Cheating in the 21st Century

There was a time not long ago when academic honesty meant crib notes, frat exam files, and exam "sharing." While there is still the occasional formula written on an arm, well-placed cheat sheet, or exam "codes" (body/object manipulations representing answers, etc.), fraternity files have less relevance (as do fraternities, it seems), and "scoping" has not evolved beyond the basic baseball cap in the back of the room technique. What's different now is technology.

One reads/hears about text messaging being a cheating source, and it's easy to imagine laptops, calculators, ipods, etc., being programmed and used for nefarious purposes, but I suspect that this doesn't really happen anywhere except in the largest classes with the least attentive instructors, if then. Rather, the real problem is the internet and its impact on plagiarism.

In a practical sense, the internet sources are often difficult to locate unless the cheater is especially lazy (not exactly an uncommon attribute of cheaters) and uses a simple (ditto) search using obvious keywords. In the days when students knew where the library was, it was pretty simple, albeit time consuming, to walk over with a suspicious paper and locate the journal or book with the lifted passage. Now with the internet, it is significantly more difficult to identify and locate the plagiarism. For one thing, the majority of internet pieces are not particularly rigorous or well-written, in an academic sense, and might plausibly pass for the spell-checked work of a college student. For another, the internet is now essentially one big cliff note service, and the sheer magnitude of plagiarism sources makes detection problematic.

However, a much more fundamental problem is that many students just don't seem to understand what plagiarism is. In the old days, their dilemma was how to scramble the words sufficiently so that the words might pass as their own, or perhaps to discern what was common knowledge and what was not. Today, the concept of a citation is as foreign to them as the proper use of a semicolon. Oh, sometimes there will be a reference at the end of the paper, perhaps perceived as a get-out-of-jail-free card to account for any and all borrowed thoughts. Yet it may simply be a matter of not caring, or worse, looking for an edge. In both cases, this of course reduces to a matter of ethics. What are yours?

As I grow older I increasingly appreciate the fine line between negligence and willful misconduct.