An anonymous essay by a guy who claims to make a living writing academic papers for students is kicking up some dust over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed — forty comments and counting over the course of the weekend.
What’s really dismaying to me about the kerfuffle is how quick many professors have been to disclaim responsibility for addressing this problem. Four of the first six commenters on the Chronicle essay are teachers who say it’s beyond their powers to put a stop to this kind of cheating in their classrooms, that because of their class sizes or their administrations’ policies, they’re just not able to do anything about the problem.
I just don’t believe it. I just don’t believe that there’s no way for them to address the issue, that they’ve tried everything there is to try and been stymied at every turn. That just doesn’t ring true to me — not on the basis of my own experience nor in light of the comments left by other aggressively anti-cheating professors in the thread.
Combatting cheating and plagiarism takes inventiveness. It takes dedication. It takes flexibility. But it absolutely can be done.
But let’s say I’m wrong. Let’s say that some professors are teaching under circumstances in which they have no ability to resist certain kinds of cheating. There’s still a simple solution to the problem: Don’t use assignments that can be gamed. If you’re not competent to detect and address plagiarism in a term paper, don’t assign term papers. If you can’t stop students from cheating on quizzes, don’t give quizzes. It’s really that simple.
Because if you, as a college professor, create a classroom environment in which students are able to cheat without consequences, you’re rewarding cheating and punishing honest work. You can wring your hands all you like about declining ethical standards, but the situation you deplore is one that you’ve helped to create.
To put it another way, if you’re a teacher or a professor then finding and punishing cheaters is your job. It’s your job in the same way that grading is your job. It’s your job in the same way that facilitating class discussion is your job. It’s your job in the same way that crafting appropriate tests and assignments is your job.
It’s your job, professor. Do your job.
studentactivism.net 
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November 14, 2010 at 3:41 pm
zunguzungu
Exactly. The easiest way for a professor to assign papers is essentially to say “here’s the assignment, turn it in on this date.” This is an easy hurdle for a plagiarizer to clear. One the other hand, intermediate assignments — which build to a final portfolio of work — and various stages of conferencing and peer review make plagiarism too much work to be feasible. It takes work on the part of the professor (and in big classes, that can make it daunting). But it’s also just a matter of being creative in how you design your classes. If you treat paper writing as a process — and intervene in that process — plagiarism ceases to be a problem (or becomes really easy to detect); if you treat writing as the simple production of a product, you make it very hard for yourself. It’s not surprising that so many profs take the easy road, since universities themselves want to make teaching into a simple selling of a service and evaluation of a clearly defined skill. But that doesn’t make it that only road.
November 15, 2010 at 11:30 am
The Plagiarism Fetish « zunguzungu
[…] for those of us who make our own syllabi, it’s a choice, and a bad one. As Angus Johnson writes, What’s really dismaying to me about the kerfuffle is how quick many professors have been to […]
November 15, 2010 at 7:07 pm
rosmar
I agree that doing as much as possible to prevent and catch cheating is my job, but I don’t agree that it is as simple as avoiding assignments that can be “gamed.” What kind of assignment could not be gamed? The research papers I assign are staged, so I can help the students develop their ideas along the way. I still sometimes catch people plagiarizing. I once caught a student cheating on an exam by hiding notes in the bathroom and then pretending she had a cold so she could go blow her nose a few times during the test-taking period.
I’d like to think I’ve caught every student who cheated in my classes, and I think I have at least caught most since I teach at a small liberal arts college and am lucky enough to get to know most of my students pretty well. But I don’t know for certain that none have slipped past.
November 16, 2010 at 11:30 am
Angus Johnston
You’re right, rosmar, that it’s never going to be possible to eliminate cheating completely. I was speaking casually, and over-broadly. None of us are ever likely to reach 100%.
But my broader point is that there’s a huge amount that each of us can do to bring the numbers way down. (The going-to-the-bathroom thing is a prime example — it pains me to do it, but I tell my students that they can use the restroom before or after a pop quiz, but not during. I’ve had too many students sneak off to Google stuff on their smartphones.)
November 17, 2010 at 11:30 am
rosmar
Thanks. And that’s a good idea.
November 22, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Megan
I can design assignments that are darn close to cheater proof. But I don’t think they are better assignments than some of the more open-ended ones I use that allow students to develop their own strengths as writers. I can place requirements on assignments that demand students turn in hard-copies of every source they use and spend my time comparing them word-for-word with the finished essays, but it won’t teach my students anything–instead it will just force me to put my time toward crime prevention rather than working with students who do want to learn and do have ideas to discuss with me.
I can teach to the cheaters or I can teach to the students with integrity. I cannot do both. So, I put in a few requirements to keep the lazy cheaters from cheating, but I don’t worry about the ones who hire personal assistants to write and turn in a topic, write and turn in an annotated bibliography, write and turn in a draft, etc. The dedicated cheaters have more time to cheat (and more money to spend on the process) than I have hours to chase after them.
And if you think I can fail a student for cheating based on nothing else but my belief in his or her dishonesty, you do not understand the service mentality of the modern universtiy. The student is innocent until I find the source of the plagiarism in print, and even then I may be instructed to forego the honor court on the grounds that being caught is part of “the learning process.” There is almost no way I can bring a case against a student who purchased an original paper. If the student is saavy enough to hire a writer who follows the requirements of the assignment, then my beliefs about the origin of the paper have no standing. This is part and parcel of our judicial system–the police officer cannot cite me for speeding because he feels like I’m driving too fast. And I cannot penalize a student for cheating because his prose feels inauthentic to me.
We live in a country that prefers to let some cheaters and crooks escape rather than risk penalizing innocent people very often. It is a trade off. If it makes you indignant, then speak up when you see classmates cheating–don’t ask me to be the tyrant in the democracy. Cheating occurs because most students refuse to hold their peers to standards of integrity and sympathize with cheaters when they are caught. I catch the ones I’m allowed to catch (the ones who cut and paste from sources). If you want the others caught, then take part in the process.
November 25, 2010 at 6:22 am
Kevin Whitefoot
The best defence against such cheating is to require your students to defend their work orally, in English universities called viva voce. When I was studying physics many years ago the most important parts were the tutorials every second week where groups of not more than four students would have to present to their tutor (a faculty member not some kind of assistant) the results of exercises that they had been set and defend the conclusions and methods. The final was a set of open note written examinations plus an oral defence before three faculty members of the written report (about 120 pages of single spaced typescript) of the major project that had occupied a large part of the final year. I don’t think any cheat could have got past that because the questions one is asked cannot be answered merely by regurgitating the paper that they have bought; they have to defend the methods, calculations, and conclusions.
Perhaps it is harder to weed out the cheats in soft sciences and arts but surely the same principles apply. The problem of course is that all this costs time and money so if the state wants everyone to have a bachelor’s degree something has to give and as far as I can see it is viva voce that is always the first to go.
If we always require that the students defend their work in person it doesn’t matter very much if they bought the work because they will not be able to defend it, the laziest of them will not even have read it.