in the future.

Moreover, those students who reported less cheating were also less likely to believe that their fellow students regularly committed academic dishonesty.

People who don’t cheat “have a more positive view of others,” said Sara Staats, co-author of the research and professor of psychology at Ohio State University’s Newark campus.

“They don’t see as much difference between themselves and others.”

In contrast, those who scored lower on courage, empathy and honesty – and who are more likely to report that they have cheated -- see other students as cheating much more often than they do, rationalizing their own behavior, Staats said.

The issue is important because most recent studies suggest cheating is common on college campuses. Typically, more than half – and sometimes up to 80 percent – of college students report that they have cheated.

Staats conducted the research with Julie Hupp, assistant professor of psychology and Heidi Wallace, an undergraduate psychology student, both at Ohio State-Newark.

They presented their results Aug. 16 and 17 in Boston at two poster sessions at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.

Staats said this continuing research project aimed to find out more about the students who don’t cheat – a group that Staats and her colleagues called “academic heroes.”

“Students who don’t cheat seem to be in the minority, and have plenty of opportunities to see their peers cheat and receive the rewards with little risk of punishment,” Staats said. “We see avoiding cheating as a form of everyday heroism in an academic setting.”

The research presented at APA involved two separate but related studies done among undergraduates at Ohio State’s Newark campus. One study included 383 students and another 73 students.

The students completed measures that examined their bravery, honesty and empathy. The researchers separated those who scored in the top half of those measures and contrasted them with those in the bottom half.

Those who scored in the top half – whom the researchers called “academic heroes” – were less likely to have reported cheating in the past 30 days and the last year compared to the non-heroes. They also indicated they would be less likely to cheat in the next 30 days in one of their classes.

The academic heroes also reported they would feel more guilt if they cheated compared to non-heroes.

“The heroes didn’t rationalize cheating the way others did, they didn’t come up with excuses and say it was OK because lots of other students were doing it,” Staats said.

Staats said one reason to study cheating at colleges and universities is to try to figure out ways to reduce academic dishonesty. The results from this research suggest a good target audience for anti-cheating messages.

When the researchers asked students if they intended to cheat in the future, nearly half -- 47 percent -- said they did not intend to cheat but nearly one in four -- 24 percent -- agreed or strongly agreed that they would cheat.

The remaining 29 percent indicated that they were uncertain whether or not they would cheat.

“These 29 percent are like undecided voters – they would be an especially good focus for intervention,” Staats said. “Our results suggest that interventions may have a real opportunity to influence at least a quarter of the student population.”

Staats said more work needs to be done to identify the best ways to prevent cheating. But this research, with its focus on positive psychology, suggests one avenue, she said.

“We need to do more to recognize integrity among our students, and find ways to tap into the bravery, honest and empathy that was found in the academic heroes in our study,” she said.

Jensen Comment
I think cheating in school is much like accounting fraud in adulthood. The psychological factors interact heavily with situational factors such as the "tone at the top," particular pressures at the time, crowd psychology, and opportunity. In particular there's something to the statement that "since others were doing it, I also tried it."

Note in particular how many athletes, especially baseball players, succumbed to use of illegal performance enhancing drugs because they were aware that other top players were using such drugs.

There is also the circumstance of easy opportunity. I've previously mentioned that one daydream I repeatedly had, when I was riding my horse through about 100,000 acres of woods north of Tallahassee, centered on what I would do if I found suitcase full of cash hidden in those woods. This is analogous to having fraternity files of former examinations given by a professors who tend to repeat old questions and problems. Students who in most circumstances would not cheat might succumb under particularly easy opportunities that give them somewhat of an unfair advantage. Some might not even see looking at old examinations as cheating. Alas I never found a suitcase full of money.

An accounting professor at Trinity University was disturbed to learn that one student had purchased (on eBay) the examination test bank for the textbook she was using in a course. Some students shared using that test bank including some students who probably would not have cheated if the act had not become so darned easy and convenient.

One of the negative externalities of the Internet is that students now have more and more opportunities to cheat that did not exist when information at their fingertips did not double every 12 hours on the Internet.

"Why We Take Risks — It's the Dopamine," Alice Park, Time Magazine, December 30, 2008 --- http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1869106,00.html
As quoted by Jim Mahar on January 2, 2008 --- http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/

A new study by researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City suggests a biological explanation for why certain people tend to live life on the edge — it involves the neurotransmitter dopamine, the brain's feel-good chemical.

Dopamine is responsible for making us feel satisfied after a filling meal, happy when our favorite football team wins ....It's also responsible for the high we feel when we do something daring,...skydiving out of a plane. In the risk taker's brain, researchers report in the Journal of Neuroscience, there appear to be fewer dopamine-inhibiting receptors — meaning that daredevils' brains are more saturated with the chemical, predisposing them to keep taking risks and chasing the next high.....

The findings support Zald's theory that people who take risks get an unusually big hit of dopamine each time they have a novel experience, because their brains are not able to inhibit the neurotransmitter adequately. That blast makes them feel good, so they keep returning for the rush from similarly risky or new behaviors, just like the addict seeking the next high...."It's a piece of the puzzle to understanding why we like novelty, and why we get addicted to substances ... Dopamine is an important piece of reward.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Be that as it may, some risk takers are merely trying to recover or at least average out losses which, if successful, is more of a relief than a thrill. The St. Petersburg Paradox may be more as a recovery strategy than a thrill --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox
Bernie Madoff probably got dopamine surges from his villas, Penthouses, and thrills of scamming investors, but at some point he might've been speculating recklessly in options derivatives in a panic to save his butt. The same might be said for any gambling addict who first gets "doped up" on the edge, and then bets more recklessly by betting the farm at miserable odds when "sobered up."

Apparently Bernie is now going to plead insanity. I think that's great defense as long as the court insists on long-term confinement as a pauper in Belleview rather than a posh psychiatric hospital --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellevue_Hospital

This may be a reason why some students, certainly not all, cheat for a better grade. Just the thrill of getting away with breaking the rules may lead to a dopamine surge just like a person who shoplifts an item that she/he neither needs nor wants. In my small hometown in Iowa, the wife of a high school coach, an other very dignified woman, was addicted to shop lifting items that she really didn't need or want. Our coach made an arrangement with downtown merchants to simply bill him for items that she thought she purloined without payment. The merchants kept a sharp and silent watch on her whenever she entered their stores.

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

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.

"The Shadow Scholar: The man who writes your students' papers tells his story," by Ed Dante, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 12, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

November 15, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi David,

Thanks for this interesting link.

This cheat cannot be an expert on everything without becoming a very good plagiarist, and even then he probably does not have a clue about specialty topics that can be plagiarized. My guess is that he's never heard of XBRL, FAS 138, IAS 9, FIN 48, or FAS 157. So as long as you stick to tough and narrow topics, chances are he will refuse offers to write on such technical topics.

Our worry is that when he or she retires from ghost writing, this cheat will form a sizable company comprised of technical experts that can write/plagiarize on many more specialized topics.

If fact it leads me to wonder how many students today are bypassing this cheat and are simply cutting and pasting from some of my documents at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm

Thanks,

Bob

"The Computer Stole My Homework -- and Sold It Through an Essay Mill," by Ben Terris, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2009 --- Click Here

Without her knowing it, a paper that Melinda Riebolt co-wrote while getting her M.B.A. was stolen and put up for sale. And, according to an article that USA Today reported last week, that same scenario has played out many times before.

The article discusses how some essay mills -- Web sites that provide written works for students -- surreptitiously steal work and then sell it for others to pass off as their own.

For the first time, however, those who find unauthorized postings of their work online may have a way to seek legal retribution. The article says a class-action lawsuit filed in 2006 is making its way through the courts, and one judge in Illinois has found a provider liable on six counts, including fraud and copyright infringement. That site is called RC2C Inc. and hosts at least nine sites that sell term papers.

Essay mills often provide their own written works.

Darn! It’s hard for us accounting professors to pad our resumes.
I could not find a single essay to purchase on accounting for derivative financial instruments or variable interest entities.

"Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply," by Thomas Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Cheating-Goes-Global-as-Essay/32817/

The orders keep piling up. A philosophy student needs a paper on Martin Heidegger. A nursing student needs a paper on dying with dignity. An engineering student needs a paper on electric cars.

Screen after screen, assignment after assignment—hundreds at a time, thousands each semester. The students come from all disciplines and all parts of the country. They go to community colleges and Ivy League universities. Some want a 10-page paper; others request an entire dissertation.

This is what an essay mill looks like from the inside. Over the past six months, with the help of current and former essay-mill writers, The Chronicle looked closely at one company, tracking its orders, examining its records, contacting its customers. The company, known as Essay Writers, sells so-called custom essays, meaning that its employees will write a paper to a student's specifications for a per-page fee. These papers, unlike those plucked from online databases, are invisible to plagiarism-detection software.

Everyone knows essay mills exist. What's surprising is how sophisticated and international they've become, not to mention profitable.

In a previous era, you might have found an essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you'll find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in Manila or Mumbai. Just as many American companies are outsourcing their administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to outsource their academic work.

And if the exponential surge in the number of essay mills is any indication, the problem is only getting worse. But who, exactly, is running these companies? And what do the students who use their services have to say for themselves?

Go to Google and type "buy an essay." Among the top results will be Best Essays, whose slogan is "Providing Students with Original Papers since 1997." It's a professional-looking site with all the bells and whistles: live chat, flashy graphics, stock photos of satisfied students. Best Essays promises to deliver "quality custom written papers" by writers with either a master's degree or a Ph.D. Prices range from $19.99 to $42.99 per page, depending on deadline and difficulty.

To place an order, you describe your assignment, the number of pages, and how quickly you need it. Then you enter your credit-card number, and, a couple of days later, the paper shows up in your in box. All you have to do is add your name to the top and turn it in. Simple.

What's going on behind the scenes, however, is another story.

The address listed on the site is in Reston, Va. But it turns out that's the address of a company that allows clients to rent "virtual office space" — in other words, to claim they're somewhere they're not. A previous address used by Best Essays was a UPS store in an upscale strip mall. And while the phone number for Best Essays has a Virginia area code, that line is registered to a company that allows customers to forward calls anywhere in the world over the Internet.

The same contact information appears on multiple other essay-mill Web sites with names like Rush Essay, Superior Papers, and Best Term Paper. All of these sites are operated by Universal Research Inc., also known as Essay Writers. The "US/Canada Headquarters" for the company, according to yet another Web site, is in Herndon, Va. An Essay Writers representative told a reporter that the company's North American headquarters was a seven-story building with an attached garage and valet parking.

That was a lie. Drive to the address, and you will find a perfectly ordinary suburban home with a neatly trimmed front lawn and a two-car garage. The owner of the house is Victor Guevara and, ever since he bought it in 2004, he has received lots of strange mail. For instance, a calendar recently arrived titled "A Stroll Through Ukrainian Cities," featuring photographs of notable buildings in Odessa and Yalta. Not all of the missives, however, have been so benign. Once a police officer came to the door bearing a complaint from a man in India who hadn't been paid by Essay Writers. Mr. Guevara explained to the officer that he had no idea what the man was talking about.

So why, of all the addresses in the United States, was Mr. Guevara's chosen? He's not sure, but he has a theory. Before he bought the house, a woman named Olga Mizyuk lived there for a short time. The previous owner, a friend of Mr. Guevara's, let her stay rent free because she was down on her luck and she promised to teach him Russian. Mr. Guevara believes it's all somehow connected to Ms. Mizyuk.

That theory is not too far-fetched. The state of Virginia listed Olga Mizyuk as the agent of Universal Research LLC when it was formed in 2006, though that registration has since lapsed (it's now incorporated in Virginia with a different agent). The company was registered for a time in Nevada, but that is no longer valid either. The managing member of the Nevada company, according to state records, was Yuriy Mizyuk. Mr. Guevara remembers that Ms. Mizyuk spoke of a son named Yuriy. Could that all be a coincidence?

Hiring in Manila

Call any of the company's several phone numbers and you will always get an answer. Weekday or weekend, day or night. The person on the other end will probably be a woman named Crystal or Stephanie. She will speak stilted, heavily accented English, and she will reveal nothing about who owns the company or where it is located. She will be unfailingly polite and utterly unhelpful.

If pressed, Crystal or Stephanie will direct callers to a manager named Raymond. But Raymond is almost always either out of the office or otherwise engaged. When, after weeks of calls, The Chronicle finally reached Raymond, he hung up the phone before answering any questions.

But while the company's management may be publicity shy, sources familiar with its operations were able to shed some light. Essay Writers appears to have been originally based in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. While the company claims to have been in business since 1997, its Web sites have only been around since 2004. In 2007 it opened offices in the Philippines, where it operates under the name Uniwork.

The company's customer-service center is located on the 17th floor of the Burgundy Corporate Tower in the financial district of Makati City, part of the Manila metropolitan area. It is from there that operators take orders and answer questions from college students. The company also has a suite on the 16th floor, where its marketing and computer staff members promote and maintain its Web sites. This involves making sure that when students search for custom essays, its sites are on the first page of Google results. (They're doing a good job, too. Recently two of the first three hits for "buy an essay" were Essay Writers sites.) One of its employees, who describes herself as a senior search-engine-optimization specialist at Uniwork, posted on her Twitter page that the company is looking for copy writers, Web developers, and link builders.

Some of the company's writers work in its Makati City offices. Essay Writers claims to have more than 200 writers, which may be true when freelancers are counted. A dozen or so, according to a former writer, work in the office, where they are reportedly paid between $1 and $3 a page — much less than its American writers, and a small fraction of the $20 or $30 per page customers shell out. The company is currently advertising for more writers, praising itself as "one of the most trusted professional writing companies in the industry."

It's difficult to know for sure who runs Essay Writers, but the name Yuriy Mizyuk comes up again and again. Mr. Mizyuk is listed as the contact name on the domain registration for essaywriters.net, the Web site where writers for the company log in to receive their assignments. A lawsuit was filed in January against Mr. Mizyuk and Universal Research by a debt-collection company. Repeated attempts to reach him — via phone and e-mail — were unsuccessful. Customer-service representatives profess not to have heard of Mr. Mizyuk.

Installed in its Makati City offices, according to a source close to the company, are overhead cameras trained on employees. These cameras reportedly send a video feed back to Kiev, allowing the Ukrainians to keep an eye on their workers in the Philippines. This same source says Mr. Mizyuk regularly visits the Philippines and describes him as a smallish man with thinning hair and dark-rimmed glasses. "He looks like Harry Potter," the source says. "The worst kind of Harry Potter."

Writers for Hire

The writers for essay mills are anonymous and often poorly paid. Some of them crank out 10 or more essays a week, hundreds over the course of a year. They earn anywhere from a few dollars to $40 per page, depending on the company and the subject. Some of the freelancers have graduate degrees and can write smooth, A-level prose. Others have no college degree and limited English skills.

James Robbins is one of the good ones. Mr. Robbins, now 30, started working for essay mills to help pay his way through Lamar University, in Beaumont, Tex. He continued after graduation and, for a time, ran his own company under the name Mr. Essay. What he's discovered, after writing hundreds of academic papers, is that he has a knack for the form: He's fast, and his papers consistently earn high marks. "I can knock out 10 pages in an hour," he says. "Ten pages is nothing."

His most recent gig was for Essay Writers. His clients have included students from top colleges like the University of Pennsylvania, and he's written short freshman-comp papers along with longer, more sophisticated fare. Like all freelancers for Essay Writers, Mr. Robbins logs in to a password-protected Web site that gives him access to the company's orders. If he finds an assignment that's to his liking, he clicks the "Take Order" button. "I took one on Christological topics in the second and third centuries," he remembers. "I didn't even know what that meant. I had to look it up on Wikipedia."

Most essay mills claim that they're only providing "model" papers and that students don't really turn in what they buy. Mr. Robbins, who has a law degree and now attends nursing school, knows that's not true. In some cases, he says, customers have forgotten to put their names at the top of the papers he's written before turning them in. Although he takes pride in the writing he's done over the years, he doesn't have much respect for the students who use the service. "These are kids whose parents pay for college," he says. "I'll take their money. It's not like they're going to learn anything anyway."

That's pretty much how Charles Parmenter sees it. He wrote for Essay Writers and another company before quitting about a year ago. "If anybody wants to say this is unethical — yeah, OK, but I'm not losing any sleep over it," he says. Though he was, he notes, nervous that his wife would react badly when she found out what he was doing. As it happens, she didn't mind.

Mr. Parmenter, who is 54, has worked as a police officer and a lawyer over the course of a diverse career. He started writing essays because he needed the money and he knew he could do it well. He wrote papers for nursing and business students, along with a slew of English-literature essays. His main problem, he says, is that the quality of his papers was too high. "People would come back to me and say, 'It's a great paper, but my professor will never believe it's me,'" says Mr. Parmenter. "I had to dumb them down."

Eventually the low pay forced him to quit. In his best months, he brought home around $1,000. Other months it was half that. He estimates that he wrote several hundred essays, all of which he's kept, though most he can barely remember. "You write so many of these things they start running together," he says.

Both Mr. Parmenter and Mr. Robbins live in the United States. But the writers for essay mills are increasingly international. Most of the users who log into the Essay Writers Web site are based in India, according to Alexa, a company that tracks Internet traffic. A student in, say, Wisconsin usually has no idea that the paper he ordered online is being written by someone in another country.

