Are 100% online schools perpetuating academic fraud?

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by Cyber, Mar 20, 2011.

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  1. Cyber

    Cyber New Member

    I was wondering if what is said in the comment that is quoted below is actually happening at 100% online schools, and if this is why employers are skeptical of hiring holders of degrees from 100% online schools like NCU, TUI, JIU, etc.

    The comment is a response to an interview that Dr. Gardner, President of Northcentral University (NCU), granted Paula Rhoden of The Prescott Daily Courier in 2009. The entire quote is linked to the full article.


    [FONT=Verdana, Times New Roman, Times, Serif]Posted: Monday, November 16, 2009[/FONT]
    [FONT=Verdana, Times New Roman, Times, Serif]Article comment by: Online Universities are Ripe for Fraud. No policing.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Verdana, Times New Roman, Times, Serif]Did you know that the online university system is replete with for-hire students? Many international - India, Philippines, Pakistan, etc. The way it works is that I would fully register my real self for a degree. Then, I hire "Raj" to take all the classes, write all the papers, etc. He gets my user ID and password - and he's off. As long as he passes each class - he gets paid. In the online world - there are insufficient checks and balances. Fraud is easy and particularly lucrative for foreigners. Of course, no one will blow the whistle. The hired student gets paid. I get my degree. The online university gets their money. In some cases, the shareholders get their dividends. Win-win-win-win. As an employer - all things being equal - I will always prefer to hire the bricks-and-mortar traditional graduate than an online graduate who may or may not have "attended" class.[/FONT]
     
  2. Chip

    Chip Administrator

    There was an article recently (I think it was discussed here) about academic fraud in the B&M world as well, and it's apparently an epidemic problem. People at B&M schools hire people from India (or wherever) to write papers, even theses, for them... and then they hire other people to take in-class exams for them. There's an excellent book called The Cheating Culture that examines the entire issue of not only education but cheating and fraud in corporate america (not surprising, given it's been a growing problem in academia, where most of corporate america is educated).

    Schools are fighting back but it's difficult; you get the same guy to write all your papers and do all your work for you and all the work looks the same, and it won't show up in a plagiarism detector because it's all original work... just not done by you.

    I could see that there's some concern about this being easier with 100% online programs, but many schools are catching on to that and looking at IP addresses and computer details to determine who is actually signing on to the class discussions and so forth.

    Might it be easier to cheat in a 100% online environment? Possibly. But from what I have been hearing, and reading, and even what I hear from people I know of college age, there seem to be quite a few people who simply don't see this sort of thing as a big deal, or else they take the approach that "everyone else does it, so why not me." This, in turn seems to be leading to an ever-increasing concern about academic fraud throughout the educational system, not just in online programs.
     
  3. mattbrent

    mattbrent Well-Known Member

    It's not just higher ed. High Schools are flooded with cheating too. I pushed to have my school develop an honor code for next year so that we can help "encourage" students not to cheat. I know this might sound odd, but at our level, a lot of students cheat because A) everyone else does it and B) they don't THINK it's actually cheating.

    For example, if a student is asked to do some translation in a Spanish textbook, he just hops onto Google Translator or whatever and does it that way. In my opinion, that's cheating because he's not doing it himself, but in his mind, it's not really any different than using a dictionary.

    -Matt
     
  4. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    I know I should have bookmarked it, but there's a study out there that suggests that cheating is more prevalent on campus than online. If I remember correctly, the study's authors said it might be because online is favored by working adults who know they actually need to learn things to get ahead, and who are paying their own money and want their money's worth, whereas traditional age college students don't yet get it.

    I'll see whether I can find it.

    -=Steve=-
     
  5. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    What's to stop me from hiring "Raj" to write a paper for me, he e-mails me the .docx file, I print it out, and submit it in the traditional classroom setting?
     
  6. Psydoc

    Psydoc New Member

    You make a good point, Bruce. In some institutions the instructors are requiring that the student write, while in class, the general idea as to what will be in the paper, sometimes up to 20% in length of the paper. This gives the instructor an idea of the writing style of the student. This work is not returned to the student to carry to a paid writer. If the finished paper is very different an alarm should go off. Some instructors are not willing to invest that amount of time and energy. With a Masters in English, it is difficult not to look for employment in this sector.
     
  7. mattbrent

    mattbrent Well-Known Member

    As a teacher, it's difficult to find the time to devote to finding cheating in papers. We do it, obviously, but I probably have missed some just because I'm so rushed all the time. Our school superintendent actually turned down buying a subscription to TurnItIn.com because she didn't think it was important. While there are some good plagiarism detectors our there, sometimes I find picking a random string of words from a paper and typing them into Google will show me what I need to know.

    -Matt
     
  8. SurfDoctor

    SurfDoctor Moderator

    I can see how this would work for finding plagiarism, but not for outsourced paper writing.
     
