Friday, September 09, 2011
Is Policing Plagiarism At A University As Counterproductive As Trying To Stop Copyright Infringement?
Techdirt: We've talked in the past about how multiple studies have shown that greater enforcement efforts to stop copyright infringement aren't particularly effective. One of the reasons for this is that they tend to piss off and anger the biggest fans, which has significant ripple effects and unintended consequences. A few months ago, there was an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which I'm finally getting around to writing about, all about one NYU CS professor's experience in trying to catch and deal with cheaters on tests.
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6 comments:
This article brings up something that has been becoming more and more of an issue. Professors are focusing more on catching people cheating that they are not focusing on actually teaching the students and encouraging creative thinking. It reminds me a lot of being in elementary school when the trouble makers got all of the teachers' attention while the good students just had to sit there and deal with their work on their own. The article also brings up a good point about creative assignments. If the professors present homework and projects in a manner that students will actually want to do the assignment, there is a lower chance that people will cheat. However, I am a strong believer that when someone is caught cheating they deserve to be thrown out of school. They're wasting people's valuable time that they could be using instead to teach those people who actually want to learn, and are taking up seats in a classroom that could be taken by someone who actually wanted to be there. I do think that professors need to have solid proof that the person is cheating, though. Someone very close to me was accused of plagiarism because their paper "looked too good" and the professor didn't think they could possibly write a paper that detailed without cheating. An innocent person had to go in front of a board and plead their case, and risked getting thrown out of school for something they didn't do.
Having dealt with cheating many times as a high school teacher it's safe to say that you don't need a witch hunt in order to find people cheating. As you become familiar with a student's work you start to notice when something just doesn't feel right, and while it may be just a quirk, it is often worth looking at the test paper of the person that sat next to them. Most students cheating seem to do it out of desperation, and they don't seem to think about what might happen or the possibility of getting caught. Few things are more embarrassing that being told that yes, the answer you gave was correct, but it was identical to the one given by the person sitting next to you who had a different question to answer than you did.
I do think cheating rules need to be enforced more in all schools. Especially when it comes to punishment but some of the devices used to stop cheaters just don't work well at all. There is this one site called "Turn It In". In theory it works very well. You turn in you assignment before a deadline and then the computer will check to see if any of your work is stolen from a source directly. But sometimes the site would take a simple sentence like. "Odysseus was a tragic hero." And say that you plagiarized it when you came up with that very simple sentence on your own. Then you would be punished for doing you own work. I think some plagiarism rules need to be re-thought out. And like Tom said you can usually stop the cheaters if you pay attention to their writing styles.
Moral is one of the most important aspects of learning. I found in high school the teacher who had the students with the highest moral had more respect for the teacher and what they were teaching. Less people skipped and less people cheated on tests. And after taking multiple classes with that teacher, I discovered that those classes had the biggest impact on me. I learned so much and was happy to.
Having a high moral makes you happy and gives you something to look forward to. Its the best environment to learn in.
I think this is a very interesting article in describing the dynamic that occurs when teachers begin to focus on finding cheaters rather than the coursework itself. I think that while cheating should be discouraged, I think that sometimes teachers focus too much on finding cheaters than teaching the coursework and encouraging their students. And that is what the classes are about, when all is said and done. I'm not saying cheating is good, but I think some different methods to deal with it, more proactive methods that the author has listed are better than trying to find it after the fact. Thwarting someone from cheating rather than finding out they've cheated after the fact is a better in my opinion. And it allows the teacher to focus on the classwork, and get the students more involved in creating the work rather than trying to find a way around doing it.
This is a really tough issue. It is so important to make sure that cheaters are not rewarded, but at the same time professors should not have to be constantly suspicious of students and focusing on following rules rather than learning. From reading the article, I did not really understand why using Turnitin.com hurt student morale so much. To me, using such software is a good way of assuring that students will not cheat, because who would be dumb enough to turn in a plagiarized paper when you're guaranteed to be caught? However, it sounds like a lot of students still try to get away with cheating. It sounds like professors just need to remind themselves that the majority (I hope) of students are at university to learn, and it isn't fair to everyone else to let negative feelings from dealing with cheaters carry over into the general tone of the classroom.
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