Like Nigeria. Paul Arhewe lives in Lagos, that nation's largest city, and started writing for essay mills in 2005. Back then he didn't have his own computer and had to do all of his research and writing in Internet cafes. Now he works as an online editor for a newspaper, but he still writes essays on the side. In the past three years, he's written more than 200 papers for American and British students. In an online chat, Mr. Arhewe insisted that the work he does is not unethical. "I believe it is another way of learning for the smart and hardworking students," he writes. Only lazy students, Mr. Arhewe says, turn in the papers they purchase.

Mr. Arhewe started writing for Essay Writers after another essay mill cheated him out of several hundred dollars. That incident notwithstanding, he's generally happy with the work and doesn't complain about the pay. He makes between $100 and $350 a month writing essays — not exactly a fortune, but in a country like Nigeria, where more than half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, it's not too bad either.

Mr. Arhewe, who has a master's degree from the University of Lagos, has written research proposals and dissertations in fields like marketing, economics, psychology, and political science. While his English isn't quite perfect, it's passable, and apparently good enough for his clients. Says Mr. Arhewe: "I am enjoying doing what I like and getting paid for it."

Write My Dissertation

Some customers of Essay Writers are college freshmen who, if their typo-laden, grammatically challenged order forms are any indication, struggle with even the most basic writing tasks. But along with the usual suspects, there is no shortage of seniors paying for theses and graduate students buying dissertations.

One customer, for example, identifies himself as a Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He or she (there is no name on the order) is interested in purchasing a 200-page dissertation. The student writes that the dissertation must be "well-researched" and includes format requirements and a general outline. Attached to the order is a one-page description of Ph.D. requirements taken directly from MIT's Web site. The student also suggests areas of emphasis like "static and dynamic stability of aircraft controls."

The description is consistent with the kind of research graduate students do, according to Barbara Lechner, director of student services at the institute's department of aeronautics and astronautics. In an initial interview, Ms. Lechner said she would bring up the issue with others in the department. Several weeks later, Ms. Lechner said she was told by higher-ups not to respond to The Chronicle's inquiries.

The head of the department, Ian A. Waitz, says he doesn't believe it's possible, given the highly technical subject matter, for a graduate student to pay someone else to research and write a dissertation. "It seems like a bogus request," says Mr. Waitz, though he wasn't sure why someone would fake such an order. However, like Ms. Lechner, Mr. Waitz acknowledged that the topics in the request are consistent with the department's graduate-level research.

Would-be aerospace engineers aren't the only ones outsourcing their papers. A student at American University's law school ordered a paper for a class called "The Law of Secrecy." She didn't include her full name on the order, but she did identify one of her two professors, Stephen I. Vladeck. Mr. Vladeck — who immediately knew the identity of the student from the description of the paper — was surprised and disappointed because he tries to help students who are having trouble and because he had talked to her about her paper. Mr. Vladeck argues that a law school "has a particular obligation not to tolerate this kind of stuff." The student never actually turned in the paper and took an "incomplete" for the course.

Essay Writers attempts to hide the identities of its customers even from the writers who do the actual work. But it's not always successful. Some students inadvertently include personal information when they upload files to the Web site; others simply put their names at the bottom of their orders.

Jessica Dirr is a graduate student in communication at Northern Kentucky University and an Essay Writers customer. She hired the company to work on her paper "Separated at Birth: Symbolic Boasting and the Greek Twin." Ms. Dirr says she looked online for assistance because the university's writing center wasn't much help and because she had trouble with citation rules. She describes what Essay Writers did as mostly proofreading. "They made some suggestions, and I took their advice," she says. Unfortunately, Ms. Dirr says, the paper "wasn't up to the level my professor was hoping for."

Mickey Tomar paid Essay Writers $100 to research and write a paper on the parables of Jesus Christ for his New Testament class. Mr. Tomar, a senior at James Madison University majoring in philosophy and religion, defends the idea of paying someone else to do your academic work, comparing it to companies that outsource labor. "Like most people in college, you don't have time to do research on some of these things," he says. "I was hoping to find a guy to do some good quality writing."

Nicole Cohea paid $190 for a 10-page paper on a Dove soap advertising campaign. Ms. Cohea, a senior communications major at the University of Southern Mississippi, wrote in her order that she wanted the company to "add on to what I have already written." She helpfully included an outline for the paper and wondered whether the writer could "add a catchy quote at the beginning."

When asked whether it was wrong, in general, to pay someone else to write your essay, Ms. Cohea responded, "Definitely." But she says she wasn't planning to turn in the paper as her own; instead, she says, she was only going to use it to get ideas. She was not happy with the paper Essay Writers provided. It seemed, she says, to have been written by a non-native English speaker. "I could tell they were Asian or something just by the grammar and stuff," she says.

James F. Kollie writes a sporadically updated blog titled My Ph.D. Journey in which he chronicles the progress he's making toward his doctorate from Walden University. He recently ordered the literature-review portion of his dissertation, "The Political Economy of Privatization in Post-War Developing Countries," from Essay Writers. In the order, he explains that the review should focus on privatization efforts that have failed.

Mr. Kollie acknowledged in an interview that he had placed an order with Essay Writers, but he said it was not related to his dissertation. Rather, he says, it was part of a separate research project he's conducting into online writing services. When asked if his university was aware of the project, he replied, "I don't have time for this," and hung up the phone.

Policing Plagiarism

Some institutions, most notably Boston University, have made efforts to shut down essay mills and expose their customers. A handful of states, including Virginia, have laws on the books making it a misdemeanor to sell college essays. But those laws are rarely, if ever, enforced. And even if a case were brought, it would be extremely difficult to prosecute essay-mill operators living abroad.

So what's a professor to do? Thomas Lancaster, a lecturer in computing at Birmingham City University, in England, wrote his dissertation on plagiarism. In addition, he and a colleague wrote a paper on so-called contract-cheating Web sites that allow writers to bid on students' projects. Their paper concludes that because there is almost never any solid evidence of wrongdoing, catching and disciplining students is the exception.

In his research, Mr. Lancaster has found that students who use these services tend to be regular customers. And while some may be stressed and desperate, many know exactly what they're doing. "You will look and see that the student has put the assignment up within hours of it being released to them," he says. "Which has to mean that they were intending to cheat from the beginning."

What he recommends, and what he does himself, is to sit down with students and question them about the paper or project they've just turned in. If they respond with blank stares and shrugged shoulders, there's a chance they haven't read, much less written, their own paper.

Susan D. Blum suggests assigning papers that can't easily be completed by others, like a personal reflection on that day's lecture. Ms. Blum, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and author of the recently published book My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture, also encourages professors to keep in touch with students as they complete major projects, though she concedes that can be tough in a large lecture class.

But Ms. Blum points out a more fundamental issue. She thinks professors and administrators need to do a better job of talking to students about what college is about and why studying — which may seem like a meaningless obstacle on the path to a credential — actually matters. "Why do they have to go through the process of researching?" she says. "We need to convey that to them."

Mr. Tomar, the philosophy-and-religion major who bought a paper for his New Testament class, still doesn't think students should have to do their own research. But he has soured on essay mills after the paper he received from Essay Writers did not meet his expectations. He complained, and the company gave him a 30-percent refund. As a result, he had an epiphany of sorts. Says Mr. Tomar: "I was like — you know what? — I'm going to write this paper on my own."

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

Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mills are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill

This study is consistent with remarks made earlier by Linda Kidwell regarding student cheating.

"Do Students Cheat More in Online Classes? Maybe not," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 16, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Do-Students-Cheat-More-in/8073/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

A new study contradicts the perception that cheating is more widespread in online classes, finding that students in virtual courses were less likely to cheat than their face-to-face peers.

You can’t make any sweeping generalizations based on the results, since the study only looked at 225 students at Friends University, a private, mid-sized, Christian-based institution in Wichita, Kansas.

But the study, “Point, Click, and Cheat: Frequency and Type of Academic Dishonesty in the Virtual Classroom,” adds fresh data to the ongoing debate about academic integrity online. The issue is on the minds of many in the distance education world because the recently reauthorized Higher Education Opportunity Act requires accreditors to monitor steps that colleges take to verify that an enrolled student is the same person who does the course work.

For the new study, researchers surveyed undergraduate students about seven types of academic misconduct. These included cheating on tests, plagiarism, and aiding and abetting (letting a classmate copy a paper, for example). In both traditional and online classes, aiding and abetting was found to be the cheating method of choice.

Asked about the results, Donna Stuber-McEwen, an author of the study, suggested that age may be one factor.

“Research has show that older students tend to cheat less frequently than younger students,” said Stuber-McEwen, a psychology professor, told The Chronicle. “And our sample tended to have a greater percentage of nontraditional students in the online classes.”

"Cambridge Survey Finds That 49% of Students Have Plagiarized," by Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3, 2008 ---
Click Here

Half the students at the University of Cambridge have plagiarized, according to results of a survey by Varsity, a student newspaper at the university.

The newspaper said its survey had attracted 1,014 respondents, of whom 49 percent said they had committed at least one act defined by the university as plagiarism. The list of forbidden acts included: handing in someone else’s essay; copying and pasting from the Internet; copying or making up statistics, code, or research results; handing in work that had been submitted previously; using someone else’s ideas without acknowledgment; buying an essay; and having an essay edited by Oxbridge Essays, a company that provides online essay services. Five percent of those who admitted having plagiarized said they had been caught.

Some students were surprised to find that what they thought were innocuous academic acts had landed them in the plagiarist category. “Of course I use other people’s ideas without acknowledging them, but I didn’t think that this made me a plagiarist,” one student said.

But others admitted copying or buying work “when I am late with an essay or finding it difficult.” Law students, the newspaper said, broke the rules most often, with 62 percent admitting that they had plagiarized. Four percent of students surveyed said they had written for Oxbridge Essays.

Comments

Yes, and 100% of civil rights leaders named Martin Luther King, Jr., have also plagiarized. And 100% of writers named Doris Kearns Goodwin have plagiarized. And 100% of vice-presidential candidates named Joe Biden have plagiarized. These students are in good company. Maybe we should educate them rather than haul them before a firing squad, as too many professors want to do.

— gl Nov 1, 08:22 PM #

I agree with gl, it seems a bit harsh to haul anyone anywhere, much less before a firing squad, until we have delved into the depth of the training students receive about the rigors of attribution. (Hint: scandalously little)

The internet with all its advances did bomb us back to the intellectual property stone age with the conspicuous absence of paper trails for the materials one can find within a click or two of beginning research.

The other part of the problem, and I am ready to be placed before the firing squad for this comment, professors (especially at the undergraduate level) do not put enough thinking into the construction of their essay questions. And to make matters worse, they use the same old tired questions year in decade out. So let’s look at our role in perpetuating this obnoxious problem and criminal waste of time on both sides.

Newsflash, profs! Life is short. Why spend your precious discretionary time playing cops and robbers with your students?

— BC PROF Nov 1, 11:42 PM #

Using a service like Turnitin.com helps to reduce plagiarism quite a bit because even if the students don’t have a high likelihood of getting caught, they know that they are really taking a big risk if they try to fool the system. If students know there’s a good chance they’ll get caught, they will not engage in plagiarism. Some professors would rather spend their leisure time with their families or doing their own research rather than chasing down sources of plagiarism. Use the tools to help you catch cheaters so you can have more time for your own life.

— MEH Nov 2, 02:16 PM #

Of course if I discover that a student has committed plagiarism, I take the steps that are prescribed by the honor code at my university. But I did not become a teacher to spend my time enforcing such codes. If a student cheats and receives a grade that he doesn’t deserve, he is the poorer for it. We have this idea that cheaters are robbing someone else of something valuable, and therefore that we ought to act to stop them or to punish them. It is not so difficult to see that plagiarists are only cheating themselves. They pay the very high price of not learning what they might have learned under their own lights, and to my mind that is penalty enough.

— SK Nov 2, 02:49 PM #

MEH, the time you save with turnitin.com is lost when you catch a cheater, because you yourself become a cheater if you don’t report the honor violation (rather than handle it privately, which most campuses frown upon). So assuming you’re as honest as you expect your student to be, you’re sucked into the whole lengthy honors process, with forms and hearings and meetings and eventually the wish that you had not been so persnickety.

I think the plagiarism situation is easy to avoid if you assign paper topics based on very recent events about which nothing could have been already written. Or, as I do, require first drafts of nearly completed works, a couple weeks before the real due date, with which you can issue warnings framed in face-saving look-what-you-forgot-you-cite-or-enclose-in-quotation-marks language. They get the message you’re tough, especially if you threaten reporting an honors violation if the supposed error is not corrected, and you spend even more time with your own life.

— gl Nov 2, 03:04 PM #

gl

I think the plagiarism situation is easy to avoid if you assign paper topics based on very recent events about which nothing could have been already written.

right, I am sure that is feasible in history of philosophy classes. Second Idea was much more reasonable.

— jon Nov 2, 08:54 PM #

The key is what the students perceive as cheating. If using someone else’s ideas without acknowledging it is cheating, then we are all cheaters. The kids come in to college 17 years old and dumb. They sit in lectures, read books, talk to classmates and faculty, and hear all kinds of new ideas. How can they ever acknowledge where all those ideas came from? How can they even remember when the ideas were first planted and by whom?

Similarly, good writing involves sharing ideas with other students, revising and proofreading. That violates the honor code standard of “doing your own work.” We create a catch-22 when we demand high quality work but strictly prohibit some of the methods that are essential for good learning. And even if we don’t “strictly” prohibit appropriate collaboration, not all students know where the line is. Consequently, some students will identify themselves as cheaters, even though the type of help they get on their assignments is acceptable.

And in my field, it is pretty common for students to forget to write down some detail of their source information, and at the last minute have to fudge the works cited. Technically it is fabrication, and the students know it. It would be embarrassing to publish a error-filled works cited. But in the end it is too trivial to worry about.

All these kinds of cases drive up the number of self-identified cheaters. It isn’t worth faculty worrying out.

— Shar Nov 3, 12:33 AM #

As others have noted, the extensive use of plagiarism requires an educational solution. I commend to you an excellent article by Eleanour Snow who describes (and links to) a number of institution-wide web tutorials designed to teach students about plagiarism. You can view the article at http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=306&action=article (requires free subscription).

James L. Morrison Editor-in-Chief, Innovate

Jensen Comment
There's serious doubt that Vladimir Putin even read his own thesis.

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

Joe Biden --- Beyond Plagiarism
If only Vice President Joe Biden had stuck to plagiarism. But he apparently hasn’t learned. In 1987, he copied and used a large chunk of a speech given by British labor leader Neil Kinnock, even though some of the facts (related to family history) didn’t match his own. Since then, he’s gone from plagiarism to smashmouth rhetorician. Last week, Biden was called out by former Bush advisor Karl Rove because Biden repeatedly said he’d chastised President Bush in person. And Biden came out of the ensuing discussion with a lot of mud on his face. On April 6, 2009, Biden said: “I remember President Bush saying to me one time in the Oval Office, 'Well, Joe, I'm a leader.' And I said: 'Mr. President, turn and around look behind you. No one is following.’” Three days later, on April 9, Rove said Biden’s conversation with Bush did not happen. Candida P. Wolff, Bush’s White House liaison, concurred: “I don't ever remember Biden being in the Oval. He was such a blowhard on all that stuff -- there wasn't a reason to bring him in." Facts notwithstanding, Biden has been telling stories that make it sound like he had unfettered access to Bush for some time. On HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” in April 2006, Biden said: “The president will say things to me, and I'll literally turn to the president, say: 'Mr. President, how can you say that, knowing you don't know the facts?' And he'll look at me and…say: 'My instincts. …I have good instincts.' [To which I’ll say]: 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough.'"
A.W.R. Hawkins, Human Events, April 14, 2009 --- http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=31447

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

Since I have such a huge number of documents at my Website, I often wonder what kinds of grades I'm getting around the world --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

November 3, 2008 reply from Guest, Paul [paul.guest@CRANFIELD.AC.UK]

Having taught accounting at Cambridge for several years, I believe that these high plagiarism figures are of no relevance to any accounting courses taught there.

I would guess that the high figures are likely due to the unique college tutorial system at Cambridge University (along with Oxford and a few others) where undergraduate students attend frequent (usually biweekly) small group tutorials in addition to lectures. Students are often required to write essays for these tutorials under very tight time constraints. The high plagiarism figures are likely driven by undergraduates trying to finish essays by these deadlines. The students don't benefit from such cheating. Although the essays are marked they do not count towards a final grade, and any under-prepared students are usually exposed as such in the tutorials. [For accounting tutorials, essays are very rarely set, and instead students are required to work through a previously unseen question.]

Paul Guest
Cranfield School of Management

Then in a second message Paul wrote the following:

I agree, cheating students won't learn much about the assigned material if they cheat. However, under the Cambridge and Oxford (tutorial & written assignment) system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial_system , cheating students are much more likely to be caught at an early stage when the consequences are much less severe (since written assignments do not contribute to final grades). The cheating can therefore be dealt with informally and with a light touch by a tutor who is close to the student, so lessons can be learned with no lasting damage. Especially important when many cases of plagiarism appear to arise from ignorance.

Also, assignment writing for tutorials at Cambridge is optional. Undergraduate students can choose not to produce written assignments for tutorials (or simply not turn up to them). However, by not participating they are foregoing the most important learning experience at Cambridge. The tutorial and written assignment system is the fundamental pedagogic difference between Cambridge and other universities and a key reason why Cambridge has been so successful. It is worth £2000 per year for each undergraduate student (previously paid by the government but not any longer as of this year http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/oct/14/highereducation.universityfunding ). Students are very aware of this and very rarely miss supervisions or fail to submit written assignments.

