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Which Grad Students Cheat the Most?
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Sep 21, 2006 11:51 AM
from the means-to-an-end dept.
from the means-to-an-end dept.
SpectralDesign.Net writes, "The results of a research paper released Wednesday reveal who is admitting to cheating (in North America). The study focused on 5,300 graduate students in Canada and the U.S. and concluded that the biggest cheaters were business students — 56% of them admitted to copying papers, plagiarizing, etc. The author of the study said, 'The typical comment is that what's important is getting the job done. How you get it done is less important. You'll have business students saying all I'm doing is emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world.'" Other grad-student cheaters include: engineering students, 54%; physical sciences, 50%; medical and health-care, 49%; law, 45%; liberal arts, 43%; and social science and humanities students, 39%. These numbers are close to the guesstimate of the anonymous professor.
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Cheating Via the Internet at College 467 comments
Electron Barrage writes, "An anonymous professor writes that last year about half of the seniors at his US university were suspected of cheating, mostly due to the Internet and community sites such as Wikipedia. He guesses that perhaps 25%-30% were actually guilty, a huge increase from earlier levels. According to this professor, it's nearly impossible for the universities to keep up with the new forms of cheating enabled by the Net. Will academic institutions learn to deal with this new reality? It sounds a little dubious from this professor's viewpoint." The article mentions the anti-cheating services Turn It In and iThenticate (while decrying their expense), but expresses worry over the new countermeasure represented by Student of Fortune.
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You know what these numbers really mean? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You know what these numbers really mean? (Score:5, Funny)
It means that Captain Kirk was a Business Student.
KHAAAAAAAN!
Parent
cheating (Score:4, Funny)
After analyzing the risk and the return, (Score:4, Funny)
I rationally decide to cheat.
-- from an anonymous coward B-schooler :-)
Re:After analyzing the risk and the return, (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
First Half Students (Score:5, Funny)
The study must have been done on students in the first half of their business degree, and the second half must be the part where they teach, "Always lie about cheating."
Need graduates, not students for sample (Score:5, Interesting)
At my college, our final graduating class size was less than 10% what it was when we started. I know of people who cheated, copied, and plagiarized in the associates program but none of them made it to the final graduation. Oddly enough, only about 33% of our starting class graduated the assoc program, we had 5 students tossed out of the school in the second to last class of the program for plagiarizing code. Once we got into the bachelor's degrees, even though the papers got longer and more common, there was significantly less cheating. Sure, there were a few slackers who depended on other people in group work, but it was more like 15% than 50%.
I would be much more interested in seeing those numbers from graduates, not active students.
-Rick
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
PoliSci (Score:5, Funny)
They learn quick, don't they.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, their results are included in another degree. Would admit to being a poli-sci student?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Who Is Admitting To Not Editing (Score:3, Funny)
"students confessed cheating" maybe?
Sad but true... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen this too often when managers focus on getting their numbers in instead of doing the right the first time. One company I worked for promoted the supervisor who always got his numbers in to be the department manager. Senior level people started to leaving (I was number three out of a dozen) since the guy was so ruthless that no one wanted to work with him and he would find reasons to fire you if try to hold him to a higher standard. What happened? He hired new people and quality took a serious hit but he got his numbers in number. BTW, the company is facing bankruptcy but the manager is still getting his numbers in.
getting the job done (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:getting the job done (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Outside of academia, it is generally accepted truth that original research is a foolish waste of time (okay, maybe in print
Re:getting the job done (Score:5, Insightful)
They do, it's called properly attributing your sources.
Parent
The benefit of the doubt (Score:4, Interesting)
In my junior year of comp sci undergrad, I took a class with my friend (hi, Aaron!) that required us to write a lot of programs. We usually talked about the projects in detail, figured out the best way to solve them, then went off and separately implemented those solutions.
One assignment was the typical "you have ten telephone lines and five operators..." sort of problem. We hashed out our strategy as usual, sat down at our respective computers, and typed out the exact same programs. I mean it. Line-for-line identical. Since we both pulled variable names out of the assignment text ("int telephonelines = 10; int operators = 5;", etc.), we'd evolved the same formatting style from years of working together, and we were implementing the same relatively short algorithm, our answers were perfect matches.
