Survey Finds Cheating Among Students At All GPA Levels 333
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."
How much of the cheater is in the filler classes? (Score:2, Interesting)
How much of the cheater is in the filler classes?
How meany class is there cheating where just the final test is the grade?
Re:Imagine that (Score:5, Interesting)
If the skills you want to form mainly involve fraud and deception rather than forging the framework for your life ahead, then they aren't going to work hard for $10/hr to ty and catch you so that you can further develop those skills.
Tech the test and just reading from the book lead (Score:3, Interesting)
Tech the test and just reading from the book lead to it being all about cheating or cramming for the test.
No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
The brighter the student, the more devious the means of cheating.
Also, I've seen (and caught) students cheating to get into a prestige university school with a highly competetive enrollment. The greater the reward, the greater the desperate measures sought to achieve that award. One student in particular was found guilty of Academic Fraud and expelled from the university - criminal charges may or may not have been pressed as a follow up.
One can well imagine the anger and frustration of those students who didn't make it, when they find someone did and did so through cheating.
As a former TA I'm not surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
I TA'd classes during my PhD. I'm in no way surprised that there is a perception that TAs don't care about cheating - the fact is that very few of them really want to catch cheaters.
I used to try hard to catch people cheating during exams, on homeworks etc, but this is actually very difficult to do. Typically you have hundreds of papers/worksheets to grade in a week and if you don't get two identical ones in a row, the odds of you remembering that a solution was done in the same way by two students is fairly low. It sticks out when two students get the same wrong answer, but even then it's difficult to prove.
However, the main thing that turns TAs off catching cheats is what happens when you do. First, you have to prove that the students in question were cheating. This is a LOT of extra work on top of your normal workload which usually exceeds your contracted hours by about 50%. Then you have to report it to the ethics committee in your department. This takes a long time, the student has the right to challenge you on everything - and believe me you'll get everything thrown at you from claims of sexual harassment to racism because you're accusing some kid of cheating. This has the knock-on effect of showing up on your SRTE (student rating of teaching effectiveness) if the cheater has friends in the class, and so you get pulled in to see the dept. head at the end of the semester because 6-7 students have called you racist on your evaluations, which in turn doesn't help if you want recommendation letters for a teaching job afterwards. Even worse if the kid is on a sports scholarship, you'll get the coach attesting to his 'good character' - so there's no way he was cheating, you just have a thing against him for some bizarre reason.
Finally, when you show that two students mysteriously answered the same wrong way to the same questions in a row on a test, and you caught them talking during the test, what punishment does the university give out? They make the kid re-sit the test. So the upshot of your efforts are that you've wasted a whole bunch of your time, got a ton of hassle that you didn't need, and the cheater simply has longer than his peers to prepare for a new test which the lecturer is often too lazy to make sufficiently different from the previous one, so the cheater is ready for the questions.
I'd still try to catch cheaters as often as I could, because it was the right thing to do. But it was so much trouble for most people, and you became a 'troublemaker' if you did it, that most of us didn't want the hassle. Even when you explained to the classmates that the cheater was cheapening their degree and ruining their scores, they still thought that you were some kind of monster for punishing their friend.
Re:It's not just drugs. Sometimes it's culture, to (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's not just drugs. Sometimes it's culture, to (Score:5, Interesting)
Since you posted AC I just wanted to echo what you said. I'm at a Computer Science graduate school where 90% of the students are Chinese. The other day in class homework was due, and I saw students copying homework in class, just passing it down the row. They all turned it in at the end of class. Best part is, the TAs are all Chinese grad students as well, and are friends with the students. The professor didn't even come to the exam, and the Chinese TAs were almost overtly helping their friends cheat on the exam. It was absolutely infuriating. I saw it in my undergrad too, but there it was Indians. It just seems like something that these people aren't taught.
If memory serves... (Score:5, Interesting)
Memories can be tricky, but my recollection of high school was that the "smart kids" who got good grades were generally the most rampant cheaters. These were the kids who were in the honors society and went to ivy league schools, and they cheated every damned day so I wouldn't expect that the behavior changed when they went to college. It was almost an institution: They would copy each other's homework at lunch. They would help each other plagiarize the papers they wrote. They would get together and devise ways to sneak answers into tests. It was cooperative and competitive cheating, as much a part of the process as studying.
If you asked them about it, they'd tell you that it was because they were taking tons of AP courses, and they didn't have time to do it all. Of course, part of the problem was the school's approach to honors/AP coursework: it wasn't necessarily more advanced, it was often enough just *more*. More memorizing, more busywork, and more time consuming. There were kids going home with 10 hours of homework for the night, and so they'd cope by splitting up the work and copying each others' answers.
And I'll repeat: these were the "smart kids". They were the "good kids". In a sense, what they were doing *was* smart. They were stuck in a bureaucratic system, and so they gamed the system. They got what they wanted, even if it wasn't "fair".
Re:Academic Steriods (Score:5, Interesting)
Those are unrelated?
Sports: athletes use [illegal, or at the very least, not allowed in the league] drugs to improve their performance. Only problems occur if they get caught.
Kids follow sports. And drug usage things. Apparently, it's ok - unless you get caught. Why NOT use them in academics then?
Perhaps the real issue is that we don't value "work" and "learning" and such. I went through school; I took no drugs, I was extremely busy, and I got good grades. I learned a lot. I didn't just practice test taking.
The people I knew that used caffeine a lot either (1) worked all the time to support themselves while going to school or (2) generally partied/goofed off until the night before the test, at which time they pulled an all-nighter. Group #2 was significantly larger than #1. I actually only knew one person I'd put into group #1.
I don't think we can simply assume that students are doing the drug thing in order to "keep up" because they can't otherwise. I have met tons of students who pass off education as unnecessary, worthless, stupid, and a waste of time. It's not shocking that grades would be lower and drugs would be used as "study aids" ... as a substitute for the real "study aid," known as "time."
Re:How much of the cheater is in the filler classe (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree that these classes aren't filler. They are political indoctrination masquerading as "breadth" or whatever they want to call it. And as you say, most engineers would just craft their major to make as many of these classes reinforce their major as best they could. For those classes they couldn't, they'd either lap up, grit their teeth or mindlessly absorb the Marxist viewpoint, depending on their predilection.
teaching assistants (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm an instructor at a university, and about 10 minutes before I saw this story, I overheard some TA's deciding that trying to deal with the cheaters wasn't worth the extra time it would take in consultation with the professor.
Yep, the biggest thing enabling cheating is that it's a major inconvenience to punish.
Pre-Med Students Were The Worst... (Score:5, Interesting)