Cheating in schools
Universities officials in every country have admitted that today cheating is rampant as students are getting access to many types of technology. A professor explained: “In the past about 5% of students cheated and most of them were bad students who failing in school but today more students are cheating, some are good students, and the reason they cheat because they can.”
Cheating happens in almost every school including top schools in the U.S such as Harvard, Stanford and Princeton; top schools in China such as Beijing, Tsinghua as well as top school in India such as India Institute of Technology (IIT). The degree of cheating ranges from copy someone's works to organized cheating when students hire someone to do the works for them. When professors assign homeworks, many students just copy materials from websites; blogs and Wikipedia instead of write their own work. When confront, many use excuses such as “They do not know plagiarism is cheating”, or Borrowing a few paragraphs from Wikipedia is part of their “research.”
Today cheating is rampant in schools that require entrance exams such as Medical schools, nursing schools, or top Business schools who are selected students based on entrance tests. With mobile phone, it is easy for someone outside to text the answers to people in the test rooms. A professor complained: "Cheating was always there among students but now with advanced technology the urge to cheat is even more. Not only do failing students try to cheat to pass exams, even good students cheat to get better grade. We see the number of cheating incident increases in past few years, especially with smartphone where students can program the phones to store all the answers."
In the past when students were caught, they received a “zero” for the test. But one bad test score may not deter students from cheating again. Today most schools immediately remove students from the class and consider that they fail the entire course. If a group cheats than the entire group also fail the course. If anyone get caught cheating again, they are removed from the school permanently. The problem is students could go to another school and start cheating again.
Cheating happens in the U.S but is not as rampant as in India or China. The simple reason is most tests do not based on memorization but require students to solve problems and explain their logics. During exam time, no one can stand nearby the exam rooms to feed the answers. Students are deterred from cheating because of the technology used to detect any cheating. There are software applications that can spot whether a portion of the assignment has been copied from somewhere else such as Wikipedia or websites. The schools also keep all homeworks and written works submitted by previous year's students so that any similarity with those given by previous years' students can be detected."
The industry also steps up and modifies the hiring process regarding cheating. Instead of depending on the degrees, they require all candidates to pass a number of tests to demonstrate their knowledge and skills. An industry representative explains: “Since many students cheat and many schools ignore it or fail to deal with it. We do not trust the degree anymore. We want to make sure that people that we hire have the knowledge and skills that we need. We test all of them and if they do not have skills, they do not get jobs.” Another manager adds: “That is why you will see many graduates with degrees but no jobs.”
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
