I went to college at Haverford, a small liberal arts, Quaker school with a strong student-run Honor Code. I was thrilled to be in an environment where it was taboo to not only cheat, but also to even discuss grades or the content or difficulty of exams. I think the Honor Code helped make the school less of an academic pressure cooker than similar institutions since as students we weren't focusing on how we were doing compared to others. It was so refreshing to not be asked "what grade did you get?" — a question that now seems akin to asking someone's salary.

College was extremely different from the scene at my competitive Silicon Valley public high school, where we tracked our friends' class ranks, SAT scores, and college acceptances. One of my classmates (who was later busted) even ran an SAT-cheating ring to help kids get better scores. So, why did things change when I went to college? I think it had a lot to do with the inherent trust that the faculty at my school put in the students. In that type of atmosphere people are less likely to cheat because it was considered a major breach of community trust. In a competitive place like my high school, community was not even a factor as every person seemed to be out for themselves, competition was encouraged and the assumption among students was that everyone was cheating (even if that wasn't true).

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I'm always a bit discouraged when I hear about how rampant academic dishonesty is these days with the availability of online services that can do your homework or sell you papers from the privacy of your own home. It rattles me in the same way that rumors of the decidedly low-tech fraternity and sorority "paper files" (full of old tests and term papers for lazy students to pilfer through as study/cheat aids) did when I had to bust a sorority gal for turning in someone else's paper for an assignment in the class I was teaching in grad school.

Over the past week the Wall Street Journal published two articles that address the role of technology in either facilitating academic dishonesty or in changing the rules of how students should be tested. This weekend's article (link will function for non-subscribers for about a week) highlighted schools that actually allow students to use computers and other forms of technology during tests and other assignments. In a way, I like this form of "testing" better than the traditional method of assuming that students need to memorize dates, facts, and random bits of trivia. Having an "open book," actually seems more like real life for certain types of exams. Of course I'm assuming that the instructors are devising tests and assignments that don't necessarily have an easy answer than can be found online. Personally I think educators owe it to themselves and their students to be creating tests that require critical thinking more so than looking up "answers."

The other Wall Street Journal piece is more disturbing to me, as it describes students who actually hire professionals to do assignments for them. Essentially some students are "outsourcing" their computer programming homework to professional coders. I realize that people who want to avoid doing their own work have been coming up with creative ways to do so for centuries, but technology's role in it is an interesting change in how cheating is being accomplished.

Categorized under: Education, Web

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