cheating

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For Exams, is Using the Internet Considered Cheating?

May 9, 2012 | 10:41 AM | By

Erin Scott

By Ann Michaelsen

Students sit in the test-taking room, with full access to computers and wireless connections. As they work on national exams, they can be seen accessing the Internet from time to time. Are the results from this test going to be corrupted because these test-takers are not isolated from global information resources?

What is high-tech cheating exactly? Is it really a problem, or do our old-school definitions of cheating need rethinking?

Most educators agree that students must meet certain requirements if they’re going to succeed as citizens and workers. “The term ’21st-century skills’ is generally used to refer to certain core competencies such as collaboration, digital literacy, critical thinking, and problem-solving that advocates believe schools need to teach to help students thrive in today’s world, according to Education Week.

“Our exams have to reflect daily life in the classroom and daily life in the classroom has to reflect life in society.”

But when you look closely at these competencies and think about how students perform on exams, it starts getting complicated. What qualifies as cheating and what qualifies as a natural extension of learning, when students are increasingly expected to apply online research skills to find specific information in the vast ocean of facts and data?

WHAT DENMARK HAS LEARNED

In November 2009, 14 Danish upper secondary schools used the Internet during written exams, and a follow-up report  in 2010 by a group of auditors concluded that the experiment was a success. “The Internet is an integrated part of students’ everyday lives and education so this Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, cheating, search education

Plagiarism Differences in High School and College Students

November 3, 2011 | 12:12 PM | By

B. Gilliard

A report released today by the plagiarism-detection tool TurnItIn confirms what a lot of teachers already know: that students are copying content from online sources. According to the report, for both high school and college students, Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers were the top two most popular sources of lifted copy.

But another interesting fact emerged from the report about the difference between high school and college students. While 31% of content matches for high school students came from social and “content-sharing” sites (like Facebook or Yahoo Answers), just 26% of the matches for college students originated there.

College students were more likely to use content from cheat sites and paper mills, the report finds: 19.6% of content matches in college students’ papers came from those sites, whereas just 14.1% of matches to high school students’ papers. College students were also more likely to turn to news sites — 16.6% versus 12.3% of college students. And even though Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, cheating, plagiarism

What’s Behind the Culture of Academic Dishonesty

October 11, 2011 | 1:09 PM | By

B. Gilliard

You’ve heard the stories: Cheating in Atlanta, Georgia. Cheating in Washington, DC. Cheating in Long Island, New York.

Academic dishonesty, plagiarism, and cheating are hardly new. And as the history of the banking industry and baseball demonstrate, cheating scandals aren’t just limited to schools. With numerous incidents making headlines in recent months, however, questions are being raised about the validity and the pressures of standardized testing, as well as the security of testing practices. And some are asking if it’s time to scrutinize the underlying behaviors and motivation for all this cheating.

In a climate where they’re told what really matters are grades, students turn to cheating (rather than to learning) in order to do well.

Is the pressure to score high — not just on standardized tests, but in all facets of school life — leading to a rampant culture of academic dishonesty? Or is it simply that technology is making it easier to cheat?

Some studies indicate that cheating is at an all time high — or at least, students’ willingness to admit they’ve cheated. Some 75% of college students admit that they’ve cheated at one point Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, cheating, Khan Academy