From my experience in teaching these supervisions (I also taught economics and finance for which essays were assigned) I dont believe that plagiarism is rampant. Instead I interpret the high figures along the lines suggested by Dave Albrecht, that although 49% of students have plagiarised at some point, each student has done it very rarely.

By the way, a huge thankyou from across the pond to you and the other contributors to this list, and for the great material on your website.

Paul Guest

"Dissertation cheats: the dark, corrupt slice of the Internet," by Zack Whittaker, zdnet, December 10, 2008 ---
http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=652&tag=rbxccnbzd1
I thank Scott Bonaker for pointing this link out to me.

The Internet is slowly becoming a rubbish tip for junk, useless information, knitting patterns and videos of blind Scottish men being hit in the nuts with a baseball. Because nothing on the web really ever disappears, we can see into the looking glass of the past. Over the last few decades, we’ve accumulated a lot of content, and the amount of “immoral” websites and services available; essay writing services for university students who want to cheat, have increased. Take this made up example:

Students can spend anything as little as a few hours up to a few weeks for an average, normal essay part of their undergraduate studies. Some will have more essays than others, but they’re an important part of a qualification. They show how the learner understands the knowledge they have acquired, how to reference and cite sources, as well as a discipline in writing formats. It’s an art, rather than a chore; maybe that’s why so many Bachelor of Arts degree qualifications have essays - art and arts.

But the other day, I received an email from CheatHouse.com, a website which “specialises in essays and papers for students”. They offer a variety of ways to plug into the database, but the primary way is to pay for access, allowing you to read through and access thousands of pre-written essays and dissertations. From their about page:

“To stimulate learning. Simply. We have gotten a lot of critisism in the past, and I suspect this will continue in the future, but we are trying to build a community, where students come together.”

Considering the name of the damn website is “CheatHouse”, are we supposed to fall for that? Now let’s face it; the chances of somebody buying a unique essay to study it and not to plagiarise it, is little-to-none. As a society, we are unfortunately not that moral.

It does, however, try to justify it on a specific page buried within the mass of links, and dodging the “encouraging cheating” question with another question; whilst creating a loophole to wiggle out of the plagiarism question. Just because the person who wrote the essay cites all the sources, references and acknowledges authors, doesn’t mean someone else can hand it in as theirs. It just doesn’t work like that. A dictionary definition won’t detract away from what appears to be a standard policy of a university.

“So you didn’t write this essay?” … “No, but all the sources are cited and it’s referenced.” … “Oh that’s OK then, well done, you’ve got a first.”

Idiots.

Why pick out this website? Because not only do they offer a slice of temptation cake to students, they also send out spam emails to Hotmail addresses. I just wish I hadn’t deleted the email in the first place. It’s not just them though; there are so many “services” out there which promote and actively support this.

Google, back in June, began to blacklist advertisements which promoted essay-writing services, which has certainly cut the number of these immoral ads from the main Google search, but for local search locales, it seems to have little effect.

Considering that a degree, or a masters or doctorate qualification enables a person to go on to very specific, specialised practices, I cannot see how the people who buy and use these essays should be let through to graduate. They surely wouldn’t, except they aren’t detected. The websites that provide these, especially this particular website which spam’s people as well, should be absolutely ashamed of themselves.

Putting it simply, it’s cheating a way into a qualification, which could be used to gain a job position or academic status. That, my friends, is fraud.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Plagiarism is generally thought of as being a literal or nearly-literal stealing of parts of the writings of others. It can, however, also entail the stealing of ideas without citation as to where those ideas were borrowed from in the literature or other media. It is especially relevant in this era of Weblogs, blogs, and YouTube where many ideas are stated that do not necessarily appear in traditional printed versions such as journals and books.

By way of illustration, suppose I was looking for an idea for an accounting dissertation. I stumble upon this particular module obscurely buried at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm

How to play tricks on fair value accounting by "managing" the closing price of key securities in the portfolio
Painting the Tape (also called Banging the Close)
This occurs when a portfolio manager holding a security buys a few additional shares right at the close of business at an inflated price. For example, if he held shares in XYZ Corp on the last day of the reporting period (and it's selling at, say $50), he might put in small orders at a higher price to inflate the the closing price (which is what's reported). Do this for a couple dozen stocks in the portfolio, and the reported performance goes up. Of course, it goes back down the next day, but it looks good on the annual report.
Jason Zweig, "Pay Attention to That Window Behind the Curtain," The Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2008 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122973369481523187.html?

The above module has great potential for dissertation study. A doctoral student who does so, however, and fails to cite Jason Zweig for the idea is in fact cheating even if not a single phrase is lifted from Zweig's article.

The problem with this non-literal text phrasing is that plagiarism search engines often cannot detect the plagiarism of ideas.

Question
Have you considered asking your students to turn in two term papers simultaneously, one of which is mostly plagiarized and one that is pledged to be not plagiarized in any way with proper citations?

"Winning Hearts and Minds in War on Plagiarism," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, April 7, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/07/plagiarism

That’s what Kate Hagopian, an instructor in the first-year writing program at North Carolina State University, does. For one assignment, she gives her students a short writing passage and then a prompt for a standard student short essay. She asks her students to turn in two versions. In one they are told that they must plagiarize. In the second, they are told not to. The prior night, the students were given an online tutorial on plagiarism and Hagopian said she has become skeptical that having the students “parrot back what we’ve told them” accomplishes anything. Her hope is that this unusual assignment might change that.

After the students turn in their two responses to the essay prompt, Hagopian shares some with the class. Not surprisingly, the students do know how to plagiarize — but were uncomfortable admitting as much. Hagopian said that the assignment is always greeted with “uncomfortable laughter” as the students must pretend that they never would have thought of plagiarizing on their own. Given the right to do so, they turn in essays with many direct quotes without attribution. Of course in their essays that are supposed to be done without plagiarism, she still finds problems — not so much with passages repeated verbatim, but with paraphrasing or using syntax in ways that were so similar to the original that they required attribution.

When she started giving the assignment, she sort of hoped, Hagopian said, to see students turn in “nuanced tricky demonstrations” of plagiarism, but she mostly gets garden variety copying. But what she is doing is having detailed conversations with her students about what is and isn’t plagiarism — and by turning everyone into a plagiarist (at least temporarily), she makes the conversation something that can take place openly.

“Students know I am listening,” she said. And by having the conversation in this way — as opposed to reading the riot act — she said she is demonstrating that all plagiarism is not the same, whether in technique, motivation or level of sophistication. There is a difference between “deliberate fraud” and “failed apprenticeship,” she said.

Hagopian’s approach was among many described at various sessions last week at the annual meeting of the Conference of College Composition and Communication, in New Orleans. Writing instructors — especially those tasked with teaching freshmen — are very much on the front lines of the war against plagiarism. As much as other faculty members, they resent plagiarism by their students — and in fact several of the talks featured frank discussion of how betrayed writing instructors feel when someone turns in plagiarized work.

That anger does motivate some to use the software that detects plagiarism as part of an effort to scare students and weed out plagiarists, and there was some discussion along those lines. But by and large, the instructors at the meeting said that they didn’t have any confidence that these services were attacking the roots of the problem or finding all of the plagiarism. Several people quipped that if the software really detected all plagiarism, plenty of campuses would be unable to hold classes, what with all of the sessions needed for academic integrity boards.

While there was a group therapy element to some of the discussions, there was also a strong focus on trying new solutions. Freshmen writing instructors after all don’t have the option available to other faculty members of just blaming the problem on the failures of those who teach first-year comp.

What to do? New books being displayed in the exhibit hall included several trying to shift the plagiarism debate beyond a matter of pure enforcement. Among them were Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age, just published by the University of Michigan (and profiled on Inside Higher Ed), and Pluralizing Plagiarism: Identities, Contexts, Pedagogies, released in February by Boynton/Cook.

Like Hagopian, many of those at the meeting said that they are focused on trying to better understand their students, what makes them plagiarize, and what might make them better understand academic integrity. There wasn’t much talk of magic bullets, but lots of ideas about ways to better see the issue from a student perspective — and to find ways to use that perspective to promote integrity.

Continued in article

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:

Write a detailed, self-exam on “Why I plagiarized.”

Read case studies of plagiarism. (Files said that many of the examples cover cases of professional journalists fired from their jobs.)

Write a paragraph defining plagiarism.

Meet with a tutor to discuss proper citation etiquette and complete a short worksheet on citations.

Meet with a faculty committee to talk about how to avoid plagiarism and lessons learned.

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

The source Putin plagiarized is a well known textbook. Perhaps by translating it into Russian he or his helpers thought it would not be detected.

Russian President Vladimir Putin plagiarized US textbook Russian President Vladimir Putin plagiarized sections of an American management textbook in writing an economics dissertation a decade ago, The Washington Times newspaper reported. Putin, who wrote a 218-page paper on planning in the natural resources sector, reportedly lifted numerous passages directly from a management text published by two University of Pittsburgh academics, the Times said late on Saturday, citing research by two scholars at the respected Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. Putin, who obtained a doctorate degree in economics in 1997 from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute wrote his thesis on "The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations." After reviewing the document, Brookings researchers Clifford Gaddy and Igor Danchenko concluded that large sections of Putin’s dissertation were copied almost word-for-word from the 1978 management text "Strategic Planning and Policy," by University of Pittsburgh professors William King and David Cleland.
http://theunjustmedia.com/Unjustmedia%20Archive/March%202006/march%2027%202006.htm

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

Bob Jensen's threads about assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

It's About Time
"Settlement Reached in Essay-Mill Lawsuit." by Paige Chapman, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 25, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/settlement-reached-in-essay-mill-lawsuit/27852?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

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 Test Questions and Essay "Consulting"

This type of cheating raises all sorts of legal issues yet to be resolved for students who might've thought what they did was perfectly legal

More than 1,000 prospective MBA students who paid $30 to use a now-defunct Web site to get a sneak peak at live questions from the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) before taking the exam may have their scores canceled in coming weeks. For many, their B-school dreams may be effectively over. On June 20, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted the test's publisher, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), a $2.3 million judgment against the operator of the site, Scoretop.com. GMAC has seized the site's domain name and shut down the site, and is analyzing a hard drive containing payment information. GMAC said any students found to have used the Scoretop site will have their test scores canceled, the schools that received them will be notified, and the student will not be permitted to take the test again. Since most top B-schools require the GMAT, the students will have little chance of enrolling. "This is illegal," said Judy Phair, GMAC's vice-president for communications. "We have a hard drive, and we're going to be analyzing it. If you used the site and paid your $30 to cheat, your scores will be canceled. They're in big trouble."
Louis Lavelle, "Shutting Down a GMAT Cheat Sheet: A court order against a Web site that gave away test questions could land some B-school students in hot water," Business Week, June 23, 2008 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2008/bs20080623_153722.htm

Jensen Comment
A university admissions office that refused to accept applications from the "cheating" prospective MBA students would probably be sued by one or more students. GMAC would probably be sued as well. But it's hard to sue a U.S. District Court.

There are several moral issues here. From above, this is clearly cheating. But in various parts of society exam questions and answers are made available for study purposes. For example, preparation manuals for drivers license tests usually contain all the questions that might be asked on the written test. It is entirely possible that some MBA applicants fell for a scam that they believed was entirely legitimate. Now their lives are being messed up.

I guess this is a test of the old saying that "Ignorance is no defense" in the eyes of the law. Clearly from any standpoint, they were taking advantage of other students who did not have the cheat sheets. But the cheat sheets were apparently available to anybody in the world for a rather modest fee, albeit an illegal fee. Every buyer did not know it was illegal.

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

"Penn State Cracks Down on Plagiarism," by Allison Damast, Business Week, February 3, 2011 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/feb2011/bs2011022_942724.htm?link_position=link1

"Turnitin Begins Crackdown on Plagiarism in Admissions Essays," by Louis Lavelle, Business Week, January 20, 2010 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/blogs/mba_admissions/archives/2010/01/turnitin_begins.html?link_position=link5

For a long time, b-school applicants have had it good. Submit an MBA application to Harvard, and who’s going to know if you send the same one to Wharton? And Columbia? And Yale? Turn in an essay with a few well-chosen words lifted from an online source, or a friend’s essay, and who’s the wiser? Well, those days are over my friends. O-V-E-R, over.

Turnitin.com, the web site that professors have been using for years to check student research papers for plagiarism, is now turning it’s attention to admissions essays, with Turnitin for Admissions. The new service, which was announced in December, checks admissions essays submitted by participating schools against a massive database that contains billions of pages of web content as well as more than 100 million student works previously submitted to Turnitin and millions of pages of proprietary content, including journals and books. It’s capable, the company says, of flagging instances of “plagiarism, recycled submissions, duplicate responses, purchased documents, and other violations of academic standards.”

No b-schools have signed up for the service yet, but it seems only a matter of time. The service was started by popular demand from colleges and universities, and b-school admissions directors are as vocal as any in their complaints about duplicate essays and similar problems.

And they don’t even know the half of it. Back in 2007, in anticipation of the new service, Turnitin undertook a study of every single undergraduate admissions essay submitted over the course of a year in a large (unnamed) English-speaking country, all told, about 453,000 “personal statements” received by more than 300 institutions of higher education. About 200,000 of them were found to include text that matched sources in the Turnitin database.

In all, more than a million matches were found (5 for each of the 200,000 essay). Half the matches were from online sources, with 29% coming from student documents (research papers, etc.) and 20% coming from other admissions documents. Turnitin’s conclusion: that 36% of the matches it found were suspected plagiarism. Here’s an excerpt from the Turnitin report:

Personal statements attached to university applications should be the work of that applicant and help the university know more about the perspective applicant. It is safe to assume that more that 70,000 applicants that applied though this system did so with statements that may not have been their own work. The number of Internet sites that matched personal statement/essay providing services leads one to question the additional 100,000 applicants whose personal statement contained a significant match (they may have borrowed or purchased all or part of their personal statement). The list of internet sites where most of this poaching went on includes Wikipedia, the BBC, the Guardian newspaper, as well as numerous sites designed specifically to help students with their essays, including Peterson’s Essayedge.com. A few of the sites belonged to admissions consultants, including Accepted.com and EssayEdge.com, and few others, if you can believe this, actually belong to schools themselves, including online writing labs at Purdue University and Ohio State.

I really don’t know where to begin. If the Turnitin study is at all representative of the current state of college admissions, it seems safe to assume that more than a few current MBAs, and quite a few MBA alumni who have gone on to bigger and better things, started out their academic lives committing the cardinal sin of the academy, and a serious breach of ethics. If they stammered through the essays on their own, without the benefit of cutting and pasting, would they have been admitted? Impossible to say. Did not getting caught encourage them to go on to bigger and better lies? Again, nobody knows.

I’m willing to entertain any opposing viewpoint that makes a modicum of sense, but I’m not sure there is one. Is duplicating your admissions essay okay? Is plagiarizing someone else’s work in an essay ever permissable?

Continued in article

"The Computer Stole My Homework -- and Sold It Through an Essay Mill," by Ben Terris, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2009 --- Click Here

Without her knowing it, a paper that Melinda Riebolt co-wrote while getting her M.B.A. was stolen and put up for sale. And, according to an article that USA Today reported last week, that same scenario has played out many times before.

The article discusses how some essay mills -- Web sites that provide written works for students -- surreptitiously steal work and then sell it for others to pass off as their own.

For the first time, however, those who find unauthorized postings of their work online may have a way to seek legal retribution. The article says a class-action lawsuit filed in 2006 is making its way through the courts, and one judge in Illinois has found a provider liable on six counts, including fraud and copyright infringement. That site is called RC2C Inc. and hosts at least nine sites that sell term papers.

Essay mills often provide their own written works.

"In Lawsuit, College Board Accuses Company of Circulating Copyright-Protected SAT Questions," by Elizabeth R. Farrell, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 25, 2008 --- Click Here

A test-preparation company in Texas is being sued by the College Board for what it calls "one of the largest cases of a security breach in our company's history," according to Edna Johnson, a senior vice president of the nonprofit group, which owns the SAT.

In a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court in Dallas, the College Board is seeking unspecified damages against the company, Karen Dillard's College Prep LP, which it says illegally obtained copies of SAT and PSAT tests before they were available to the public. The lawsuit also accuses the company of violating copyright-protection laws by circulating and selling materials that included test questions owned by the College Board.

The lawsuit arose after a former employee of the test-preparation company reported information to the College Board. Karen Dillard, the owner of the company, said the employee was disgruntled but would not elaborate on why.

Ms. Dillard did not deny that one of her employees obtained a copy of the SAT that was administered in November 2006 before the test was given. But Ms. Dillard said her company did not use any questions from that test in preparatory materials it provided to clients.

The lawsuit states that the employee got the test from his brother, the principal of a high school in Plano, Tex. The principal has been put on paid leave while the Plano school district investigates the matter, according to the Associated Press.

Copyright Confusion

In reference to the copyright allegations in the lawsuit, Ms. Dillard said in an interview on Friday that she had believed she was lawfully allowed to use materials she had purchased from the College Board before 2005.

Part of the confusion may stem from a shift in the College Board's policies regarding circulation of previous test materials. Until 2005, the company would sell copies of previously given SAT's to companies. After the SAT was revamped that year, the College Board no longer sold those materials. At that time, the company also began to offer its own online test-preparation course to students, which now costs $69.95.

"We believe part of the motivation of the College Board in bringing this lawsuit," Ms. Dillard said, "is to drive test-preparation companies like ours out of business so they can dominate the industry with their own test-preparation materials, which are for sale."

