Students cheat. They have the means, motive, and opportunity to receive credit for work done by others. Internet sites will do students’ assignments for a fee. What can instructors do to discourage and detect this widespread practice?
In surveys of over 71,000 undergraduate students conducted by the International Center for Academic Integrity from 2002 to 2015, 68% admitted to cheating on a test or written assignment. Sites like Chegg, CourseHero, HWSolutionOnline, and JustAnswer provide “Tutoring” services that frequently amount to doing the student’s work for them.
More than ever, our students are willing and able to cheat by submitting work that they didn’t do. They live in a world which encourages “winning” by any means necessary. Their high school teachers are often too overwhelmed and too ill-equipped to discourage and discover plagiarism. As a result, too many college students know they can “get away with it.” The best thing we can do, when our students cheat, is to catch them. In the long run, our students do not benefit from getting away with it and neither does the rest of our society.
Software tools like Turnitin are helpful in discouraging and detecting plagiarism in essays, but they are not as useful for other kinds of documents like computer programs. They also miss documents that lurk behind walls in the internet that require a credit card to access.
This presentation will look at some of the resources our students have that many instructors are not aware of. We will discuss ways teachers can discourage plagiarism in the first place and detect it when it happens.
Bring your ideas and success stories. Let’s see how we can reverse (or at least resist) the tide of cheating on our virtual campuses.