The New Cheating Economy

http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-Cheating-Economy/237587?key=O998qdDb93HBMW6pFSQu7k2-7whQ1v-5yYJBsWeIFOjez2UA5seF8Kbhc15aZAp_YzhPMC1XcHRJSWMwWHA1eVhSRnNXQ1FBcm5uVm9kbjVGbG5WWWNyRmdkOA

by firebones • 10 years ago

51 61 10 years ago

chronicle.com

alexmat3• 10 years ago

Seems like teachers aren't spending enough quality time going over the assignments with students. When I was teaching a Java class last year at a community college, I had students present their homework in front of the class. It was very easy to figure out who was cheating and who wasn't.

analog313• 10 years ago

Quality time costs money. A potential problem is that the majority of teachers are adjuncts who are not full time employees, and who are likely to be working multiple jobs in order to make ends meet. Not only does catching cheaters take effort, but pursuing it to the point of disciplining a student can be a nightmare for the teacher if their department doesn't support them.

When I taught an electrical engineering class, the prof with whom I shared a syllabus and exams, made the exam problems look a lot like the homework problems. The kids who (probably) cheated on their homework lessons paid for it on the exams.

Perhaps likewise for the humanities courses. In my own experience, writing essays and term papers for the regular course assignments was what got me so I could write a decent essay quickly during a "blue book" exam. I don't know any way other than sheer physical practice, to learn how to do that. You can't pay someone else to practice for you.

booleandilemma• 10 years ago

I knew an adjunct who, in the words of the department head, was fired for being too harsh on cheaters.

neutronicus2• 10 years ago

likely to be working multiple jobs

A substantial fraction of contract cheaters (as in, the ones actually doing the work), are current or former adjuncts who need the money.

djsumdog2• 10 years ago

Unless someone is paid to take the entire class. If it's not in your subject (a big 200 person Chemistry 101 class), how would you even know? A Chemist could just show up for the tests and earn $1k for 4 ~ 5 days of work.

alexmat3• 10 years ago

Obviously this will be a problem for massive lecture classes, maybe those should be graded heavily on attendance with mandatory id inspection. But you're right, in the conditions you describe, this problem is not solvable.

enraged_camel3• 10 years ago

I don't know about higher education, but my aunt teaches K-12 in San Diego. She says that over a period of about 8 years, her class size tripled, making it impossible for her to spend the same amount of time with each student as she used to.

chipperyman573• 10 years ago

Out of curiosity, is running a service this article mentions (BoostMyGrade, etc) illegal?

I know _using_ one will get you expelled from a university, but does running one breaking any laws? Assuming you follow all other e commerce laws

analog313• 10 years ago

What I gathered from the article is that some of the services maintain a public posture they are doing what amounts to contract research, and they make the customer agree that the material won't be used for cheating. Ethically, of course they know what's going on, but they seem to have sheltered themselves from a legal perspective.

rdtsc5• 10 years ago

I imagine they cloak themseleves as a "tutoring service". They know exactly what they are doing. It is a bit like when during Prohibition companies would sell grape juice, yeast, and other ingredients needed to make wine and then put a label on the kit saying "Just to let you know, it is illegal to mix the contents of these ingredients, let them sit for X amount of days at T temperature, and then consume the resulting product".

neutronicus2• 10 years ago

It is against the law in at least some states.

joe_the_user• 10 years ago

Well, sadly this does seem like the logical result of college being a purely commercial endeavor for all concerned.

Colleges are closer and closer to the situation where they don't care about being anything but skill-certifiers, certainly they don't worry about becoming places where learners begin maturing and taking their place in an enlightened society.

In this environment, what will make the student respect the university's requirements?

gengkev2• 10 years ago

The reason this type of cheating occurs is that a college degree has external value. If the cheaters aren't even the ones doing the learning, I doubt that the quality or nature of the college's education would affect their behavior. So I don't think that colleges are really at fault here (besides not putting enough effort into catching cheaters).

enraged_camel3• 10 years ago

>The reason cheating occurs is that a college degree has value, and cheaters would like to obtain that degree through money rather than effort.

I don't follow your logic at all. They earn that money through effort, so at the end of the day it comes down to the same thing. The article specifically gives the example of someone who has a full-time job plus a commitment to the National Guard, and doesn't have any spare time for 15 credits worth of class and its associated work.

trevyn• 10 years ago

Are there any good services like this, but for tutoring? I'd definitely pay to have someone answer all my ridiculous questions as I work through material. (Assume that I'm not able to get enough quality time with my real instructor/TA.)

mentat• 10 years ago

This is a great question. I wonder how it "would scale" (or how cheating does.)

barry-cotter• 10 years ago

Chegg.com has online contract tutors. Don't know if they're any good.

vinchuco2• 10 years ago

There probably is a market: graduate students. I am one.

I'd rather tutor 12+ motivated-to-learn people 1hr than an uninterested kid with helicopter parents.

The only reason hours are the unit of measure for teaching/tutoring is for practical purposes. But knowledge is not poured into minds through time as much as by clever guidance. Like defusing a bomb, but the opposite.

rdtsc5• 10 years ago

I have seen the end of the line for this kind of corruption and it is not pretty. Once it starts it spreads like a cancer.

