Adv B RWG
Puccini/Kurzweil
High-Tech Cheating on Homework Abounds, and Professors Are Partly to Blame
Jeffrey R. Young. March 28, 2010
A casual joke on Twitter recently let slip a dirty little secret of large science and engineering
courses: Students routinely cheat on their homework, and professors often look the other way.
"Grading homework is so fast when they all cheat and use the illegal solutions manual," quipped
Douglas Breault Jr., a teaching assistant in mechanical engineering at Tufts University. After all,
if every answer is correct, the grader is left with little to do beyond writing an A at the top of the
page and circling it. Mr. Breault, a first-year graduate student, ended his tweet by saying, "The
profs tell me to ignore it."
While most students and professors seem to view cheating on examinations as a serious moral
lapse, both groups appear more cavalier about dishonesty on homework. And technology has
given students more tools than ever to find answers in unauthorized ways -- whether
downloading online solution manuals or instant-messaging friends for answers. The latest
surveys by the Center for Academic Integrity found that 22 percent of students say they have
cheated on a test or exam, but about twice as many -- 43 percent -- have engaged in
"unauthorized collaboration" on homework.
And cheating on an engineering problem set could be the perfect crime, in that it can be done
without leaving a trace. Students in a large lecture course based on a best-selling textbook can
often find the answer online, complete with all the math it took to get there. How can a professor
prove that the cheating students didn't work things out on their own? Enter David E. Pritchard, a
physics professor who teaches introductory courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(when he's not in his laboratory devising new ways to use lasers to reveal the curious behavior of
supercooled atoms).
Mr. Pritchard did detective work on his students worthy of a CSI episode. Because he uses an
online homework system in his courses, he realized he could add a detection system to look for
unusual behavior patterns. If a student took less than a minute to answer each of several complex
questions and got them all right, for instance, the system flagged that as likely cheating. "Since
one minute is insufficient time to read the problem and enter the several answers typically
required, we infer that the quick-solver group is copying the answer from somewhere," he wrote
in a paper last month in the free online journal Physical Review Special Topics -- Physics
Education Research.
He and his research team found about 50 percent more cheating than students reported in
anonymous surveys over a period of four semesters. In the first year he did his hunting, about 11
percent of homework problems appeared to be copied.
Mr. Pritchard has no interest in becoming a homework cop. What he really wants to do is
understand the minds of the offenders. The issue, he says, is far more nuanced than a story of
"Top Students Caught Cheating." He told me that the dishonesty reveals flaws in the very way
Adv B RWG
Puccini/Kurzweil
science is taught, and indicates an unhelpful spirit of "us versus them" between professors and
students.
He believes that the most important part of learning physics comes by doing, and so students
who outsource their homework learn little. His studies of his students prove his point. The
cheaters generally perform far worse than other students come test time -- students who
frequently copied their homework scored two letter grades lower on comparable material on the
exam.
Why Students Cheat
Here's what surprised me most when talking with people who have tracked college cheaters.
Many students simply do not view copying homework answers as wrong -- at least not when it is
done with technology.
That's what Trevor Harding found. He's a professor of materials engineering at California
Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo who has researched student cheating in
engineering.
In surveys, he asked students if they viewed bringing a cheat sheet to an exam as cheating. Most
did. Then he asked the same students whether they would consider it cheating to bring a
graphing calculator with equations secretly stored on it. Many said no, that wasn't cheating.
"I call it 'technological detachment phenomenon,'" he told me recently. "As long as there's some
technology between me and the action, then I'm not culpable for the action." By that logic, if
someone else posted homework solutions online, what's wrong with downloading them?
The popularity of Web sites full of homework answers seems to confirm his finding. One of
them, called Course Hero, boasts a free collection of "over 500,000 textbook solutions." The
company set up a group on Facebook, where more than 265,000 people have signed up as "fans."
Drew Mondry, a junior at New England College, who recently transferred from Michigan State,
is among them. "The feeling about homework is that it's really just busywork," he told me. (He
said he does not cheat on his homework and only signed up as a fan of the Course Hero site
because some friends did.) "You just call your friend and say, 'Hey, do you know the answer?'"
In the big science courses he has taken, professors didn't put much effort into teaching, so
students don't put real effort into learning, he says: "I have yet to meet a professor who really
loves teaching an introductory course, and that translates," was how he put it. "If you look bored
out of your mind, guess how much I care?"
Some professors seem to believe that since students who cut corners on homework end up
bombing exams, students get a kind of built-in punishment for the behavior, says Mr. Pritchard.
