The Shadow Scholar

By my original statement, I meant that professors often tell of others in the same department that actively look the other way at cheating, of department heads that discourage faculty from bringing charges of plagiarism or cheating and, to expand on what I originally said, on administration that does little or actively discourages reports of cheating or plagiarism. One professor told of being sued by rich parents of a cheating student after an accusation, and told by the college administration that he was "on his own" to defend the lawsuit. With crap like that going on, it's no wonder that the problem perpetuates itself.

 

Luvd the esay. Thx to Hortonka. I running to hurry find him.

 

No seriously... 2 grand for a paper? Wow. Maybe people do just have enough money to pull something like this off. I can't imagine it. I would worry that my teacher could detect a different writing style, but the author addressed this and said his students have never been caught.

I watched an episode at learner.org in the Against All Odds stats series about a poem signed by William Shakespeare. It was tucked away, and the scholars didn't think it was legit because it was so bad. Well, turns out, there was a software program that the poem was fed through and based on the author's other word use, they concluded with a high degree of probability that the poem was authentic. This might be what Chip was talking about. (and that show is from ~1990) Anyway, they could determine the frequency of word use, average number of words per sentence, etc. *I know my word processor does some of this too.* It seems to me, that the sophisticated masses would certainly be able to work this out. In addition to the coolness of TurnItIn software, I think evaluating a student per course is the problem. Sample size too small. I have a better idea. Simply, a database of the students writing since...say 9th grade. All electronic work can be logged into their "account" and held for..ever? That might be a better predictor of growth, development, etc. Style, grammar, word use, vocabulary count, sentence lenght. Other fun stuff can be thrown in too, like SAT tests, GRE exam scores, etc. Certainly once a baseline was established it would take about 5 minutes to detect fraud. Anyone wanna start a business?

 

I know it happens frequently, my fraternity had it's fair share of guys who wrote next to nothing during their time at AU. My favorite was my buddy that was a history/political science major who literally didn't write a single paper longer than 2 pages after freshman year. He ended up at Tulane Law with a scholarship covering half his tuition.
This was in the late 90s and it was easy finding someone to do your work. I imagine it is exponentially easier today with the advances in technology.

 

Unfortunately, technology will always be a step ahead of the academic community with regards to cheating. Increase smartphone technology with 4G technology IPADS encrypted jump drives makes it difficult for instructors and universities to adequately combat cheating. Moreover, citing the examples listed in the article. I am having a hard time believing that someone, whom can’t construct a basic sentence, yet can produce a well written scholarly paper? Furthermore, and not be detected by professors! If you are to believe the article and some of the comments on this forum "Most professors are turning a blind eye to the problem”

 

That was an interesting article!

 

Here I am worried about going to a NA rather than RA school... each and every penny I pay towards the lower cost NA school is strongly felt within the family. Every day of the 4 years I served in the Army for the college funding was felt and here the "haiku" writer is going to be better educated than me on paper. Ah well, I am making honest choices and with that comes some sacrifice. I couldn't imagine cheating my way through schools and still feeling good about the degree. I will be honest, when that paper is due that I put off for far too long, these companies seem awfully tempting. I've even thought, well, I could buy one "just to get some ideas to focus my paper and get some good citations!" Right!

Charter Oak State College uses Turnitin.com for all of their papers and have a very strict policy on plagiarism - even in the discussion boards.

 

In one of my online courses there was a fellow who copied and pasted all of his discussion board answers directly from wikipedia. I'd recognized it first by noticing a similarity in text when looking there myself for ideas, but to my knowledge they never did anything from him, even after I reported it multiple times. Good to see someone takes that seriously.