New Technology Lets Students Cheat More Than Ever

[xchrom]

http://www.businessinsider.com/new-technology-lets-students-cheat-more-than-ever-2012-8

Heloise Pechan's heart rose when she read the essay one of her students, a seemingly uninterested high school sophomore, had turned in for a class assignment on "To Kill a Mockingbird." The paper was clear, logical and well written -- a sign, she thought, that she had gotten through to the boy.

Her elation passed quickly. What came next was suspicion.

Pechan, then substitute teaching at a McHenry County high school, went to Google, typed the paper's first sentence ("Kind and understanding, strict but fair, Atticus Finch embodies everything that a father should be&quot and there it was: The entire essay had been lifted from an online paper mill.

"I went from amazement and excitement to 'Oh my God' in the space of a half-second," Pechan recalled.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/new-technology-lets-students-cheat-more-than-ever-2012-8#ixzz22rDIJANB

[customerserviceguy]

1. This is news to this teacher?

Students have been able to buy papers from the Internet for about twenty years now. It actually amazes me that they still hand out these kind of old-fashioned writing assignments anymore. A simple class discussion of a book that gives a student the top four or five points of that novel is all anybody's going to possibly remember a half dozen years later, anyway.

[exboyfil]

2. My daughter just finished a speech class

and they used TurnitIn to check her speeches (software is used for English as well). She now has a totally paper driven English class online at a different college, and I am curious to see if they use some sort of plagarism detection software as well. I am sure good English teachers can smell a rat pretty fast, but proving it might be another thing. The lack of tests will mean a loss of one control on stopping cheating.

I do think the final statement about emphasizing learning versus testing is a little naive. At the end of the day it is about the grade. The grade means college admittance, scholarships, and future employment. That is the world in which we live in. I had no issue with my Engineering Ethics teachers saying that it is highly unlikely that anyone would get an A in his class (I got a B - my college did not award half grades), and I was ok with it because I learned a great deal (one of the best classes which I ever had). That B served to pull down my GPA and probably was a consideration by employers regarding whether I would get an interview. I would have a tough time advising my daughter that it would be ok to take that class now for that reason. If she was thinking med school like my other daughter, I would emphasize that she avoid the class like the plague.