  9. Randell1234

    Randell1234 Moderator

    Here is something funny about TurnItIn. I submitted my dissertation to TurnItIn and had to submit the output / results to NCU after my defense and that would add to the final seal of approval. Well, the results were something like a total of 37% plagiarized. I freaked a little so I looked at the exact matches and it was 35% to one paper with nearly whole pages as a match. Now I freaked a lot! How could this possibly happen? So I examined the paper with the exact matches and it was my DP that I submitted just to see what would come back. The DP had 1-3% matches throughout which were mostly common phrases such as, "Many business see the value..."

    While TurnItIn is a good tool, be sure you do not find your own papers flagging you as a cheater if you submitted an earlier version.
     
  10. NewTown

    NewTown New Member

    I had a Marketing teacher for my MBA program, a former VP of Marketing for Sony, who also taught for a year in China. He said that the cheating in China would make a criminal in the US blush. It's rampant and not really look down on in their society. Plagiarism is apparently no big deal either. You see all that competition makes it so most students have to cheat in order to get into the limited number of seats in college. Students cheat, whether online or at a traditional university. It happens.

    Beware of hacks with an agenda. Kinda like politics.
     
  11. Abner

    Abner Well-Known Member

    AT the B&M college I attended for several years, the exams were given in gigantic lecture halls. The students that wanted to cheat simply sat way up towards the top, then handed or signaled test answers to each other.

    Abner





     
  12. JBjunior

    JBjunior Active Member

    I agree that it could and does happen in traditional programs as much or more than online programs. Most people look at a 4-year program not as a learning tool but as a stepping stone to a job (possibly outside of their degree area) or a graduate program. I know I care much more about my graduate program than I did about learning about every little thing in my undergraduate. Ultimately it is an ethical problem but I don't think there has been any lapse or degradation in societal standards but that it has been a thing that has been around since the beginning. Considering the different levels of ethical behavior most people don't progress at all or not until later in life than the 18-24 crowd that is primarily in the higher learning arena. I know there are many things, education included, that I would do differently now that I viewed as acceptable when I did them.
     
  13. TEKMAN

    TEKMAN Semper Fi!

    I am not targeting any race or ethnicity here. When I started off my Master at George Mason University on campus. Indian students cheated during the exams, the TA who monitored the exam also Indian. They wrote the notes on their hands and forearms.

    Well, now I am on my second Master at Georgetown University. The students require to write one or two research papers. If I want to cheat, I can come up with a topic for approval. Then I just hire somebody to write the paper for me. Just as others have said, what stops me from hiring somebody writes my paper? At Capella University, I have constantly keep up with the materials because discussion through writing not verbal. Now, if I hire somebody to write the paper for me. The instructor would know because he or she has seen my writing style in discussion. At B&M classroom, the instructor would not know if I have hired somebody tow rite my paper because he or she has not seen any of my written language.

    Well, that is talking about writing standard English and search paper. What's about writing in programming languages? All I need just copy a program and change the values and variables. How do they Professors on campus know I cheat?

    Now, if you're saying online schools perpetuating academic fraud in this way I would agree. If I don't speak French, but I attend school curriculum in French via distance learning. I was able to turn in all assignment and discussion in French. It more like I hire somebody to do it for me.
     
  14. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    Last year I had a student call me, literally in tears, because her major paper for the course came back with a high percentage of plagiarism. When I examined the report, the issue was that she used a lot of direct quotes, but they were all properly attributed with an APA citation, including page numbers.

    With the advent of TurnItIn, it's sometimes difficult to convince students that a high plagiarism return doesn't automatically mean they actually plagiarized anything.

    As someone mentioned, it's important for B&M teachers to get to know their student's writing styles; I like to think I'm an articulate writer, but my speaking style tends to be somewhat rough, just due to my occupation, so I'm a far better writer than I am a speaker. In an online environment, the written word rules, so if I had a student who was a lousy writer in class discussions who suddenly turned in a terrific paper, the red flag would go right up the flagpole.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Mar 21, 2011
  15. Student_Rex

    Student_Rex New Member

    Some 100% online colleges require a proctor at least, for some final exams..right? A student can cheat throughout the course until a proctor examination. Then they are out of luck. x_x
     
  16. perrymk

    perrymk Member

    My dad moved from Greece to Canada in the late 50s. He was a painter and in order to get his license (or whtever it was called) one of the things he had to do was take a test. He told the test taker in Winnipeg that due to his poor English, he would like to use his Greek-English dictionary. Can you see were this is going? He had notes written in Greek in the dictionary. Funny thing is that he was already an expert painter, he just needed to fulfill the legal stuff.
     
  17. Chip

    Chip Administrator

    Unless the student hires someone to take their exam for them. When I took my national certification exam in massage, it was a special exam session they set up for me (I was the only one taking it within 200 miles) and it was just me and the proctor. I was not asked for ID. Even if I had sent someone to take the exam for me ,and they had been asked for ID if I'd been devious, I am sure I could have come up with a reasonable fake ID for my friend to use, good enough to get past the proctor.

    The bottom line is the culture of cheating. We can reduce it, but we can't eliminate it.
     
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