Cheating in communication schools
An article in the New York Times today talks about the new "high tech" cheating in colleges and universities:
These anecdotal examples may be part of a widespread (but not necessarily new) pattern: "In a survey of nearly 62,000 undergraduates on 96 campuses over the past four years, two-thirds of the students admitted to cheating. The survey was conducted by Don McCabe, a Rutgers professor who has studied academic misconduct and helped found the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke."
I think this is interesting with respect to all of us in the J-School and in Comm Arts, not only because the same new information and communication technologies which many of us study are being mustered into the cheating war on both sides, but because the very discipline of "communication" in all its forms -- especially the professional practices of both journalism and strategic communication -- demands an ethic of truthfulness and a norm of trust that is undermined by cheating, plagiarism, and the like.
I wonder how fellow students, TAs, staff and faculty have been dealing with this. In the nine big exams I've given for my 400+ student class J201 since I've been here, I've never caught anyone cheating. But we demand that all cell phones and computers be put away, and we do stroll the aisles to let the students know that they're being watched. And when we find a review sheet left behind after the exam, I have to wonder if anyone was sneaking a peek during their test.
More troubling to me have been instances of Web-based cut-and-paste plagiarism. I encounter at least one of these incidents a year -- sometimes small and sometimes large, sometimes (in my best judgement) inadvertent and sometimes calculated, sometimes from undergraduates and sometimes (shockingly) from graduate students. It's relatively easy for me to notice when an essay changes "voice" and then Google a suspicious phrase to check for this kind of cheating. And I even explain to students at the beginning of each class how adept I am at such checks, and how many students I've caught plagiarizing over the years. Yet the practice continues. On one hand I'm annoyed that I have to even mention this to students paying thousands of dollars for a supposed education. On the other hand I feel like, in the context of "communication ethics," perhaps I don't talk about it enough in the classroom -- or don't link it to wider debates over the social norms and poltical-economic structures of knowledge production in journalism and business, in academia and government, like I should.
Any suggestions from other Vilas Hall folk?
At the University of California at Los Angeles, a student loaded his class notes into a handheld e-mail device and tried to read them during an exam; a classmate turned him in. At the journalism school at San Jose State University, students were caught using spell check on their laptops when part of the exam was designed to test their ability to spell.
And at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, after students photographed test questions with their cellphone cameras, transmitted them to classmates outside the exam room and got the answers back in text messages, the university put in place a new proctoring system.
These anecdotal examples may be part of a widespread (but not necessarily new) pattern: "In a survey of nearly 62,000 undergraduates on 96 campuses over the past four years, two-thirds of the students admitted to cheating. The survey was conducted by Don McCabe, a Rutgers professor who has studied academic misconduct and helped found the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke."
I think this is interesting with respect to all of us in the J-School and in Comm Arts, not only because the same new information and communication technologies which many of us study are being mustered into the cheating war on both sides, but because the very discipline of "communication" in all its forms -- especially the professional practices of both journalism and strategic communication -- demands an ethic of truthfulness and a norm of trust that is undermined by cheating, plagiarism, and the like.
I wonder how fellow students, TAs, staff and faculty have been dealing with this. In the nine big exams I've given for my 400+ student class J201 since I've been here, I've never caught anyone cheating. But we demand that all cell phones and computers be put away, and we do stroll the aisles to let the students know that they're being watched. And when we find a review sheet left behind after the exam, I have to wonder if anyone was sneaking a peek during their test.
More troubling to me have been instances of Web-based cut-and-paste plagiarism. I encounter at least one of these incidents a year -- sometimes small and sometimes large, sometimes (in my best judgement) inadvertent and sometimes calculated, sometimes from undergraduates and sometimes (shockingly) from graduate students. It's relatively easy for me to notice when an essay changes "voice" and then Google a suspicious phrase to check for this kind of cheating. And I even explain to students at the beginning of each class how adept I am at such checks, and how many students I've caught plagiarizing over the years. Yet the practice continues. On one hand I'm annoyed that I have to even mention this to students paying thousands of dollars for a supposed education. On the other hand I feel like, in the context of "communication ethics," perhaps I don't talk about it enough in the classroom -- or don't link it to wider debates over the social norms and poltical-economic structures of knowledge production in journalism and business, in academia and government, like I should.
Any suggestions from other Vilas Hall folk?
posted by Greg Downey at 10:52 AM
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