Cheating shows, and goes.

Discussion in 'Off-Topic Discussions' started by decimon, Mar 25, 2004.

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  1. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member

    Continued

    One David Gillies does confirm the trend, in England, in a <Comment> here.

    One thing, please: the second link is from a site expressing a political point of view that I favor but politics is not here the issue. I hope that, should the interest be there, the discussion will be about the cheating.
     
  2. Guest

    Guest Guest

    I would make them come up with original work within a week, to receive any grade at all and then it would be the lowest passing mark.

    If they fail to do that then I would fail them. I think my policy is remarkably generous. Most schools treat academic dishonesty very harshly. My university allows for expulsion.
     
  3. Professor Kennedy

    Professor Kennedy New Member

    The issues raised by rampant plagiarism and cheating are both ethical and pedagogical. The ethical response must be disciplinary. I shall not comment further here on that aspect, other than to say that suspension and expulsion are the most appropriate responses.

    A more fundamental issue is pedagogical. When our predecessor research institution (The Esmee Fairbairn Research Centre) to EBS was researching how managers learn and what they should learn to be better managers, the pedagogy of on campus teaching was also examined from top to bottom.

    An early (and lasting) target were the increasingly common regimes of 'continuous assessment' spreading from the schools to the Universities. It is in these regimes that the motivation for plagiarism is engendered and has the largest payoffs for plagiarising habits. If off campus, out of sight assignments contribute to final grades and have deadlines for submission, it pays students to plagiarise if they can get away with it. Learning (as opposed to the School have a paper trail showing it is teaching) is minimalised, and awarded grades have doubtfull value in assessing the fitness of the students, because it is not unambiguously clear what is being assessed - the student's performance or somebody else's.

    In Distance Learning (DL) and Distance Teaching (DT) the graded continuous assessment (CA) regimes are suspect and should be abandoned, except in cases, as members have pointed out here, in certain subjects where class work cannot cope with the intracacies of the subject - software writing has been mentioned.

    This raises the problem that if the work is not graded, it would not be done (though, if it is graded it is not clear who did it). I am concerned with the learning side of the problem, not the teaching, and I think it is possible to develop a regime that is self assessed, not graded by faculty, and which motivates DL students to undertake it regularly. It also eliminates plagiarism as a problem as plagiarism is pointless.

    I refer to our MBA courses which combine a printed text of the examinable material supported by online materials which require the student to undertake more case studies, exercises, and essay questions, rising in difficulty up to examination standard. We start from the assumption that students want to pass their exams and be attested as fit by their award in the subjects.

    They can undertake the online case or essay and compare their performance with the full worked faculty solution, and then grade themselves on a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (better than the professor's answer). Behind the screen a programme uses the analytical breakdwon of the contribution of the subject's core concepts needed to answer the questions and assigns the self assessed grade to a formula. Over a number of these self-assessed exercises, a Profile is obtained by the student providing him or her with a bar chart showing in which concepts from the examinable course he or she is strong or weak. The student can then assess (unless on the 'highly nervous' wing of students) how much additional effort to put in to be sure of reaching the 'pass' line in the subject.

    This does not count as a graded test because the student still has to sit and pass the actual EBS exams (9, invigilated, closed book, no choice of unsighted questions, 3 hours duration, one re-sit only). Faculty do not have access to the Profiler for a student. Whether a student uses this online learning environment is voluntary; doing other than their own work is pointless (they are on their own in the final exams); plagiarising is likewise pointless; deliberately grading themselves up to 'cheat the Profiler' is pointless, because you cannot cheat the final exam (our experience shows caught cheats are 0.0002 per cent of the 20,000 candidates a year), which is graded by EBS faculty, and Externally examined by senior faculty from other British universities.

    Finally, I should make clear I have gone into detail on these points not in order to sing the praises of EBS (if it seems I have, I apologise) but because I think the DL community in particular (I have given up on the campus community) should address the problems plagiarism is threatening to engulf higher education in and because the count down to severe 'scandals' in degree programmes has begun.
     
  4. oxpecker

    oxpecker New Member

    Hmmm. That's 0.04 cheaters caught per year, or 1 every 25 years.
     
  5. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member

    Here's a mea culpa (of sorts) from an Oxford graduate: My career as an academic cheat and fraudulent examiner.

    Interesting to me that she refers to twenty years past. I've thought cheating in school to be prevalent for far longer than that if not forever. And my experience is in the U.S.
     
  6. Professor Kennedy

    Professor Kennedy New Member

    Oxpecker

    Caught with my pants down. OK a fair cop.

    What I was trying to say was that we catch and bring before the discipline committee 2 persons per main exam Diet where 10,000 papers are sat (about 5,000 students in 300+ exam centres all invigilated by independent, usually British Council, persons).

    The usual decision is for the candidates to have their exam results cancelled for all papers sat that Diet, and depending on previous form or the nature of the evidence, they can be suspended for a year or expelled.

    In one year we found 70 out of 85 cheated with the help of a corrupt local official. However, the culprit copied down a set of multiple choice answers and made an error of transposition, which all the cheaters miscopied to their answer books, hence all making the same mistake and all getting a rare accurate high score on the rest. Both indicated something was wrong. All candidates were failed, even those who may not have cheated.

    However, none of this should distract from my main points.

    My fault. I accept for careless drafting.
     

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