Ms. Dillard said she also thinks that the College Board is going to great efforts to publicize the lawsuit to make an example out of her company. To support that point, she said that Justin Pope, a higher-education reporter for the Associated Press, received a copy of the lawsuit and contacted her for comment before it was filed.

When contacted by The Chronicle, Mr. Pope said he could not confirm how or when he received the lawsuit, and could not comment further about the matter.

The lawsuit is the culmination of a four-month investigation by lawyers for the College Board. Two lawyers from the firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, along with a representative for the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, visited Ms. Dillard's office several months ago.

Ms. Dillard said that, at that time, her company fully cooperated with all requests for information and interviews with employees, and that she also provided personal financial records to the lawyers.

Ms. Dillard also said that her company offered to settle the matter for $300,000, but that lawyers for the College Board made a counteroffer of $1.25-million, a sum her company could not afford.

Ms. Johnson, of the College Board, said she could not comment on any offers made in settlement negotiations.

Continued in article

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

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 was disturbing until Google shut it down

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:

Gathering and sharing information about academic integrity;

An annual conference and faculty institute; periodic mailings; a newsletter; an electronic listserv; a website with both public and member-only access; and presentations at the conference of other associations as well as on the campuses of member institutions;

Encouraging and supporting research on factors that impact academic integrity;

Identifying and describing fundamental vales of academic integrity and the sustaining practices that support those values on a variety of college and university campuses;

Helping faculty members in different disciplines develop pedagogies that encourage adherence to these fundamental values;

Showcasing successful approaches to academic integrity from school around the country – policies, enforcement procedures, sanctions, research, curricular materials, and education/prevention programs; and,

Providing individual consultation on ways to promote an honest climate of learning.

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:

On most campuses, over 75% of students admit to some cheating. In a 1999 survey of 2,100 students 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.

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.

Internet plagiarism is a growing concern on all campuses as students struggle to understand what constitutes acceptable use of the Internet. In the absence of clear direction from faculty, most students have concluded that 'cut & paste' plagiarism - using a sentence or two (or more) from different sources on the Internet and weaving this information together into a paper without appropriate citation - is not a serious issue. While 10% of students admitted to engaging in such behavior in 1999, this rose to 41% in a 2001 survey with the majority of students (68%) suggesting this was not a serious issue.

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.

Longitudinal comparisons show significant increases in serious test/examination cheating and unpermitted student collaboration. For example, the number of students self-reporting instances of unpermitted collaboration at nine medium to large state universities increased from 11% in a 1963 survey to 49% in 1993. This trend seems to be continuing: between 1990 and 1995, instances of unpermitted collaboration at 31 small to medium schools increased from 30% to 38%.

A study of almost 4,500 students at 25 schools, conducted in 2000/2001, suggests cheating is also a significant problem in high school - 74% of the respondents admitted to one or more instances of serious test cheating and 72% admitted to serious cheating on written assignments. Over half of the students admitted they have engaged in some level of plagiarism on written assignments using the Internet.

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

Racial Divide: Are their differences in cheating by race?

"University community reacts to diversity statistics from Committee: Various minority organizations, administrators discuss racial issues, discrepancies based on recently released statistics about cases reported, brought to trial," by Cameron Feller, Cavalier Daily, April 14, 2009 ---
http://www.cavalierdaily.com/news/2009/apr/14/university-community-reacts-to-diversity-statistic/

The 2008-09 Honor Committee released statistics last week about the demographics of cases reviewed during its term. Although the data dealt specifically with cases reported, accused and brought to trial, the information also lends itself to several discussions about some students’ concerns pertaining to the University’s honor system and diversity.

Reporting

One of the most obvious areas of interest within the statistics were the numbers that dealt specifically with reporting. According to the statistics, a total of 64 cases were brought before the past Committee. Of these cases, 27 reports were brought against white students, 21 against black students, 11 against Asian and/or Asian-American students, four against Latinos and four against students of unknown race.

“When I saw [the statistics], I was a little bit surprised at the disproportionate number of minority students reported compared to [white] students,” said Vice Chair for Investigations Mary Siegel, a third-year College student.

“Looking at these numbers, there are almost as many [black] students reported as [white] students, which is not at all proportional [to the actual number of students enrolled at the University],” Siegel said.

These concerns with respect to reporting extend beyond just Committee members, however.

“In terms of data collection, I can’t help but be startled by the discrepancy,” African-American Affairs Dean Maurice Apprey said.

Another alleged discrepancy is the ratio of cases brought against males to those brought against females. The statistics show that 48 males were reported of committing an honor offense, whereas only 18 females were reported.

Some members of the University attribute such statistical discrepancies to spotlighting, which is when certain minorities — such as blacks, athletes and Asians — are reported at a much higher rate than white students for reasons like standing out in the room more, as well as some reporters’ inherent biases.

“From a psychology point of view, sometimes you are going to look at what’s different in the room,” said Black Student Alliance President-elect Lauren Boswell, a third-year Architecture student.

Siegel said she hopes to help explore the reasons behind allegedly biased reporting by speaking to reporters more frequently than the current system allows.

“I think the first place we have to start is reporters and ask them why they suspected this person of an the Committee offense,” Siegel said. “If there seems to be a pattern, then the Committee can try and correct that pattern.”

Currently reporters of an alleged honor offense are involved in the first interview during the investigations process and then during a rebuttal, but are removed from the investigations process, Siegel said. Removing the reporter from the process ensures that his or her bias does not play a part in investigations, Siegel added, but does not ensure that there are not any biased motivations behind the initial report.

Accusations and Trials

After students are reported of having committed an alleged honor offense, the case is taken up by the Investigative Panel, which is comprised of three rotating Committee members, and examined to see if an honor offense occurred. If the panel believes an offense occurred, the student is formally accused and is brought to trial.

According to the statistics excluding last weekend’s trials, 35 students were formally accused of committing an honor offense by the I-Panel, 13 of whom were black. Twelve white students were accused and 10 Asian and/or Asian-American students also were brought to trial. A total of 29 trials, including last weekend’s trials, occurred during the past Committee’s term. Of the 11 white students brought to trial, six were found not guilty, whereas 14 of the 19 black students brought to trial were found not guilty. A total of 32 males, meanwhile, were brought to trial, nine of whom were found guilty. Comparatively, four of the 11 female students brought to trial were found guilty.

After looking at the statistics, several Committee members said they believe that any bias present in the beginning of the honor trial process is lost during the process.

“Once a case comes into the system ... these students are being found guilty at the same rate” regardless of race, 2007-08 Committee Chair Jess Huang said.

Fourth-year College student Carlos Oronce, co-chair of the Minority Rights Coalition, disagreed, however.

“I challenge the notion that students of different color are on par with white students” after trials, Oronce said, noting that though Committee members have told him a “balance” eventually exists, his own data analysis yields different conclusions. He explained that his conclusions are based on a study done six years ago; the Committee has yet to do a similar study since.

“You’ll see that there’s something like a 6 percent difference in guilt rate between [white] students and black students,” Oronce said. “Six percent comes off to me as a huge difference.”

Oronce added that he believes that a more formal study needs to be done to accurately see and analyze the alleged disparities. Siegel also said she believes the Committee “needs to look at ways to correct these imbalances” regardless of whether the imbalances come into play during the actual investigation and trial process.

Representation, Recruitment and Retention

Several members of the University community also have expressed concern about representation within the actual Committee itself in regards to diversity.

“I think if you look at the Committee and support officer pools, they are admittedly not very diverse,” said Committee Chair David Truetzel, a third-year Commerce student. La Alianza Chair Carolina Ferrerosa, a fourth-year College student, agreed, noting that one of her organization’s major concerns is increasing diversity within the Committee.

“We would like to see more of a push” to get more minority representatives on the Committee, and make sure that “the Committee is realistic when it looks in the mirror,” Ferrerosa said.

Members and non-members alike hope that by increasing minority representation within the Committee, other diversity issues can be addressed, like increasing outreach and personal relationships between minority contracted independent organizations and the Committee.

Vice Chair for Education Rob Atkinson, a third-year College student, said he already has had several meetings aimed at improving education efforts with some of these groups. He added that he feels it is important to create a personal relationship between these groups and the Committee before more formal relationships can be developed.

“We want to take into account the concerns or views of the different communities when we reach out to those communities,” Atkinson said. Reaching out to these groups, Truetzel added, will help ensure that all students feel like the system belongs to them, no matter their race or gender.

“When you lack diversity ... you don’t have diversity of thought, diversity of ideas,” Truetzel said.

Apprey, meanwhile, agreed that increasing minority representation on the Committee could lead to “healthy conversation, healthy debates” and could help promote “further cultural competence” and understanding.

To help increase representation, the Committee has taken steps to improve recruitment and students attracted to joining the Committee. BSA President-elect Boswell noted that the Committee has made an effort to help promote recruitment among the black student community, holding two honor education classes during both the fall and spring semesters this academic year that encouraged members of the black community to join the Committee.

Boswell said that first-year students in the black community often are approached by a lot of different programs focused on black students their first semester to create “a sense of family and place here” at the University. It is therefore sometimes difficult, however, to attract first-year students that are minorities within the Committee and other organizations during their first semesters, Boswell said. By holding an education class during the spring, Boswell said, the Committee “got outstanding turnout for minorities.”

The Committee and BSA also held a study hall that discussed both the Committee and UJC. Although Boswell said she thought it was a success, she hopes in the future that it will become more “casual” so that students will feel comfortable enough to have personal conversations.

Despite these efforts, there are still many things the Committee can do to encourage minorities to participate in the honor system, Boswell said. Even though the Committee attends The Source, the black community’s activities fair, Boswell said she does not know if it is “the most effective way” to help recruitment.

Oronce said consistent outreach efforts to these different communities, rather than just right before elections or the beginning of the year, could prove helpful for recruitment or maintaining relationships.

In addition to issues of recruitment and representation, Oronce said that many minority students end up quitting the Committee because they feel uncomfortable and marginalized. Boswell added that officer pool meetings can be isolating as students generally sit with their friends. Though she said this might be found in any organization, she also noted that it is imperative that the Committee makes sure every minority student feels comfortable and included if they wish to maintain diversity.

“This past year, there has been a move towards getting a group that is more representative,” Huang said.

Oronce also said he believes that “this year is definitely a lot better than last year” in terms of representation within both the Committee and the support officer pool, but that there is still room for improvement.

“Once we fix our problems internally, we will be in a better place to discuss” some of these other issues of diversity and the Committee, Siegel added.

FAC and DAB

The Committee’s educational outreach efforts are not limited to students. Within the Committee, the Faculty Advisory Committee and the Diversity Advisory Board were created to help address issues with faculty members and diversity organizations. The FAC chair meets with faculty members once a month to discuss faculty concerns and teach aspects of honor, while the DAB works with Honor to increase Honor relevancy and understanding with diverse groups.

Continued in article

Cheating Issues Somewhat Unique to Distance Education

Ideas for Teaching Online --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Ideas
Also see the helpers for teaching in general at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

In a previous edition of Tidbits, I provided a summary of resources for learning how and being inspired to teach online --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Ideas

I forgot to (and have since added) helpers for assessment (e.g. testing) online ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineOffCampus
Also see the helpers for assessment in general at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Also I forgot to add some special considerations for detection and prevention of online cheating ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline
Also see helpers for detection and prevention of cheating in general at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

Question
Why do colleges have to identify each of their online students without the same requirement imposed on onsite students?
My daughter took chemistry in a class of 600 students. They never carded her for exams at the University of Texas?
How can you tell if an onsite or online student has not outsourced taking an entire course with a fake ID? (see Comment 1 below)
I know of an outsourcing case like this from years ago when I was an undergraduate student, because I got the initial offer to take the course for $500.
Fake IDs are easy to fabricate today on a computer. Just change the name and student number on your own ID or change the picture and put the fake ID in laminated plastic.

Online there's a simple way to authenticate honesty online. One way is to have a respected person sign an attestation form. In 19th Century England the Village Vicar signed off on submissions of correspondence course takers. There are also a lot of Sylvan Centers throughout the U.S. that will administer examinations.

Is That Online Student Who He Says He Is?" by Sara Lipka, Chronicle of Higher Education,
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3455&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

To comply with the newly reauthorized Higher Education Act, colleges have to verify the identity of each of their online students. Several tools can help them do that, including the Securexam Remote Proctor, which scans fingerprints and captures a 360-degree view around students, and Kryterion’s Webassessor, which lets human proctors watch students on Web cameras and listen to their keystrokes.

Now colleges have a new option to show the government that they’ll catch cheating in distance education. Acxiom Corporation and Moodlerooms announced this month that they have integrated the former’s identity-verification system, called FactCheck-X, into the latter’s free, open-source course-management system, known as Moodle.

“The need to know that the student taking a test online is in fact the actual one enrolled in the class continues to be a concern for all distance-education programs,” Martin Knott, chief executive of Moodlerooms, said in a written statement.

FactCheck-X, which authenticates many online-banking transactions, requires test takers to answer detailed, personal “challenge” questions. The information comes from a variety of databases, and the company uses it to ask for old addresses, for example, or previous employers.

The new tool requires no hardware and operates within the Moodle environment. Colleges themselves control how frequently students are asked to verify their identities, Acxiom says, and because institutions don’t have to release information about students, the system fully complies with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

Comments

Where’s the concern about whether that student in the large course on campus is who he says he is? How many schools really card students before exams are given in those courses?
— Steve Foerster Nov 11, 05:52 PM

My sentiments exactly, Steve! I am surprised at the shift in thinking that somehow online students are more likely to cheat than those who appear for exams onsite!
— Born to teach Nov 11, 06:03 PM

I’ve been teaching online for five years, and I have found cheating to be much more prevalent in the online environment. Most institutions use proctors for high stakes testing, and student identification is presented. For purely online initiatives, however, it simply doesn’t make sense to ask these students to come to campus for assessments. No LMS currently addresses this legislation to my knowledge, so it is interesting to consider the options for compliance.

Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers (and took two online courses for him)
The wife of a star University of South Florida linebacker says she wrote his academic papers and took two online classes for him. The accusations against Ben Moffitt, who had been promoted by the university to the news media as a family man, were made in e-mail messages to The Tampa Tribune, and followed Mr. Moffitt’s filing for divorce. Mr. Moffitt called the accusations “hearsay,” and a university spokesman said the matter was a “domestic issue.” If it is found that Mr. Moffitt committed academic fraud, the newspaper reported, the university could be subject to an NCAA investigation.
"Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers," Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, January 5, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/news/article/3707/linebackers-wife-says-she-wrote-his-papers?at
Jensen Comment
If Florida investigates this and discovers it was true, I wonder if Moffitt's diploma will be revoked. Somehow I doubt it.

Ideas for online testing and other types of assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineOffCampus
Also see the helpers for assessment in general at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

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

"Far From Honorable," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, October 25, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/25/online-students-might-feel-less-accountable-honor-codes

Much of the urgency around creating a “sense of community” in online courses springs from a desire to keep online students from dropping out. But a recent paper suggests that strengthening a sense of social belonging among online students might help universities fight another problem: cheating.

In a series of experiments, researchers at Ohio University found that students in fully online psychology courses who signed an honor code promising not to cheat broke that pledge at a significantly higher rate than did students in a “blended” course that took place primarily in a classroom.

“The more distant students are, the more disconnected they feel, and the more likely it is that they’ll rationalize cheating,” Frank M. LoSchiavo, one of the authors, conjectured in an interview with Inside Higher Ed.

While acknowledging the limitations inherent to a study with such a narrow sample, and the fact that motivations are particularly hard to pin down when it comes to cheating, LoSchiavo and Mark A. Shatz, both psychology professors at Ohio University's Zanesville campus, said their findings may indicate that meeting face-to-face with peers and professors confers a stronger sense of accountability among students. “Honor codes,” LoSchiavo said, “are more effective when there are [strong] social connections.”

Honor codes are not, of course, the only method of deterring cheating in online courses. The proliferation of online programs has given rise to a cottage industry of remote proctoring technology, including one product that takes periodic fingerprint readings while monitoring a student’s test-taking environment with a 360-degree camera. (A 2010 survey by the Campus Computing Project suggests that a minority of institutions authenticate the identities of online students as a rule.)

But LoSchiavo said that he and Shatz were more interested in finding out whether honor codes held any sway online. If so, then online instructors might add pledges to their arsenal of anti-cheating tools, LoSchiavo said. If not, it provides yet an intriguing contribution to the discussion about student engagement and “perceived social distance” in the online environment.

They experimented with the effectiveness of honor codes in three introductory psychology courses at Ohio University. The first course had 40 students and was completely online. These students, like those in subsequent trials, were a mix of traditional-age and adult students, mostly from regional campuses in the Ohio University system. There was no honor code. Over the course of the term, the students took 14 multiple-choice quizzes with no proctoring of any kind. At the end of the term, 73 percent of the students admitted to cheating on at least one of them.

The second trial involved another fully online introductory course in the same subject. LoSchiavo and Shatz divided the class evenly into two groups of 42 students, and imposed an honor code -- posted online with the other course materials -- to one group but not the other. The students “digitally signed the code during the first week of the term, prior to completing any assignments.” The definition of cheating was the same as in the first trial: no notes, no textbooks, no Internet, no family or friends. There was no significant difference in the self-reported cheating between the two groups.

In a third trial, the professors repeated the experiment with 165 undergraduates in a “blended” course, where only 20 percent of the course was administered online and 80 percent in a traditional classroom setting. Again, they split the students into two groups: one in which they were asked to sign an honor code, and another in which they were not.

