To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery

Interesting article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/education/06cheat.html?_r=1

 

That article is downright chilling. I did not know the extent to which cheating has progressed. Notice that this is not cheating in online classes, this is cheating in regular B&M classrooms. It makes you wonder if many of the students who graduate will actually know anything because they cheated their way through.

 

It they are anything like some of the people I attended community college with, a lot of people will graduate having cheated and amongst some, cheating and not being caught is something of a badge of honor oddly enough. Ahhh....you gotta luv community college.

 

Between the students cheating to get good grades and many of the colleges giving inflated grades to keep the enrollment up makes you wonder what direction were headed.

underdog

 

B&M students probably have a higher rate of cheating than DL students. I went to the police academy with a guy that had a degree from Sam Houston State. He use to brag that his frat hired grad students to write all there papers and they paid GA/TA for all the test answers. He claimed to have never opened a book for four years.

 

I had a marketing prof, former VP of Marketing for Sony, who teaches/taught marketing to college students in China each year. He said that the cheating by the Chinese was astounding and oddly enough almost acceptable on the surface by most Chinese.

The article does not surprise me.

With an undergraduate GPA from Washington State University of 2.8 I probably should have partaken in some sort of cheating. Although I will admit that I have not had any employer make any comment one way or another on my GPA. Therefore I assume that, for the most part, regular people (read:not the uber-nerds here on dinfo) do not care much about grades.

 

Yea, what you said. Especially that cod net disco dance stuff. ( Sorry, I cheated my way through that class.)

 

From what I am seeing, a surprising number of recent graduates of top schools seem unable to produce truly original thought. They are essentially clueless without someone else's paper/website/book/etc to borrow from, and when they do write original material, it is choppy, doesn't flow, is full of syntactic and grammatical errors, and often belies a lack of true analysis of the material they're writing about.

I have to assume this is a byproduct of having done this all the way through school. And as one of the NYT essayists said, part of it is a cultural phenomena in the era of Napster and Bittorrent and an erosion of the idea of ownership of intellectual property.

I do think that if we do more to educate people about the importance, both individually and societally, of honesty and integrity, that it makes a difference. But I don't think much of this is happening.

 

Chip, it's pretty scary. I wonder, are we making advances in technology that are making our young people illiterate?

May daughter is studying in Cambridge this summer and is amazed at the students there. She is a straight "A" student and a fairly conservative person and she can't believe how little most of the other students in her study abroad group care about where they are at and what they are doing. Only a few kids are studying, the other 70% are constantly getting wasted and doing the least work possible to get by, and some not even that much. These students have the privilege of attending one of the finest schools in the world yet they are clueless about the value of what they are doing. What a way to waste an opportunity. Like I said, it's scary.

 

Well, most people just "do what they gotta do" to make ends meet. This is hardly a surprise in the difficult world of today. Doesn't some of the blame also have to fall on the bland unchanging educational machine? I believe most people would agree that learning is fun, but often school is not. I also think vocational school (and maybe some type of applied 4 year degree?) would help stimulate student interest, which I suspect would prove helpful in curbing these numbers.

 

Another thought, I think that the "adversarial" methods described in the article (as well as other factors such as over-sized classes, unfair grading practices, lack of empathy, and other serious concerns I've witnessed with my wife's school experience) produce a "me vs. the system" mentality. The logical conclusion is that a student attempts to defeat the system.

 

I disagree. The problem is lack of self-discipline. A disciplined person can address a task, even if it is not interesting, and excel. No cheating necessary. It does not have to be fun because it can be rewarding. I have direct contact with a number of college aged students and I have never once heard one of them say that learning of any kind is fun. Most achievements that are worth accomplishing, such as learning, are difficult and it is the self-disciplined individuals that are the ones who most often succeed.