[Air-L] cheating students?

[Jacob Johanssen]

We should be focussing on the reasons behind / causes of such developments
rather than only the developments themselves, or on just blaming the
students, in my view.



On Sun, Feb 2, 2020, 17:19 Richard Forno <rforno at infowarrior.org> wrote:

>
> 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-dun
>  k.    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
> > American University
> > 4400 Massachusetts Av., NW
> > American University, Washington, DC 20016-8017
> > McKinley Hall 323
> > @paufder @cmsimpact
> > cmsimpact.org<http://cmsimpact.org>
> > paufder at american.edu<mailto:paufder at american.edu>
> > 202-885-2069 office
> > 240-643-4805 mobile
> >
> > 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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