This time, when LoSchiavo and Shatz surveyed the students at the end of the term, there was a significant difference: Students who promised not to cheat were about 25 percent less likely to cheat than were those who made no such promise. Among the students who had not signed the code, 82 percent admitted to cheating.

LoSchiavo concedes that this study offers no definitive answers on the question of whether students are more likely to cheat in fully online courses. Cheating is more often than not a crime of opportunity, and containing integrity violations probably has much more to do with designing a system that limits the opportunities to cheat and gives relatively little weight to those assignments for which cheating is hardest to police.

“The bottom line is that if there are opportunities, students will cheat,” he said. “And the more opportunities they have, the more cheating there will be, and it is incumbent upon professors to put in a system that, when it’s important, cheating will be contained.”

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm

"Typing Analysis Software Keeps Online Students Honest," by Tanya Roscorla, Converge Magazine, May 12, 2010 ---
http://www.convergemag.com/classtech/Typing-Analysis-Software-Keeps-Online-Students-Honest.html

During his senior year, Shaun Sims took online classes at the University of Texas at Austin to supplement his regular courses. Some of his friends took online classes too, but they turned in assignments that other people completed for them.

That's when Sims decided to do something to cut back on cheating online. In 2009, he and computer science Ph.D student Andrew Mills launched a startup company called Digital Proctor. By analyzing each online participant's unique typing pattern, their software authenticates the student's work.

“We verify that students who sign up are the same students actually completing the coursework,” Sims said. "We make sure students are who they say they are.”

Two customers are currently using the software in pilot programs, including Midland College in Texas.

With the reauthorization of the Higher Education Opportunity Act in 2008, colleges and universities must now meet 50 new accountability requirements, one of which is making sure that the students who sign up for online courses are the ones who are participating in it. They have three options: use secure logins and passcodes; give proctored examinations; or find new technologies that could verify students' identity.

Midland College already has the first two options, but wants to be proactive in maintaining the integrity of their online classes, said Dale Beikirch, dean of distance learning and continuing education. So the college decided to enter a pilot with Digital Proctor.

“The day is coming when this secure login and password is not going to be enough to authenticate students," Beikirch said, "and that’s what’s sort of driving all of this is the need for schools to be able to ensure that the person enrolled in a course is the one taking the test.”

Continued in article

Cheating Issues Somewhat Unique to Distance Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#OnlineCheating

Question
What's the value of watching somebody send you an email message?

Answer
There may be some security and subtle communication advantages, but there's a huge cost-benefit consideration. Is it worth valuable bandwidth costs to transmit all that video of talking heads and hands? I certainly hope that most of us do not jump into this technology "head" (get it?) first.

One huge possible benefits might be in distance education. If a student in sending back test answers via email, it could add a lot to the integrity of the testing process to watch the student over this new video and audio channel from Google.

"Google juices up Gmail with video channel," MIT's Technology Review, November 11, 2008 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/21665/?nlid=1507&a=f

Google Inc. is introducing new tools that will convert its free e-mail service into a video and audio channel for people who want to see and hear each other while they communicate.

Activating the features, introduced Tuesday, will require a free piece of software as well as a Webcam, which are becoming more commonplace as computer manufacturers embed video equipment into laptops.

Once the additional software is installed, Gmail users will be given the option to see and hear each other without leaving the e-mail application.

The video feature will work only if all the participants have Gmail accounts. It's supposed to be compatible with computers running the Windows operating system or Apple Inc.'s Mac computers.

Google, the Internet's search leader, has been adding more bells and whistles to Gmail as part of its effort to gain ground on the longtime leaders in free e-mail, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Video chatting has long been available through the instant messaging services offered by Yahoo and Microsoft, but the feature isn't available in their free e-mail applications.

Although Mountain View, Calif.-based Google has been making strides since it began welcoming all comers to Gmail early last year, it remains a distant third with nearly 113 million worldwide users through September -- a 34 percent increase from the previous year, according to comScore Inc.

Microsoft's e-mail services boasted 283 million worldwide users, up 13 percent from the previous year, while Yahoo was a close second at 274 million, an 8 percent gain, comScore said.

Special considerations for detection and prevention of online cheating ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline
Also see helpers for detection and prevention of cheating in general at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

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, Cambridge, 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.

Update on May 22, 2008
Duke University Invites Back Business Students Who Cheated

"Fuqua Puts Scandal Behind It: A year after being rocked by a cheating scandal, Duke's business school plans to welcome back students who were suspended," by Alison Damast, Business Week, May 22, 2008 --- http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/may2008/bs20080522_585217.htm

"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

Question
What happens when professors who let students cheat get caught themselves?

"‘Distinguished’ No Longer," by Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed, February 22, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/22/ohio

Fallout continues from a plagiarism saga at Ohio University that has clouded the reputation of the university’s engineering college. Earlier this month, Roderick J. McDavis, Ohio’s president, for the first time in the institution’s history rescinded the title of “distinguished professor,” a high academic honor that had been given to engineering professor Jay S. Gunasekera years earlier for his research, teaching and service.

Gunasekera is at the center of the controversy, the subject of charges that he both plagiarized a graduate student’s work in a published book, and failed to adequately monitor graduate students who went on to copy others’ material in theses they submitted under his watch.
What began in 2005 as a former engineering graduate student’s effort to show dishonesty among his colleagues has ballooned into a university-wide investigation. A review by two university officials found “rampant and flagrant plagiarism” by graduate students in the mechanical engineering department, as well as a “failure to monitor” those students.

Gunasekera didn’t respond to messages for comment Thursday. He is suing the university for defamation and has said the report misstates his role.

Several other committees have looked into the work of students, many of whom Gunasekera advised. Already, Ohio has revoked the master’s degree of a former mechanical engineering student whose thesis it determined contained unoriginal work.

Gunasekera was chair of the department at the time the allegations surfaced. He was removed from that position, and also had a named professorship taken away. This year, he’s on assignment and not teaching or advising students.

In November, a panel of fellow “distinguished professors” who looked at Gunasekera’s work and that of some of his students, voted to recommend that the university remove “distinguished” from his title.

“It’s supposed to be an honor for people whose records have brought acclaim to the university and to themselves,” said Steven Grimes, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy, who chaired the committee and voted to rescind the title. “He clearly had done that, but obviously now it doesn’t look like he’s helping the reputation of the university.”

McDavis, himself the subject of much faculty criticism for his leadership of the university, followed the group’s recommendation.

David Drabold, a distinguished professor of physics, who voted in favor of removing the title, said he was surprised that the decision took as long as it did. “I think the case was fairly clear,” Drabold said, adding that he was swayed by the examples of unoriginal work from theses that were approved by Gunasekera.

Those who have heard Gunasekera’s defense to the plagiarism charges say the professor argues that as an international professor (he taught in Australia and Sri Lanka) he didn’t understand the prevailing American citation standards.

Drabold said he can understand how that could have been the case initially — Gunasekera joined the Ohio faculty in 1983. He even said the professor made an attempt in the preface of the book in question to credit the graduate student whose material he used.

But, as Drabold and others on the distinguished faculty committee note, his defense wouldn’t explain why he allowed his graduate students to routinely copy others for years after he started at Ohio.

Said Gar Rothwell, a distinguished professor of environmental and plant biology: “There are standards of scholarship that we all have to follow. They aren’t secret.”

Greg Kremer, chair of the mechanical engineering department and an associate professor, said while he didn’t feel comfortable commenting on what Gunasekera’s future at Ohio should be, he offered that “the level of proof and the level of seriousness it takes to remove a distinguished professor title is very, very significantly different than anything that would result in the de-tenuring process.”

Kremer said the department is waiting for the university-wide investigation of student theses to finish before it decides whether to take action.

Several of the distinguished professors interviewed referred to Gunasekera as affable and successful in parts of his professional life — saying he brought in significant external funding for engineering and technology projects.

“This is a decent man who has been through a lot of unpleasantness,” Drabold said. “This was an active, productive person. He was trying to be a good citizen and was simply doing too much.”

Grimes agrees that Gunasekera likely didn’t have bad intentions, and that “it’s not at all obvious to me that what he did rises to the level of firing.” Yet he said that he’d still “seriously consider” voting for de-tenure.

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:
How to Cheat With Crib Notes (Video) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpQZDJ2fGnI

Other Videos on How to Cheat

How to Cheat During Exams --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH2KZTyp3_A&feature=related
(But students in the front row are out of luck.)

Skirting: How to Cheat on Exams --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slL9WkjZt-g
(There's hope for the front row too. But if you have a male instructor, your chances of getting caught are greater.)

How to cheat in an exam with just a pen and paper --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fr0e8DqQ-E&feature=related
How to Cheat at School --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcmHVSZr32o

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.

"Cambridge Survey Finds That 49% of Students Have Plagiarized," by Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3, 2008 ---
Click Here

Half the students at the University of Cambridge have plagiarized, according to results of a survey by Varsity, a student newspaper at the university.

The newspaper said its survey had attracted 1,014 respondents, of whom 49 percent said they had committed at least one act defined by the university as plagiarism. The list of forbidden acts included: handing in someone else’s essay; copying and pasting from the Internet; copying or making up statistics, code, or research results; handing in work that had been submitted previously; using someone else’s ideas without acknowledgment; buying an essay; and having an essay edited by Oxbridge Essays, a company that provides online essay services. Five percent of those who admitted having plagiarized said they had been caught.

Some students were surprised to find that what they thought were innocuous academic acts had landed them in the plagiarist category. “Of course I use other people’s ideas without acknowledging them, but I didn’t think that this made me a plagiarist,” one student said.

But others admitted copying or buying work “when I am late with an essay or finding it difficult.” Law students, the newspaper said, broke the rules most often, with 62 percent admitting that they had plagiarized. Four percent of students surveyed said they had written for Oxbridge Essays.

Comments

Yes, and 100% of civil rights leaders named Martin Luther King, Jr., have also plagiarized. And 100% of writers named Doris Kearns Goodwin have plagiarized. And 100% of vice-presidential candidates named Joe Biden have plagiarized. These students are in good company. Maybe we should educate them rather than haul them before a firing squad, as too many professors want to do.

— gl Nov 1, 08:22 PM #

I agree with gl, it seems a bit harsh to haul anyone anywhere, much less before a firing squad, until we have delved into the depth of the training students receive about the rigors of attribution. (Hint: scandalously little)

The internet with all its advances did bomb us back to the intellectual property stone age with the conspicuous absence of paper trails for the materials one can find within a click or two of beginning research.

The other part of the problem, and I am ready to be placed before the firing squad for this comment, professors (especially at the undergraduate level) do not put enough thinking into the construction of their essay questions. And to make matters worse, they use the same old tired questions year in decade out. So let’s look at our role in perpetuating this obnoxious problem and criminal waste of time on both sides.

Newsflash, profs! Life is short. Why spend your precious discretionary time playing cops and robbers with your students?

— BC PROF Nov 1, 11:42 PM #

Using a service like Turnitin.com helps to reduce plagiarism quite a bit because even if the students don’t have a high likelihood of getting caught, they know that they are really taking a big risk if they try to fool the system. If students know there’s a good chance they’ll get caught, they will not engage in plagiarism. Some professors would rather spend their leisure time with their families or doing their own research rather than chasing down sources of plagiarism. Use the tools to help you catch cheaters so you can have more time for your own life.

— MEH Nov 2, 02:16 PM #

Of course if I discover that a student has committed plagiarism, I take the steps that are prescribed by the honor code at my university. But I did not become a teacher to spend my time enforcing such codes. If a student cheats and receives a grade that he doesn’t deserve, he is the poorer for it. We have this idea that cheaters are robbing someone else of something valuable, and therefore that we ought to act to stop them or to punish them. It is not so difficult to see that plagiarists are only cheating themselves. They pay the very high price of not learning what they might have learned under their own lights, and to my mind that is penalty enough.

— SK Nov 2, 02:49 PM #

MEH, the time you save with turnitin.com is lost when you catch a cheater, because you yourself become a cheater if you don’t report the honor violation (rather than handle it privately, which most campuses frown upon). So assuming you’re as honest as you expect your student to be, you’re sucked into the whole lengthy honors process, with forms and hearings and meetings and eventually the wish that you had not been so persnickety.

I think the plagiarism situation is easy to avoid if you assign paper topics based on very recent events about which nothing could have been already written. Or, as I do, require first drafts of nearly completed works, a couple weeks before the real due date, with which you can issue warnings framed in face-saving look-what-you-forgot-you-cite-or-enclose-in-quotation-marks language. They get the message you’re tough, especially if you threaten reporting an honors violation if the supposed error is not corrected, and you spend even more time with your own life.

— gl Nov 2, 03:04 PM #

gl

I think the plagiarism situation is easy to avoid if you assign paper topics based on very recent events about which nothing could have been already written.

right, I am sure that is feasible in history of philosophy classes. Second Idea was much more reasonable.

— jon Nov 2, 08:54 PM #

The key is what the students perceive as cheating. If using someone else’s ideas without acknowledging it is cheating, then we are all cheaters. The kids come in to college 17 years old and dumb. They sit in lectures, read books, talk to classmates and faculty, and hear all kinds of new ideas. How can they ever acknowledge where all those ideas came from? How can they even remember when the ideas were first planted and by whom?

Similarly, good writing involves sharing ideas with other students, revising and proofreading. That violates the honor code standard of “doing your own work.” We create a catch-22 when we demand high quality work but strictly prohibit some of the methods that are essential for good learning. And even if we don’t “strictly” prohibit appropriate collaboration, not all students know where the line is. Consequently, some students will identify themselves as cheaters, even though the type of help they get on their assignments is acceptable.

And in my field, it is pretty common for students to forget to write down some detail of their source information, and at the last minute have to fudge the works cited. Technically it is fabrication, and the students know it. It would be embarrassing to publish a error-filled works cited. But in the end it is too trivial to worry about.

All these kinds of cases drive up the number of self-identified cheaters. It isn’t worth faculty worrying out.

— Shar Nov 3, 12:33 AM #

As others have noted, the extensive use of plagiarism requires an educational solution. I commend to you an excellent article by Eleanour Snow who describes (and links to) a number of institution-wide web tutorials designed to teach students about plagiarism. You can view the article at http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=306&action=article (requires free subscription).

James L. Morrison Editor-in-Chief, Innovate

Jensen Comment
There's serious doubt that Vladimir Putin even read his own thesis.

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

Since I have such a huge number of documents at my Website, I often wonder what kinds of grades I'm getting around the world --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

November 3, 2008 reply from Guest, Paul [paul.guest@CRANFIELD.AC.UK]

Having taught accounting at Cambridge for several years, I believe that these high plagiarism figures are of no relevance to any accounting courses taught there.

I would guess that the high figures are likely due to the unique college tutorial system at Cambridge University (along with Oxford and a few others) where undergraduate students attend frequent (usually biweekly) small group tutorials in addition to lectures. Students are often required to write essays for these tutorials under very tight time constraints. The high plagiarism figures are likely driven by undergraduates trying to finish essays by these deadlines. The students don't benefit from such cheating. Although the essays are marked they do not count towards a final grade, and any under-prepared students are usually exposed as such in the tutorials. [For accounting tutorials, essays are very rarely set, and instead students are required to work through a previously unseen question.]

Paul Guest
Cranfield School of Management

Then in a second message Paul wrote the following:

I agree, cheating students won't learn much about the assigned material if they cheat. However, under the Cambridge and Oxford (tutorial & written assignment) system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial_system , cheating students are much more likely to be caught at an early stage when the consequences are much less severe (since written assignments do not contribute to final grades). The cheating can therefore be dealt with informally and with a light touch by a tutor who is close to the student, so lessons can be learned with no lasting damage. Especially important when many cases of plagiarism appear to arise from ignorance.

Also, assignment writing for tutorials at Cambridge is optional. Undergraduate students can choose not to produce written assignments for tutorials (or simply not turn up to them). However, by not participating they are foregoing the most important learning experience at Cambridge. The tutorial and written assignment system is the fundamental pedagogic difference between Cambridge and other universities and a key reason why Cambridge has been so successful. It is worth £2000 per year for each undergraduate student (previously paid by the government but not any longer as of this year http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/oct/14/highereducation.universityfunding ). Students are very aware of this and very rarely miss supervisions or fail to submit written assignments.

From my experience in teaching these supervisions (I also taught economics and finance for which essays were assigned) I dont believe that plagiarism is rampant. Instead I interpret the high figures along the lines suggested by Dave Albrecht, that although 49% of students have plagiarised at some point, each student has done it very rarely.

By the way, a huge thankyou from across the pond to you and the other contributors to this list, and for the great material on your website.

Paul Guest

Some cheating scandals may not be scandals

Question
In the Central Florida University cheating scandal was it student cheating or instructor laziness?
Watch the video?

This article below blames the Central Florida University management instructor (Richard Quinn) for being lazy in using test questions that the publisher allowed students to download for study and review. Perhaps it was not the scandal as grave as we were led to believe. It certainly appears the media over-reacted on this one.
Also see http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/17/cheating

In the article below you have to scroll down past the LSU physics professor discussion to see the discussion on the Richard Quinn video that's now off the air.
But no, I found the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbzJTTDO9f4
It may not stay there long!

"Video Killed the Faculty Star," by Jack Stripling, Inside Higher Ed, November 18. 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/18/videos

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
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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.

