New Frontiers in Cheating

▪ 2003

Introduction

by R. Murray Thomas

      A number of high-profile instances involving plagiarism and résumé padding that were reported in 2001 continued to capture headlines in 2002 and to bring increased scrutiny to the methodology of cheating. Though historian Doris Kearns Goodwin maintained that the cribbing in her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987) was unintentional, her reputation was severely damaged, and in June she resigned her post on the Pulitzer Prize board. Fellow historian Stephen Ambrose apologized in January for having failed to acknowledge his source material in at least six books. (See Obituaries (Ambrose, Stephen Edward ).) After Piper (Kan.) High School teacher Christine Pelton accused some students of having taken material from the Internet for a botany project, gave them all failing grades in 2001, and had her decision overruled by the school board in December, she resigned in February 2002; other teachers were inspired to follow suit as well, and the handling of the incident sparked a national uproar. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis lost his credibility and was suspended in 2001 for one year from teaching at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass., after it became known that he had fabricated stories about military exploits in Vietnam and subsequent activity in the peace and civil rights movements. Football coach George O'Leary lost his dream job in 2002 at the University of Notre Dame a few days after signing his contract when “inaccuracies” sprang up in his résumé.

      As a result of technological advances in recent years, cheating in educational and academic circles has become more sophisticated. At the same time, however, the ability of school personnel (and journalists) to catch cheaters has also been enhanced. Inventions contributing to such progress include photocopying equipment, computers, the Internet, scanners, optical-character-recognition software, language-translation programs, cell phones, and pagers, among others. Three of the most common forms of cheating affected by these trends are plagiarism, fake credentials, and unauthorized test assistance.

Plagiarism.

      Plagiarism is the act of claiming to be the author of material that someone else actually wrote. Students have plagiarized book reports, term papers, essays, projects, and graduate-degree theses. Teachers—including college professors—have plagiarized journal articles, course materials, and textbooks. Researchers have plagiarized reports, articles, and book chapters. Although academic plagiarism is not new, what is new since the latter years of the 20th century is the ease with which writings on virtually any topic can be misappropriated with little risk of detection. The principal instrument responsible for the recent rapid rise in academic plagiarism has been the Internet, which John Barrie, a developer of software for detecting Web plagiarism, called “a 1.5 billion-page searchable, cut-and-pasteable encyclopedia.”

      Especially popular are the on-line “paper mills” or cheat sites—companies that sell students completed essays, book reports, projects, or theses that can be submitted in school under the students' own names. At least 150 cyber paper mills have been operating over the past three years. Those available on the World Wide Web bear such names as Evil House of Cheat (more than 8,000 essays), Genius Papers, Research Assistance, Cheat Factory Essay Warehouse, School Sucks, Superior Term Papers, and 12,000 Papers.com. In Germany, advertised high-scoring essays, term papers, stories, interpretations, book reports, and other types of homework. The site reported having between 3,000 and 5,000 high-school and college users daily.

      Just as the Internet has greatly expanded students' opportunities to plagiarize, however, it has also increased teachers' ability to discover sources from which students have lifted material. This new ability to discover plagiarism is attributed to Web-plagiarism checkers or verifiers.

      The typical Web checker is an Internet service that works in the following way. A student's paper is entered into the checker's Web site. That Web site is programmed to compare the contents of the paper with the contents of thousands of documents on the World Wide Web. A report showing how much of the student's paper is identical to, or highly similar to, documents on the Web is sent back to the teacher, and the report identifies what those original documents were.

      Web checkers usually charge for their services, either a flat annual fee or a stated amount for each paper processed. One popular plagiarism checker is . In 2001 the operators of the site claimed 20,000 subscribers worldwide. Another much-used checker is the Essay Verification Engine (EVE), which conducted 45,840,495 assessments between February 2000 and late August 2002. Educators who have used Web-plagiarism checkers report that telling students that their papers will be Web-checked reduces the incidence of Internet plagiarism.

Fake Credentials.

      Besides the simple inflation of credentials on a résumé, an increasingly popular method of faking credentials involves obtaining a legitimate certificate that someone has earned, erasing the original recipient's name, printing a photocopy of the certificate, and inserting one's own name as the beneficiary. Modern photocopy machines produce such accurate copies of documents that only an expert can distinguish between a copy and its original. The Internet too has rapidly improved people's access to fake credentials. A Liverpool, Eng.-based company that advertises on the Web as “the largest degree template library available in the world” is prepared to sell “impressive authentic looking certificates” of graduation from universities based in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Two sources in Australia have marketed fake degrees throughout Asia over the Internet, selling verifiable degrees (“original certificate and transcript … with valid serial number and student ID”) or nonverifiable degrees (the certificate itself without a serial number). An administrator of Australia's Internet system, while trying to discover if the fake-degree scheme was popular, managed to intercept more than 1,000 potential customers' e-mail inquiries in response to the on-line advertisements. The universities for which fake degrees could be provided totaled eight in Australia; seven in Great Britain, including the University of Cambridge; and four in the United States, including Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

      With no international agency in control of Internet traffic, education officials have been unable to shut down fake-degree operations.

Unauthorized Test Assistance.

      As teachers and test makers develop computer skills, they increasingly store test items in computers rather than in traditional file cabinets. The convenience of storing items in computers, however, has been accompanied by the danger that hackers can break into test-question files and distribute the questions to students prior to the test period. Educators' attempts to guard test items now involve devising complex passwords for accessing computer files, strictly limiting the number of people who know those passwords, and equipping computers with firewall software. A typical example of present-day test-security practice is the policy adopted by Sunway College near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where information about exams and test questions is never sent over the college's network of computers or sent in the form of e-mail because of fears that it may be hacked by dishonest students.

      During test sessions, present-day students continue to use a variety of traditional ploys to gain an advantage—crib notes hidden in a shoe, mathematical formulas written on an arm, and notes passed to neighbouring test takers. Those ruses have now been joined by schemes made possible by wireless communication devices known as personal digital assistants (PDAs), which include cell phones, pagers, and handheld computers. From inside or outside the classroom, students can communicate with each other during a test session by means of PDAs. Thus, it is becoming common practice for teachers to confiscate all such devices prior to administering tests.

      If the pattern and pace of cybernetic development over the past decade are accurate predictors of the future, the contest between academic cheaters and cheat preventers can be expected to become ever more complex as the years advance.

R. Murray Thomas is Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of Folk Psychologies Across Cultures (2001).

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