After some years we'd have doctors, engineers, lawyers, banker, nurses, safety inspectors, police officers who got into those positions by cheating. Then because they did it, they don't mind hinting and advising their children to do the same, and so on.

sevenless3• 10 years ago

We're ruled by politicians, bankers and corporations who lie, cheat, bribe, tax-dodge, and break the law with impunity. Why shouldn't the rest of us?

rdtsc5• 10 years ago

That's a great point. It was educational to read an article from one of those high-brow economics or policy journals after the housing crisis warning about regular citizens noticing that banks and other institutions are happily using bankruptcy as a strategic option. The fear was that people with underwater properties will stop feeling guilty about bankruptcies and will walk away from their mortgages. Basically making the same calculated business decision that bankers make. Paraphrased the message was "careful, or the plebeians will start doing what we are doing"

vinchuco2• 10 years ago

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/Tianasquare.j...

idiot900• 10 years ago

Because then we end up with a broken third world society.

hodgesrm2• 10 years ago

Because two wrongs don't make a right. If you believe cheating is wrong, start by not doing it. There's no path to eliminating this behavior that does not start with people saying it's wrong and backing it up with an alternative example.

cmurf3• 10 years ago

No, they do not all do that, and not even most of them do it, or yes the sky would fall. We wouldn't, in fact, have the civilization we have. The choice is to have strong anti-fraud funding to find, catch, and prosecute most of these sorts of things; or to go back to feudalism/law of the jungle/might makes right.

djsumdog2• 10 years ago

doctors

Would we really? I mean once you really get into your field, someone is going to notice the guy talking Ralph's tests for him .. isn't Ralph.

Doctors especially are pretty tight knit with their group. Even if they buy answers for tests, they still have to do real clinical work and residencies with real doctors. There's a limit on how much they could fake.

rdtsc5• 10 years ago

It depends. It differs between countries. I have heard in Eastern Europe doctors buying their diplomas just as public prosecutors, judges, and so on.

Another example: someone I went to school with has bought himself a "public prosecutor" title. He doesn't work as one, but it gives him a higher rank than any of the traffic cops he encounters daily. So he basically speeds and drives recklessly around the city like an idiot. When a cop stops him, he pulls rank tells him to fuck off, and they all do. He out-corrupted the corrupt cops. If it wasn't tragic, it would be funny.

That is just an example of an end-game for when cheating and corruption spreads completely throughout the society. And it always, in a person's life starts with education. That is where they learn and internalize how to cheat and how to game the system using it.

morecoffee• 10 years ago

Getting my first job in Silicon Valley, I assumed that all jobs asked technical questions when hiring to see if the candidate was fit. I later found out that while this "work sample" test is common here, it's much rarer in other industries.

Why doesn't every industry use such a test? You can't fake your way through an in-person technical interview.

firebones• 10 years ago

Honestly, when I submitted this, this comment is what scared me the most. A tinpot intellectual economy is what I fear when I teach my kids to play by the rules (and watch them struggle.)

There's this hacker tension: teach them to hack the system (and effectively teach them to cheat) or recognize the disease and do things ethically. It's an easy decision to focus on doing the right thing, but it's hard not feeling like a sap if the world goes the way of some libertarian Nirvana where cheating is just survival of the fittest by any other name.

jmknoll• 10 years ago

As I was reading through the section on the difficulty of catching cheaters, I got to thinking whether the process of submitting a paper might be better done through something like GitHub, where you then have a record of the person's commits, whether that be new sources found, time spent researching, a section written/edited. It then allows the professor to grade the process, not just the result.

I mean, when I'm hiring software developers, and they send me a link to a site that they made, i find that basically meaningless, because it doesn't tell me how they work, when/where they decided to incorporate external resources, and how they collaborate. It also doesn't guarantee that they actually made the site.

A link to a github repo doesn't automatically solve all of those problems, but it solves a lot of them, and it would be almost as much work to falsify well as it would be to just do it correctly.

ben_jones• 10 years ago

I don't think it would be difficult to falsify. How thoroughly do you go through the commits of candidates? My guess is it's only a cursory glance which would be pretty easy to fool.

It makes me wonder though, could a pull request contain changes to previous commits to a project and thus "steal" credit from other authors?

gengkev2• 10 years ago

For papers, Google Docs basically does this — except that the revision history isn't as accessible as it is with Git.

