Someone must stop this train...

[Janice in NJ]

I recently read that 68% of college students purchase at least one paper per semester.

 

I didn't believe it. How could there be so many kids who would do that? So many.

 

Then I saw this on Craigslist today. Um... this is a joke, right?

 

 

 

Date: 2012-12-26, 6:13PM EST

need somebody great in science specifically anatomy and physiology to take two tests for me. they are the midterm and final for next semester...i will pay 100 for each test which is an hour of your time. only serious responses please. not looking for tutor

 

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[creekland]

I guess I'd be wondering if it were real or a set up looking to catch responders...

 

It's sad if it's real.

 

Our high school wastes tons of potential instructional time each year having kids write papers during class time. When I asked why, the reason I was given was that it was the only way to ensure papers were written by the student (and even then, it's not a foolproof system - just the best option they could come up with).

[maize]

I wish I felt certain that add was a joke...

[MtnMama]

Kids have been doing this forever. It's just more high-tech now.

[Lang Syne Boardie]

There have always been cheaters, but I don't believe that the majority have always been cheaters.

[regentrude]

No, it's not a joke. On our local classified website, there was an ad by a student who wanted a paper written. One of my friends contacted him, posing as an interested writer, inquired about school and course - turned out he was at the same college where she was teaching - and notified administration. They had already received word from somebody else.

 

I once had a student who was not enrolled in my class show up to take a test. I can only suspect that somebody was planning to trade tests with him. That's when knowing the names of all your students is very helpful; I was able to spot the person in the middle of the lecture hall just before I was beginning to pass out tests.

 

The subject I teach does not require papers; however, homework is frequently copied form the internet. Bugs me every time. But it is a small portion of the grade and those students will fail my exams.

[G5052]

No, it's not a joke. On our local classified website, there was an ad by a student who wanted a paper written. One of my friends contacted him, posing as an interested writer, inquired about school and course - turned out he was at the same college where she was teaching - and notified administration. They had already received word from somebody else.

 

I once had a student who was not enrolled in my class show up to take a test. I can only suspect that somebody was planning to trade tests with him. That's when knowing the names of all your students is very helpful; I was able to spot the person in the middle of the lecture hall just before I was beginning to pass out tests.

 

The subject I teach does not require papers; however, homework is frequently copied form the internet. Bugs me every time. But it is a small portion of the grade and those students will fail my exams.

 

Yes, same at the college where I work. Several professors routinely monitor the local Craigslist for papers, and there have been a number who were tracked down and suspended. The electronic tools thankfully work pretty well for basic checks, and the majority of schemes are pretty basic.

 

Once two online students of mine cut-and-pasted between each other, and the system caught it. They claim that they had been sharing a flash drive and got the files mixed up, so I took the highest grade of the two and divided it in half. They didn't complain, so I figured they were guilty.

 

Another student turned in her boyfriend's project from two years before. Given that I had taught the boyfriend, I guess that they thought that I wouldn't remember. I did.

 

I used to assign a newsletter that required writing an article. Once two students (friends who sat together) cut-and-pasted from the electronic version of the textbook. When I read the first one, I was surprised at the level of the writing. Then I read the friend's (identical) and realized that it was word-for-word from the textbook. They both got zeros.

[Janice in NJ]

I'm wondering how tis is possible. For his freshman comp class my son had to submit his paper to some kind of online program. It would give a percentage of how much was plagarized or had been posted somewhere before.. So, you would have to have someone write a new paper that had never ever been used before... I think it was easier earlier in time, but maybe I'm naive.

 

Yes, my son's comp prof did this; he was the only prof.

 

My dd has taken nine courses. So far, she has not submitted a paper to be checked. I watch her work, so I know she is working.