Here's another way
How to Cheat With Crib Notes (Video) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpQZDJ2fGnI

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

Foreign Countries That Cheat

Plagiarism --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
Plagiarism Law and Legal Definition --- http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/plagiarism/
The Best Plagiarism Video Ever Made ---
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/international_law/2010/06/friday-fun-the-best-plagiarism-video-ever-made.html

There is no such thing as international copyright law --- http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2005/11/21/international-incidents/

"Yale U. Complains That Chinese University Press Plagiarized Free Course Materials," by Jeff Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 7, 2011 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/yale-u-complains-that-chinese-university-press-plagiarized-free-course-materials/31609?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Bob Jensen's links to Yale's open sharing are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

"Chinese Publisher Apologizes to Yale for Plagiarizing Free Course Lectures," by Jeff Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 17, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/yale-u-complains-that-chinese-university-press-plagiarized-free-course-materials/31609

A university press in China appears to be selling transcripts of Yale University’s free online courses in a new volume, sparking complaints from Yale officials. Under the terms of the course giveaway, called Open Yale Courses, others cannot profit from the material.

Shaanxi Normal University Press recently published the compilation of five Yale open courses, according to a post today on a Yale Alumni Magazine blog. The book reportedly lifted largely from Chinese subtitles translated by a nonprofit group called YYeT, though that group insists it was not involved in the publication, whose author is listed as Wu Han.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing videos and course materials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

"Yale Professor at Peking U. Assails Widespread Plagiarism in China," Chronicle of Higher Education, December 21, 2007 --- http://chronicle.com/news/article/3678/yale-professor-at-peking-u-assails-widespread-plagiarism-in-china

A Yale University professor has written a stern letter expressing concern about widespread plagiarism by students he taught at Peking University this fall.

“The fact that I have encountered this much plagiarism … tells me something about the behavior of other professors and administrators here,” Stephen Stearns, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, wrote to his students. “They must tolerate a lot of it, and when they detect it, they cover it up without serious punishment, probably because they do not want to lose face. If they did punish it, it would not be this frequent.”

Plagiarism and other forms of academic corruption have been common in Chinese higher education for years, even as the authorities try to raise academic standards.

Mr. Stearns went on to attack the lack of protection for intellectual-property rights in China, even citing the pirating of his own textbook by Peking University itself, a premier Chinese institution that is often called Beida. “Disturbingly, plagiarism fits into a larger pattern of behavior in China,” he wrote. “China ignores international intellectual-property rights. Beida sees nothing wrong in copying my textbook, for example, in complete violation of international copyright agreements, causing me to lose income, stealing from me quite directly.”

Chinese translations of the strongly worded letter, titled “To My Students in Beijing, Fall 2007,” quickly spread around the Chinese-language Internet. It was also published on New Threads, a Chinese Web site that reports cases of plagiarism in China. (The English original follows the Chinese translation.)

Continued in article

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

A Yale University professor has written a stern letter expressing concern about widespread plagiarism by students he taught at Peking University this fall.

“The fact that I have encountered this much plagiarism … tells me something about the behavior of other professors and administrators here,” Stephen Stearns, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, wrote to his students. “They must tolerate a lot of it, and when they detect it, they cover it up without serious punishment, probably because they do not want to lose face. If they did punish it, it would not be this frequent.”

Plagiarism and other forms of academic corruption have been common in Chinese higher education for years, even as the authorities try to raise academic standards.

Mr. Stearns went on to attack the lack of protection for intellectual-property rights in China, even citing the pirating of his own textbook by Peking University itself, a premier Chinese institution that is often called Beida. “Disturbingly, plagiarism fits into a larger pattern of behavior in China,” he wrote. “China ignores international intellectual-property rights. Beida sees nothing wrong in copying my textbook, for example, in complete violation of international copyright agreements, causing me to lose income, stealing from me quite directly.”

Chinese translations of the strongly worded letter, titled “To My Students in Beijing, Fall 2007,” quickly spread around the Chinese-language Internet. It was also published on New Threads, a Chinese Web site that reports cases of plagiarism in China. (The English original follows the Chinese translation.)

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

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

Question
What's the latest innovation in cheating?

Hint
Students are using YouTube in a very clever way.

"Students Show How to Cheat via YouTube," Chronicle of Higher Education, July 11, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3160&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Academic cheating and dishonesty have long been a problem. But with YouTube students have discovered a new avenue for actually promoting such fraud. Liz Losh, a rhetorician at the University of California at Irvine, notes that there’s now a genre of videos that combine cheating advice with a “do-it-yourself aesthetic.” She flagged one of them Wednesday on her blog. It shows a student using a scanner and photo-editing software to make a cheat sheet on a Coke bottle.

Plagiarism: A study of 24 million college papers by Turnitin, which makes plagiarism-detection software, finds that college students are most likely to lift copy from Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, and Slideshare. The study counted all suspiciously similar language and did not consider whether students cited the sources they lifted from. Via the Scholarly Kitchen, where Phil Davis noted some of the study’s limitations.
Profanity: A Web site promoting Oberlin College co-created by its social media coordinator, Why the F*** Should I Choose Oberlin?, drew varied reactions and plenty of attention last week. The site, which notes it is not officially affiliated with Oberlin, collects profanity-laced quotes about why Oberlin is great. Georgy Cohen interviews the co-creator, Ma’ayan Plaut, who says she has “tacit and unofficial approval” from her boss. On Higher Ed Marketing, Andrew Careaga says his inner 15-year-old thought the site is brilliant, but his 51-year-old “shook his jaded head.”

Fraud: Educause offers advice on how colleges can respond to a Dear Colleague letter from the U.S. Department of Education that asks colleges to limit student-aid fraud in online programs.

Design: Keith Hampson argues that good design will play an increasingly important role in the college student experience as college move online. “Somehow, though, digital higher education—both its software and content—has managed to remain untouched by good design. Design is not even on the agenda,” he says.

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

"The Sources of Plagiarism," Inside Higher Ed, April 29, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/04/29/qt#258386

A new study by Turnitin, the plagiarism detection service, has found that term paper mills account only for a small minority (15 percent) of the apparent sources of the copying. One-third of such material comes from social networks and another one-fourth from "legitimate" educational sources.

"Plagiarism Goes Social," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 28, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/plagiarism-appears-to-be-going-social/31142?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

The Web is going social. And now it seems that plagiarism might be heading that way, too.

A new study found that social and user-generated Web sites are the most popular sources for student copying. Academic sites come in second, while paper mills and cheat sites are third.

A report on the findings was released today by iParadigms, creator of Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection service that takes uploaded student papers and checks them against various databases to pinpoint unoriginal content. For its study, the company analyzed 40 million papers submitted by high school and college students over a 10-month period.

“It shows that plagiarism in sourcing work is going the way that everything else in the world is going,” says Chris Harrick, vice president of marketing at Turnitin. “People are relying more on their peers than on experts.”

But the findings come with a big caveat: Turnitin detects “matched content,” not necessarily plagiarism. In other words, the software will flag material from a paper mill, but it will also flag legitimate stuff that is properly cited and attributed. The company leaves it up to individual professors to determine plagiarism. So there’s no way to know exactly how much of the copying highlighted in this study, outside of the material that matches content from shady sites, is actually cheating.

Continued in article

It' Snot Nice to Cheat
"Illinois Candidate Caught Cheating on the CPA Exam," by Adrienne Gonzalez, Going Concern, June 28, 2011 ---
http://goingconcern.com/2011/06/illinois-cpa-exam-candidate-caught-cheating-on-the-cpa-exam/

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

"High-Tech Cheating Abounds, and Professors Bear Some Blame," by Jeffrey Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/High-Tech-Cheating-on-Homew/64857/

Cheated in Online Tests?
"Medical Students, Accused of Cheating, Face Possible Expulsion," Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/medical-students-accused-of-cheating-face-possible-expulsion/31516

The State University of New York Upstate Medical University is investigating allegations that some fourth-year students cheated in a medical-literature course, reports The Post-Standard, in Syracuse. The students, who are scheduled to graduate in May, could be expelled, or face lesser punishment, if the charges are true, said the dean, Steven Scheinman. One student told school officials that some students in the course had collaborated in taking online tests, which is not permitted.

The students are in their seats, and the test has begun.

And so has the cheating.

BlackBerrys and iPhones need just a couple of taps of the keypad to offer the right answers. It doesn't matter whether the subject is math, social studies, science, English, or a foreign language. Information is available at your fingertips, just as advertised.

Indeed, we have to face a simple fact about students today: As technology has evolved to provide a vast wealth of information at any time, anywhere, cheating has never been easier.

In the good old days, cheating was a simple affair and as a result not too difficult to track down, like the time a girl with limited English skills in one of my high school English classes handed in a terrifically written, sophisticated short story. She copied, word for word, Shirley Jackson's story "Charles," except for changing the title character's name. I guess she thought I wouldn't have a chance hunting down the story once she cleverly renamed her story "Bob." Alas, catching a cheater is not so easy any more.

Smartphone Photos

A few years ago, students would write the answers on the inside labels of water bottles they brought into tests. Today we have students photographing the tests from their phones in an earlier period of the day, so that students in subsequent periods could know the questions before they walk into the classroom.

Now catching the cheaters requires a level of vigilance and research better suited for the corridors of the National Security Agency than the cluttered desk of a humble teacher.

Today, students wouldn't have to rely merely on CliffNotes to provide them with handy, if highly unoriginal, commentaries on Hamlet. They have other choices, including study guides from SparkNotes, PinkMonkey, ClassicNotes, and BookRags, as well as a seemingly endless supply of articles online from both paid and unpaid sources. Just Google "Hamlet Essay," and you'll receive a listing of 1,460,000 results, the first page of which is teeming with free essays.

Sure, you can track down some of the cheaters by typing in an excerpt of their essays on the very same Google search engine to discover the source. And such websites as Turnitin.com, which checks student papers against a massive archive of published and unpublished work for signs of plagiarism, can also be useful. But the available materials are so vast, and the opportunities for students to create hybrid papers so easy, that students are now one step ahead, especially since underground networks of materials are constantly cropping up, concealed from the peering eyes of teachers.

Fonts of Duplicity

Of course, even in this technological age, some students are so lazy they won't even bother to match the font and the type size for one section of an assignment to another, as they indiscriminately cut and paste material from assorted websites. A Spanish teacher I know once told me of a student who handed in an essay she clearly plagiarized from a website. Unfortunately, the girl could not explain why her essay was written in the Catalan language as opposed to Spanish.

Yet, we can't count on incompetence. Many students are so wily and crafty that they've learned to mask their cheating to impressive levels. Some can find answers on handheld devices while looking you straight in the eye or appearing to be in deep, philosophical contemplation; others plagiarize from a dizzying array of sources and cover their trail with vigilance worthy of a CIA operative.

Continued in article

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

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

Bob Jensen's thread on cheating ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

Ideas for Teaching Online --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Ideas
Also see the helpers for teaching in general at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

"To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery," by Trip Gabriel, The New York Times, July 5, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/education/06cheat.html?hp
Thank you David Albrecht for the heads up.

The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central Florida.

No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could disguise a student’s speaking into a hands-free cellphone to an accomplice outside.

The 228 computers that students use are recessed into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen — using, say, a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test later — is easy to spot.

Scratch paper is allowed — but it is stamped with the date and must be turned in later.

When a proctor sees something suspicious, he records the student’s real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for evidence.

Taylor Ellis, the associate dean who runs the testing center within the business school at Central Florida, the nation’s third-largest campus by enrollment, said that cheating had dropped significantly, to 14 suspected incidents out of 64,000 exams administered during the spring semester.

“I will never stop it completely, but I’ll find out about it,” Mr. Ellis said.

As the eternal temptation of students to cheat has gone high-tech — not just on exams, but also by cutting and pasting from the Internet and sharing of homework online like music files — educators have responded with their own efforts to crack down.

This summer, as incoming freshmen fill out forms to select roommates and courses, some colleges — Duke and Bowdoin among them — are also requiring them to complete online tutorials about plagiarism before they can enroll.

Anti-plagiarism services requiring students to submit papers to be vetted for copying is a booming business. Fifty-five percent of colleges and universities now use such a service, according to the Campus Computing Survey.

The best-known service, Turnitin.com, is engaged in an endless cat-and-mouse game with technologically savvy students who try to outsmart it. “The Turnitin algorithms are updated on an on-going basis,” the company warned last month in a blog post titled “Can Students ‘Trick’ Turnitin?”

The extent of student cheating, difficult to measure precisely, appears widespread at colleges. In surveys of 14,000 undergraduates over the last four years, an average of 61 percent admitted to cheating on assignments and exams.

The figure declined somewhat from 65 percent earlier in the decade, but the researcher who conducted the surveys, Donald L. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers, doubts there is less of it. Instead, he suspects students no longer regard certain acts as cheating at all, for instance, cutting and pasting a few sentences at a time from the Internet.

Andrew Daines, who graduated in May from Cornell, where he served on a board in the College of Arts and Sciences that hears cheating cases, said Internet plagiarism was so common that professors told him they had replaced written assignments with tests and in-class writing.

Mr. Daines, a philosophy major, contributed to pages that Cornell added last month to its student Web site to bring attention to academic integrity. They include a link to a voluntary tutorial on avoiding plagiarism and a strongly worded admonition that “other generations may not have had as many temptations to cheat or plagiarize as yours,” and urging students to view this as a character test.

Mr. Daines said he was especially disturbed by an epidemic of students’ copying homework. “The term ‘collaborative work’ has been taken to this unbelievable extreme where it means, because of the ease of e-mailing, one person looking at someone else who’s done the assignment,” he said.

At M.I.T., David E. Pritchard, a physics professor, was able to accurately measure homework copying with software he had developed for another purpose — to allow students to complete sets of physics problems online. Some answered the questions so fast, “at first I thought we had some geniuses here at M.I.T.,” Dr. Pritchard said. Then he realized they were completing problems in less time than it took to read them and were copying the answers — mostly, it turned out, from e-mail from friends who had already done the assignment.

About 20 percent copied one-third or more of their homework, according to a study Dr. Pritchard and colleagues published this year. Students who copy homework find answers at sites like Course Hero, which is a kind of Napster of homework sharing, where students from more than 3,500 institutions upload papers, class notes and past exams.

Another site, Cramster, specializes in solutions to textbook questions in science and engineering. It boasts answers from 77 physics textbooks — but not Dr. Pritchard’s popular “Mastering Physics,” an online tutorial, because his publisher, Pearson, searches the Web for solutions and requests they be taken down to protect its copyright.

“You can use technology as well for detecting as for committing” cheating, Dr. Pritchard said.

The most popular anti-cheating technology, Turnitin.com, says it is now used by 9,500 high schools and colleges. Students submit written assignments to be compared with billions of archived Web pages and millions of other student papers, before they are sent to instructors. The company says that schools using the service for several years experience a decline in plagiarism.

Cheaters trying to outfox Turnitin have tried many tricks, some described in blogs and videos. One is to replace every “e” in plagiarized text with a foreign letter that looks like it, such as a Cyrillic “e,” meant to fool Turnitin’s scanners. Another is to use the Macros tool in Microsoft Word to hide copied text. Turnitin says neither scheme works.

Some educators have rejected the service and other anti-cheating technologies on the grounds that they presume students are guilty, undermining the trust that instructors seek with students.

Washington & Lee University, for example, concluded several years ago that Turnitin was inconsistent with the school’s honor code, “which starts from a basis of trusting our students,” said Dawn Watkins, vice president for student affairs. “Services like Turnitin.com give the implication that we are anticipating our students will cheat.”

For similar reasons, some students at the University of Central Florida objected to the business school’s testing center with its eye-in-the-sky video in its early days, Dr. Ellis said.

But recently during final exams after a summer semester, almost no students voiced such concerns. Rose Calixte, a senior, was told during an exam to turn her cap backward, a rule meant to prevent students from writing notes under the brim. Ms. Calixte disapproved of the fashion statement but didn’t knock the reason: “This is college. There is the possibility for people to cheat.”

A first-year M.B.A. student, Ashley Haumann, said that when she was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, “everyone cheated” in her accounting class of 300 by comparing answers during quizzes. She preferred the highly monitored testing center because it “encourages you to be ready for the test because you can’t turn and ask, ‘What’d you get?’ ”

For educators uncomfortable in the role of anti-cheating enforcer, an online tutorial in plagiarism may prove an elegantly simple technological fix.

That was the finding of a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January. Students at an unnamed selective college who completed a Web tutorial were shown to plagiarize two-thirds less than students who did not. (The study also found that plagiarism was concentrated among students with lower SAT scores.)

The tutorial “had an outsize impact,” said Thomas S. Dee, a co-author, who is now an economist at the University of Virginia.

“Many instructors don’t want to create this kind of adversarial environment with their students where there is a presumption of guilt,” Dr. Dee said. “Our results suggest a tutorial worked by educating students rather than by frightening them.”

Only a handful of colleges currently require students to complete such a tutorial, which typically illustrates how to cite a source or even someone else’s ideas, followed by a quiz.

The tutorial that Bowdoin uses was developed with its neighbor colleges Bates and Colby several years ago. Part of the reason it is required for enrollment, said Suzanne B. Lovett, a Bowdoin psychology professor whose specialty is cognitive development, is that Internet-age students see so many examples of text, music and images copied online without credit that they may not fully understand the idea of plagiarism.

As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on his arm. He had blended them into his body art.

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

The Dog Swallowed My Homework and Pooped Out the Answers

On November 26, 2009 I was spammed by a so-called Mike Watson providing a link to a site where students can supposedly submit their assignments for “help” from experts --- http://www.pupilhelp.com/
The site also offers live chats with a paying student regarding a homework assignment.

