From humble beginnings in a lab where engineers struggled to get two computers from two different manufactures to transfer a single file or send a single piece of e-Mail, the Internet was born. These two computers were only a few feet apart! After a slow start, the Internet exploded in the late 1990s to become the world’s most powerful platform for connecting people and collaboration regardless of time or place. As the educators of the next generation of business professionals, we require our students to leverage this platform for connecting and collaboration. Thomas Friedman tells us that, over time, the creation of the Internet represents an inflection point in the development of mankind. Never before have so many people from all parts of be globe been able to connect and collaborate in real-time and at almost no cost.
As digital natives, students today have indeed learned to leverage the Internet. Unfortunately, it is not always the way we expect. The Internet is the home for countless web sites where students can share class materials and improve their grades. From basic study guides and flash card to answer keys to exams and assignments, in many cases students are sharing far more information than we ever expected. Many educators are naïve of what is going on and ignorant of what their students are doing. As educators, we have an obligation to understand what is going on and must develop controls that safeguard academic integrity.
Some things never change. When I was an undergraduate freshman studying Engineering, I vividly remember taking an exam in Differential Equations. I was naïve and didn’t understand why the student sitting next to me took two exams at the beginning of the exam period. I thought that completing one of these exams would be painful enough; why would a student grab two exams? In the chaos at the end of the exam period when the professor and his TA were hustling to collect exams, this student calmly stashed the extra exam in his backpack and was completely unnoticed. Being a freshman I was a bit confused and never said anything to anyone. Later on I found out that this student was a member of a fraternity and that the fraternity has a secret file cabinet in their basement full of old exams which the brothers would all use to prepare for exams. I had finally figured out how the guys from this frat could party every night and still do reasonably well on exams!
Again, some things never change and shenanigans like this take place regularly in classrooms where professors are not vigilant and where controls are not put in place. The difference now is that instead of an exam ending up in the secret filing cabinet in the basement of a frat house, the exam now ends up on the Internet where students can connect and collaborate like never before.
While this cannot be condoned, as business professionals, we must appreciate the number of and variety of e-Businesses that have come to market to exploit this phenomenon. For a fee, sites like www.coursehero.com provide students with access to everything from study guides and flash cards to old exams and answer keys to assignments. CourseHero doesn’t create any of this content. All of the content is contributed by its members. CourseHero simply provides the platform for connecting students with content. CourseHero claims that they are not doing anything that is unethical. Their policies clearly state what is not appropriate to post but without any policing, students will be students and they have clearly crossed the line between collaborating together to prepare for an exam and unethical behavior.
Any student with a computer and a credit card now has immediate access to the secret file cabinet in the basement of that frat. The world’s greatest platform for connecting and collaborating is now being used by our students in ways we never expected. Trying to stop students from leveraging the Internet in this way would be about as fruitful as stepping in front of a moving freight train.
While we can’t stop this phenomenon, there are things that we can do to help preserve academic integrity. Some approaches will work better than others. Some will work well but not be practical or sustainable over the longer term. I invite you to reflect on this issue and contribute your thoughts on this issue and what we as educators can do the address this issue.
Mart
Hi Mart. I agree and welcome to the internet age where anything and everything that can be digitized can be shared. Pair this with “where there is a will there is a way” and we are left with no confidentiality. In my opinion, the best way to reduce cheating is to refrain from using assessments methods which are repetitive (same MC questions, same case, same problems, etc.) and take a page out of the cryptographer’s playbook and to mix it up and keep patterns to a minimum. Personally, I prefer assignments that cannot be duplicated like critical analysis of timely articles that change from semester to semester and structured problems like spreadsheets looking very different from assignment to assignment over time. However, class sizes and grading time limitations will strictly limit the degrees of freedom in innovation in assessment. Also note, that professors who use the same assignment format are also susceptible to a time series analysis by the students. In other words, how long would it take to exhaust thousands of questions from a text where students using the text from all over the world across universities can post exams and quizzes based on that text? This is not about closed communities like frat houses in the old days; this is a global community.
I don’t know all of the answers but I do know two.
The punishment for cheating must be severe. It is not sufficient to fail a student who cheats for the assignment or even the course. A suspension or expulsion should be considered so that we as a school make the statement that we will not tolerate cheating.
