[Air-L] cheating students?

[Griffin Boyce]

> 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.

   Even though I'm American, I do occasionally use UK spelling (mostly 
just "colour") and turns of phrase (if a paper's late, it's probably 
because I "couldn't be arsed").  This affectation is worse in writing, 
but for a capstone paper?  As a student, I would definitely want to 
eliminate these kinds of inconsistencies, and it's a weird enough detail 
to merit investigating further as you did.

   On the other hand, there was a story in the past couple of years about 
a student who got docked points because the professor didn't believe she 
would use the word "hence" in a paper.  She was understandably upset, 
and it became a Whole Thing.

   Personally, I think a lot of cheating comes as a result of the 
pressure to get a certain grade, rather than a basic pass.  Some people 
want to make an A rather than the B they might otherwise get if they 
tried very hard and didn't cheat.  I would love to know what the 
(detected) academic dishonesty rate is at universities that use a 
pass/fail system rather than grades/GPA.

   Part of this is also that the cost of failure is so high.  Failing a 
class could mean that someone is out of college entirely, but at a 
minimum it can be thousands of dollars to retake a course.  So if you're 
an insecure college student, outsourcing your homework to someone else 
*almost* makes sense.  But ethics aside, the output from these tends to 
be very sub-par, and the okay-ish ones won't fool a professor who is 
grading dozens of similar papers at once.  Not to mention that "service 
providers" aren't obligated to keep things confidential.

   For programming, having students use version control is a good idea.  
But keep in mind that it won't stop committed cheaters, who can re-write 
the history with BFG or git-filter-branch.  For other assignments, 
having students use google docs would provide similar benefit, while 
showing the full edit process.

   For students in the US, I'd say that if a particular course is truly 
that worrisome, look into alternative credit for the class.  There may 
be an option to test out, which means that one can study for months if 
they need to, can retake it for little money if needed, and credit is 
provided as pass/fail only (with 70%+ being "pass" in most instances).

cheers,
Griffin


On 2020-02-02 17:18, Richard Forno 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 ...