 

I could see how that ad might be real around here. We have a couple of very large uni's with very large A&P classes. Huge lecture halls. Many kids don't go to class. So the prof wouldn't know them. And unlike the SAT, no one is checking ID's. At our very large state uni, the A&P class is the weeder class. The head of the department did the admissions presentation and told the HUGE room full of eager seniors and anxious parents, "This classroom is our A&P classroom. No one is watching you to see if you are coming to class or doing your work. This room is half-empty on lecture days and packed on exam days. We are treating you like adults." I doubt she has seen the ad on Craigslist. If she has, I suspect she'll stop inserting that line into her admin presentation; it's not generating the fear in the students that she thinks it's generating. (Gosh, I feel old. I would never have even thought like that. But in a twisted way, that kind of reasoning is starting to make sense if you listen to the news..... Why worry about spending $50K+ per year for college when only 53% of students will have a degree in six years?* You can pay the tuition, the kid can learn a couple of things, and the kid can get a diploma. After all, no one really checks to see if anyone learned anything. Plenty of businesses hire you because you have a degree, not because you know anything. OR DO ANYTHING!!!! Look at our Congress right now, they are getting paid even though they aren't working when the whole world is watching..... And they don't seem to be completely embarrassed about it. Goodness, if I was a member of the House right now, I would show up and just sit in the room even if I were the only one there. I would be too embarrassed NOT to. I digress....)

 

Back to the ad - it doesn't seem possible that anyone would have the guts to do something like that. It seems utterly foolish. But then, if they didn't get caught, I would be the one scraping my jaw off the floor. (Psst: it's possible that your X-Ray technician has no idea where your liver is....... Better watch out!)

 

But then again, the paper-cheating stat caught me off guard too. But then I thought about it for a minute. No institution wants to catch students cheating. If you catch them, you have to deal with it. You have to punish them. They are going to put up a stink. Their parents are going to put up a stink. AND - that student is gone. No more money. If word gets out that you actively hunt down and punish cheaters, how many kids are going to sign up for your class? School administrators need to focus on retention; they have bills to pay. So you have to give the appearance of being tough on cheaters, but I suspect that since most schools are on a very tight budget, you probably can't actually afford (in time and money) to BE tough on cheaters.

 

Hmmm..... interesting new question to ask at the admissions presentations.

 

Proud administrator in front of a room full of eager parents who are hopeful that the college will let their kid in and take their money to do it: "Are there any questions?"

Me: "Yes, according to the stats, 2/3 of college students purchase at least one paper per semester online. How many kids are caught and punished for cheating at this school each semester?"

 

I'm anticipating a VERY blank stare.

Should be fun. (NOT!)

 

Peace,

Janice

 

* http://usatoday30.us...tion-rate_N.htm

[Barbara H]

Yes, it is upsetting stuff. This is a really fascinating and disturbing article that is worth reading. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

 

Minor point, but just for what it is worth, our state university does implement a variety of security measures in the big lecture hall type testing situations. Those include - multiple copies of the test, assigned seating, extra TAs and staff to supervise and checking photo ID.

[G5052]

 

But then again, the paper-cheating stat caught me off guard too. But then I thought about it for a minute. No institution wants to catch students cheating. If you catch them, you have to deal with it. You have to punish them. They are going to put up a stink. Their parents are going to put up a stink. AND - that student is gone. No more money. If word gets out that you actively hunt down and punish cheaters, how many kids are going to sign up for your class? School administrators need to focus on retention; they have bills to pay. So you have to give the appearance of being tough on cheaters, but I suspect that since most schools are on a very tight budget, you probably can't actually afford (in time and money) to BE tough on cheaters.

 

Hmmm..... interesting new question to ask at the admissions presentations.

 

Proud administrator in front of a room full of eager parents who are hopeful that the college will let their kid in and take their money to do it: "Are there any questions?"

Me: "Yes, according to the stats, 2/3 of college students purchase at least one paper per semester online. How many kids are caught and punished for cheating at this school each semester?"

 

I'm anticipating a VERY blank stare.

Should be fun. (NOT!)

 

Peace,

Janice

 

* http://usatoday30.us...tion-rate_N.htm

 

Yes, this is a very valid question.

 

The V.P. in charge of my campus is very anti-cheating, as is the Dean that I work under. Both say that our degrees won't mean anything if we don't go after those who are trying to beat the system. They bring this up in every faculty meeting before the semester starts, and usually email 2-3 times during the semester with reminders of the process and how important it is to do it.

 

Not too long ago a professor was sued for giving an "F" on an assignment that was copied from Internet. Ultimately the judge threw out the case, but it forced formal statements in the course documents and a formal procedure for how we handle such cases. My Dean said that they are indeed tracking the statistics now, but I haven't heard how many cases they actually have. That would be a good question for my faculty meeting next week!

 

And yes, it is a pain, but I've found over the years that being a pushover professor just drags you down. Better to say "zero tolerance for cheating" and have them complain to my boss that I follow my policies. And yes, they do that too.

