Results tagged “cheating” from PEDABLOGUE

Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 13:40:21 -0000 From: "writinglance" Subject: NEW FREELANCE PROJECTS on Directfreelance.com 4/21/2005

Dear Freelancers!

Recent Projects:

4/21/2005 - #21192 Foucault Philosophy Term Paper ...Article/News/Press Release Writing/Editing I need a writer to write a 25-page term paper (double-spaced) on Foucault''s philosophy. I have an article that contains all the ideas that are needed to write this paper. However, those ideas need to be re-written so this term-paper is original. Please provide quote me a flat-fee to for this service.

I subscribe to a fairly good Yahoo group called Work For Writers that sends out job opportunities for freelance writers, as a way of both finding new markets for my work and maintaining my own newsletter for writers and journalism students looking for work, The Handy Job Hunter for Writers. But this week there's been a spate of job listings coming in from student plagiarists looking to hire professionals to write their papers for them, like the listing above.

Subscribers to this list have been expressing their outrage and strongly recommending that others don't take those jobs. But some are defending the practice as legitimate "Work-for-Hire." "Work-for-Hire" is common in the freelance writing game -- it's what you do when you are contracted to write a single document for a company, who generally tells you what to write, claims all rights to what you've written, and almost always removes the writer's byline (replacing it with their own). It's the lowest job on the food chain for the freelancer, but for many it is unfortunately a necessary way to supplement income so they can pay their bills.

In most cases "Work-for-Hire" is legitimate, but being hired to commit a fraud in the classroom is obviously unethical (and illegal, though I've yet to hear of a school convicting a student with "fraud" for plagiarism). But it appears to be a widely growing trend. I recall seeing an interview with a person who makes a VERY good living writing papers for college students on the ABC special report, Cheating Crisis in America's Schools...and that writer was netting more money for a single term paper than most writers get for writing a department for a magazine. Nate Kushner's weblog got a lot of attention recently, when he "outed" a student who approached him via instant messaging, trying to negotiate rates for writing a paper on Hindu religion. And, obviously, term paper mills are still thriving businesses.

I've written here before about how teachers can try to prevent plagiarism in the classroom, but today I'm marvelling over the irony that I am BOTH a teacher who gets papers from students AND a freelance writer who is receiving solicitations for writing them for students. (If I were truly entrepreneurial, I would design a paper so difficult that students would be likely to turn to professionals for "work for hire," then take their job offers under a pseudonym, and write the papers myself -- which would not only net me some easy $ but also make them oh so very easy to grade. Hah!)

But seriously: this reminds me of the importance of teaching ethics when training students in the "business side" of writing. Whereas most college classes only focus on the aesthetics of creative writing, the various formats of business documents, or the effective methods of research, the ethical application of these skills needs to be emphasized just as much. Not just in terms of source citation -- but also distribution and publication of one's work. I have seen a number of advanced courses in creative writing and "how to" articles which emphasize the goal of making money -- and with good reason, because there are a lot of markets for writers out there that pay a pittance or nothing at all, preying on the writer's ego and the desire to see one's name in print. But they tend to go over the top in their advocacy for "guerilla marketing" and trading on your skills in a quest for a buck.

Oh, and what would Foucault say about that job listing at the top of this entry? He'd probably chuckle at the way a commercial worldview has blinded all who are a party to the exchange, and point back to his article on the "Author-Function" (aka "What is an Author?"). I'd like to imagine that the student writer who is soliciting a freelancer's "work-for-hire" is doing so as a sly and canny form of research about Foucault's essay on literature as property -- as proof positive that an author's name is a social construct that is necessary only to make the creator accountable for acts of discursive transgression -- but I somehow doubt it.

Matthew S. Willen's "Reflections on the Cultural Climate of Plagiarism," from the latest issue of Liberal Education, looks at the way that plagiarism -- as a way of working the system in a way to win at any cost -- is endorsed by our culture-at-large. It comes as no news to most of us that we live in what David Callahan terms "the cheating culture." But Willen raises the interesting suggestion that our campus climate itself in many ways unconsciously reproduces the culture that encourages the plagiarist.