Fortunately, our professor was a good guy and believed our convincingly dumb-struck expressions when he told us what he'd discovered. We were also both able to explain every step of the algorithm and why we'd chosen it, and we all had a good laugh about it afterward.
I know that's a bit different than a kid turning in your Wikipedia entry for credit, but remember that strange things do happen sometimes, and not every case of obviously blatant cheating turns out to be legitimate.
Parent
Re:getting the job done (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this a bad alternative? Basically no one but you cares about your marks, and you end up getting what you deserve. If you're unable to pass without copying, you don't deserve the degree. If you're unable to get an A without copying, why the hell do you think you should have an A?
Parent
Cheaters who admitted? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This applies to business, (pre-)med, and a variety of other fields.
Then, even with an understanding of ethics, some people just don't care.
50% is a huge number though. I imagine things might break down a bit differently if the question was something other than "have you cheated within the past year". It's like asking everyone with a car "have you broken the speed limit in the last year?"
I'd be much more interested in comparing th
Reminds me of the movie (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty accurate protrayal of what i've seen in the business world...
Unfortunately, when you work for a corporation whose ONLY motive is profit then moral considerations are barely an afterthought, to the detriment of everyone who uses that corporation's products and are affected by the same and those who work for the corporation.
Re:Reminds me of the movie (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Reminds me of the movie (Score:4, Insightful)
My career spans similar extremes, and my experience mirrors yours. My hunch? Oversight works.
At a small start up with no outside investors, no one really cares if a shop getting 30 emails a day over DSL is using a warez copy of Exchange. If the owner decides to go that route, it filters down to employees who will feel free to use email, phones, etc. for personal purposes.
At the big firm, folks at the top are prone to be more aware of the oversight, especially in a financial firm. If I know my boss's boss's boss is concerned about the contents of communications coming into and out of the company, and the implications of records of those communications being subpoenaed, then I need to be concerned about my use of those resources.
(....typed while at a computer in said billion-dollar financial investment firm)
Parent
Cheating vs Utilizing resources (Score:4, Insightful)
It's just a question of which resources you are utilising to accomplish the task.
Maximizing the benefit of your available resources is clearly something you should do both in school and in real life.
Where cheating breaks down is that you are improperly using them in violation of the rules. In school it is cheating, plagarism etc, in "real life" it's fraud, cooking the books etc.
Go ahead push the rules to the limit, but don't use the "real life" excuse, it's just as invalid in school as at Enron.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, that's a little rediculous. This is a survey of people who admitted to cheating. Are you saying that you don't think they know when they're cheating or not? A grad student totally knows the difference between, as in your example, working together on a group project or a take-home exam, and something like plaigar
'The ends justify the means' (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is exactly the type of reasoning that leads to this [slashdot.org] clusterfuck. Perhaps it's time for professors and the deans to expel these students rather than let the behavior continue? The cheaters might learn a valuable lesson, and society as a whole would be the better off for it.
Ok, now trackback.. (Score:5, Insightful)
When cheating is the only way? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interestingly, these were informatics-related subjects.
Sickening.. (Score:3, Funny)
Bodes ill for our future health care needs.
Almost a 50/50 chance of getting a doc who cheated his/her way through college.. scary.
On the bright side if your doc is ever stuck with a diagnosis he can always look it up on wikipedia..
ok, let's keep this civilized (Score:3, Interesting)
Cheating in Business School (Score:3, Interesting)
I am a student in the MBA program at my school. If you want to look at the big cheaters, look at the Public Administration students. These guys are VERY brazen about cheating and their teachers don't seem to care. Most of the PA students get into trouble in the 'normal' business classes, like accounting, due to cheating. Plagerizing, collabrative work when it isn't suppost to be (like take home finals), turning in the same paper in multiple classes. Our instructors in the management classes use turn-it-in religiously, so it can get funny to see the surprised look on the PA students faces when they get told that they get to have a fun talk with the Dean.
