PhillyBurbs.com: The ABCs of your schools: Internet makes cheating easier
By: RACHEL CANELLI
Bucks County Courier Times
A Duke University study found that 75 percent of high school students admit to cheating.
A stunned and baffled look is spreading across the faces of many students across the country along with a question: That's cheating?
In this digital age, today's pupils are growing up online where a plethora of information on the Internet can appear to be anonymous and, therefore, up for grabs. Many students don't understand that copying and pasting a paragraph from a website still counts as plagiarism.
In fact, smart phones and how-to videos on YouTube make plagiarizing easier.
For educators, that means not only finding new tools to catch cheaters, but also techniques to educate them.
"I see plenty of it," said Michael Hennessey, associate professor in Bucks County Community College's language and literature department. "It's just easier. In some ways, it's often comically obvious because the writing style suddenly changes. They're not being educated earlier in their academic life about the issue and they're not doing enough writing. They get away with stuff that then becomes habit."
Some students, like Jenna Spadaccino of Bristol, agree that plagiarism - plain and simple - is stealing someone else's ideas. But, she said, it's not always intentional.
"Some topics may be hard to find, which therefore sends me to Google, where it can become tricky figuring out if a website is a reliable source to cite in an academic essay," said Spadaccino, a sophomore at Holy Family University. "For some, I really think that plagiarism is done accidentally a lot of times because students honestly do not understand how to correctly cite a source."
Nationally, though, cheating is on the rise. A Duke University study found that 75 percent of high school students admit to cheating.
In a survey, researcher Don McCabe and the Center for Academic Integrity learned that 70 percent of college students cheated. That's compared to about 20 percent in the 1940s, officials said.
But only 29 percent of pupils thought copying from the Web was serious versus 34 percent earlier this decade. Perhaps that's because most believe cheaters aren't caught, or appropriately disciplined, according to a poll by U.S. News and World Reports.
And it's no longer just students having trouble with a certain subject who are doing the copying. Some straight-A pupils see others cheating and are willing to do whatever it takes to stay ahead, administrators said.
"It's all kinds of students, not just someone having difficulty," said Ruth Fields, library curriculum leader for Bensalem School District and a librarian at Robert K. Shafer Middle School. "These kids are top notch, but there's pressure, especially in high schools to keep up their grades and get into the best colleges. Maybe it's laziness or waiting until the last minute, but they don't understand it's not ethical."
Fields hosts workshops for teachers on preventing and avoiding plagiarism by requiring students to do creative and original work, like writing in a journal. Pupils are also educated from picture books on copying in third grade to learning how to cite sources in middle school, said Fields.
Similar to policies in other districts, including Pennsbury, Bensalem students who cheat or plagiarize are first given the opportunity to re-write the assignment. But they'll receive a failing grade on their record for a second offense, Fields said.
At Bucks, it's up to a professor to require the student to either redo or fail the assignment on the first offense, withdraw or fail the course for a second offense and dismiss the pupil from the college for a third offense, said Hennessey.
He's on the same page when it comes to educating to avoid plagiarism. At BCCC, only a handful of plagiarism charges were made per year more than 10 years ago. Now, between 40 and 50 are made each semester, said Hennessey.
"In my class, there's no excuse for students not to know because I require them to do online tutorials on plagiarism," he said. "It's OK for students to use other people's work in research papers. In many cases, it's expected. But there's also the expectation to document where it comes from."
What students seem to forget is that it's just as easy for teachers to Google whatever topic they're researching, too, said Hennessey.
Bucks professors also use SafeAssignment, a software package within their course management system called Blackboard. The educators can copy and paste a student's work into the program and it will find whatever website it came from - even if it's cited properly, he said.
Hennessey encourages students to use the software as well. After all, Fields said, it's not just what colleges expect, but there are real world consequences like lawsuits and fines.
As Hennessey likes to point out to his students: "Would you want your car inspected or repaired by a mechanic who cheated? Professionals can lose their jobs because of (cheating)."
Rachel Canelli can be reached at 215-949-4191 or rcanelli@phillyBurbs.com