Faculty need to be encouraged to bring cheaters before the disciplinary committee rather than handling the situation themselves. This serves two purposes. It gets the student’s indiscretion known to the administration who will be aware if a student has multiple instances of cheating. The second purpose is that, again, it is a statement to students that we will not tolerate cheating.
Perhaps, we as a school need to develop a policy on cheating. I don’t think I have ever seen one.
Howard,
I’m assuming that you would be a fan of the new “Zero Tolerance” policy in my syllabus for 2501…
Academic Integrity – Zero Tolerance
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There will be zero tolerance for blatant plagiarism or any other type of academic dishonesty. Former MIS2501 students have posted both extra credit assignments and their work on exams to their e-Portfolios. You can find these with a simple Google search. Because of this, some people may be tempted to present the work of other students as their own. Under this zero tolerance policy, any student found doing this will immediately receive a final grade of “F” for the course and a formal complaint will immediately be filed with the University Discipline Committee (UDC). This incident will be listed on your permanent academic record. As part of my formal complaint, I will petition to have you expelled from the university. I will not discuss the penalty for violating this policy; I will simply direct you to this paragraph in the class syllabus.
We will be using SafeAssign as part of submitting exams and extra credit. If you make a bad choice, you will be caught and the zero tolerance policy will be strictly enforced.
We’ve been warning our students that what goes through the internet is “permanent” so we should not be surprised to find our old notes, exams, even basic homework solutions made available to students online.
Our challenge is how to overcome and build upon this new reality.
I do post notes, solutions, sample exams, sample papers, etc (on bb – which I know is not secure) because I can remind students that these are the baseline – the minimum and that my expectations are that they use these “tools” to improve their output.
I also discuss the concept of academic integrity; both the letter and spirit of policies.
I couple these efforts with UNIQUE (or at least as unique as I can be) assignments which are not easily mimicked and have come to rely less on standardized tests. I also feel comfortable “challenging” students to support their creative output with bibliographies and sources (and when I have doubts about originality – I “google” elements of the content and have championed the return of plagiarism software).
I have no “solution” for how to curtail the reality that students have found new ways to short-cut (many don’t believe they are cheating) work I assign, but I know that my awareness of these methods has helped change (and improve) the way I teach and the way I assess learning outcomes for my students.
I thought I had posted a comment when Debbie first sent this to us, but it apparently didn’t go through. I agree with Howard – we need to encourage faculty to take students to the Office of Student Conduct (OSC) when they cheat. Now, from my own experiences in the past year – the OSC is a pain to deal with. They are slow, they sometimes don’t follow through, and they sometimes even make you the faculty member feel like you are on trial. However, by using SafeAssign, I’ve been able to successfully charge 3 students in the past year who were found guilty by the OSC. My question is what happens after that? Yes, the OSC changes their grade to an F, but does this stay on their record? Do we know of any repeat offenders? I’m curious if a repeat offender went before OSC, if that student would get a stronger punishment like suspension or expulsion.
It’s not just Course Hero though – I had a student last year that took another student’s paper that she had posted on her MIS ePortfolio site. She posted it because employers were asking for writing samples. She had done really well in BizComm (deservedly so) and posted a tough paper that she was proud of. This guy thought he could get away with tweaking it and handing it in, but SafeAssign flagged it as over 80% plagiarized. I don’t think this girl even knows another student stole her paper.
Les trois antihéros de GTA 5 PC représentent de la meilleure disposition possible, le modèle structurel du psychisme humain de Sigmund Freud.
Le cruel et sauvage Trevor évoque le moi : un psychopathe mené par de vigoureux instincts et désirs sans zéro considération pour les autres.
Le bandit retraité Michael est le surmoi : la force critique,
réaliste, morale qui s’tente de garder le moi en échec.
Cela laisse au jeune Franklin le rôle de l’égo : un partenaire arrangé, réaliste qui sert d’intermédiaire entre les soifs du moi et
le surmoi ou, dans ce cas, la cohabitation de deux psychopathes qui semblent
continûment être à un cheveu de s’étrangler.
Tout au long de GTA 5, vous naviguerez au sein de ce trio,
ce qui vous permettra de voir San Andreas par les vues de trois caractères différentes d’une manière extravagante, chacune apportant sa propre
classification de psychose à un des jeux les plus fascinants de cette génération.