Cyber-Cheating

NEA Today, Nov 2004 by Flannery, Mary Ellen

A new generation of cheaters uses modern methods to grab grades. But you can catch them with a combination of high-tech sleuthing and old-fashioned teaching.

Montana high school English teacher Steve Gardiner still remembers finding the perfect Macbeth paper in the middle of his stack almost five years ago. It screamed out for an A. And then, right below it another fantastic analysis of Shakespeare's cursed play-exactly the same as the first.

When Gardiner confronted the devious duo the next day, he expected to find one creator and one copier. Instead, each sheepishly admitted to finding the paper on the Web and downloading it independently. It was mere chance that they ended up in consecutive order on his desk.

"I was devastated," he recalls.

At that, Gardiner put down his pencil and sharpened his wits. After plugging a few sentences into an Internet search engine, he quickly found the plagiarized Macbeth paper for sale. Then, within just minutes, he found a half-dozen more that had been sold and submitted for his grade book.

"It was a real eye-opener for me to realize how easy it was to (download student papers.) At that point I wasn't even aware that those sites exist," Gardiner says. Now he and his colleagues at Billings Senior High School routinely check papers and warn their students to beware.

"I understand cyber-cheating and I will catch you," Gardiner promises his kids. "It'll take me longer to fill out the discipline slip than it will take me to find (your paper) on the Internet."

Bluster and threats aside, Gardiner still finds plagiarized papers. The problem is, more and more, kids cheat.

It's easier these days, for one thing. Cell phones make it a cinch to send or store test answers or, with a few keystrokes, even search for hints on the Internet. Outside of class, dozens of companies sell "Grade-A" essays on the Web: www.schoolsucks.com, www.ivyessays.com, www.lazystudents.com, and more.

In a 2002 survey by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, 74 percent of high school students admitted to cheating on at least one exam within the last year, up from 61 percent in 1992. Perhaps more troubling, almost half agreed with the statement: "A person has to lie or cheat sometimes to get ahead."

Facing that kind of attitude, what are educators to do? Students are becoming more sophisticated stealers, relying on spy strategies that seem positively CIA-ish, sometimes with little remorse. Still, NEA members say there are ways to pluck out the plagiarists, using time-tested techniques that have worked for years, and also by turning their new-age weapons back on them.

Policing Plagiarists

TURN THE TABLES

Just like their students, teachers can turn to technology for help. It doesn't cost anything but a few minutes to take a few phrases from your student's unusually savvy essay and run them through Google, AltaVista, or any other search engine, says Patti Tjomsland, a Washington media specialist who has conducted seminars on treating the plagiarism epidemic.

"(A quick search) has led us to the source more times than I care to think about," says Don Mack, technology facilitator at Laramie High School in Wyoming.

HIRE A DETECTIVE

If you'd rather leave it to the pros, a number of companies, like iParadigms and CaNexus, also sell products that chase cheaters. Submit a paper, and these programs search for matching text strings in books and journals, online sources, and databases of essays, including those offered by the so-called paper mills.

"It's not fair to let honest students get out-competed by their dishonest peers," says iParadigms founder John Barrie, whose expanding service checks about 20,000 student essays a day, at a cost of about 60 cents per student per year. About one-third raise red flags-many from your finest students, who desperately want good grades and the best colleges, he adds.

USE MORE WRITING

Feeling frugal? "We don't have a lot of money to spend on things like that" says Wyoming's Mack of anti-cheating products. His teachers assign papers early in the year, including in-class jobs, so they can become familiar with each student's skills and style.

Last year, an essay-winner at Van Nuys Middle School in Sherman Oaks, California, lost his prize when a sharp-eyed teacher noticed that the winning entry didn't much resemble the student's regular work, says English teacher Emily Ettinger.

"You can usually tell," she says.

WATCH FOR CLUES

Frequently bought papers sound "too good," Gardiner says. (Or bizarre-a few years ago, Tjomsland heard about a plagiarized paper on drug use. When the pre-teen author claimed to have written, "Yes, I was a cocaine addict for five years," it was a dead give-away!)

Always check the citations-if a student buys or borrows, the citations often will be old or absent. Look carefully at its presentation-are the margins skewed? Are the fonts odd? At Laramie High, one particularly lazy looter printed his paper off the Internet with the Web address still scrawled across the top.

JUST ASK

Simplest of all, just ask students to talk to you about the assignment. If they can't summarize their paper's main points, they probably didn't write it.