Poorly performing students might even learn a lesson from their laziness. So the cheating will
take care of itself, right? That's the rationalization, anyway.
Adv B RWG
Puccini/Kurzweil
Certainly, many professors put a lot of effort into their classes. And to them, blatant student
cheating can feel like a personal insult. Eric Roberts, a computer-science professor at Stanford
University who has studied academic cheating, told me about a student in his course who went to
a public computer lab, found some other student's homework assignment saved on a machine
there, changed the name to his own name, and turned it in as his own work. Except he left the
other student's name on one page by mistake. Busted.
"This is lazy cheating," Mr. Roberts said. "They're trying to put one over on us. And if they're
trying to match wits with us, I'd just as soon win -- if that's their game I'll play it."
Policy Change?
It isn't just professors who overlook cheating. Many colleges offer no comprehensive approach
to minor academic cheating (the exceptions are institutions with honor codes, though few have
them).
That's the view of Tracy Mitrano, Cornell University's director of information-technology policy.
She recently attended a panel discussion on the campus where junior professors and students told
stories of widespread cheating there -- including a course where half the students routinely
cheated on homework at least once a term. She started asking around and heard similar stories in
several departments and at other institutions.
Now she's calling for universities to focus on the problem, and to devise a more standardized
approach to punishing those who cheat on routine assignments. "Let's stop the cover-up of
plagiarism," she wrote in an op-ed last month in Cornell's student newspaper. "The current
system places too great a burden on individual faculty who would, under the circumstances,
appear to have perverse incentives: Pursuing these matters lowers course evaluations, takes their
severely limited time away from research for promotion, and unfortunately personalizes the issue
when it is not personal at all, but a violation against the university."
Her proposal: Make it easier for professors to handle such cases, and reform academic judicial
systems to make clearer distinctions between smaller violations, like homework copying, and
larger ones, like cheating on exams. And assign appropriate punishments for each.
I ran that idea by W. Scott Lewis, president of the Association for Student Conduct
Administration. "The short answer is she's right," he told me. "The system needs to be consistent.
As it is, you might get caught cheating in physics, and that professor might say 'You failed my
class.' Then you get caught cheating in an English class, and that professor says, 'You have to
retake the final and get one letter grade lower.' That's inequitable." Even worse, the English
professor and the physics professor will probably never talk to each other, so the serial cheater
will never be reported to the institution's disciplinary system. In that case, the cheater wins.
In the humanities, professors have found technological tools to check for blatant copying on
essays, and have caught so many culprits that the practice of running papers through plagiarism-
Adv B RWG
Puccini/Kurzweil
detection services has become routine at many colleges. But that software is not suited to
science-class assignments.
Mr. Pritchard, the MIT professor, did find a way to greatly reduce cheating on homework in his
classes. He switched to a "studio" model of teaching, in which students sit in small groups
working through tutorials on computers while professors and teaching assistants roam the room
answering questions, rather than a traditional lecture. With lectures, he detected cheating on
about 11 percent of homework problems, but now he detects copying on only about 3 percent.
It probably helps that he shares some crucial findings from his study with his students.
Homework cheaters, he showed, are much more likely to get C's and D's on exams than those
who work out the assignments on their own.
Young, Jeffrey R. "High-Tech Cheating on Homework Abounds, and Professors Are Partly to
Blame." The Chronicle of Higher Education 56.29 (2010). General OneFile. Web. 18 June
2011.