Devil's advocacy (Score:3, Informative)
Mind you, I'm a grad student myself, and I would never, never even consider plagiarizing or copying anyone else's published or unpublished work (at least partly because I think my own work is better than most other people's, anyway :) ). But realistically, grad school is not like undergrad, where every test performance, every paper, every evaluation is being used to sort you out of the herd and give your future employers information about your ability and potential. In grad school, three or four big, important performance evaluations-- getting in, passing comps, finishing the dissertation, getting it published-- are interspersed with lots of smaller "evaluations" that are basically hoops to jump through.
Most humanities and social science courses I know require papers, and most students will get A's on said papers-- A's that are basically meaningless since employers don't look at transcripts anyway. So one's performance on the paper is essentially immaterial-- it's not making you look any better, it's not teaching you much (particularly in courses outside your field), and the professor may barely skim it before dustbinning. Under those circumstances, actually writing the paper essentially just ensures that you waste lots of time that could be devoted to performance points that do matter, like the diss. Plagiarism under those circumstances is still lying, I guess, and lying is always wrong, but I don't think in these cases that it's the sort of lying that necessarily says much about your professionalism or future behavior-- just that you're the sort of person who gets impatient with pointless rules.
So, lawyers get a bad rap? (Score:3, Funny)
Who did this study, again?
-jcr
Computer Science cheaters (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Statistics student understand surveys! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As a former (undergrad) math student I can honestly say that it all depends on how you define cheat; yes like every good math student I will argue over definitions. In one of my courses my Professor openly said that he anticipated that everyone would end up working in groups to understand and solve the challenging proofs, but he required us to write it up on our own and use our own words; as he pointed
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
At the graduate level? Mathematics and statistics at the graduate level tends to be very different from high school and early undergrad math and stats, and also tends to be assessed rather differently. I've had several graduate math courses that were assessed by having the students give lectures - I'm not sure how you can cheat at that easily, especially when the lecturer olr any other student can ask y
Re:hm (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:hm (Score:4, Insightful)
As a social science grad student, each assignment was unique. I might be doing a paper on X while my friend wrote something up about Y. Professors always vetted paper topics to make sure that no two students were working on the same subject. Aside from comparing class and reading notes, there wasn't much we could do to help each other out.
Parent
Re:Business Students... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because there's an infinite difference between business students at 56% and engineering students at 54%. That's likely within the margin of error for the poll, which means there is no real difference between the two.
But you go ahead and stay comfy wrapped in your preconceptions.
Fucktard.
Parent
Re:Business Students... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, they weren't asked in which classes they cheated. So we could be talking about an engineering student having a friend write an english paper for him, which, while less than desirable for his education, is not a matter of safety.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Business Students... (Score:4, Insightful)
Once that is completed they have to work for 5+ years, take more exams, and then they can be considered a "Professional Engineer."
I think its scarier that computer programmers, who might be working on that software running life support machinery, doesn't need any professional certifications other than a college degree
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
the LOWEST % was 39%, and that is assuming that every one reported acuratly (I call BS on that), and I am sorta scared.
I admit, I never finished college (let alone start grad work), however I never cheated on anything when I was there. When I had problems (and I did have alot of problems) I sought help, I didn't get some one to do the work for me.
Mabey If I had cheated like a large number of people aparently do, then I would have
Re:Business Students... (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone with an undergrad engineering degree I can confidently say that I never cheated in college. However, certain phrasings of the question could cause me to respond differently. For example, if the question was asked, "Have you every used another students work to complete your own without the instructors explicit consent." I'd have to say yes.
I spent many late nights in computer labs or study halls working with other students in an attempt to understand the material. Often times this means working homework problems together. Sometimes I'd do the problem independently and then share the results with others, other times I'd make little or no progress and have someone explain it to me. It wasn't about copying answers, it was about understanding the methodology. A poll question that understands this distinction is difficult to come up with. I don't ever remember a teacher telling us not to work together in an engineering class (aside from exams) but I don't think they all explicitly told us it was ok - mostly because it is part of the culture and it wouldn't occur to them to endorse it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
1. making up fake references.
2. taking someone else's ideas as your own without giving credit.
3. pure plaigarism (an extreme example of 2, and then some.)
4. making claims about a work that you haven't studied directly (using secondary sources while trying to give the impression you are using the primary source.)
5. making false claims to buttress your argument (making stuff up... "Gertrude Stein had been diagnosed with cancer earlier that year, before finishing the novel." Whe