Something is causing an unpleasant feeling among NSU’s faculty. Like a flu outbreak, students’ tendencies to cheat is spreading, but to the woe of professors, a cure seems out of reach.
Several professors say they are frustrated and saddened by the high frequency of cheating and plagiarism; their role as instructors is shifting to policing, as they try to create ways to apprehend cheating students.
Randi Sims, professor of management at the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship, uses a fairly high-tech method with her online students. She requires students to take every exam through Tegrity, a Blackboard component that allows her to view a recording of a student’s computer screen and the student on webcam for the duration of the exam.
“After they sign in by taking picture with their ID, students have to use their webcam to show me their testing area, so I can see if they have any notes or anything with them,” said Sims.
Sims said she is one of very few NSU professors to use Tegrity because teaching new students every semester how to use the program takes a lot of time and effort.
Even though Tegrity is a high security system, Sims still deals with cheating, both in her online and residential classes. Many students regularly borrow notes from other students or use online resources to prepare for exams. But Sims said that most cheaters don’t consider this behavior as dishonest because it doesn’t fit into the socially accepted definition of cheating.
According to NSU’s 2013-2014 Student Handbook, cheating is defined as intentionally using or attempting to use unauthorized materials, information or study aids in an academic exercise. In addition to cheating, fabrication and facilitating academic dishonesty and plagiarism are considered violations of academic honesty standards. This means that a cheating student isn’t defined only as someone Googling test questions in the back of the classroom during a midterm exam.
“Students are cheating before, during and after the exam,” said Sims. “Days before the test, they study a friend’s notes from last semester or a test bank they found online, and they think that this a good studying technique. But, in reality, this is cheating.”
Sims has dealt with students who walk into her classroom on exam day with test banks in hand, claiming that they use them as study guides. At NSU, and many other universities, students are permitted to research topics online for clarification or to supplement the information provided to them by a professor, but Internet test banks are considered unauthorized materials and are not permitted as a legitimate form of test preparation.
“Test banks are worse than venereal disease,” said Sims.
In literature and composition-based classes, professors are often obligated to contour their assignments to help prevent cheating. Kathleen Waites, professor of humanities in the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences, gives her students many short writing assignments throughout the semester, and reads each one to become familiar with each student’s writing style and abilities before they have to turn in a larger assignment.
“When it comes to longer papers, I have a pretty good idea how a student writes and what his or her capability is,” said Waites.
Like many other professors, Waites uses turnitin.com to scan papers for discrepancies. The website compares a digital copy of a student’s paper to other students’ papers and online resources and checks for sentences or phrases that match other documents.
Professors are also trying to prevent cheating, rather than simply catching students already doing so. Waites requires students to turn in small increments of their term papers before the final deadline, which allows her to see their progression and reduces students’ impulses to cut and paste from the Internet out of desperation at the last minute.
Vicki Toscano, assistant professor in the Division of Humanities in the Farquhar College, combats plagiarism in several ways. She discusses with her classes the various forms of plagiarism, such as improper citations or quoting, and encourages students to visit the Tutoring and Testing Center for help. She also creates assignments with plagiarism in mind, and gives very specific topics that require in-depth research and analysis that can’t be faked using generic material on websites like Wikipedia.
“Nonetheless, cheating still occurs,” said Toscano. “I discover several instances of plagiarism in my classes every year.”
Professors may have their individual methods of dealing with guilty students, but all are required to report cases to their respective dean’s office.
Frank Cavico, professor of business law at the Huizenga School of Business, said he has not experienced problems with cheating at the graduate school level. He works to create a culture of honesty and believes he has been successful so far in his business law and ethics classes.
“I try to be proactive to prevent academic misconduct,” said Cavico. “I take an egoistic approach to academic misconduct, by striving to get the students to care about learning and the real practical value of them of learning these valuable knowledge and skills.”
When Cavico assigns term papers, he is careful to review research, reference and citation rules with his students and makes it clear to them that he is available to assist students as they work on their papers, to prevent them from copying other papers or online resources out of desperation.
Sims also shares Cavico’s outlook on cheating: students who take the easy way out on a test or paper are only cheating themselves. Academic dishonesty, at any level, occurs for many reasons. The pressure to achieve, especially at a private university where tuition costs are especially high, makes some students willing to do anything to avoid failure. But Sims wants students to understand that the values parents try to instill in their children, such as integrity, honesty and fairness, should not be compromised during college as young people pursue high GPAs.
“I talk to my students whenever there’s an issue, because even if they made a bad decision today, I want them to do better tomorrow,” said Sims.
