How to Reduce Cheating and Plagiarism :: Expository Process Essays

How to Reduce Cheating and Plagiarism Early in the fall semester, a professor of American studies at Cornell found a three-page paper on the Internet analyzing a poem by Anne Bradstreet. A student in his course had just handed in that very paper. Accused of plagiarism, the student confessed that she had taken the paper from an Anne Bradstreet Web site. She had locked herself out of her apartment the night before the paper was due, she said, and without access to her notes had panicked. Two weeks later, the professor's wife, who teaches psychology, gave an examination to her advanced class. Halfway through the test a student asked to go to the bathroom. She was gone a long time, but the psychologist, who employed the young woman as a lab assistant and was directing her honors thesis, suppressed her suspicions. That evening, she visited the ladies room. In the toilet stall she noticed a sheaf of papers stuffed behind a plumbing pipe. They turned out to b e handouts distributed in the course, covered with notes in what she believed was the student's handwriting. Measured by recent surveys, cheating has reached epidemic proportions in high schools and colleges. In a survey of 21,000 students by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, 70 percent of high school students and 54 percent of middle schoolers admitted that they had cheated on an exam. That is up sharply from a study cited in "The State of Americans: This Generation and the Next," edited by Urie Bronfenbrenner and others.. That study found that 33.8 percent of high school students used a "cheat sheet" on a test in 1969. By 1989 the percentage had risen to 67.8. Furthermore, 58.3 percent of high school students let someone else copy their work in 1969, and 97.5 percent did so in 1989. A recent study by the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University yielded results similar to the Josephson study, with almost 75 percent of college students acknowledging some academic dishonesty. In four focus-group discussions conducted by the Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University, many students appeared blas about academic dishonesty. "I guess the first time you do it, you feel really bad, but then you get used to it," said one. Another asserted: "People cheat. It doesn't make you less of a person or worse of a person. There are times when you just are in need of a little help.