With the approach of final exams and final project deadlines nearing, some students may turn to technology for an unfair advantage over their classmates.
Heather Webb, student affairs specialist for the Office of the Dean of Students said Purdue’s level of academic dishonesty is, based on student surveys, consistent with other universities.
“Our level of cheating isn’t better or worse than other universities. You’re going to have academic dishonesty at any institution,” she said.
However, common forms of cheating aren’t what they used to be. With small, concealable devices like Blackberrys, cell phones and iPods, students can communicate with friends or access the Internet during a test.
Webb encountered a situation where a student asked for a restroom break during a math exam and ran a copy of the test several blocks to drop off to friends. The student’s friends literally sat around the kitchen table working on the exam and text messaging the answers to the student, said Webb.
Other forms of high-tech cheating include storing information in cell phones or PDAs and programming formulas into a calculator.
“If you aren’t sure about how you can use a calculator, clarify with the instructor. An instructor will never fault you for asking a question,” Webb said.
H.E. Dunsmore, head of the undergraduate program in the department of Computer Science, hasn’t encountered any exotic methods of high-tech cheating, but he has heard stories from his colleagues. One story is about a student who used a camera-phone to transmit portions of an exam to another student, who then showed up late for the test with all of the answers.
University regulated punishments vary for academic dishonesty on an exam and many factors are taken into consideration, including the degree a test affects the final grade, the year of the student and if the student has had problems in the past. For a high-tech offense like receiving answers via text messages, an instructor will probably fail the offending student for the exam or for the entire semester, said Webb.
“We (the Office of the Dean of Students) consider that to be a very serious form of dishonesty and we may have a discussion with that student about staying at Purdue,” she added.
In order to prevent instances of high tech cheating, some instructors are taking advantage of Purdue’s proctor pool, a system developed by the Provost’s Office in order to provide extra hands and eyes to professors administering exams. The extra eyes are sometimes the best way of catching someone cheating.
“A lot of times, cheating behaviors are caught by an observant TA or professor, or students who participated tell their friends and word gets back to the professor,” said Webb.
To ensure students aren’t wrongly accused of cheating, Webb urges students to make sure cell phones or other devices are turned off or even left at home.
“I called a student and they told me they couldn’t talk because they were in an exam,” Webb said. “Remove any opportunity to be wrongly accused.”
High-tech cheating encompasses more than exams, which is why Purdue subscribes to turnitin.com, an online service designed to stop plagiarism. Students submit papers electronically through the Web site and the program searches the Internet and the database of submitted papers and returns an originality report to the instructor. It is then up to the instructor to check the paper.
“We have several instructors using turnitin.com and they have been very happy with how easy it makes detecting plagiarism,” said Webb.
Dunsmore and other instructors in Computer Science use software specially designed to detect assignments which are too similar to be a coincidence.
As a professor for incoming freshman, Dunsmore has to show them that cheating is a sobering experience.
“When I catch someone cheating and I can confirm it, I call and confront them with evidence to get their side of the story. The first strike is a zero for the assignment and a letter grade deduction at the end of the semester. The second strike is an F in the class,” he said.
Dunsmore is concerned with the unfair advantage high- or low-tech cheating allows students, which is why his and the University’s policies are so strict.
“A reason I am so adamant about cheating is that we recognize the vast majority of students don’t cheat and it puts them at a disadvantage. The business of catching cheaters is to try to put honest students on level ground when grades come,” he said.
By Mat Vross
http://www.purdueexponent.com/index.php/module/Issue/action/Article/article_id/3833