Document URL
http://find.galegroup.com/gps/infomark.do?&contentSet=IACDocuments&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=IPS&docId=A223293419&source=gale
&srcprod=ITOF&userGroupName=contra_main&version=1.0
Adv B RWG
Puccini/Kurzweil
High-Tech Cheating on Homework Abounds, and Professors Are Partly to Blame Jeffrey R. Young. March 28,
2010 A casual joke on Twitter recently let slip a dirty little secret of large science and engineering courses:
Students routinely cheat on their homework, and professors often look the other way. "Grading homework is
so fast when they all cheat and use the illegal solutions manual," quipped Douglas Breault Jr., a
teaching assistant in mechanical engineering at Tufts University. After all, if every answer is correct, the grader
is left with little to do beyond writing an A at the top of the page and circling it. Mr. Breault, a first-year graduate
student, ended his tweet by saying, "The profs tell me to ignore it." While most students and professors seem
to view cheating on examinations as a serious moral lapse, both groups appear more cavalier about dishonesty
on homework. Andtechnology has given students more tools than ever to find answers in unauthorized ways - whether downloading online solution manuals or instant-messaging friends for answers. The
latest surveysby the Center for Academic Integrity found that 22 percent of students say they have cheated
on a test or exam, but about twice as many -- 43 percent -- have engaged in "unauthorized collaboration" on
homework. And cheating on an engineering problem set could be the perfect crime, in that it can be done
without leaving a trace. Students in a large lecture course based on a best-selling textbook can often find the
answer online, complete with all the math it took to get there. How can a professor prove that the cheating
students didn't work things out on their own? Enter David E. Pritchard, a physics professor who teaches
introductory courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(when he's not in his laboratory devising
new ways to use lasers to reveal the curious behavior of supercooled atoms). Mr. Pritchard did detective work
on his students worthy of a CSI episode. Because he uses an online homework system in his courses, he
realized he could add a detection system to look for unusual behavior patterns. If a student took less than a
minute to answer each of several complex questions and got them all right, for instance, the system flagged
that as likely cheating. "Since one minute is insufficient time to read the problem and enter the several
answers typically required, we infer that the quick-solver group is copying the answer from somewhere," he
wrote in a paper last month in the free online journal Physical Review Special Topics -- Physics
Education Research. He and his research team found about 50 percent more cheating than students
reported in anonymous surveys over a period of four semesters. In the first year he did his hunting, about
11 percent of homework problems appeared to be copied. Mr. Pritchard has no interest in becoming a
homework cop. What he really wants to do is understand the minds of the offenders. The issue, he says, is far
more nuanced than a story of "Top Students Caught Cheating." He told me that the dishonesty reveals flaws in
the very way science is taught, and indicates an unhelpful spirit of "us versus them" between professors and
students. He believes that the most important part of learning physics comes by doing, and so students who
outsource their homework learn little. His studies of his students prove his point. The cheaters generally
perform far worse than other students come test time -- students who frequently copied their homework scored
two letter grades lower on comparable material on the exam. Why Students Cheat Here's what surprised me
most when talking with people who have tracked college cheaters. Many students simply do not view copying
homework answers as wrong -- at least not when it is done with technology. That's what Trevor
Harding found. He's a professor of materials engineering at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis
Obispo who has researched student cheating in engineering. In surveys, he asked students if they viewed
bringing a cheat sheet to an exam as cheating. Most did. Then he asked the same students whether they
would consider it cheating to bring a graphing calculator with equations secretly stored on it. Many said no,
that wasn't cheating. "I call it 'technological detachment phenomenon,'" he told me recently. "As long as
there's some technology between me and the action, then I'm not culpable for the action." By that logic, if
someone else posted homework solutions online, what's wrong with downloading them? The popularity of
Web sites full of homework answers seems to confirm his finding. One of them, called Course Hero, boasts a
free collection of "over 500,000 textbook solutions." The company set up a group on Facebook, where more
than 265,000 people have signed up as "fans." Drew Mondry, a junior at New England College, who
Adv B RWG
Puccini/Kurzweil
recently transferred from Michigan State, is among them. "The feeling about homework is that it's really just
busywork," he told me. (He said he does not cheat on his homework and only signed up as a fan of the Course
Hero site because some friends did.) "You just call your friend and say, 'Hey, do you know the answer?'" In the
big science courses he has taken, professors didn't put much effort into teaching, so students don't put real
effort into learning, he says: "I have yet to meet a professor who really loves teaching an introductory course,
and that translates," was how he put it. "If you look bored out of your mind, guess how much I care?" Some
professors seem to believe that since students who cut corners on homework end up bombing exams, students
get a kind of built-in punishment for the behavior, says Mr. Pritchard. Poorly performing students might even
learn a lesson from their laziness. So the cheating will take care of itself, right? That's the rationalization,
anyway. Certainly, many professors put a lot of effort into their classes. And to them, blatant student cheating
can feel like a personal insult. Eric Roberts, a computer-science professor at Stanford University who has
