A majority of students cybercheat, taking information from the Internet and using it without citing the source or claiming it as their own. This is big. What’s worse, in my opinion, is that their attitude is that it’s okay because “everyone else does it.” That speaks to their character more than their academic skills.
February 8, 20112 CommentsRSS feed for comments on this post. Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time. |
I received my BS (Civil Engineering) in 2008, and never knew (about) anyone cheating in the ways outlined in that article, but I do have a story about cheating in general that seems to back up the numbers involved.
In the last term of my senior year, the structural engineering students all took a class on Structural Design with Steel, and because it was our last term in school, the professor taught it with a light hand and most of our assignments were not terribly taxing, and in fact homework was just graded on a “serious attempt = full credit / not serious attempt = no credit” basis. There were about 40 students in the class.
A group of students representing about half the class (twenty or so) obtained a teacher’s edition of the textbook which included the solutions to all the homework problems, and got in the habit of copying the solution for every problem. The Professor discovered the cheating ring about 2 weeks after it started when all of the people involved turned in a homework problem with the exact same mistake (a nonsensical typo in the textbook solution that made no sense in the context of the problem).
The Professor ultimately decided to go leniently on them and reduce their grade by two letters and require a final exam for the cheaters (graduating seniors weren’t normally required to take final exams). I thought that was incredibly nice of him given that school policy allowed him to fail them, which would have the majority of the cheaters to no longer be eligible for graduation.
I could never figure out though, why, in an easy class, where homework was effectively an effort grade, and with graduation nearly at hand, so many students would cheat and risk failing the class and therefore not graduating. Many of them had jobs lined up they might have lost as a result.
Comment by JohnnyK — February 8, 2011 @ 2:55 pm
Great story, JohnnyK. Again, I think such a thing speaks to the person’s character more than their academic skills. Many of those students are most likely going to work in government where ethics and accountability are subject to higher levels of scrutiny than in the private sector.
Comment by admin — February 8, 2011 @ 3:40 pm