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Cheating was once a fairly low-tech undertaking - notes scribbled on your palm, a peek at a classmate's paper. But in the age of the Internet, cell phones and graphing calculators, cheating has gone high-tech.
“Video cameras can be concealed in a tie-tack,” says Professor Stephen F. Davis of Emporia State University in Kansas, “with a video feed going to someone outside in a van who sends back answers to the test-taker on an alpha-numeric pager.”
Lazy, immoral or overworked students -- depending on your view of cheaters' motivations -- also use the vast cyber-library of the Internet, where they can access tests, term papers, foreign-language translators and class notes from major U.S. universities. Students with credit cards can click on the Schoolsucks.com Web page, for instance, and have term papers sent to their e-mail address almost instantaneously.
Technology also allows students to get answers from a friend across the room by simply clicking the screen of a palm pilot. Another popular cheating tool is the graphing calculator, now standard equipment in most higher-math classes. Cheaters program them to display formulas and other information needed during exams. When teachers caught on, they ordered kids to empty the memory of their calculators before taking a test, but some students simply programmed a button next to the actual delete button to say “Memory deleted” when pressed.
“A lot of students are so tuned in to technology . . . they can create programs teachers aren't aware of,” said a spokeswoman for Texas Instruments in Dallas, which makes the most popular graphing calculator. “A lot depends on the teacher and what he knows about technology.”
Moreover, high-tech cheating is apparently a global phenomenon, say Harold J. Noah and Max A. Eckstein in their forthcoming book, Fraud and Education: The Worm in the Apple. For instance, during military exams in Thailand, soldiers vying for promotion to non-commissioned status hid radio-controlled receivers and batteries in their underwear. And in Australia, frustrated educators have proposed banning students' use of all technological aids, such as preprogrammed calculators, pagers and mobile phones.
Perhaps the most common form of high-tech cheating is the so-called “new plagiarism” -- downloading excerpts or entire essays from either legitimate Internet document sources or from scores of Web-based term-paper mills, some of which offer term papers for free. Big spenders can even order customized papers at up to $35 a page.
Advertising directed at college students supports the Web sites. And while dozens of states now make it illegal to knowingly distribute term papers that will be used illicitly, the laws are poorly enforced, and the Web site operators argue they are entitled to free-speech protections. Many of the operators also claim, disingenuously, that their papers are meant only for research and should not be submitted as the student's own work, even as they offer to include the student's name, course name and class period on the cover sheet of custom-ordered papers.
“Some of them will even customize your bibliography to coincide with books in your university's library,” says Anthony Krier, the research librarian at Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, N.H., an expert on Internet plagiarism.
In recent years, cyber-cheating has been on the increase at several prestigious universities. In 1997, Virginia Tech registered 280 cheating complaints, up from 80 the previous year, and in 1998 officials at Boston University went to court, unsuccessfully, charging on-line term-paper mills with violating mail fraud and racketeering laws.
Some educators think more cyber-cheating goes on in high school than in college. “High school teachers are generally clueless about Internet plagiarizing,” says Donald McCabe, founder of the Durham, N.C.-based Center for Academic Integrity, which promotes anti-cheating campaigns on more than 200 college campuses. “And the quality of the papers is sufficient to get by in a high school course. But for college, the quality of Internet papers is crap.”
But high school teachers are catching on. Scott Underbrink, who teaches French and Russian at Natrona County High School in Casper, Wyo., wised up about Internet cheating after students began turning in translations exceeding even his own abilities. Native French-speakers would have been put to shame by some of the grammatical nuances the students used, he said.
“I can't prove it, but I can stop it. . . . The writing [assignments] are going to be in class from now on,” he said.
Krier says students today think information found on the Internet is in the public domain. “They feel that if they get it off the Internet, it's different from taking it out of a book,” he says.
Lawrence M. Hinman, director of the Values Institute at the University of San Diego, says the Internet makes cheating easier because it's fast and private. “There is no public shame in asking somebody for a paper,” he says. And it can be done in the privacy of your own room. “You can download a paper at 2 a.m. and hand it in at 8.”
Much of the new plagiarism apparently occurs because students are either overworked, or they procrastinated and got too far behind. “Many students who plagiarize from the Web do so at the last minute,” Hinman says. “Five years ago, if they had let an assignment go that long they couldn't have done anything.” In the old days, when term papers were offered in tiny ads buried in student newspapers, even plagiarism required planning ahead.
Hinman points out that some cyber-cheating may be unintentional. “With 'drag and drop' capabilities, it's easy to plagiarize if you start gathering data on the Web, and several weeks later you're not sure which of your notes are yours and which came from an on-line source, especially if you forgot to write down the URL,” he says.
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