Let's Put the Heat on Campus Cheats

The scandal of college cheating.

Declining Morals

James Karge-Taylor was astonished at the rampant cheating taking place in his jazz-history class at the University of Arizona. Students looked over each other's shoulders, devised coughing codes to communicate to friends, and flashed answers on the backs of their hands while pretending to stretch.

He once caught one student using his cell phone to send answers to a friend's pager. The code "54*2," for instance, meant the answer to question 54 was B. Karge-Taylor kicked them out of his classroom and gave both an F.

At small Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, philosophy professor Heather Reid discovered cheating in, of all places, her introductory ethics class. Two students turned in homework assignments that were almost identical. Reid reported the incident to the academic dean, leading to an investigation. One student was suspended and given an F for the course.

Incidents such as these are all too common. In recent years many colleges and universities have reported a surge in plagiarism, unauthorized collusion on assignments and cheating on tests.

In research conducted at 31 schools over the past decade, Rutgers University professor Donald McCabe has found that nearly 70 percent of students admit to cheating at some point during college, with over 15 percent reporting that they were, in McCabe's words, "serious, repetitive cheaters."

TermPapers.com
While this surge has been blamed on many factors, including a declining emphasis on moral values in the home and school, without question it's never been easier to cheat. With the Internet, students have access to a treasure-trove of information they can pinch without proper attribution. "There's a cowboy feeling about the Internet that the information is out there for everybody to use as they see fit," says Michele Goldfarb, director of the Office of Student Conduct at the University of Pennsylvania.

In a composition class, University of Texas instructor Sharan Daniel asked students to write an evaluative argument, which could include reviewing a contemporary film. One student chose a Bruce Willis movie.

Daniel suspected plagiarism when the paper turned in was different in style from the student's previous work. She did a search on the Internet and found the review the student had lifted in its entirety.

There are hundreds of websites, with names like schoolsucks.com and CollegeTermPapers.com, which offer ready-made essays on topics ranging from anthropology to zoology. Some sites are free, as long as you contribute a paper of your own, while others charge anything from a modest membership fee to over $100 a paper.

Students also get papers directly from their peers. As the semester-end approaches, the online message boards and chat rooms on many websites fill with requests for papers from desperate students.

The website of the Evil House of Cheat boasts 2000 daily visitors. There you can pick up tips on how to cheat on exams and read comments from people described as satisfied users, like one student who said he had raised his grade-point average from a D- to a B+ after he paid his $9.95 annual membership fee.

Many of the term-paper sites include a statement that the work is "for research only." But those disclaimers are regarded as a joke.

Excuses, Excuses
Experts say that academic cheating begins as early as middle school, and often becomes a well-honed habit by high school. A recent survey of 3100 high-achieving students by Who's Who Among American High School Students revealed that 80 percent of the nation's best and brightest admitted cheating in school, up five percent from the year before. More than half said it was "no big deal." Not surprisingly, 36 percent of the reported cheating cases at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., were brought against freshmen during the past three academic years.

Some rationalize that it's okay to cheat if the course is not in their major but is required for graduating. Others assume it's a victimless offense. One University of Texas student, in a posting on an Internet forum on cheating, went so far as to defend it as a legitimate form of learning. "I personally don't cheat unless I learn something from it," the student wrote. "If that involves looking at one answer on a quiz, I think the person is more likely to remember that one answer since they had to resort to cheating to obtain it."

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