I think this would be a good idea to implement, but it still doesn't solve the main problem that this article presents, which is contacting out the entire research/writing process itself.

divbit• 10 years ago

If you don't mind people seeing your occasional stupid ideas that don't pan out, then yeah, it works fine: https://github.com/divbit/phd-thesis

edit: as an addendum to this, overleaf has built-in git integration, which I found to be useful

downandout• 10 years ago

There's no excuse for cheating. But part of the problem here is that most desirable jobs require degrees, yet vast portions of the time it takes to get degrees are spent satisfying general education requirements. A huge part of college is simply proving that you can follow instructions and do large amounts of busy work.

thefastlane• 10 years ago

"Among the assignments was a 19-page paper, longer than anything he’d ever written."

off-topic, but wow: no college graduate should break out in a cold sweat over a 19-page paper.

notacoward2• 10 years ago

I had the same reaction. It might not be reasonable to ask for something like that overnight, but with a month or more of notice that seems like it should be No Big Deal. That's less than a page a day, on average, so the actual writing is almost trivial. A page's worth of thought and research doesn't seem like an unreasonable daily burden except maybe for something like a dense mathematical proof.

Spooky232• 10 years ago

Seriously. I was expected to churn out 2-3 of those a semster in high school!

Animats• 10 years ago

One begins to understand where those totally unqualified people who show up for job interviews come from.

Futurebot• 10 years ago

Why has cheating become so pervasive? The book "The Cheating Culture" explores this question at length. If you don't want to read the whole book, try this short work by the author: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/on-campus-author...

Excerpt:

"It’s also not surprising that winner‐take‐all competition would breed cheating in another area ‐‐ in the classrooms of elite high schools and colleges. These days, even the smart kids who already have everything going for them often cheat to guarantee their success. When I was writing my book, I spent some time looking into the cheating problem at Horace Mann, which is one of the top prep schools in New York City.

Students there are from extremely well off families. In the grand scheme of things, if you’re a student at Horace Mann, you’ve already won the game of life. Paying $20,000 per year for their children to attend, parents of these kids are loaded. And yet cheating is common at the school. Why are the most privileged kids cheating?

There is no single reason why students cheat. But in this case, certainly one reason is the intense desire to be a winner, to get the rewards at the top. The Horace Mann kids are remarkably worldly.

They know what partners at big name investment firms make. They understand just how just big the rewards are if you’re a winner and make it to the very top of American society. Many feel entitled to those rewards. And these students come to believe from early on that a key to being a winner – perhaps the key – is a degree from a prestigious university, the ivy leagues. And some of them will cut whatever corners are necessary to attain that goal.

Now, of course, the obsession with winning is not the only reason people cheat. A lot of people aren’t out to strike it rich or become a big shot. They just want to lead a comfortable and secure life. But increasingly, that is not something one can take for granted, and more people are afraid of falling behind, and not being able to lead that comfortable, secure life. This brings me to a second reason people cheat, which is fear.

Things are tough out there. Jobs are less secure, and even the best white collar jobs are now getting outsourced to China or India, disappearing just like that. 45 million Americans lack health insurance, which makes us unique among advanced nations. We just don’t look out for our fellow citizens like we once did. And a lot of middle class Americans who should be feeling secure are instead feeling anxious. And their kids are growing up around this anxiety. I think there are a lot of young people who go through life, thinking “I better not screw things up. One lost scholarship, one flunked exam, if I take one wrong step, get one blot on my permanent record, I’ll end up living at home for the rest of my life.”

When you make the rewards for being a winner and the concomitant punishments for being a loser so large, don't be surprised when people start cheating en masse.

mjevans2• 10 years ago

Not only the jobs, but the resources to properly afford their own family. A place near their job (thanks NIMBY for cutting down on denser housing and urban environments).

Not to mention time away from 'the job'. Technology is supposed to liberate us to work better, and less often; while still improving our quality of life.

notacoward2• 10 years ago

Very insightful. Cheating's most likely to be worth the expense and risk when the marginal compensation for each iota of (perceived) performance is large, so those at or above that inflection point are likely to cheat the most. We hear constantly how governments are corrupted by power and thus markets are preferable; it helps to be reminded sometimes of how certain kinds of markets are prone to their own forms of corruption.

damaru• 10 years ago

But on the other side of the medal, there are a lot of people who gets paid to study no? If I was a poor student I'd try to get hired in one of these business and start going to school while being paid.

nradov2• 10 years ago

More colleges should institute honor codes, and rigorously enforce them.

ManlyBread• 10 years ago

Honor is dead.

cmurf3• 10 years ago

Some online courses make it easy to enable cheating with weak authentication. For instance, rather than course specific login, if it were authenticated by your real one and true prized Google account, would these students be so eager to give up credentials? Of course merely changing to Google authenticated accounts isn't enough, just get a throw away Google account for the cheater to use. But there should be some chain of trust that enables authentic authentication. What's going on here, aside from the cheating, is inauthentication.

znhll• 10 years ago

A couple years ago as I was finishing my CS degree, I often wondered about this. I knew lots of my classmates were cheating with stuff like this, or even just buying whole zipped archives of past student's work to pass off as their own.

Cheating of this nature is really is getting quite rampant, and you can definitely notice it when you get to higher level CS classes and have to do projects with other students who have basically just cheated, coasted, and freeloaded of off other students for years. I had to do a capstone Software Engineering class project with a student who could barely write anything past a HelloWorld program in Java.

I wrote a very candid evaluation of that student and personally spoke to the professor but nothing came of it. I'm sure he still passed the class, and perhaps even cheated his way to graduation.

The New Cheating Economy

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