Willen suggests a few options for preventing plagiarism by changing the campus ethos -- including incorporating a code of ethics of some kind and enforcing the rules more strictly. But the really difficult task of getting students to value learning, rather than winning, is the key to success. Willen implores that "it may be useful to reflect on the ways that our institutional and pedagogical practices continue to reinforce and reward aggressive competitiveness and an individualistic me-first climate, to the exclusion of recognizing those who have contributed to the integrity of a campus or local community."

Writing classes are an important space for accomplishing this. In addition to evaluating writing as an process of discovery (as opposed to an end-product, inspected by the teacher before kicked off the imaginary assembly line), I think having students peer review their papers and share their research is a good way to make learning communal. I've noted that some students often feel more accountable to each other than to the teacher in peer editing workshops, when the due date is established not to turn papers in to me, but to trade papers with a partner and write some feedback (which I do collect). Students who might otherwise be procrastinators who turn their papers in late will often work harder to meet deadlines for one another's peer editing homework and try to impress one another with their research skills. Some students will risk plagiarism when it comes to the teacher's private evaluation, but few would do so at the risk of being exposed "live" in class by a fellow student. Making the writing process alive and human curtails plagiarism because it resists the "system" of grading, the "mechanics" of paper grading as product evaluation. The more mechanical an educational structure is, the more apt it is to be treated as something to "work" and manipulate, rather than as an (organic?) process of learning.

This year we're moving quickly toward adopting turnitin.com as a way to combat plagiarism on our campus, and this participates in the culture of cheating in an interesting, if problematic, way. While it's true that there are many reasons not to use the software, it acknowledges the ubiquity of plagiarism and denounces it as unethical, while also proclaiming that "we've armed our defenses up against you internet cheaters." Since some of our faculty lack the skills, let alone the time, to hunt down plagiarized writing from online sources -- and since cheating students often count on such weakness as working in their favor -- I think it's probably a good thing that we're adopting turnitin as a solution in our particular campus. But it's not THE solution, and I'm highly aware that we're using a mechanical process -- a technology -- to do the work of plagiarism prevention. Pitting machine against machine is rarely the solution to a social problem. I've written about turnitin on Pedablogue before, but I'm going to start thinking more practically about how to humanize and socialize this technology as much as possible to ensure that it is conceived as part of a learning process, rather than a mechanical operation which itself could be manipulated. For example, in addition to having students write about cheating in a thematic paper, I might also try to figure out how to incorporate turnitin.com into their peer review processes. Or maybe I'll have them write a reflective paper about their first experiences with the software. I could come up with a creative assignment like W. L. Yarroch's "turn it in quest." I'll probably have them print out their own originality reportsand turn those in (in hard copy) with their essays, at the very least, rather than adopting the role of plagiarism cop.

Maybe our culture is too aggressively competitive. If academic life is a sport, I'm not the umpire. I'm the coach. Part of my job is to live up to the values behind that old cliche, "it isn't whether you win or lose but how you (or better yet, we) play the game."

I've been a longtime user of a PDA (a Sony Clie with PalmOS) -- given a keyboard, it's become my substitute laptop for traveling, and I love to write on it when I'm on the road. A few years ago, I did a creative writing experiment with it (which developed into my book, Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems) and, along with Agendus Datebook, I use an excellent outlining tool called ShadowPlan to plan and organize my life.

This semester I've decided to bring the PDA into my teaching a little more actively. I just purchased Teacher's P.E.T. -- an interesting student management tool that includes a portable electronic gradebook. I worry that it's more suitable for courses where there are regular tests and quizzes than impromptu writing assignments, but I'm willing to give it a shot. It features "category weighting" of grades which, I think, might work well for my purposes. There's also a Windows' desktop add-on which I might look into down the line.

What I expect will be tricky: a) to remember to carry the PDA with me to class; b) not be impeded by the act of weilding a stylus on a small screen (paper and pen is always easier) -- hitting the checkboxes accurately is important; c) ensure visibility given the classroom lighting; d) keep regular backups and enable security features in case of emergencies; and e) try to keep my cool and not look too geeky in the front of the classroom.

