Students: Using Technogolgy to cheat isn’t cheating?
I came across this article last week, posted by Robyn (@serendipitynz) on Twitter … “Students say using tech to cheat isn’t cheating“.
“According to the poll, more than a third of teens with cell phones (35 percent) admit to cheating at least once with them, and two-thirds of all teens (65 percent) say others in their school cheat with them … (and) just over half of students polled (52 percent) admitted to some form of cheating involving the Internet.”
The piece finished with this …
“Students who cheat using the Internet generally view plagiarism as more serious an offense than other types of cheating, yet more than a third of teens (36 percent) said downloading a paper from the Internet was not a serious offense, and 42 percent said coping text from web sites was a either a minor offense or not cheating at all.”
If the students here (aged 11-17) think it’s OK to cheat, then they will turn up at University and get a really huge shock. Plagiarism is taken very seriously here, and I presume at other institutions too, and students can expect to be grilled if copying or plagiarising is suspected.
This also raises another point; not all cultures have the same opinion on copying. In the report “Cultural Attitudes Towards Plagiarism” the authors explore the increase in the number of overseas students, in the UK HE Institutions, who are copying/plagiarising content as “in some cultures it is acceptable, even flattering, to copy the work of ‘masters’.”
In the Business School, and BU, we put the following phrase on all our online submission boxes:
Note: PLAGIARISM or COPYING is a serious academic offence and may incur severe penalties beyond a Fail Grade. Bournemouth University reserves the right to use electronic means to identify plagiarism.
We use SafeAssign (integrated into myBU; our Blackboard installation) at the moment, but have had TurnItIn in the past. While we don’t create submission boxes in SafeAssign every time, we have the digital files submitted to us so we can, if need be, pass through to detect any plagiarism.
This then brings me to another bigger question … which is better, SafeAssign or TurnItIn? I have my own opinion on this, born mainly from experience rather than from a detailed examination, but I’d be happy to hear your views on the two tools as well please … answers on a postcard below!
Kia ora e David!
At The Correspondence School, New Zealand, cheating the way you describe in this post is always viewed seriously.
We have a significant component of our senior secondary assignments that are for internal assessment towards New Zealand Certificate of Education (NCEA). The NZ university Entrance is also based on NCEA assessments.
In Science, we draw the distinction (sensibly I think) between what would be considered plagiarism and what can be considered ‘legitimate copying’. To unpack what I’ve just said here, when a student is assessed in a so-called open-book assessment, an amount of copying (cut and paste whether digitally or with scissors and glue) is perfectly acceptable provided the content is appropriate and relevant. It may well be, for instance, that a student has chosen to use a particular method for a chemical analysis (say) and pastes the procedure directly into their report. That’s acceptable up to the point where they start discussing their own findings, etc. BUT beyond that, plagiarism (as it is commonly understood) is out. This applies to copying other students’ work as well as any Internet copying – data, result handling/collating, discussion, conclusion.
What’s more, students are made well aware
(a) what’s meant by copying and
(b) the consequences of copying in submitted assignments.
Frankly, I think it’s part of education to teach young learners what plagiarism is and the ethical and moral shades of grey that are implied by plagiarism. It is just as important to know when copying is appropriate as it is to know when it is not.
Catchya later
Plagiarism is becoming rampant, both at the middle and high school levels as well as at the university level. I think it is important to have IN WRITING a policy that clearly states how seriously this practice is viewed and what the consequences will be. If the goal of all of education is to get the students to THINK and ultimately to think for themselves, we are going to be in big trouble if we don’t confront this abuse of technology head on.