Students are getting better and better at cheating, and it's time for college faculty and administrators to do something about it.
The latest scandal to rock the academic world happened last month at the University of Maryland, where 12 students in the undergraduate business school were accused of using their cell phones and PDAs to cheat on an exam.
Faced with accusations in front of the school's Honor Council, six of the students admitted to academic misconduct and will be disciplined accordingly. Those who admitted to cheating say they used Web-enabled devices -- cell phones and PDAs -- to access test answers that their professor had uploaded to the class Web site during the exam.
Students at the University of Maryland who served on the school's Honor Council said they weren't surprised their colleagues used Web-enabled devices to cheat. But here's the kicker: Many of the school's faculty members, including perhaps the professor who prematurely uploaded the exam answers, said they were unaware that such cheating could occur ("UM students accused of high-tech," The Baltimore Sun, Jan. 26).
A number of steps should be taken to make students and professors more cognizant of hi-tech academic dishonesty. A committee consisting of professors and students should meet once each semester to discuss new technologies and how they might be exploited during exams. The same committee also should design a training session for incoming freshmen who might not understand what is expected of them during exams or when they are writing papers -- especially when modern technology is involved.
Some preventative measures, however, would go too far and shouldn't be implemented at any school. For example, requiring students to leave all of their handheld electronic devices at the exam-room door would be insulting and unfair, not to mention impractical.
Beyond the measures outlined above, the most professors can do is protect their answer keys and carefully read students' essays. Granted, no amount of training, education or awareness will completely eliminate cheating -- there always will be a certain number of students who continue to compromise their academic integrity. But some minimum steps will go a long way toward discouraging students from using technology to cheat.
Academic cheating has been around ever since the first time a student successfully stole an answer key, or took someone else's intellectual property and put their own name on it. What's new is how easily students are exploiting technology to get the right answers -- or produce the perfect essay -- without their professors suspecting a thing.
Whether or not it is always acknowledged, students and professors often stand on opposite sides of a digital divide. The current generation of college kids has grown up on instant communication in the form of computers, the Internet and cell phones. They adapt quickly to new technology, get what they need out of it and throw it away as soon as it becomes obsolete. Most professors, however, are constantly playing a catch-up game when it comes to technological gadgets.
Sending signals with pencil-tapping or hand gestures used to be the most sophisticated way students could cheat on exams in the classroom. They could also steal answer keys and memorize them in advance, or write answers on small pieces of paper and sneak them in to the exam room.
Now, students have many more options, thanks to the explosion of technology in the past decade. Students can store information on their calculators and access them discreetly during tests -- making it more difficult for watchful exam proctors to detect cheating.
Perhaps even more disturbing is how easily material from the Internet can be plagiarized. A simple search of the phrase "buy essays" on Google.com, a popular Internet search engine, yields dozens of sites where users pay money for papers other students have written and then sold to the Web site. Not all professors are aware of these sites, but they should be.
At MyEssays.com, users are advised to specify their state of residence to help them "find an essay that has not been over used" in their region. Quite shamelessly, the Web site also guarantees that the "latest plagiarism scanning technologies could not detect plagiarism in these papers."
At the same site, students can pay a hefty $17 per page to have a custom paper written and e-mailed to them within one week. If they need it within 24 hours, they can pay an even heftier $38 per page.
The creation of committees to prevent hi-tech academic fraud would help make professors aware of such cheating tools and help college campuses bridge the digital divide between faculty and students. In the meantime, professors and students should work hard to prevent a repeat of what happened at the University of Maryland.
(Sam Bresnahan's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at sbresnahan@cavalierdaily.com)
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