Handango features many handheld software teaching aids if you're thinking about doing something along these lines, too. Handheld learning is becoming more and more common. Many schools have already made Palm Pilots an active part of their classes, with students performing work on them and "beaming" assignments to the teacher and so forth. Some teachers are doing pioneering work along these lines. PalmOne is supporting the growing industry. GoKnow seems to offer some very good educational tools in this regard (for example, their PicoMap is a neat "mind mapping/brainstorming" tool. You can find a great list of links on Midge Frazel's page, Tips and Tricks for Using Handhelds in the Classroom, which is intended to accompany her book by the same title.

One of the lessons here is that Palm Pilots aren't only being used for high tech cheating. Like all technology, it's only a tool -- it's up to teachers to make it pedagogical.

As I watched Primetime Thursday's special on the "Cheating Crisis" last night, I felt the full range of familiar emotions: frustration with students who don't realize that they're only cheating themselves out of learning experiences, anger at the audacity of students who proudly plagiarise, vindication when the students who in the early segments were claiming ethical high ground were confronted with their own cheating by a surprise 'trap' that a teacher sprung on them... I even felt I could identify, in a strange way, with the freelance writer who writes papers for students as a fulltime job, for twenty bucks a page...

I already knew about a lot of these problems, but I kept wondering: so what's the solution? I've read a lot about what teachers can do to better police their classes and prevent cheating in the first place; I've also heard the arguments that the change really needs to come in the students themselves, who need to value ethical behavior. And I realize that this is a cultural issue whose origin lies in multiple cloudy areas, ranging from TV news reportage of big business cheaters (like Enron) to the ease of text manipulation in cyberspace. But Primetime made it clear that the problem is worsening and that it may very well be a "crisis" in the educational system as a whole. If the problem is systemic and out of control, I'm wondering what academic institutions can do to help save us from the "crisis"?

One solution that seemed to leap out at me is instituting smaller student-teacher ratios. The more intimate teachers can become with their students, the less likely they'll try to sneak a peek at a graphics calculator or videophone. Cattle herding students through huge lectures halls generates the anonymity that allows and encourages cheating. This should be obvious, but it's more cost effective to some institutions to have large lectures with grad student recitations/discussion sections than otherwise. A lecture hall reduces the number of faculty necessary, the number of classrooms needed to schedule, and so on. It will take institutions really caring about this problem enough to cap classes at a reasonable level and do what it takes to reduce the student-teacher ratio, even if it means losing money.

Another solution might be to ban some technologies from the classroom...but I don't mean to get rid of them. The trick might be to prohibit student-owned storage and transmittal devices and instead to substitute them with technology that the institution provides. To actually have non-networked computers already at the desks or calculators that are distributed by the teacher for the purposes of working the texts. Technology should be used as a tool, but one that enhances learning. As with many technologies, using it for its own sake seems to become part of the pleasure of cheating with electronic gizmos -- it's "fun" to IM a friend in class...and only one step away from passing quiz answers.

I'm still a proponent of turnitin.com, though I realize that students can subvert it, that there are copyright issues still being debated, and that it is not a magic solution to the problem of plagiarism. Education is what will solve it. But I do still think turnitin.com is a good idea for now. I simply think it arms teachers with technology to fight cheating technology; like giving an anti-aircraft gun to a country without an air force, institutions can arm those teachers who are unsavvy about plagiarism and technology. It can also make some students think twice.

And finally, I think institutions need to have a "zero tolerance policy" for cheating. At one point, the "plagiarist for hire" in the program mentioned that when he writes an A paper, everybody wins: the student gets his A, his parents are pleased that their boy is succeeding, the teacher feels like they've done their job, and the institution doesn't lose a student. The institution needs to be willing to risk losing a student in order to gain a reputation for being academically sound. I think a zero tolerance policy would actually attract good students who want to reap the rewards of doing their own work -- in a classroom where there's an even playing field -- and that parents, too, would prefer to send their children to such a place.

I'm not sure what changes can be done in high schools to help students see the value of working for the sake of learning, rather than cheating for the sake of the grade (or for the sake of time management, or a host of other reasons...). But I do wonder if the emphasis on assessment in the "No Child Left Behind" era is a contributing factor to all of this. I have no basis to make such a claim; just a sense of uncertainty....but as a teacher of Freshman Composition, I will be confronting the products of today's high school head on, and do my best to at least talk about this issue and help my students see the value of learning for its own sake.

