The Internet and Education - Cheating

Cheating is one of the biggest problems facing academia today and includes any instance in which a student breaks the rules for an assignment or test to gain an advantage over fellow classmates. A specific type of cheating known as plagiarism occurs when a student submits someone else's work as his or her own. Plagiarism itself has several forms, including purchasing a previously written paper, copying sentences or ideas from an original source document without proper attribution, or paying someone else to complete the work. In 1999 Donald L. McCabe, founder and president for the Center for Academic Integrity (CAI), conducted a survey of 2,100 college students at twenty-one campuses across the country. The survey results, which are posted in part on the CAI Web site (www.academicintegrity.org), revealed that a full three-quarters of all college students cheated. Of those who admitted cheating in 1999, one-third said they had cheated seriously on a test and half said they had cheated seriously on written assignment. A 2001 survey involving 4,500 high school students at twenty-five schools demonstrated that the problem was perhaps worse in high school. Seventy-four percent of high school students admitted cheating on a test in a serious manner, and 72% said they cheated on a written assignment in a serious manner. In "Colleges Clamp Down on Cheaters" (Karen Thomas, USA Today, June 20, 2001), McCabe noted that academic cheating will continue to escalate unless schools impose stricter policies because high school students have "defined their own rules and will take them to college." Many students cheat because they believe others are getting away with it, and they want to stay competitive.

TABLE 6.13

College students who had ever gone online compared to general population online experience, 2002
	College students (n)	General population (N)
N = 2,501
n = 1,092
SOURCE: Steve Jones and Mary Madden, "Table 1. Have you ever gone online?" in The Internet Goes to College Pew Internet and American Life Project, September 15, 2002, http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_College_Report.pdf (accessed November 22, 2004). Used by permission of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which bears no responsibility for the interpretations presented or conclusions reached based on analysis of the data.
All respondents	86%	59%
Men	87%	62%
Women	85%	56%
Whites	90%	61%
Blacks	74%	45%
Hispanics	82%	60%

TABLE 6.14

How college students described their use of the Internet, 2002
n = 1,021
SOURCE: Steve Jones and Mary Madden, "Table 2. Students use the Internet MOST OFTEN to:" in The Internet Goes to College Pew Internet and American Life Project, September 15, 2002, http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_College_Report.pdf (accessed November 22, 2004). Used by permission of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which bears no responsibility for the interpretations presented or conclusions reached based on analysis of the data.
Communicate socially	42%
Engage in work for classes	38%
Be entertained	10%
Communicate professionally	7%
Not sure/Don't know	2%

The Internet and other information technologies have only served to fuel American's cheating epidemic. Phones with instant messaging allow students the opportunity to communicate with outsiders or others in class during a test. Companies that specialize in writing papers for students, commonly known as "paper mills," can now deliver papers discreetly to students via e-mail. The Internet in general provides an endless source of documents and papers from which students might copy material. Catching plagiarism on the Web, however, involves combing through countless articles and Web sites. The issue of plagiarism on the Internet is further complicated by the fact that the Internet has obscured the distinction between what information requires attribution and what information is public knowledge. According to McCabe's research, 10% of college students admitted to cut-and-paste online plagiarism in 1999. Only two years later, nearly 41% of students admitted to using the Internet to plagiarize, and as many as 68% of students did not think this type of plagiarism was a big deal. Of high school students in 2001, more than 50% admitted to using the Internet to plagiarize.

TABLE 6.15

Web sites* that received a disproportionate number of hits from college campuses, 2002
Web site	The primary activity that takes place at the site	The proportion of site traffic that comes from college PCs (August 2002)
*Defined as sites with more than 1 million total U.S. home, work and college visitors in August 2002
SOURCE: Steve Jones and Mary Madden, "20 Large Web Sites Where the Proportion of Traffic from College Students is Particularly High," in Pew Internet and American Life Project Data Memo: College Students and the Web, "Pew Internet and American Life Project, September 2002, http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_College_Memo.pdf (accessed November 22, 2004). Used by permission of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which bears no responsibility for the interpretations presented or conclusions reached based on analysis of the data.
livejournal.com	Online journal posting service	20.1%
audiogalaxy.com	Peer-to-peer file-sharing service	18.1
billboard.com	Online music magazine	17.7
mircx.com	Provides access to IRC and related downloads	17.3
imesh.com	Peer-to-peer file-sharing service	17.1
fastweb.com	College and scholarship search engine	17.1
hotornot.com	Entertainment site for rating individuals' appearances	17.0
thespark.com	Entertainment and humor site	16.7
duenow.com	Online homework resources for students	16.5
azlyrics.com	Resource for song lyrics	16.4
winamp.com	Entertainment site with free Winamp downloads	15.7
astraweb.com	Portal to MP3 and song lyrics search engines	15.5
badassbuddy.com	Source for Instant Messenger buddy icons	15.5
blizzard.com	Online gaming site	15.1
fileplanet.com	Online gaming site	15.0
abercrombie.com	Retail site for Abercrombie and Fitch apparel	14.9
picturetrail.com	Online photo album services	14.6
lyrics.com	Song lyric search engine	14.6
blackplanet.com	Online community for African Americans	14.4
gamefaqs.com	Gaming information site	14.4

The CAI Web site suggested that one of the more effective ways to control cheating is to set up an honor code. Honor codes place the responsibility not to cheat on the student. Teachers monitor students less and rely on other students to turn in cheating classmates. Since the cheater has been made aware of the rules, penalties in honor code schools can be very stiff. According to the CAI Web site, honor codes typically reduced cheating on tests by one-third to one-half of normal levels. To catch plagiarizers some schools are also using high-tech online services. In her USA Today article, Thomas reported that the service teachers relied on most in 2002 was Turnitin.com. This online service receives papers from teachers and scans them into a database. The papers then are checked against more than two billion Web sites, a quarter of a million previously submitted student papers, and a number of books and encyclopedias. The site handled nearly six thousand papers daily in 2002. Of these, more than 30% of papers typically turned out to be fakes (i.e., from a paper mill), and 75% contained plagiarized text from the Internet.

FIGURE 6.2

TABLE 6.16

Internet communication habits of college students, 2002
n = 1,021
SOURCE: Steve Jones and Mary Madden, "Table 6. With Whom Do Students Communicate Most While Using the Internet?" in The Internet Goes to College, Pew Internet and American Life Project, September 15, 2002, http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_College_Report.pdf (accessed November 22, 2004). Used by permission of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which bears no responsibility for the interpretations presented or conclusions reached based on analysis of the data.
Friends	72%
Family	10%
Professors	7%
Romantic partners	6%
Work colleagues	5%

TABLE 6.17

Online communication tools used by college students, 2002
n = 1,021
SOURCE: Steve Jones and Mary Madden, "Table 7. Internet Communications Tools Used Most by College Students," in The Internet Goes to College, Pew Internet and American Life Project, September 15, 2002, http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_College_Report.pdf (accessed November 22, 2004). Used by permission of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which bears no responsibility for the interpretations presented or conclusions reached based on analysis of the data.
Email	62%
Instant messaging	29%
Web boards	5%
Chat rooms	2%
Newsgroups	1%

TABLE 6.18

Types of electronic games played by college students, 2002
n = 1,162
SOURCE: Steve Jones, "Table 2. Do you ever:" in Let the Games Begin, Pew Internet and American Life Project, July 6, 2003, http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_College_Gaming_Reporta.pdf (accessed November 22, 2004).Used by permission of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which bears no responsibility for the interpretations presented or conclusions reached based on analysis of the data.
Play computer games	71%
Play video games	59%
Play online games	56%