Pupilhelp was born in the month of July 2006. Pupilhelp was started with a vision to help students with their assignments and homework at an affordable price. More than ten thousand students have benefited from the services of pupilhelp. The service at pupilhelp is available for students all over the world. We at pupilhelp believe in having the best among the best in the tutor team. Tutors are recruited after a laborious process which tests their skills, knowledge on the subject and willingness to work anytime, anywhere. Every tutor in pupilhelp holds a master's degree or a doctorate degree in their respective subject. The feed backs from our students have always been motivating and inspiring. We would like to continue providing quality work at an affordable price which has always been our unique feature. We would like to extend our thanks to students who have supported us and we request you to continue your support. We hope that many more students across the globe will use our service.

Pupilhelp provides e-mail based Homework/Assignment Help to students from grade 12 to Ph.D. level. Our primary objective is to help you in improving your grades and to achieve academic excellence. With our help you can quickly and easily get your assignment done by one of over 300 experts. Our service is focused on, time delivery, superior quality, creativity, and originality for every service we provide.

The discipline categories include “Accounting.”

My hunch is that the so-called assignment “counselors” are probably sitting on top of hundreds of solutions manuals for major and even minor textbooks. Text phrases from end-of-chapter assignments are probably linked to answers in solutions manuals.

In any case, it is advised that instructors do not rely heavily on end-of-chapter assignments for grading purposes. Perhaps students can learn a great deal from counselors at this site, but for me the site does not pass the smell test even though it claims to have a supposed "no plagiarism" policy. I wonder how closely the recommended solutions follow the copyrighted solutions in textbook manuals supposedly available only to course instructors. Of course many of these solutions manuals are for sale at used book sites and even on eBay and Craigslist.

November 27, 2009 message from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

I received 52 e-mails from him on Thursday. That it took 52 to deliver the message made me think it was a bogus site.

I think most HW real person solutions differ from the solutions manual only in terms of layout, as there's only one way the answer can be.

I can't ever remember a publishers SM that provided explanation that would benefit students. Presumably instructors don't need the explanation, so it isn't provided. I recall the last time I taught Advanced Accounting, and used a certain textbook with its HW problems. I had to seek help to get some of those solutions explained to me. If pupilhelp.com provides explanations, then it might be a service worth paying for.

Given the publisher sites nowhave algorithmic HW, I'm confident that pupilhelp.com has seen a decline in business. Of course, with the economy it undoubtedly has a decline in revenues just like everyone else. That could explain the spam-like broadcast advertising.

Jensen Comment
I think David is correct. I would warn students not to send credit card numbers to this outfit.

Question
If you are using some commercial test bank for examinations in your course, can students down load them here?
http://www.e-junkie.com/

At a minimum, perhaps you should conduct a search in the same manner as Professor Krause?

Note that when I enter "Spiceland" at http://www.e-junkie.com/ there are zero hits.
Instructors must be more creative in their searches.

February 16, 2010 message from Paul Krause [Paul@PAULKRAUSE.COM]

In a recent discussion someone mentioned they use questions from an author's test bank. A student has told me of the very readily available answer manuals and test banks, and walked me through a real transaction. The example he used was Spiceland's Financial Accounting text. Both manuals were available for purchase, and payment was quite easy through PayPal.

Maybe I'm naive, but I was not aware of the ease of obtaining this material.

The site is http://www.e-junkie.com/shop/product/335909.php which I got to by typing into a Google search "Financial Accounting Spiceland answer manual". The test bank procedure was essentially the same, I typed in "financial accounting spiceland test bank" and got
http://www.e-junkie.com/shop/product/337857.php

The answer manual was an exact copy of what instructors can download or get on a CD.

I tried "Financial accounting horngren" and got a reply "either the listing or the payment method has been removed"

For a listing of all products at this site and to see if your text is available there, try http://www.e-junkie.com/shop/ I'm sure there are other sites also, I didn't bother to go any deeper.

So what? We must assume that all answers and all test questions are available to any computer literate accounting major (that is all accounting majors). If we feel test banks are a good study guide for students, if they review all questions in a test bank, then I suppose it is OK. However, if we want to maintain integrity of tests, forget about using test banks.

Paul Krause
Chico, CA, USA
Paul@PaulKrause.com

February 17, 2010 reply from Glen Gray [glen.gray@CSUN.EDU]

Here is the flip side—I periodically teach the capstone course for the management department. The book I use was published by Houghton Mifflin. Sometime in the recent past, Cengage acquired Houghton Mifflin. When I asked Cegage for the test bank (which is an instructor resource listed in the book), first I was told there wasn’t one. Then I was told, if there was one, it must have “fell into a crack” during the acquisition. I told my students that if I couldn’t get the test bank I would have to make up my own exam from scratch. That put fear into my students, so several of them said they could get a copy of the test bank for me! Ultimately, after much complaining by me, Cengage looked into the crack and found the CD, so I didn’t have to rely on my students to provide the test bank.

Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA Dept. of Accounting & Information Systems College of Business & Economics California State University, Northridge 18111 Nordhoff ST Northridge, CA 91330-8372
818.677.3948
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f

February 17, 2010 reply from Paul Krause [Paul@PAULKRAUSE.COM]

I just went out there to check the links, and lo and behold the prices have increased dramatically for Spiceland. My student paid $15 at PayPal for an instant download.

I see the prices now are $29 for the Solutions Manual and $41 for the Test Bank. The market works! Wait until mid-terms come around to see how much the Test Bank goes for then.

Paul

February 17, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Paul,

Lest we make an assumption that the buyers are all students, I think that your posting on the AECM inspired a boat load of instructors to order the Spiceland test bank, e.g., the instructors who adopted Kieso might want to confuse their students who all bought the Kieso test bank for courses requiring the Kieso textbook.

In other words, we can attribute much of the increase in test bank demand to you Paul.

Bob Jensen

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

Darn! It’s hard for us accounting professors to pad our resumes.
I could not find a single essay to purchase on accounting for derivative financial instruments or variable interest entities.

"Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply," by Thomas Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Cheating-Goes-Global-as-Essay/32817/

The orders keep piling up. A philosophy student needs a paper on Martin Heidegger. A nursing student needs a paper on dying with dignity. An engineering student needs a paper on electric cars.

Screen after screen, assignment after assignment—hundreds at a time, thousands each semester. The students come from all disciplines and all parts of the country. They go to community colleges and Ivy League universities. Some want a 10-page paper; others request an entire dissertation.

This is what an essay mill looks like from the inside. Over the past six months, with the help of current and former essay-mill writers, The Chronicle looked closely at one company, tracking its orders, examining its records, contacting its customers. The company, known as Essay Writers, sells so-called custom essays, meaning that its employees will write a paper to a student's specifications for a per-page fee. These papers, unlike those plucked from online databases, are invisible to plagiarism-detection software.

Everyone knows essay mills exist. What's surprising is how sophisticated and international they've become, not to mention profitable.

In a previous era, you might have found an essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you'll find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in Manila or Mumbai. Just as many American companies are outsourcing their administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to outsource their academic work.

And if the exponential surge in the number of essay mills is any indication, the problem is only getting worse. But who, exactly, is running these companies? And what do the students who use their services have to say for themselves?

Go to Google and type "buy an essay." Among the top results will be Best Essays, whose slogan is "Providing Students with Original Papers since 1997." It's a professional-looking site with all the bells and whistles: live chat, flashy graphics, stock photos of satisfied students. Best Essays promises to deliver "quality custom written papers" by writers with either a master's degree or a Ph.D. Prices range from $19.99 to $42.99 per page, depending on deadline and difficulty.

To place an order, you describe your assignment, the number of pages, and how quickly you need it. Then you enter your credit-card number, and, a couple of days later, the paper shows up in your in box. All you have to do is add your name to the top and turn it in. Simple.

What's going on behind the scenes, however, is another story.

The address listed on the site is in Reston, Va. But it turns out that's the address of a company that allows clients to rent "virtual office space" — in other words, to claim they're somewhere they're not. A previous address used by Best Essays was a UPS store in an upscale strip mall. And while the phone number for Best Essays has a Virginia area code, that line is registered to a company that allows customers to forward calls anywhere in the world over the Internet.

The same contact information appears on multiple other essay-mill Web sites with names like Rush Essay, Superior Papers, and Best Term Paper. All of these sites are operated by Universal Research Inc., also known as Essay Writers. The "US/Canada Headquarters" for the company, according to yet another Web site, is in Herndon, Va. An Essay Writers representative told a reporter that the company's North American headquarters was a seven-story building with an attached garage and valet parking.

That was a lie. Drive to the address, and you will find a perfectly ordinary suburban home with a neatly trimmed front lawn and a two-car garage. The owner of the house is Victor Guevara and, ever since he bought it in 2004, he has received lots of strange mail. For instance, a calendar recently arrived titled "A Stroll Through Ukrainian Cities," featuring photographs of notable buildings in Odessa and Yalta. Not all of the missives, however, have been so benign. Once a police officer came to the door bearing a complaint from a man in India who hadn't been paid by Essay Writers. Mr. Guevara explained to the officer that he had no idea what the man was talking about.

So why, of all the addresses in the United States, was Mr. Guevara's chosen? He's not sure, but he has a theory. Before he bought the house, a woman named Olga Mizyuk lived there for a short time. The previous owner, a friend of Mr. Guevara's, let her stay rent free because she was down on her luck and she promised to teach him Russian. Mr. Guevara believes it's all somehow connected to Ms. Mizyuk.

That theory is not too far-fetched. The state of Virginia listed Olga Mizyuk as the agent of Universal Research LLC when it was formed in 2006, though that registration has since lapsed (it's now incorporated in Virginia with a different agent). The company was registered for a time in Nevada, but that is no longer valid either. The managing member of the Nevada company, according to state records, was Yuriy Mizyuk. Mr. Guevara remembers that Ms. Mizyuk spoke of a son named Yuriy. Could that all be a coincidence?

Hiring in Manila

Call any of the company's several phone numbers and you will always get an answer. Weekday or weekend, day or night. The person on the other end will probably be a woman named Crystal or Stephanie. She will speak stilted, heavily accented English, and she will reveal nothing about who owns the company or where it is located. She will be unfailingly polite and utterly unhelpful.

If pressed, Crystal or Stephanie will direct callers to a manager named Raymond. But Raymond is almost always either out of the office or otherwise engaged. When, after weeks of calls, The Chronicle finally reached Raymond, he hung up the phone before answering any questions.

But while the company's management may be publicity shy, sources familiar with its operations were able to shed some light. Essay Writers appears to have been originally based in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. While the company claims to have been in business since 1997, its Web sites have only been around since 2004. In 2007 it opened offices in the Philippines, where it operates under the name Uniwork.

The company's customer-service center is located on the 17th floor of the Burgundy Corporate Tower in the financial district of Makati City, part of the Manila metropolitan area. It is from there that operators take orders and answer questions from college students. The company also has a suite on the 16th floor, where its marketing and computer staff members promote and maintain its Web sites. This involves making sure that when students search for custom essays, its sites are on the first page of Google results. (They're doing a good job, too. Recently two of the first three hits for "buy an essay" were Essay Writers sites.) One of its employees, who describes herself as a senior search-engine-optimization specialist at Uniwork, posted on her Twitter page that the company is looking for copy writers, Web developers, and link builders.

Some of the company's writers work in its Makati City offices. Essay Writers claims to have more than 200 writers, which may be true when freelancers are counted. A dozen or so, according to a former writer, work in the office, where they are reportedly paid between $1 and $3 a page — much less than its American writers, and a small fraction of the $20 or $30 per page customers shell out. The company is currently advertising for more writers, praising itself as "one of the most trusted professional writing companies in the industry."

It's difficult to know for sure who runs Essay Writers, but the name Yuriy Mizyuk comes up again and again. Mr. Mizyuk is listed as the contact name on the domain registration for essaywriters.net, the Web site where writers for the company log in to receive their assignments. A lawsuit was filed in January against Mr. Mizyuk and Universal Research by a debt-collection company. Repeated attempts to reach him — via phone and e-mail — were unsuccessful. Customer-service representatives profess not to have heard of Mr. Mizyuk.

Installed in its Makati City offices, according to a source close to the company, are overhead cameras trained on employees. These cameras reportedly send a video feed back to Kiev, allowing the Ukrainians to keep an eye on their workers in the Philippines. This same source says Mr. Mizyuk regularly visits the Philippines and describes him as a smallish man with thinning hair and dark-rimmed glasses. "He looks like Harry Potter," the source says. "The worst kind of Harry Potter."

Writers for Hire

The writers for essay mills are anonymous and often poorly paid. Some of them crank out 10 or more essays a week, hundreds over the course of a year. They earn anywhere from a few dollars to $40 per page, depending on the company and the subject. Some of the freelancers have graduate degrees and can write smooth, A-level prose. Others have no college degree and limited English skills.

James Robbins is one of the good ones. Mr. Robbins, now 30, started working for essay mills to help pay his way through Lamar University, in Beaumont, Tex. He continued after graduation and, for a time, ran his own company under the name Mr. Essay. What he's discovered, after writing hundreds of academic papers, is that he has a knack for the form: He's fast, and his papers consistently earn high marks. "I can knock out 10 pages in an hour," he says. "Ten pages is nothing."

His most recent gig was for Essay Writers. His clients have included students from top colleges like the University of Pennsylvania, and he's written short freshman-comp papers along with longer, more sophisticated fare. Like all freelancers for Essay Writers, Mr. Robbins logs in to a password-protected Web site that gives him access to the company's orders. If he finds an assignment that's to his liking, he clicks the "Take Order" button. "I took one on Christological topics in the second and third centuries," he remembers. "I didn't even know what that meant. I had to look it up on Wikipedia."

Most essay mills claim that they're only providing "model" papers and that students don't really turn in what they buy. Mr. Robbins, who has a law degree and now attends nursing school, knows that's not true. In some cases, he says, customers have forgotten to put their names at the top of the papers he's written before turning them in. Although he takes pride in the writing he's done over the years, he doesn't have much respect for the students who use the service. "These are kids whose parents pay for college," he says. "I'll take their money. It's not like they're going to learn anything anyway."

That's pretty much how Charles Parmenter sees it. He wrote for Essay Writers and another company before quitting about a year ago. "If anybody wants to say this is unethical — yeah, OK, but I'm not losing any sleep over it," he says. Though he was, he notes, nervous that his wife would react badly when she found out what he was doing. As it happens, she didn't mind.

Mr. Parmenter, who is 54, has worked as a police officer and a lawyer over the course of a diverse career. He started writing essays because he needed the money and he knew he could do it well. He wrote papers for nursing and business students, along with a slew of English-literature essays. His main problem, he says, is that the quality of his papers was too high. "People would come back to me and say, 'It's a great paper, but my professor will never believe it's me,'" says Mr. Parmenter. "I had to dumb them down."

Eventually the low pay forced him to quit. In his best months, he brought home around $1,000. Other months it was half that. He estimates that he wrote several hundred essays, all of which he's kept, though most he can barely remember. "You write so many of these things they start running together," he says.

Both Mr. Parmenter and Mr. Robbins live in the United States. But the writers for essay mills are increasingly international. Most of the users who log into the Essay Writers Web site are based in India, according to Alexa, a company that tracks Internet traffic. A student in, say, Wisconsin usually has no idea that the paper he ordered online is being written by someone in another country.

Like Nigeria. Paul Arhewe lives in Lagos, that nation's largest city, and started writing for essay mills in 2005. Back then he didn't have his own computer and had to do all of his research and writing in Internet cafes. Now he works as an online editor for a newspaper, but he still writes essays on the side. In the past three years, he's written more than 200 papers for American and British students. In an online chat, Mr. Arhewe insisted that the work he does is not unethical. "I believe it is another way of learning for the smart and hardworking students," he writes. Only lazy students, Mr. Arhewe says, turn in the papers they purchase.

Mr. Arhewe started writing for Essay Writers after another essay mill cheated him out of several hundred dollars. That incident notwithstanding, he's generally happy with the work and doesn't complain about the pay. He makes between $100 and $350 a month writing essays — not exactly a fortune, but in a country like Nigeria, where more than half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, it's not too bad either.

Mr. Arhewe, who has a master's degree from the University of Lagos, has written research proposals and dissertations in fields like marketing, economics, psychology, and political science. While his English isn't quite perfect, it's passable, and apparently good enough for his clients. Says Mr. Arhewe: "I am enjoying doing what I like and getting paid for it."

Write My Dissertation

Some customers of Essay Writers are college freshmen who, if their typo-laden, grammatically challenged order forms are any indication, struggle with even the most basic writing tasks. But along with the usual suspects, there is no shortage of seniors paying for theses and graduate students buying dissertations.

One customer, for example, identifies himself as a Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He or she (there is no name on the order) is interested in purchasing a 200-page dissertation. The student writes that the dissertation must be "well-researched" and includes format requirements and a general outline. Attached to the order is a one-page description of Ph.D. requirements taken directly from MIT's Web site. The student also suggests areas of emphasis like "static and dynamic stability of aircraft controls."

The description is consistent with the kind of research graduate students do, according to Barbara Lechner, director of student services at the institute's department of aeronautics and astronautics. In an initial interview, Ms. Lechner said she would bring up the issue with others in the department. Several weeks later, Ms. Lechner said she was told by higher-ups not to respond to The Chronicle's inquiries.

The head of the department, Ian A. Waitz, says he doesn't believe it's possible, given the highly technical subject matter, for a graduate student to pay someone else to research and write a dissertation. "It seems like a bogus request," says Mr. Waitz, though he wasn't sure why someone would fake such an order. However, like Ms. Lechner, Mr. Waitz acknowledged that the topics in the request are consistent with the department's graduate-level research.