TV probably worth watching:

Primetime Thursday (news program) on ABC

Thursday, April 29 at 10 p.m. ET
"Charles Gibson investigates the cheating crisis in America's schools — from plagiarism to high-tech gadgets, students are using old methods and new technology to beat the system. "

== UPDATE: I just learned from a press release my dean passed along that this episode of PrimeTime will also feature a look at turnitin.com anti-plagiarism software, which we've discussed in Pedablogue in entries past.

The blog at elearnspace contains a short post about new research from Duke University that suggests that the brain will "cheat" rather than think when responding to new problems. It seeks out the neural path of least resistence, searching out rote responses that have worked in the past first, rather than approaching the problem critically, or anew.

I can't tell if this is news or confirmation of what we already know.

In his own words, psychological researcher Ian Dobbins says, "It's like you know that two plus two equals four, not because you're working through the solution; you're recovering the answer from memory.... These findings...suggest that the brain is set up to circumvent the algorithmic or deliberative processes of decision making wherever possible."

No wonder our job as teachers is so difficult. And no wonder so many teachers wind up teaching rote memorization: it is a natural method of learning.

Sure, this research kind of naturalizes intellectual laziness and the impulse toward cheating -- or maybe it just says that the brain benefits from disciplined memorization, even if that method seems like a robotic and ultimately dehumanizing form of education. But if anything, it suggests to me that it is all the more important to teach critical reasoning as a form of inquiry. Even if such brain behavior is just "hard-wired" I think it is all the more imperative that we train the brain to ask questions and engage critically with problems, so that methods of inquiry themselves will become "rote" pathways of sorts. The researchers distinguish between an "executive faculty" of the brain that makes higher decisions and a baser activity that seeks to minimize the amount of work the executive faculty has to do. If the 'executive branch' of our brain (rather than body) politic resists work, then our job is to induce it to become disciplined.

I'll avoid making jokes about the laziness of the executive office.

I've been reading Freud lately, so I see evidence of the death drive in all this, too, but I'm not going there. I'm not going to get into the Marxist analysis, either, that would see a reproduction of the division of labor in all these metaphors that explain the science ("executive" is clearly the bourgeois and the rest represents the proletariat). Just thought I'd share this interesting research and some pontification.

I read an interesting essay (found and responded to at Jerz' Literacy Weblog) by Russell Hunt that articulates why the problems that plagiarism poses for writing teachers are all good for teaching. I agreed with much of what Hunt says, but I also felt it was too counter-intuitive to buy. Isn't saying plagiarism improves education analogous to saying crime improves society? Even if it does (by increasing security or whatever), it's still crime. Read it for yourself...it's part of a larger work in progress that makes for fascinating study.

Tips for Using Questions in Large Classrooms by Daniel J. Klionsky is a great essay in working a huge room (in Klionsky's case, a bio class of 300 students!). It's all about setting a comfortable tone, getting past the sort of "groupthink" that produces silence and fear and horseplay, and challenging students to keep thinking when the urge is to become passive audience members like someone at a blockbuster movie instead of a student learning new material.

I especially liked his suggestion to not ask for answers, but to have people raise their hands to vote on possible answers -- as if doing a "live" multiple choice test. This gets folks more comfortable raising hands and, as Klionsky puts it, "the very act of having to decide and make a sign of the commitment draws students into the discussion." That's true of courses of any size.

When I was a graduate student teacher in film history at the University of Oregon, I ran discussion sections for a large lecture class with 300 seats, too. Once a week small groups of twenty would talk about the prof's large lecture -- and I would run three of these classes per week. But during the prof's lectures my job was sort of like an usher's: I watched students to make sure they weren't disrupting the films or lectures, I distributed handouts, I eagle-eyed cheaters during tests. But our teacher -- my advisor, Kathleen Karlyn Rowe -- was kind enough to let the grad students teach one lecture per term to the whole class. (I gave lectures on German Expressionism and The New Hollywood). I'd get mic'd up and have a projection screen behind me the size of a drive-in theater, to use for overheads and analyzing film clips. It was like being a rock star or something -- the performative aspect of teaching took on a grandiose dimension. I'd make a silly joke and the room roared. I'd ask questions and have a field of faces to choose on at random. I could see thirty heads nodding in agreement when I made a point. It was a thrill. A daunting experience, but a thrill nonetheless. The best thing I ever did was ask questions and cajole the class into raising their hands and talking (nay, shouting, at times), tuning in to their needs rather than focusing so much on my own voice in the amplifier, the typo on my overhead projection, or my panic that the electricity might go out.

