Survey Finds Cheating Among Students At All GPA Levels

An anonymous reader writes "Over a third of undergraduate students admitted to some form of cheating at one of America's top research universities, according to a survey published November in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics (abstract). The researchers expected to find more cheating among the top-performing group — and at the minimum at least some students with excellent grades cheated. Not so. As it turned out, the overall cheating rate was similar to that found in other studies, but the types of cheating and stated reasons for cheating were all over the map. Researchers uncovered one trend among the cheaters: the perception that teaching assistants either ignored or didn't care about cheating."

Re:You are doing it wrong

[mkiwi]

^^this

Having been an "unofficial" TA for EE and and official one for Comp Sci classes, I can tell you that going to the professor is exactly what to do. //begin rant
I once turned in a physics paper that I had done in Adobe InDesign because it required so many charts, graphs, math notation, etc. and the TA in our recitation ask me to stay after class and talk to him about my homework. In no uncertain terms he told me I cheated on the paper, even though no one had ever turned in the same paper. He was just freaked out because I could typeset. God help him if he gets a student who writes reports in TeX... but I digress.

For anyone in the situation where you did not cheat and a TA is accusing that you did, send an email directly to the professor in charge of the class. Get your complaint in writing. As for me, the TA was suitably chastised by the major professor in charge of the class, he hated my guts, and he graded my papers much lower than they should have been. All I could say to the professor at the end of the class was, "**** is doing X, please talk to **** so that he doesn't screw up again."

On to other matters, when I was a comp sci TA, I caught two people who uploaded identical assignments on our web-based submission system. I would have never known there was anything wrong, but that one of the kids forgot to change the name written in the comments to his own. He got a zero on the assignment and had to write an apology letter. Since I was doing this TA'ing at the same time as my Physics class, I knew to go directly to the professor instead of trying stroke my ego. It worked out fine.

Solution manuals are another thing that people have. I'd say that 90% of the class gets the answers from their homeworks in one way or another from a solution manual, if only because they are copying off of a friend's homework, and their friend used the solution manual. In classes where instructors write their own homeworks, this isn't a problem.

But there was a very specific Power Systems class, where most of the students were foreign and the class fell along that normal ~90% distribution. I, and a friend of mine, didn't use the solution manual for that class and, as a result, we got lower grades on our homeworks. The people with the solution manuals would turn in perfect homeworks and the instructor would think that he's got a group of really smart kids this semester (like every other semester) and that my friend and I were delinquents who didn't understand the material and weren't trying in his class. Of course, the final was 40% of the grade in that class, and karma caught up to the people who didn't know their shit. But I still wonder what would have happened if I had the solutions, used them constructively to do my homework assignments, and got good grades on my homework, and did well on the final. That's probably the difference between an A/A- and a B/B-.

If an instructor doesn't realize that kids who takes their classes know about the stakes, especially from people who come from societies where anything less than perfect is considered garbage, he or she is deluding themselves. //end rant