USU professors struggle to fight raising cheating among students
Marie Pehrson has been selected as the valedictorian for the College of Business — an honor in itself – but it’s even more impressive to know that she did it without ever cheating.
Nope, not once.
Almost 80 percent of college students admitted to cheating at least once in a study by the Center for Academic Integrity, according to Plagiarism.org.
According to Pehrson, the students that cheat don’t really accomplish anything. “It’s not achieving if you’re cheating,” she said. USU psychology professor Brian Tschanz agrees. “At some point, the student isn’t going to be able to cheat his or her way to success,” he said in an e-mail.
In Tschanz’s Psychology 1010 syllabus, he defines cheating as looking over a person’s shoulder while they are taking a Scantron test, using notes on closed-book test and plagiarism. Each will result in serious consequences for the student.
“I have personally caught two students in the act of plagiarism and only pretended to be sorry that I had to fail them. Don’t tempt me or your teaching assistants to fail you for cheating,” Tschanz said in his syllabus.
He said he didn’t have too many lasting qualms about failing students who didn’t do their own work.
“Dealing with someone who cheats takes a tremendous amount of time and effort. By the time you’re through, you’re usually pretty angry with the person,” he said. “You also tend to feel angry on behalf of the students who earned their grades honestly.”
Cheating is not going away. In fact, it’s increasing across the country and with technology at students’ fingertips, making it easier than it used to be.
In June 2005, a nationwide survey called the Assessment Project revealed that in 1999, only 10 percent of students surveyed by the Center For Academic Integrity admitted to Internet plagiarism. In 2005, the result jumped to 40 percent.
According to the article, “Survey Shows Cheating Prevalent in College” by Amanda Bray printed in The University Wire, that survey included almost 50,000 undergraduate students and suggested that cheating and plagiarism is a problem throughout the country. To many local students, this doesn’t come as a surprise.
Bridger Kimber, a junior majoring in aviation technology, said it wouldn’t surprise him if at least 80 percent of students have cheated. He said he’s done it himself.
“I didn’t learn anything by cheating,” he said. “I got a good grade, but it didn’t help me. I’m not proud that I cheated.”
Kimber said he thinks students aren’t threatened by the USU cheating policy, which can lead to not only failure of an assignment or course, but expulsion from the university.
However, he said being caught for plagiarism could be a scary thing, especially since he saw his friends “get busted for it.”
“One roommate did an assignment and the other roommate printed it off later,” Kimber said. “They both had the same class, but different teachers.”
The two students took their papers to the writing lab and happened to get the same student editor, so the student who stole the paper was caught. Kimber said they were both going to get kicked out of school, but since the roommate who wrote the paper had done nothing wrong, he didn’t get in trouble. The student who plagiarized was kicked out of school, Kimber said.
Some students have stolen essays off the Internet or have bought them from Web sites such as Essaytown.com, which offers more than 43,000 “high-quality essays, college term papers, book reports, research papers, reviews and thesis papers for e-mail delivery” for $29.99 each, according to Bray’s article.
Tschanz said it doesn’t matter whether or not a student pays for a term paper. It still isn’t their work.
“Instructors have much more respect for students who hand in sloppy work of their own than they do for students who hand in great stuff that someone else did,” he said.
Other forms of cheating include having friends take students’ tests for them. Stephanie Winger, a junior in FCHD, said she has seen this happen.
“I know kids who never attended a class and then had their friends take the test for them because the teachers didn’t know them,” Winger said.
It isn’t worth it though, Winger said, because, “Why pay all that money to cheat your way through [college]?”
Kimber added that when a person cheats, “It’s only hurting yourself.”
People can earn a degree without cheating – they just need to tell themselves they can, Pehrson said. The reason she earned a 4.0 was because she knew she had the brains to achieve it.
“I did it for myself,” she said. “I always knew I could do it without cheating. It’s been something important to me.”
Tschanz said there are probably students who get away with cheating because dealing with the problem is so labor-intensive that most instructors wait until they’re absolutely certain that the student in question has cheated before taking action.
“I’ll bet that instructors often have mild suspicions that they don’t follow up on,” he said. “I know I do.”
–mnewbold@cc.usu.edu