But the smaller rooms I teach in now are so much more learning-friendly. The larger the class, the more mechanized the process has to be in order to service so many learners. And the less likely the student will be able to disappear into the fabric of the crowd.

In "The Phil Donahue Approach to Large Lecture Halls", Gerald M. Goldhaber talks about working the audience by moving up and down the rows and breaking the invisible boundary line between audience and lecturer. He uses a seating chart and gets to know the students. But it's the movement between intimacy and distance that probably keeps students on their feet, guessing, attentive. It's a great technique to stitch yourself into that "fabric" of the crowd I mentioned above. And it probably works for any size class.

Okay, let's go to commercial...

• "The sure mark of an A paper is that you will find yourself telling someone else about it." -- Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning

  
  

• "...an A+ is a touchdown that got the crowd to its feet -- a forty-yard pass play or a seventy-yard run from scrimmage. As color commentators like to put it, so and so 'took it to the house.'" -- Sanford Pinsker, Irascible Professor

  
  

• "An A paper is written with verve and clarity. It displays a curiosity, a control of knowledge beyond what was covered in class, an original insight or an extrapolation beyond class work." -- John Lye, Brock Univeristy CPCF Handbook

  
  

• "An "A" essay is excellent work that a student should be proud of." -- Elvira Casal, MTSU

  
  

• "All it takes is a well written introduction, body and conclusion. These steps are a lot easier than most people make them out to be." -- "How to Write an A Essay" reproduced at the following plagiarism sites: NetEssays.com, MegaEssays.com, RadEssays.com, VirtualEssays.com, NeedFreeEssays.com, FindFreeEssays.com, etc.

  
  

"...the fixation on grades so prevalent in our times might have to do with a paradigm shift. Perhaps the ideal of the sage or expert instructing the receptive student/apprentice has been replaced subtly by a new model: the paid coach and his/her trainees. In the latter relationship, the older coach is hired to make sure that the younger competitor brings home "the medals." By analogy, it becomes the job of the professor to make sure that the students bring home the "A's" -- Ronda Chervin, Idol worship of the 'A'

"Some students would put guns on their desk to take the test," says Dr. Hafudh Alwan, assistant dean of the political science department at Baghdad University.

"Once, one was cheating and when I told him to stop, he said, 'Leave me alone or I will take this pen and draw on your face.' " He paused, overcome by emotion at the memory. "It made us so upset, we would cry. We are PhD professors, and our students humiliate us. We could do nothing," says Dr. Alwan. -- "Iraq Students say 'Welcome Back, Professor'" by Christina Asquith

Earlier this week -- a few days before this morning's capture of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein -- the Christian Science Monitor ran Asquith's touching report on the renewing educational atmosphere in post-war Iraq. Professors who left their country due to Hussein's control are now slowly returning to their homeland. Fulbright Scholarships to teach in Iraq restarted in late October, just after President Bush addressed the crisis in Iraqi education in his Weekly Radio Address. And as UNESCO's recent Situational Analysis of Education in Iraq (*.pdf file) noted:

There are many reasons to be optimistic about education in Iraq. First, there is Iraq’s centuries old intellectual tradition, which has its roots in the era when Arab scholars led the world in subjects as different as mathematics and medicine. Second, Iraq had a thriving education system only a decade ago, and subsequent events have weakened it, rather than destroyed it. Third, a government that was inimical to the free exchange of ideas and knowledge has been removed. Fourth, Iraq has access to rich resources and, unlike many countries emerging from conflict, is unlikely to expend much of its wealth on military hardware. Such spending wastes resources that could improve lives and signals to the people that more conflict may be imminent. -- John Daniel, UNESCO

But optimism itself doesn't solve problems; UNESCO's large document also outlines what has been lost due to the Iraq war and describes in detail what still needs to be improved. (UNESCO's fact sheet on education in Iraq is just as eye-opening).

