Science in the Sky

The other day I published a posting on my Reactions to Recent Examples of Academic Dishonesty. That posting is by far and away my most popular yet. I’ve received positive feedback through the blog comments, Facebook, and in person.  For those that have read it and gave me feedback, thanks.

What I wanted to talk about today is a follow-up to that blog entry.  Specifically, in the first example of academic dishonesty I’d mentioned that I was envious of the academic mercenary, a person hired to anonymously complete assignments, online courses, and even post-graduated theses.  I think some explanation is in order.

First off, I do not condone this person’s profession.  As I mentioned in the previous article, it sickens me to think that there are people out there willing to cheat their way through college to gain a higher economic or social status. By being an hired author this person is perpetuating a dishonest action. Yes, I know that if he’s not doing it someone else will.  But that’s just like the defense given in the second example of academic dishonesty: everyone else is cheating so it must be acceptable.

The hired author profession exists because there’s a market.  It’s very analogous to email spam. Although spam is inherently bad, it wouldn’t exist if there weren’t people clicking on those damn links or actually giving away their information in a Nigerian scam. To go back to the original Shadow Scholar article, the author describes how he got his start. His desire to write, coupled with a need for money, filled the needs of “lazy, Xanax-snorting, Miller-swilling classmates”. Thus a business was born.

So now, why do I envy this individual. While the nature of the business requires that the author stays anonymous, he’s getting paid to learn with very little consequences. Students pay thousands of dollars for this person to learn and write about all kinds of topics. If he turns in a subpar paper, so what. The client may not return for more business, but I’m sure there are plenty of others waiting in line to fill the void. In fact, from reading the article it sounds like there’s enough business that he gets to pick and choose which assignments he accepts.

Imagine this realistic scenario. Recently I’ve become curious about figuring out what the heck the Tea Party is all about. I’m suspecting there are plenty of requests from students needing assignments completed related to, or close enough to bend to, the topic of the Tea Party. So I agree to complete the assignment and in the process I get to learn about the Tea Party. Sure I don’t get a pat on the back in the form of a grade, but I do get paid a few thousand dollars to learn about a personal curiosity. It doesn’t get much sweeter than that.

Moreover, if I were an academic mercenary—which I still don’t condone—I would compile, heavily edit, and attempt to publish a good amount of my anonymous work. In fact, I’ve heard of many non-fiction books that were seeded by a series of correspondences, blog entries, or a compilation of magazine article. If the academic mercenary followed this path not only will this produce an income, the shadow scholar will become the desired publicly known author he’d originally set out to be.

I’m curious though, would it be consider plagiarism if the shadow scholar publishes material that was previously made public under someone else’s name? Would, or more importantly could, the original client that hired the academic mercenary sue over this?

A serious problem that plagues college campuses is academic dishonesty.  To put it simply, it’s the problem of cheating. Academic dishonesty has taken on many faces.  It ranges from deceptive activities (like claiming a problem with internet connectivity prevented the completion of an assignment) to blatant plagiarism and even sabotage.  Although it’s possible to categorized the various examples of academic dishonesty, it’s not fair to rank the offensiveness of each type.  I would argue, however, that there is a spectrum of possible consequences that results from cheating.

Coincidently in the last few weeks a handful of stories relating to academic dishonesty in the collegiate classroom have come to my attention.

The Problem of an Academic Mercenary

The first I want to respond to is an article posted on the Chronicle for Higher Education by an anonymous author.  The Shadow Scholar: The man who writes your students’ papers tells his story is an essay meant to bring to light an underground world of plagiarism.  To summarize the article for those that haven’t taken the time to read it (yes, there’s some irony in this), it’s the personal account of an author that’s hired by students to write whatever papers, proposals, entrance essays, theses, dissertations, etc. that are needed but for which the students are too lazy or incompetent to do for themselves.

After reading this article I was pissed.  Pissed not at the author—who I actually envy—but at the clients.  It irritates me beyond belief that there are people out there who are publicly misrepresenting themselves.  They have arrived at a financial and/or social standing by using the work of others.  In short, they are dishonest people. But what really sucks is that in many cases they’re able to get away with it.

