[Air-L] cheating students?

[Richard Forno]

Sadly, yes.

We've had cases where CS students 'outsourced' their coding assignments to code farms in Siberia or Eastern Europe.  One time the assignment deliverable a CS student got from such a service was based on sample material from their professor's own website -- it even had her (oddly non-attributed) comments still showing up in the code, which was a dead giveaway!   We all had a good/sad chuckle at that level of fail.   But thankfully there are decent commercial and free tools to detect or make it harder to use stolen/shared/plagarised code, and depending on the class there's ways to minimize the potential -- such as mandating version controls during the semester.

On written assignments, I'm certain I've been the attempted mark in such things now and then, but I'm also pretty good at discovering it.  To wit: years ago, one of my American grad students submitted a capstone paper that not only used UK English, but was written a bit .... oddly in places.  (Not uncommon, but I noticed it, which isn't a good sign).  I recall one sentence read something like "the US natural gas pipeline scheme...."   ("scheme"?) and I was thinking, that's odd.   The next page I saw reference to "personal computing schemes...." and my radar went off and I went explorin'. Sure enough, the entire paper was ganked from 5 sources (with fabricated citations no less) and apparently run thru a regionally-incorrect spellchecker/thesarus before submission.   The more amusing part?  3 of the sources I'd used years ago in my own PhD work, and I professionally *knew* the authors in question.  Suffice it to say the plagarism meeting I had with the student was more than a slam-dunk.    And using UK English? Given that my PhD is from Australia, *I*'m the only one in the class who has any excuse to occasionally 'misspell' words that way -- admittedly, ten years on, I still experience bouts of that collateral damage.  :) 

Bottom line, we'll see more of this over time, I'm sure. There's even talk of AI/ML systems 'writing' news articles, so how long before that also becomes part of the things we have to look out for when grading papers in the classroom?

-- rick




> On Feb 2, 2020, at 09:22, Patricia Aufderheide <paufder at american.edu> wrote:
> 
> does anyone else have a sneaking suspicion that this has happened to you?
> https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-01-24/doing-western-students-homework-big-business-kenya
> [https://media.pri.org/s3fs-public/styles/open_graph/public/images/2020/01/2018-09-22t014944z_1542085430_rc14e23620e0_rtrmadp_3_usa-university-unc.jpg?itok=2t3hXmMZ]<https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-01-24/doing-western-students-homework-big-business-kenya>
> Kenya is a hotbed in the $1 billion global contract cheating industry - pri.org<https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-01-24/doing-western-students-homework-big-business-kenya>
> It was 5 p.m. on a Thursday in Nairobi, Kenya, and the streets were crowded with people rushing to get home for dinner. But Philemon, a 25-year-old science researcher, was just getting ready for ...
> www.pri.org
> 
> 
> 
> Patricia Aufderheide, University Professor, School of Communication
> PhD Program Director
> Founder, Center for Media & Social Impact
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> Reclaiming Fair Use--t<https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/022637419X?pf_rd_p=d1f45e03-8b73-4c9a-9beb-4819111bef9a&pf_rd_r=9A4S3CXHCD8R7GBY3C8P>he second edition is out, with new stories, quizzes and entirely new chapters on the surprising success of fair use in enabling creativity!
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