Fairfax County schools target tech that helps students cheat

By Holly Hobbs
Fairfax County Times
Thursday, June 10, 2010

With modern technology, students have discovered new academic cheating schemes -- some through cellphone cameras, text messages and calculators -- but teachers in Fairfax County say they are on to them.

"I caught a kid last year, or the year before. The teacher had left a test answer key on her desk, and the kid walked up to get a Kleenex and took a picture" with a cellphone, said teacher Lisa Green, coordinator for Robinson Secondary School's International Baccalaureate program. Other students, who were furious that the cheater was getting a leg up, turned him in.

"The kids see it, and they really resent that they've worked so hard and this kid has taken an advantage," Green said.

Last month, the Fairfax County School Board voted to tighten regulations on the use of privately owned electronic devices in schools. Even before the new regulations, students were allowed to carry a cellphone but not to use them in school. The board ruled that students should be prohibited from using cellphones to access certain Web sites, such as social networking ones, that already are blocked from use on school devices.

In math classes, students have preprogrammed calculators with formulas, which they can gain access to at the touch of a button, Robinson teacher Coulter Weaver said.

"For me, whether it's a crib sheet or a calculator, it's just so obvious. It's in their posture," he said of the slumped shoulder and downward glances that give cheating students away.

In April, Chantilly High School's newspaper, the Purple Tide, reported that Advanced Placement U.S. history students used the Internet to cheat on a take-home test. The unusually high number of A's gave them away, wrote student journalist Marcelo Aranibar.

For the most part, teachers say they try to handle cheating in the classroom on a case-by-case basis. Depending on the severity of the case, students can receive anything from a reduced grade or zero on an assignment to suspension or expulsion from school.

Weaver said that in his IB psychology class, plagiarism is the most common form of electronic cheating.

"It is so easy for these kids to cut and paste or pay for a paper," he said. "In my circumstances, the kids are lifting whole papers and switching out the names on it."

Plagiarism is the most common form of cheating on major assignments, teachers said. Students have been found liberally using the copy and paste buttons on their computers to steal from SparkNotes or similar Web sites.

Cheating is in every school, teachers said. But for plagiarism, schools such as Robinson have an edge. Teachers have been using Turnitin, a Web-based program developed in 1996 by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. The program has ties to more than 500,000 educators in about 9,000 high schools and universities. More than 100 million student papers have been processed through the site.

Schools that have the program ask students to submit electronic copies of their work, which is loaded into the program and checked for authenticity. That means kids are finding it harder to use research papers submitted during previous years by a sibling or older student, teachers said.

"It highlights the paragraphs that could be plagiarized. You have to be very careful, though," Green said. "I had a student whose paper came up [as] 40 percent plagiarized, and it wasn't."

The student, she said, had used lines of text from sources that had been properly cited.

Teachers noted that cheating is not a new problem.

"I don't know if cheating is any more prevalent than in previous years; it's just more accessible. . . . Kids are 'borrowing' from the Web," Green said.

Readers admit, FUNdamental takes nothing and turns it into ... nothing.

Since cell phones and computers are used in today's work place, one might question whether the use of "devices" is really cheating.

Isn't the point to have the correct answer? In this day and age is using google or a search engine really cheating? Mobile devices can go with kids anywhere and they can simply repeat the google process.

It's not like 50 years ago where you couldn't carry 200 books with you to look stuff up. Chances are the internet is going to give more accurate and better answers anyway.

Plus teachers also have a responsibility and can control access to this stuff.

If some classified national security document is published on the Internet, do you go after just the people who downloaded it? Or do you kick the ass of who made it available so that never happens again?

It may take some expense, but the calculator issue can be solved by buying thirty or forty low-budget scientific calculators as classroom test-taking units ($200 total, maybe less) and not allowing personally-owned programmable calculators to be used. Kid gets wiped calculator with test paper, kid turns in calculator with test paper. This is what professional certification outfits do.

I believe that we find Google and other resources more useful because we have non-Google'd education. It wouldn't do us any good to be so reliant on online resources for every little bit of info that were it to go away (national crisis, storms that knock out power for days, etc) we'd be helpless. I wonder more why kids are still taught cursive handwriting, it is totally useless.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/10/2010 12:21PM by pgens.

Now, if those same teachers would just properly cite the web images and content they "include" in their "teacher-created" worksheets and study guides, we'd be able to see them providing a good example.

This is old news. We used to always plug formulas into our TI-83's, and I'd even tether mine to other calcs, and share the info. (And games too).

The teachers weren't dumb though, they knew we did this garbage, so they'd always have a few tests here and there where you couldn't use calculators (Or you could only use the basic ones they provided you).

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"And if any women or children get their legs torn off, or faces caved in, well, it's tough shit for them." -2LT. Bert Stiles, 505th, 339th (On Berlin Bombardier Mission, 1944).