Considering how little return American students get on their books during "Book Buyback" at the end of the semester, I wondered if Iraqi students could use these donations instead? I did a little superficial web research and found that Scotland has begun a campaign to get books back into Iraqi libraries and schools via a "Books for Baghdad" initiative. Another group in America, iraqischools.com, is adopting schools and accepting donations of teaching supplies, which are distributed by the military. You can also make academic book donations to a Jordainian group organizing to rebuild the Baghdad Library. Conversely, you could also donate your books or other Christmas gifts to US troops in Iraq, via treatsfortroops.com

And to think, I'm annoyed if I even hear a cell phone RING in my class....

After reading the CS Monitor for my entry below, I found another article on the rise of cell phone cheating in the classroom. Obviously, these phones can vibrate so that the teacher won't hear them ring. Like some fancy calculators, they can store text as a hidden cheat sheet -- or worse, SMS text messaging can be used to communicate answers back and forth between students in code. And then, of course, there is the new PICTURE phones (*clicking here opens Word doc). Students are snapping shots of tests while they take them... it's like carrying a hand scanner. This allows not only sending of answers but storing them in a graphics file. Cell phones are clearly providing an innovative way for unethical students to cheat and technophobic teachers are banning them (and rightly so) -- but geek.com wonders when these signal-emitting devices will become appropriated for innovative classroom use by educators to do something like proctor a test OVER the cell phone. Perhaps tests won't happen...old school methods like pen and paper work best sometimes...but process-oriented tasks, like collaborative work might utilize the tech wonderfully. Time will tell!

"...in about 30 percent of the papers, more than one-quarter of the text was copied verbatim" -- in "Educators, Cheating Students Rely on Web: More Schools Use Plagiarism-Tracking Software" by Linda Perlstein

Over Thanksgiving break, The Washington Post ran Perlstein's article which discusses turnitin.com -- a web service that our campus is likely to adopt next year to combat the rise in student plagiarism we are seeing (which is happening everywhere, thanks to the internet and teen culture's napster-like approach to all electronic material online). The Post's article is good because it explains the pros and cons of turnitin.com from the perspective of students and teachers who have used it, and it also discusses the rise of plagiarism among high school writers, rather than just college students. I hope faculty at my college get to read this article and think ahead about how they might use turnitin.com to assist them in their courses.

[Thanks to Tim Stahmer at Assorted Stuff for pointing out this WP article. Stahmer rightly suggests that teachers are culpable for this ethos and points out another article on how to combat plagiarism...read his recent blog entry on this topic.]

Moments after I posted the message about plagiarism (below), I discovered a plagiarized response paper from my film course. I wrote in the margins: "Well-written!" because the student was articulate >and< cited dialogue from the film verbatim. But that verbatim citation was waving a red flag at me: did she remember what that character said word-for-word? So I decided to look up a catchphrase on google and lo-and-behold: busted.

Other signs that led me to check on the paper: sophisticated style in a paper that is only three paragraphs long. It felt "excerpted" from something else (and it was). Also: plot summary written in an overly excited manner. Almost as if a reviewer were writing, trying to get me interested in attending the film (which they actually were). Uncanny!

A classic example of plagiarism: a student once began a paper in my World Lit class: "Forget everything you ever knew about Salmon Rushdie!" Would you really say that to your teacher?! I instantly recognized bookreviewese and lo-and-behold: hit #1 at Amazon.com.

I sometimes wish plagiarists would plagiarize a book on how to plagiarize. Then they might know better. Not.

I just found a great resource of online articles about combatting plagiarism, compiled by librarian Sharon Stoerger. This has been on my mind lately as our school investigates plagiarism detection software like turnitin.com. One issue is whether or not such programs are any better than using google or ebsco host to detect plagiarism. I personally have used the metasearch engine Copernic Agent with many good results: I bust at least one student a semester using it (and it helps with my own research, as well).