| ashu |
Posted
on 10-May-01 12:58 AM
Hi all,
Cheating on exams is an unusually common, even accepted,
problem in Nepal.
What are your thoughts on this?
Maybe the article below can spur on some thinking.
oohi
ashu
**********************
U. of Virginia Hit by Scandal Over Cheating
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., May 9 — As they have for 160 years, students
at the University of Virginia took their final exams unsupervised
today, despite a cheating scandal that has shaken the campus.
Under trees and on benches, on a beautiful spring day, lone
figures scrawled their answers in blue books, with teachers
trusting that students would not peek into textbooks, steal
solutions from the Internet or seek help from friends.
But the University of Virginia's code of student honor, a proud
tradition that relies on students signing pledges not to cheat,
steal or lie, is facing what may be its most severe test. Some 122
students stand accused of cheating on term papers in a popular
introductory physics class, with as many as half of them expected
to face the only penalty available for cheating here: expulsion or
loss of degrees awarded in earlier years.
The scandal at this campus of 18,000 as the academic year ends has
prompted new questions about the university's widely admired code
of honor and its single sanction system, rare among American
universities.
Cheating was discovered after a student from last semester told
Louis A. Bloomfield, the physics professor, that the grade he had
given her paper was low and that others with higher marks had
cheated. The class has 300 to 500 students each semester.
Professor Bloomfield set up a computer program to detect
similarities of six consecutive words or more between term papers
submitted to him over the last five semesters. It took the program
50 hours to run through more than 1,800 papers, but it was not long
before the first matches appeared, he said, and they showed the
papers to be virtual replicas.
"In this universe, it's not 6 or 12 identical words in a phrase,"
Professor Bloomfield said, "it's 1,500."
"I expected to see a couple of matches," he said. "I was a bit
shocked to find 60."
Professor Bloomfield's discovery was first reported in The
Richmond Times-Dispatch.
He suggested that in an era when people swap music over the
Internet, forward e-mail messages and send texts to each other with
a single keystroke, the lines between collaboration and theft have
blurred.
While some educators have raised concerns that the Internet has
made cheating on exams and term papers easier, Professor
Bloomfield's program raises the potential of electronic sleuthing
to match it.
Some university officials say they suspect the Internet has
increased cheating. But Linda K. Trevino, chairman of the
department of management and organization at Pennsylvania State
University's business school, said she found little evidence that
cheating on term papers had increased when she compared a 1963
survey of students with one she wrote in 1993 with Donald McCabe, a
Rutgers University professor who founded the Center for Academic
Integrity.
But Dr. McCabe said he believed that cheating on exams had
increased sharply. In the 1960's, he said, one in four students
admitted to cheating once or more on a test in the previous year.
By 1993, that figure had doubled.
Both researchers said that colleges that relied on an honor code
appeared to have less cheating.
In 1993, 53 percent of students at schools without honor systems
admitted to cheating once or more on a test in the previous year,
while 29 percent of students at schools with honor codes admitted
cheating. Two out of three students surveyed at colleges and
universities without an honor code admitted to copying another
student's papers, while 42 percent of students on honor codes said
they had done so.
Thomas Hall, a student who heads the University of Virginia's
Honor Committee, said that an investigative panel was going through
the 122 cases Professor Bloomfield had referred, and that some
students were found to have cheated and been told they would be
expelled. Often, he said, the students whose papers were copied
said they had shared their work to help a fellow student, but did
not know it would be plagiarized. In those cases, the students have
not been thrown out.
Several students under investigation had graduated, Mr. Hall said,
and so could see their degrees revoked.
"The majority of students who don't cheat don't want to put up
with those that do," said David Gies, a Spanish professor and
former head of the faculty senate.
Professor Gies said that he welcomed Professor Bloomfield's
discovery of cheating, and that the expulsions would force students
to think twice about cheating.
At the Alderman Library, undergraduates facing final exams said
the plagiarists should be punished, but some raised questions about
the fairness of scrutinizing just one class.
"I would agree to it if they could apply it to everyone," Chris
Reams, a sophomore from Richmond, said.
He said he knew of students who cheated in advanced economics
courses that were essential for admission to business school,
driving up the grading curve. Though he considers them more serious
offenders, he never reported them.
"The honor system is like a death penalty," Mr. Reams said.
"Because it's so severe, if you see cheating, and I have, you're
reluctant to report it, so we end up resorting to these spy
systems. We've created an atmosphere that makes cheating more
seductive."
Sean Turner and Jason Bakelar studied for a calculus test just
hours away.
"I'm having a hard time finding a gray area when you say, What's
cheating and what's not?" Mr. Bakelar, a senior majoring in
politics, said.
Mr. Turner, a junior majoring in economics, agreed, saying
students caught cheating should be expelled. "It's not fair to
students like us," he said, "who study and do our work."
But Kristen Edington, a freshman about to take a final in a class
on religion and ethics said, "I think the honor system's an ideal."
By giving students so much freedom, she said, "it sets up for
people to cheat and steal and lie."
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