Colleges Battle High Tech Cheating

So many technologies, so many ways to use them to cheat. There have been widespread reports of kids taking cell phone photos of their exams and sending them to other students via SMS messaging. Other stories cite students using PDAs to keep their notes by their sides during a test, and online paper mills where you can buy a ready-to-turn-in paper on just about anything. Some kids are purportedly so good at text messaging that they can dole out test answers without taking their phone out of their pocket.

As students get more wily about high tech cheating schools are trying to keep one step ahead.

The best known category of anti-cheat devices can help spot a plagiarized paper. There are a number of anti-plagiarism detectors on the market—the most popular being Turnitin—but they all work in a similar fashion. These store huge databases of student papers that have been acquired from numerous sources and compare the paper that's been turned in against the database. Recently Educause ran a comparative review of seven of the most popular anti-plagiarism tools.

But that's just the tip of the creative ways schools are trying to thwart cheating. The New York Times recently covered the cheating on campus story and reported numerous examples of counterattack. "At the Anderson School of Management at U.C.L.A., the building's wireless Internet hotspot is turned off during finals to thwart Internet access." One teacher had his students turn the computers to face toward him so that he could see their screens during an exam. "At Mercer County Community College in West Windsor, NJ, students must clear their calculators' memory and sometimes turn in their cell phones before tests. At Brigham Young University, exams are given in a testing center, where electronic devices are generally banned. In some classes at Butler University in Indianapolis, professors use software that allows them to observe the programs running on computers students are taking tests on." And, according to the article, some institutions even install cameras in rooms where tests are administered.

Lest you think that America is the only cheating culture, check this one out. Even the police get involved: Chinese police detained three people for running a high tech cheating scam involving wireless microphones during the national college entrance exam.

The real question, of course, is why students cheat, and sometimes the best answers come directly from the students. In a CNN interview one student asked to comment on the use of iPods as cheating devices answered, "You can just thread the earbud up your sleeve and then hold it to your ear like you're resting your head on your hand." But that, she offered, doesn't mean you should be banned from using iPods. "People who are going to cheat are still going to cheat, with or without them."

Finally, where there are kids and cheating there's bound to be an academic study. Some of the best work is being done at The Center for Academic Integrity. Who knows, you may be able to get a Ph.D. in high tech cheating someday.

In the interest of proper attribution (a more genteel form of plagiarism), this photo comes from Textually.org.