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/10/2010 07:48PM by ThePackLeader.

pgens Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It wouldn't do us any good to be so
> reliant on online resources for every little bit
> of info that were it to go away (national crisis,
> storms that knock out power for days, etc) we'd be
> helpless. I wonder more why kids are still taught
> cursive handwriting, it is totally useless.


Chances are, if any of those situations occur, businesses will be shut down as well and there will be no need to look anything up. But with the massive number of ISP's in this area who have underground data centers with backup power generators protected by armed guards to keep their SLA's, I have no concerns about lack of availability of online resources.

That's life. Deal with it. Keep complaining that students are "pathetic cheaters". Maybe it's because many of the adults are "pathetic teachers." Idiots.

Interesting to see a Robinson IB coordinator calling this out. It must be a new regime since the ones there from 2005-2008 seemed to turn a pretty blind eye to this. A student named Mark Hussa (SGA President, attended Columbia, All-Met track) led a group of students in a mass cheating exercise on an IB History test. Any repercussions for being caught? Hardly, given that Dan Meier is the ultimate jock-sniffer who is known for rewarding the guilty and punishing the innocent, especially if you are a star athlete.

ThePackLeader Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> This is old news. We used to always plug formulas
> into our TI-83's, and I'd even tether mine to
> other calcs, and share the info. (And games too).
>
> The teachers weren't dumb though, they knew we did
> this garbage, so they'd always have a few tests
> here and there where you couldn't use calculators
> (Or you could only use the basic ones they
> provided you).

Agreed. This has been common knowledge for as far back as the late 90's. If teachers can't get a grasp of the realm of cheating possibilities available to students with modern technology, perhaps they should evaluate their ability to administer tests. (NOT their teaching ability, which I'm not questioning - just their ability to correctly proctor tests.)

every 1 cheat look at baseball look cheating is part of life

well, in the end, I think that they actually LEARN something by going online and looking at several sources. So what if they copy and paste. If they are any good, they are reading the material and editing to fit their "style", thus reading and learning the material. I agree the internet is a great tool and sometimes even better then the outdated text books in classes.

THOUGHT Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> well, in the end, I think that they actually LEARN
> something by going online and looking at several
> sources. So what if they copy and paste. If they
> are any good, they are reading the material and
> editing to fit their "style", thus reading and
> learning the material. I agree the internet is a
> great tool and sometimes even better then the
> outdated text books in classes.

There are a few problems I have with this. The first being that yes, the internet is a great tool, but ANYONE can put up a webpage. How do you differentiate between legitimate sources of knowledge, and undocumented theories and personal ideology? I've seen college students treat wikipedia like it's the word of god, when in fact it's almost always biased. There are plenty of very well done webpages out there that present misinformation (such as holocaust denial, fake moon landing, 9-11) as fact, and if someone is not very savvy, might not pick up on the fact that they're reading crap.

The other issue is that when students just take other people's work, and craft a paper out of it, changing it slightly to fit they're style, they're not learning how to do original research and formulate ideas. They're reworking existing information, and not developing critical skills necessary to think on their own. That is more important to the educational processes than learning the differences between phoenecian shipbuilding techniques.

Abraham Lincoln Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> THOUGHT Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > well, in the end, I think that they actually
> LEARN
> > something by going online and looking at
> several
> > sources. So what if they copy and paste. If
> they
> > are any good, they are reading the material and
> > editing to fit their "style", thus reading and
> > learning the material. I agree the internet is
> a
> > great tool and sometimes even better then the
> > outdated text books in classes.
>
> There are a few problems I have with this. The
> first being that yes, the internet is a great
> tool, but ANYONE can put up a webpage. How do you
> differentiate between legitimate sources of
> knowledge, and undocumented theories and personal
> ideology? I've seen college students treat
> wikipedia like it's the word of god, when in fact
> it's almost always biased. There are plenty of
> very well done webpages out there that present
> misinformation (such as holocaust denial, fake
> moon landing, 9-11) as fact, and if someone is not
> very savvy, might not pick up on the fact that
> they're reading crap.
>
> The other issue is that when students just take
> other people's work, and craft a paper out of it,
> changing it slightly to fit they're style, they're
> not learning how to do original research and
> formulate ideas. They're reworking existing
> information, and not developing critical skills
> necessary to think on their own. That is more
> important to the educational processes than
> learning the differences between phoenecian
> shipbuilding techniques.


Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information. Michael Scott,

Students would be a lot better off if they spent the time actually learning something instead of trying to figure out how to beat the system. Someone might cheat and get a grade they don't deserve but they'll still be ignorant of subjects that could help them earn a living long after the class is over. Cheaters are just missing an opportunity to learn something. Ultimately they're cheating themselves.

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