The more students use technology to do homework, the more they cheat:
In surveys, he asked students if they viewed bringing a cheat sheet to an exam as cheating. Most did. Then he asked the same students whether they would consider it cheating to bring a graphing calculator with equations secretly stored on it. Many said no, that wasn’t cheating.
“I call it ‘technological detachment phenomenon,'” he told me recently. “As long as there’s some technology between me and the action, then I’m not culpable for the action.” By that logic, if someone else posted homework solutions online, what’s wrong with downloading them?
One proposal:
Make it easier for professors to handle such cases, and reform academic judicial systems to make clearer distinctions between smaller violations, like homework copying, and larger ones, like cheating on exams. And assign appropriate punishments for each.
What stops students from cheating? Social norms must play some role. Formalizing a price for allowing a decision maker to violate a norm might invalidate the norm and cause its collapse. This is the idea in an experimental paper by Gneezy and Rustichini “A Fine is a Price”. If the norm collapses, cheating may actually rise if the fine is too small. So the appropriate punishment for small infringement is large – then, even if the norm collapses, the fine alone will deter cheating on homework. Maybe a large fine for small infringements is not credible. How could a professor or a university justify a large fine for a small crime morally or even worse to an angry parent? If that is a problem, the present system, turning a blind eye to small violations, might be the best system after all.
Cheap Talk 
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
March 31, 2010 at 5:50 am
miles
I agree that the best way is turn a blind eye to academic infractions, small or large. Not only are severe penalties for small infractions not credible, but severe even large infractions are extremely difficult to prove, in most cases. The burden of proof tends to lie on the side of professors, who must have fool-proof evidence for cheating and even then, universities tend to side with the students. It may be the view that students are more of “customers” instead of “scholars-in-training”, if you will. It is too costly for those who have to prove incidences of cheating, outweighing the benefit of imposing barriers to cheating. In my view, students pay a price for cheating later in life (e.g. unemployment or lower wages because those who don’t cheat are better equipped, on average).
March 31, 2010 at 10:29 am
sandeep
Totally agree. It may be common knowledge that cheating occurred but proving it is another matter. The innocent till proven guilty standard makes it hard to implement penalties for cheating.
April 1, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Colin Grant
Hold on, shouldn’t we at least ask why the students are cheating? Could it be that they’re simply averse to tedious memorization as opposed to being lazy learners?
In an age when wolfram alpha is available on a smartphone, is memorizing equations still relevant? If exams and homework ask questions that require application rather than regurgitation, then this type of cheating is no longer a problem.
Copying homework is another matter…