studied academic cheating, told me about a student in his course who went to a
public computer lab, found some other student's homework assignment saved on a machine there, changed
the name to his own name, and turned it in as his own work. Except he left the other student's name on one
page by mistake. Busted. "This is lazy cheating," Mr. Roberts said. "They're trying to put one over on us. And if
they're trying to match wits with us, I'd just as soon win -- if that's their game I'll play it." Policy Change? It isn't
just professors who overlook cheating. Many colleges offer no comprehensive approach to minor
academic cheating (the exceptions are institutions with honor codes, though few have them). That's the view
of Tracy Mitrano, Cornell University's director of information-technology policy. She recently attended
a panel discussion on the campus where junior professors and students told stories of widespread cheating
there -- including a course where half the students routinely cheated on homework at least once a term. She
started asking around and heard similar stories in several departments and at other institutions. Now she's
calling for universities to focus on the problem, and to devise a more standardized approach to punishing
those who cheat on routine assignments. "Let's stop the cover-up of plagiarism," she wrote in an op-ed last
month in Cornell's student newspaper. "The current system places too great a burden on individual faculty who
would, under the circumstances, appear to have perverse incentives: Pursuing these matters lowers course
evaluations, takes their severely limited time away from research for promotion, and unfortunately
personalizes the issue when it is not personal at all, but a violation against the university." Her proposal: Make
it easier for professors to handle such cases, and reform academic judicial systems to make
clearer distinctions between smaller violations, like homework copying, and larger ones, like cheating on
exams. And assign appropriate punishments for each. I ran that idea by W. Scott Lewis, president of the
Association for Student Conduct Administration. "The short answer is she's right," he told me. "The system
needs to be consistent. As it is, you might get caught cheating in physics, and that professor might say 'You
failed my class.' Then you get caught cheating in an English class, and that professor says, 'You have to retake
the final and get one letter grade lower.' That's inequitable." Even worse, the English professor and the
physics professor will probably never talk to each other, so the serial cheater will never be reported to
the institution's disciplinary system. In that case, the cheater wins. In the humanities, professors
have found technological tools to check for blatant copying on essays, and have caught so many culprits that
the practice of running papers through plagiarism-detection services has become routine at many colleges.
But that software is not suited to science-class assignments. Mr. Pritchard, the MIT professor, did find a way to
greatly reduce cheating on homework in his classes. He switched to a "studio" model of teaching, in which
students sit in small groups working through tutorials on computers while professors and teaching assistants
roam the room answering questions, rather than a traditional lecture. With lectures, he detected cheating on
about 11 percent of homework problems, but now he detects copying on only about 3 percent. It probably
helps that he shares some crucial findings from his study with his students. Homework cheaters, he showed,
are much more likely to get C's and D's on exams than those who work out the assignments on their own.
Young, Jeffrey R. "High-Tech Cheating on Homework Abounds, and Professors Are Partly to Blame." The
Adv B RWG
Puccini/Kurzweil
Chronicle of Higher Education 56.29 (2010). General OneFile. Web. 18 June 2011. Document URL
http://find.galegroup.com/gps/infomark.do?&contentSet=IACDocuments&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=IPS&docId=A223293419&source=gale&srcprod=ITOF&userG
roupName=contra_main&version=1.0
Matches by word group level
Level 1
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ilar
Level 2
appropriate assistant assistants complex computer computers conduct distinctions equations
evaluations final focus institute institution institutions journal site sites surveys traditional
transferred
Level 3
minor physical insufficient technology technological
Level 4
codes promotion
Level 5
academic pursuing
Level 6
assign assignment assignments ignore lecture rationalization reveal reveals
Level 7
comprehensive confirm grade grades grading infer
Level 8
crucial detected detection detective detects widespread
Level 9
found manuals team violation
Level 10
integrity panel
Summary:
“High-Tech Cheating on Homework Abounds, and Professors Are Partly to Blame,” by Jeffrey
R. Young discusses the phenomenon of college students cheating on homework. The article
mentions several reasons why students cheat on homework, including a laissez-faire attitude
from some professors, and easy access to answers. For example websites like Course Hero,
which contain “over 500,000 textbook solutions.” Another reason may be what Trevor Harding,
professor of materials engineering at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo,
calls “'technological detachment phenomenon.” By this he means that the younger generation of
students who grew up with high technology, like online file sharing, may not think they are
cheating when they use the Internet or other forms of technology to help them do their
homework. In other words, to these students there is no difference between leaning over during
an exam and copying off their neighbor’s paper and using the Internet to get the answers.
However, both constitute cheating and the professors see the effects on exams. Students who
cheat, the article reports, do worse on tests than students who do the homework. In conclusion,
as a result of cheating some professors, like David E. Pritchard, physics professor at MIT, have
changed their approach to teaching because the goal of higher education is to acquire knowledge,
which comes from doing and “students who outsource their homework learn little.”