The recent news that graduate business students cheat more than students studying other subjects wasn’t shocking.
The study, after all, supported earlier surveys that revealed undergraduate business students cheat more than other undergraduates.
It could be that business students are just more honest about their cheating, seeing it just part of day’s work, but another study will have to address that. (Engineering students were not far behind the business students.)
Student cheating at all levels has reached a new zenith with the use of the Internet, cell phones, i-Pods, laptops, preprogrammable calculators, etc. For such students, the challenge is finding new ways to cheat and leaving less than techno savvy teachers in the dust. High school and college teachers lament that if these students put as much time into studying as they do into cheating, they would be scholars. Alas, such old-fashioned motivation apparently doesn’t give those students the satisfying sense of getting away with something.
Plenty of theories abound as to why cheating is rampant. Kids face too much pressure to get into a good college, then once in, they face too much pressure to get a good internship, etc. Some say students cheat when they aren’t interested in a subject, or when they really need to do well in a subject.
Then it is argued that it’s not the students, it’s society. David Callahan’s book “The Cheating Culture” gets quoted often in these discussions. Cheating students simply reflect our cheating ways, from business to sports to personal relationships.
But just when all seems glum, some students have stepped forward to protest the all-pervasive assumption of guilt. Seniors at McLean High School in Virginia this fall fought, and continue to fight, the school’s plan to use a popular for-profit service known as Turnitin, an Internet business that polices papers for plagiarism. The school backed off a bit, and will phase it in for future students. It’s not much of a victory, but we applaud the protest. Turnitin is used by more than 6,000 academic institutions in 90 countries and checks a student’s work against a database of more than 22 million papers around the world, as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals.
There’s obviously a role for such a service; students do cheat and the Internet makes it easier. But a teacher should be able to discern, on a case-by-case basis, if a paper sets off a cheating alarm and requires further review. But to assume every paper contains plagiarism until proven otherwise is not the way to change a cheating culture.
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