[MIch elle]

My ds just finished his first semester at a large state university. He said that all his English papers were checked online for cheating via the university system. He also said that university IDs are checked when handing in finished tests/exams.

[Julie Smith]

Yes, it is upsetting stuff. This is a really fascinating and disturbing article that is worth reading. http://chronicle.com...Scholar/125329/

 

Minor point, but just for what it is worth, our state university does implement a variety of security measures in the big lecture hall type testing situations. Those include - multiple copies of the test, assigned seating, extra TAs and staff to supervise and checking photo ID.

 

 

Thanks.

 

When I started reading this thread i thought of that article. I had read it in Reader's Digest and am happy to have a copy of it.

[cathmom]

If it weren't for the ethical issues, that would be the perfect job for me! lol

[TranquilMind]

I recently read that 68% of college students purchase at least one paper per semester.

 

I didn't believe it. How could there be so many kids who would do that? So many.

 

Then I saw this on Craigslist today. Um... this is a joke, right?

 

 

 

Date: 2012-12-26, 6:13PM EST

need somebody great in science specifically anatomy and physiology to take two tests for me. they are the midterm and final for next semester...i will pay 100 for each test which is an hour of your time. only serious responses please. not looking for tutor

• Compensation: 100/hr
   
  
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
   
  
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
   
  
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.
  

 

What??? 68%? Our days are numbered.

 

Yeah, I've seen ads like this too. "Your deeds shall return on your own head" says scripture. It will come back to bite him.

[laundrycrisis]

I am guessing the university I attended must have had their system in place because of this. We were never able to just turn in a paper, by a due date, on a given topic. In every class that required papers, they were long projects that took several weeks, and we had check-ins through the entire process. We met with TAs to go over our initial draft outlines, rough notes, etc. We had weekly appointments to show our progress. We had to keep all of our original hand-written or typed drafts, outlines, index cards, everything. The entire process of writing the paper was checked as you went along. Nobody could just turn in a paper.

 

For exams, we had to be checked in at the door, and show our university photo ID. There was no way to have someone else take an exam for you.

[kiana]

We check ID's at exams (at university) for precisely this reason.

 

Frankly, the homework is worth only a small percentage of the grade, so a student who pays someone else to do their homework is only hurting themselves. So we don't really look for cheating on the homework, other than extraordinarily blatant copying. We rely on the in-class proctored exams (which are worth far more of the grade) to fail those students who may be cheating on the homework.

 

Laundrycrisis: You are not far off -- reducing cheating is one major reason that is done. Another reason is to work with students who genuinely cannot do the work without that level of help. When the administration is demanding that the professors figure out how to get more students passing, this way is easier to stomach for many than simply changing the passing marks.

[tearose]

I thought of the same Chronicle article when I started reading this thread. I found a follow-up article--he ended up revealing his identity and writing a book about it: http://chronicle.com/article/An-Academic-Ghostwriter-Comes/133904/

 

Hiring someone to write a custom paper has come about due to the Turn It In computer program (that's the name I knew for it when I taught) and because many professors/instructors will give less generic paper topics.

 

With regards to plagiarism, I absolutely believe that the student is ultimately responsible. However, I worked as a teaching assistant as a grad student and found that some professors didn't care enough to design assignments that would make plagiarism harder (or then were annoyed that their TAs reported cases of plagiarism because that created extra work for them--this was only one professor that I worked for). But I can believe that the rate of cheating is pretty high. Just to give you a real-life example, I found a 25% plagiarism rate in a class where I was a TA (and I did not have Turn It In at my disposal at the time). My guess is that I found the papers that lifted passages which were clearly too sophisticated to come from the student (this was a low-level, nonmajor course). If there were papers plagiarizing another student's work from another year or a mediocre purchased paper, there was really no way for me to know or prove that. In case you're wondering, the plagiarized papers I found didn't just have a plagiarized sentence here or there--plagiarized material often made up 50-75% of the paper. Sometimes it was from an online encyclopedia or an article from a newspaper's archive. Basically, I entered random phrases from these papers into Google if I suspected plagiarism. I did have one student who was remarkably unlucky--he had lifted passages from a book (an academic book meant for a scholarly audience, not a textbook). Unfortunately, for this student, I had done my undergraduate thesis on this topic (but had moved onto a different area in grad school) and the writing just seemed terribly familiar, but I couldn't place it. It bugged me for a day or two, and then I finally had a eureka moment. So I tend to think that if I caught something like that just because I happened to have randomly read a book, how much stuff did I not catch? Sometimes there would be an obvious shift in style, but I couldn't do anything if I couldn't prove plagiarism. (And, if I remember correctly, Turn It In compares papers to papers turned in by other students, not to books, journals, etc.)