Would-be aerospace engineers aren't the only ones outsourcing their papers. A student at American University's law school ordered a paper for a class called "The Law of Secrecy." She didn't include her full name on the order, but she did identify one of her two professors, Stephen I. Vladeck. Mr. Vladeck — who immediately knew the identity of the student from the description of the paper — was surprised and disappointed because he tries to help students who are having trouble and because he had talked to her about her paper. Mr. Vladeck argues that a law school "has a particular obligation not to tolerate this kind of stuff." The student never actually turned in the paper and took an "incomplete" for the course.

Essay Writers attempts to hide the identities of its customers even from the writers who do the actual work. But it's not always successful. Some students inadvertently include personal information when they upload files to the Web site; others simply put their names at the bottom of their orders.

Jessica Dirr is a graduate student in communication at Northern Kentucky University and an Essay Writers customer. She hired the company to work on her paper "Separated at Birth: Symbolic Boasting and the Greek Twin." Ms. Dirr says she looked online for assistance because the university's writing center wasn't much help and because she had trouble with citation rules. She describes what Essay Writers did as mostly proofreading. "They made some suggestions, and I took their advice," she says. Unfortunately, Ms. Dirr says, the paper "wasn't up to the level my professor was hoping for."

Mickey Tomar paid Essay Writers $100 to research and write a paper on the parables of Jesus Christ for his New Testament class. Mr. Tomar, a senior at James Madison University majoring in philosophy and religion, defends the idea of paying someone else to do your academic work, comparing it to companies that outsource labor. "Like most people in college, you don't have time to do research on some of these things," he says. "I was hoping to find a guy to do some good quality writing."

Nicole Cohea paid $190 for a 10-page paper on a Dove soap advertising campaign. Ms. Cohea, a senior communications major at the University of Southern Mississippi, wrote in her order that she wanted the company to "add on to what I have already written." She helpfully included an outline for the paper and wondered whether the writer could "add a catchy quote at the beginning."

When asked whether it was wrong, in general, to pay someone else to write your essay, Ms. Cohea responded, "Definitely." But she says she wasn't planning to turn in the paper as her own; instead, she says, she was only going to use it to get ideas. She was not happy with the paper Essay Writers provided. It seemed, she says, to have been written by a non-native English speaker. "I could tell they were Asian or something just by the grammar and stuff," she says.

James F. Kollie writes a sporadically updated blog titled My Ph.D. Journey in which he chronicles the progress he's making toward his doctorate from Walden University. He recently ordered the literature-review portion of his dissertation, "The Political Economy of Privatization in Post-War Developing Countries," from Essay Writers. In the order, he explains that the review should focus on privatization efforts that have failed.

Mr. Kollie acknowledged in an interview that he had placed an order with Essay Writers, but he said it was not related to his dissertation. Rather, he says, it was part of a separate research project he's conducting into online writing services. When asked if his university was aware of the project, he replied, "I don't have time for this," and hung up the phone.

Policing Plagiarism

Some institutions, most notably Boston University, have made efforts to shut down essay mills and expose their customers. A handful of states, including Virginia, have laws on the books making it a misdemeanor to sell college essays. But those laws are rarely, if ever, enforced. And even if a case were brought, it would be extremely difficult to prosecute essay-mill operators living abroad.

So what's a professor to do? Thomas Lancaster, a lecturer in computing at Birmingham City University, in England, wrote his dissertation on plagiarism. In addition, he and a colleague wrote a paper on so-called contract-cheating Web sites that allow writers to bid on students' projects. Their paper concludes that because there is almost never any solid evidence of wrongdoing, catching and disciplining students is the exception.

In his research, Mr. Lancaster has found that students who use these services tend to be regular customers. And while some may be stressed and desperate, many know exactly what they're doing. "You will look and see that the student has put the assignment up within hours of it being released to them," he says. "Which has to mean that they were intending to cheat from the beginning."

What he recommends, and what he does himself, is to sit down with students and question them about the paper or project they've just turned in. If they respond with blank stares and shrugged shoulders, there's a chance they haven't read, much less written, their own paper.

Susan D. Blum suggests assigning papers that can't easily be completed by others, like a personal reflection on that day's lecture. Ms. Blum, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and author of the recently published book My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture, also encourages professors to keep in touch with students as they complete major projects, though she concedes that can be tough in a large lecture class.

But Ms. Blum points out a more fundamental issue. She thinks professors and administrators need to do a better job of talking to students about what college is about and why studying — which may seem like a meaningless obstacle on the path to a credential — actually matters. "Why do they have to go through the process of researching?" she says. "We need to convey that to them."

Mr. Tomar, the philosophy-and-religion major who bought a paper for his New Testament class, still doesn't think students should have to do their own research. But he has soured on essay mills after the paper he received from Essay Writers did not meet his expectations. He complained, and the company gave him a 30-percent refund. As a result, he had an epiphany of sorts. Says Mr. Tomar: "I was like — you know what? — I'm going to write this paper on my own."

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

Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mills are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill

February 16, 2010 message from Scott Bonacker [lister@BONACKERS.COM]

Caveat Emptor, Law Students Seeking Outlines

The title of this post isn’t designed to demonstrate any sort of proficiency in Latin but to alert law students to the dangers of relying on outlines received from other students. The risks posed by using passed-down outlines have been threatening law students for almost as long as there have been law schools, but digital technology coupled with the internet has multiplied the risk by orders of magnitude. Ten or fifteen years ago, students could get their hands on outlines for courses taught in the law school they were attending. In almost every instance the outline was from a previous semester offering of the course, taught by the same professor presently teaching the course.

Now, students at any law school can obtain outlines for just about any course taught at any law school. Recently, my attention was drawn to Outline Depot, which claims to be “the most comprehensive source of law school outlines anywhere.” (emphasis in the original). Perhaps it is, and I’ve not researched that point. Students earn the right to download outlines by accumulating credits, which can be obtained by uploading outlines or by purchasing the credits.

The point to which students are desperate to get their hands on outlines is apparent from what one finds on the site. There are all sorts of red flags and warning bells.

http://mauledagain.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html#2661520804417965026

This is primarily about law schools, and is a blog by a tax law professor no less, but if there is one there surely is another. Outlines are useful, but in my case mainly when I make one from material I am reading.

Scott Bonacker CPA
Springfield, MO

Cheating in the Age of Texting

"Should Definitions of Cheating Change in the Age of Texting?" Chronicle of Higher Education, June 25, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3850&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Over at The Chronicle’s Brainstorm blogs, Mark Bauerlein raised some interesting questions this week about students’ views of cheating.

Mr. Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, points to a new survey showing that about half of students have used their cellphones or other technology to cheat, and that many students do not consider their behavior to be cheating.

He suggests that they may have a point. “Don’t we see here a prime example not of the decay of personal integrity but instead the healthy spread of ‘participatory culture’?” Mr. Bauerlein wrote. “In the digital age, intelligence is a collective thing, the individual now not a repository of knowledge but a dynamic component of it. We have entered a new realm, and if the definition of knowledge has changed, then so must the definition of cheating. Right?”

Bob Jensen votes not to change the definition of cheating in the age of texting!

Question
Have you looked for your examinations and tests at the latest test sharing sites?

"Students Share Exams Online: Web sites that allow the sharing of course notes and old exams are increasing. But some professors aren't happy," by Dan Macsai, Business Week, November 23, 2008 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/nov2008/bs20081123_091062.htm?link_position=link4

Photos. Music. Irrelevant video clips. For years, college students have shared them all on the Internet. Now, they're using the same medium to swap notes, tests, and quizzes—a trend that has caught the wary eye of profs whose materials are being uploaded and school officials who worry about cheating.

In recent years, several Web sites have emerged that encourage students to submit their schoolwork for mass consumption. They collect old exams (PostYourTest.com, Exams101.com), class notes (NoteCentric.com), study guides (HowIGotAnA.com) and all of the above (CourseHero.com). Some of the largest sites claim thousands of users around the world and say they're making money.

High-Tech "Test Files" Students from an earlier generation will recognize the note-sharing sites as a high-tech twist on an old college practice. Fraternities and sororities have long maintained "test files," where younger members study from older members' course work. Non-Greeks, of course, have criticized the practice, saying it gives the frat and sorority members an unfair advantage.

Indeed, Demir Oral, a Web designer living in San Diego, says he launched the Post Your Test site to level the playing field. "This kind of service should be available to anyone, at any time," he says.

Oral supports his site using Google ads, which generate "a decent amount" of revenue, he says. But he's forecasting growth: Since July, the site's member count has more than doubled, to 1,000, and it currently hosts between 600 and 700 exams. A few weeks ago, Oral received his first international submission, from Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. "People are starting to realize the uniqueness of our database," he says. "It's a very exciting time."

Backlash from Teachers and Students Not everyone is buying into the hype, though. Because professors don't know when their exams are being posted, they could unwittingly re-use a question students have seen online, says Jim Posakony, a biology professor and former chairman of the academic senate at the University of California at San Diego, where teachers have organized to keep their exams off Post Your Test.

Having easy access to quizzes and notes could also reward laziness, says Nichole Mikko-Causby, a senior at the University of Georgia. "The whole trend seems to be more about getting the grade than improving critical thinking skills," she says, noting that she's visited Course Hero but never used it. "It kind of cheapens my degree."

Kasuni Kotelawala, a sophomore at University of California, San Diego, is far more satisfied. Because her biology professor hadn't spent much time discussing the most recent class midterm exam—let alone distributing a practice test—Kotelawala wasn't sure how to study. But after reviewing one of her professor's past exams on Post Your Test, she says she knew what to expect. "It definitely helped," she says.

Copyright Issues But was it legal? Like novels and artwork, exams are intellectual property, meaning they're owned by the universities or the professors who wrote them, and they're protected under copyright laws. Publishing them without permission is treading on "legal thin ice," says Bob Clarida, a copyright lawyer at Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman, in New York.

Faculty members at UCSD raised this concern last August, after representatives from Post Your Test visited campus. To promote the site, the reps had offered Starbucks gift cards in exchange for student exams, a gimmick that left some professors "very unhappy," says Posakony.

With Posakony's help, roughly 150 professors organized. They told Oral to take their old exams off Post Your Test and to reject future submissions bearing their names. He wasn't thrilled, but he obliged. "We always follow the Digital Millennium Copyright Act," Oral says, referencing the law that protects online service providers, like Post Your Test and YouTube, as long as they honor requests to take down unlawful uploads.

Continued in article

How would you deal with the following add on Craig's List where University X is a well known university.

The person who placed this add shows signs of becoming a great banker.

"I Will Pay Someone $$$ To Take My Finance Final Exam (at University X)"

The "Unknown Professor" (I know the name and location of this professor) who maintains the Financial Rounds Blog provides an April 30, 2009 mean solution to this unethical add --- http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/

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

This type of cheating raises all sorts of legal issues yet to be resolved for students who might've thought what they did was perfectly legal

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

Smartpen: The Beautiful and the Ugly
The following invention offers students new opportunities, some for the good and some for the bad

"Computing on Paper: Livescribe's smartpen turns a sheet of paper into a computer," by Erica Naone, MIT's Technology Review, December 13, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19892/?nlid=749&a=f

A new smartpen could change the way people practice mobile computing by bringing processing power to traditional pen and paper. Made by Livescribe, of Oakland, CA, the smartpen is designed to digitize the words and drawings that a user puts down on paper and bring them to life.

So long as the user writes on paper printed with a special pattern, the smartpen transforms what is written into interactive text. For example, the pen has a recording function, called paper replay, that can record sound and connect it to what the user writes while the sounds are being recorded. Later, the user can tap the pen over what she wrote and replay the associated sounds. "We're starting to make the whole world of printable surfaces accessible and functional," says Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff.

The smartpen, he says, will enable "paper-based multimedia," such as interactive business cards. Marggraff's business card, for example, allows contacts to e-mail him by writing him a note on its surface with a smartpen. Users can also access the pen's power by writing commands on any surface printed with the pattern. For example, if a smartpen user wants to know the definition of a word, she can write, "define," followed by the word. The pen, using data stored in its memory, will recognize the word the user writes and display its definition on a small screen on the side of the pen. The same type of procedure can be used to translate words or solve math problems.

"I wanted to make the pen itself interactive and give you feedback, so that as you're writing on paper, the pen could interpret what you're doing and then tell you something about it," says Marggraff. "That opens up a whole new way of interacting with paper, because effectively, the pen and the paper become a computer."

The pen's features depend on its ability to track its position on the paper at all times. This is largely made possible, Marggraff explains, by the paper. The paper that the pen uses is printed with microdots according to a process developed by the Swedish company Anoto. The pattern provides gridded location information on a very small scale. The pen knows its position by taking a picture of what's beneath the pen tip and processing it based on the algorithms used to produce the patterns of microdots. Paper replay, for example, then works because the pen associates particular points of an audio track with particular locations on a particular page. "If you printed the whole pattern out, it would cover Europe and Asia in square miles," Marggraff says. "So when your pen goes down in Southern Italy in a tiny corner, it knows exactly where you are." This means that a user can permanently link audio information to particular locations in a notebook, with no worry about losing the link when she turns the page. Because of the size of the pattern and the possibilities for extending it even further, Marggraff says, he's not worried that it will run out.

Pads of the paper with the special pattern will be sold by Livescribe. Users will also be able to print the pattern on regular, blank sheets of paper using certain high-quality printers.

Marggraff says that the dot-positioning technology, which he read about in a magazine, was partly what inspired his endeavors in paper-based computing. Before the Livescribe smartpen, he worked on the Fly Pentop Computer, a product for children developed from earlier applications of the technology.

In addition to the microdot pattern, the Livescribe smartpen makes use of other technologies, including a 3-D audio recording system. This technology, Marggraff says, is designed to make the pen's paper-replay function more useful in less than ideal recording conditions. If a student using the smartpen gets stuck in the back of a lecture hall, for example, most recordings would risk being too low-quality to be useful. The pen, however, uses two microphones to record the sound the way the user would have heard it originally: the two microphones help the listener sort different sounds, much as information from two ears helps people identify the source of a sound.

Rodney Brooks, director of the computer-science and artificial-intelligence laboratory at MIT, who has been an advisor to the product, says that connecting writing and computation in the smartpen is "a real step forward." While Brooks notes that it's unfortunate that a user must have special paper in addition to a special pen, he is still very enthusiastic about the technology. "If a magic wand could be waved and you didn't require [special paper], that would be wonderful, but these are pretty big steps even without that," he says.

Other companies have previously made products using the dot-positioning technology. Logitech, for example, licensed the microdot pattern from Anoto to build a digital pen called io. Mark Anderson, director of business development at Logitech, says that the io employs the dot technology to allow users to take notes and view them as typewritten text on a PC, and other similar applications. However, at this time, Anderson says that the io does not have multimedia functions.

Beyond the capabilities that the Livescribe smartpen already has, the company is releasing tools that developers can use to build their own applications for the pen. Marggraff hopes that the pen will become a new computing platform for consumers, replacing some existing mobile products.

Brooks says that he can imagine the pen taking on that role. "People do change their platforms," he says.

The smartpen is planned for release in January, when more product details will be available.

Jensen Comment
Smartpen's audio recorder is good for students to record parts of lectures for replay later when trying to better understand.
Smartpen's audio recorder is bad when student makes portions of lectures available online without permission.

Smartpen is good in when the student is writing and wants a word defined in order to improve the documents.
Smartpen is bad when the student writes "define" in an exam when the definition is an integral part of the examining question.

Since the smartpen does not work on any writing surface, the main worry for examinations is when students use smartpen paper for scratch pads while taking examinations.

Army knew of cheating on tests for eight years
For eight years, the Army has known that its largest online testing program - which verifies that soldiers have learned certain military skills and helps them amass promotion points - has been the subject of widespread cheating. In 1999, testing officials first noticed that soldiers were turning in many tests over a short period, something that would have been almost impossible without having obtained the answers ahead of time. A survey by the testing office showed that 5 percent of the exams were probably the subject of cheating. At the time, soldiers were filing roughly 200,000 exams per year. But it wasn't until June of this year, when an Army computer contractor complained about a website providing free copies of completed exams, that the Army acknowledged that it had a problem.
"Army knew of cheating on tests for eight years: Hundreds of thousands of exam copies used, Globe probe finds," Boston Globe, December 16, 2007 --- http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/12/16/army_knew_of_cheating_on_tests_for_eight_years/

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

"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

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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.

Smartphone Photos

Fonts of Duplicity

"Cambridge Survey Finds That 49% of Students Have Plagiarized," by Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3, 2008 --- Click Here

Is That Online Student Who He Says He Is?" by Sara Lipka, Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3455&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Comments

Cheating on the Rise

Stiff Penalties

Academic Pressures

Codes Not Foolproof

Handful of Cases Only

Playing With Cheaters

"Cambridge Survey Finds That 49% of Students Have Plagiarized," by Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3, 2008 --- Click Here

Create a mirror image of an object

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.

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

Smartphone Photos

Fonts of Duplicity

Caveat Emptor, Law Students Seeking Outlines

"Cambridge Survey Finds That 49% of Students Have Plagiarized," by Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3, 2008 ---
Click Here

Is That Online Student Who He Says He Is?" by Sara Lipka, Chronicle of Higher Education,
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3455&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

"Cambridge Survey Finds That 49% of Students Have Plagiarized," by Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3, 2008 ---
Click Here