8 Responses to “The biggest cheaters are …”

1. John Says:
   March 9th, 2010 at 4:48 pm

   Oh come on, this has been reported before along with the information that the CS department has good tools to catch cheating. If other disciplines had good tools and the same effort was made my guess is we’d see similar rates of cheating.

2. Former CS Student Says:
   March 9th, 2010 at 6:02 pm

   As a CS graduate myself I do wonder if this has more to do with the fact that it is easier to tell if a program or snippet of code has been copied thus meaning more CS students are caught? This would clearly explain why the numbers are seemingly higher for cases concerning CS students.

   Code reuse is taught as part of software engineering. One could argue that the students were practicing what they were taught, well at least part of what they were taught (they should contact the author for permission and document code). It also appears that a large percentage of the violations included unauthorized collaboration. It is easy to look at some code and tell, based on your knowledge of the student, if s/he was responsible for writing the code. How many times have students wrote essays in other classes together, outside of class (also unauthorized collaboration) and merely stated the same thing in a different order with changes in wording? There is no easy way to catch that when you want a correct answer. I know from first hand experience that this occurs more than what is ever reported.

   Finally, Computer Science isn’t something as easily taught as some other subjects that merely require one to memorize and regurgitate; there is a lot of abstract, higher-level thinking and practice is the only way to improve. In order to even begin, it is best to observe and then proceed. This is very similar to math, learn from observation and then practice the problems, and like some math problems, there are only a few different ways some problems can be solved; I can type a paragraph that says the same thing many different ways.

3. Terri Main Says:
   March 9th, 2010 at 10:40 pm

   John has a point. We have TurnItIn, but mostly it’s those of us who are more tech savvy (IT and those teaching online courses) who use it. Everyone else wants papers and not electronic documents. So, there may be a bit of selectiveness to this study.

   However, I think there has been a rise in cheating. First, “uncited sources” often comes from the fact that many kids get out of high school having never written a term paper and don’t know the first thing about citing sources. Secondly, you have an end sum mentality. I’ve had students look at me when I caught them cheating saying, “But I got it in on time.” It’s as though they are saying, “You wanted a paper. I gave you a paper. I got it in on time. Why should you care where it came from.” It’s like who cares where you got the money to buy the burger at the cafeteria as long as you pay for it.

   Also, there is a type of cheating mentality evident in the world. Cops who lie to get a confession are seen as clever. Movies and TV shows glamorize con men and thieves. As long as the cause if good, the means to the end are irrelevant.

   And then some are just so overworked. My students are often working full time, going to school and raising a family and it is very tempting in that type of setting to be tempted to take a short cut.

4. Adam Says:
   March 9th, 2010 at 11:30 pm

   I don’t think so. When it comes down to it, paper testing is prohibitive to blatantly easy cheating with even a modicum of professor oversight. The people who do cheat, have only those in the classroom willing to aid them to help. Since those people tend to be poorer students the cheating usually doesn’t help much. The internet has no such flaw in information reporting. I doubt the majority of CS cheating is occurring on hard copy paper tests. By that token, I think take home tests suffer similar issues.

5. Kay Baker Says:
   March 10th, 2010 at 8:00 am

   Cheating seems to be a response to pressure to get it done and also to I don’t understand and have no time to understand. This is not limited to computer science but occurs in all study. I think higher education needs to reevaluate the time constraints for one but even more importantly, think about helping the student evaluate whether the effort necessary is what the student really wants to do.

6. Greg Says:
   March 10th, 2010 at 12:07 pm

   There is nothng new about time pressure in higher education. The response to the pressure seems to have changed, probably due to increased availability of unacceptable responses (pasting from electronic/internet resources) and a philosophy that publicly available materials are owned by nobody and can therefore be presented without crediting the source.

7. Woofers Says:
   March 10th, 2010 at 2:07 pm

   The bulk of the cheating I see tends to come from students from societies where cheating is either not condemned, or often viewed as just part of the system. In particular, I find Indian and Asian international students cheat frequently, and often blatantly. That isn’t to say that domestic students never cheat, but at nowhere near the level that I see among international students.

8. Jennifer Says:
   March 29th, 2010 at 5:13 pm

   1st – it’s interesting how some CS folks who posted comments here framed themselves as engaging in higher level thinking and others as merely regurgitating. That’s pretty classic – most groups claim what THEY do as much better, more difficult, lofty than others. 2nd, Yes, I’ve seen an increase in cheating, none of them have been international students, by the way, and I teach sociology. I now use turnitin.com. I was tired of the cutting and pasting from multiple websites that goes into papers. Even with 150 students in a class i could spot it. I’m sure there were people sneaking by with it as well. So, I use turnitin.com, much as it pains me.

   As for a philosophy that emphasizes ends over means; it’s all around us. It’s in the government (torture, undeclared wars), business (theft of ideas, products, lack of sufficient testing of safety, etc), sports (steroids) and on and on. Students are NOT given much incentive to focus on learning material versus succeeding (in their definition) and getting good grades, whether they earn them or not.

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