[Nan in Mass]

tearose - How does Turn It In work?

[Storm Bay]

Kids have been doing this forever. It's just more high-tech now.

 

Correct. OTOH, I was so afraid of accidentally plagiarizing & getting caught that I took almost all my notes as quotes so that I could be sure to cite correctly, even when paraphrasing. That was back in the dark ages when you handwrote or typed your essays on typewriters (or, in the case of my friend, you hired a typist, but that was out of my budget.) That was around the time when they came out wtih erasible typing features, though. You weren't allowed to hand in photocopies, and you could always tell because there were telltale marks on the page, unlike now.

 

. Hmmm..... interesting new question to ask at the admissions presentations. Proud administrator in front of a room full of eager parents who are hopeful that the college will let their kid in and take their money to do it: "Are there any questions?" Me: "Yes, according to the stats, 2/3 of college students purchase at least one paper per semester online. How many kids are caught and punished for cheating at this school each semester?" I'm anticipating a VERY blank stare. Should be fun. (NOT!) Peace, Janice * http://usatoday30.us...tion-rate_N.htm

 

I wish I'd thought of that one--I could have embarassed my dd's even more (just asking questions embarrassed them, and I always asked at least one). Of course, most of the time they have pat answers, but this one might throw them. Not one parent asked that at any of our info sessions.

 

Yes, it is upsetting stuff. This is a really fascinating and disturbing article that is worth reading. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/ Minor point, but just for what it is worth, our state university does implement a variety of security measures in the big lecture hall type testing situations. Those include - multiple copies of the test, assigned seating, extra TAs and staff to supervise and checking photo ID.

 

That's a good system.

 

For exams, we had to be checked in at the door, and show our university photo ID. There was no way to have someone else take an exam for you.

 

Photo ID is a great idea, although there is a chance of kids making fake IDs--still much harder to cheat.

[idnib]

So is this system of electronically checking a paper against previous papers sustainable? Over, say, 50 years? Once the system contains two million papers about Huck Finn, isn't it likely anyone's original paper will be very similar to another one? Monkeys and Shakespeare and all that.

 

It seems the way around this is what laundrycrisis was talking about, and that's checking student work as you go along. Of course that involves a lot more work and doesn't let students manage their own deadlines as much.

[tearose]

Basically Turn It In has an archive of student papers (and now I think also internet available stuff) and checks new papers against papers in the archive. I've been out of the loop for a few years, but you can check out the company's website at turnitin.com. Colleges and universities then pay a subscription fee that allows their instructors to submit papers.

 

On checking student work along the way--it's a deterrent of sorts, but I have personally received plagiarized final drafts that hardly resembled earlier drafts that were presumably written by the student. Sounds like a really dumb thing to do, but I've encountered it! At least it makes it harder for a student to defend the plagiarized paper.

 

It's pretty disheartening to deal with plagiarists--they certainly did their best to make me feel terrible about reporting them, telling me things like how they planned on going to med school or it was unintentional or the first time they'd done it, etc--basically, I was the one who was going to ruin their future. On a logical level, of course, I know that they were at fault, but I found it pretty draining.

[kiana]

It's pretty disheartening to deal with plagiarists--they certainly did their best to make me feel terrible about reporting them, telling me things like how they planned on going to med school or it was unintentional or the first time they'd done it, etc--basically, I was the one who was going to ruin their future. On a logical level, of course, I know that they were at fault, but I found it pretty draining.

 

I know. I caught someone blatantly cheating in an exam, and of course it was the student I liked best. I felt quite bad about it, but what could I do when someone was using their phone to quickly google a question during an exam?

I recently read that 68% of college students purchase at least one paper per semester.

 

I'm sure the cheating is rampant, but I don't believe this figure at all. What is the source? I bet that at least 32% of students have no assigned papers to write in any given semester.