The anonymous author is right to point out that we have created a culture where cheating appears as a reasonable means to an ends.  Students are continually evaluated, graded, and assessed.  As the author found out for himself upon attending college, “How dispiriting to find out that college was just another place where grades were grubbed, competition overshadowed personal growth, and the threat of failure was used to encourage learning.” I love that last line.  Students must constantly deal with the pressure of failing and are sometimes willing to take dishonest paths in order to avoid it.

This is why I’m partially sicken to know that these clients exist.  Not only are they dishonest people, they probably don’t have the knowledge that their credentials would assert.  I would rather have a medical student fail out of school because of incompetence then to have them cheat their way through school only to eventually perform surgery on me. Likewise, I want an honest accountant to handle my financial future.  I want an honest person to educate my children.

Is it fair to place students into this highly pressurized environment and expect them to succeed? To some extent I would say yes. Again, I want my doctor, lawyer, accountant, educator, etc. to be able to handle whatever is thrown at them. On the flip side, I can also appreciate that educational institutions have missed the boat by over assessing and devaluing the education and personal growth of students.  Is there a middle ground?  Maybe.  Reed College has implemented a successful approach where grades are assigned but downplayed.  Instead students have close relationships with faculty members.  Through frequent individual conferences students receive guidance and personal evaluation.

It does amuse me to think about those that hire anonymous authors in another light.  These students pay a lot of money (about a semester’s worth of in-state tuition at a state university) for a service that’s not necessarily guaranteed.  If the hired writer does a bad job, what’s the recourse for the client?  If they complain they’re exposed.  In fact, the Shadow Scholar author even admits that “I don’t ever edit my assignments … So some of my work is great. Some of it is not so great.” It’s even laughable to think of the dishonesty the hired author has to portray to get business. ”I say yes when asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine and documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal.”  Just an itsy-bitsy bit of critical thinking should make a student skeptical of the writer’s credentials.  Of course, these students probably either don’t care, or they’re in such a desperate situation as not to care.

As a professor, what am I to do to prevent academic mercenaries?  Say there’s a student that’s just short of incomprehensible in a face-to-face conversation but turns in an intelligent piece of written work. What evidence do I have to claim plagiarism? I would suspect that the argument, “in person you’re an idiot, but on paper you’re brilliant” won’t be enough to prosecute a student for academic dishonesty.  I need more evidence and I’m not sure where to get it.

One Approach to Dealing with Academic Dishonesty

This brings me to a second account of academic dishonesty.  In this story, a University of Central Florida marketing instructor, Richard Quinn, discovered that a large fraction of the students in his Strategic Management course were able to get a hold of the test bank from which the midterm exam questions were taken.  (Check out this YouTube video of Mr Quinn addressing his class about the incident.) Naturally, for those students that had, and used, a copy of the test bank, their exam scores were higher.  In fact, the first piece of evidence that something was afoot was a statistical analysis that showed a bimodal distribution, meaning there was an outside influence that skewed the data. (Hooray for math!) More supporting evidence came from a mystery student placing a copy of the test bank in a bin outside Mr Quinn’s office, thereby demonstrating that the test bank was floating around campus.  Lastly, some of the honest students (those screwed over by the cheaters) contacted the teaching assistants to complain about dishonest students who were bragging they aced the exam because they had the answers ahead of time.  In the end, it was clear that a substantial number of students had committed an act of academic dishonesty.

In response to the cheating, Mr Quinn decided to throw out the exam results.  A new exam was written, but not from an existing test bank.  Finally, students were given the ultimatum to either turn themselves in and be required to take an ethics course through Academic Affairs, or face the possibility of Academic Affairs prosecution which will most likely result in a permanent negative mark on the offenders’ transcripts.

In all fairness, there were two rebuttals from students.  The first can be seen in the video associated with the WFTV article, UCF Learns Hundreds Cheated On Mid-Term.  Did you catch it?  The second student’s defense is that, “This is college. Everyone cheats.  Everyone cheats in life in general. I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in this testing lab who hasn’t cheated on an exam. They’re making a witch hunt out of absolutely nothing, as if it were to teach us some kind of moral lesson.”  Umm, okay. It seems that the defense here is that because everyone else is dishonest it’s acceptable to be dishonest yourself.  Do I even need to counter-argue this point?

The second rebuttal has a little bit more teeth to it.  In this YouTube video students counter that Mr Quinn was dishonest in claiming that he wrote the exam; it’s acceptable to use “an available resource from a publisher” as a study aid; and it’s unfair to the honest students that they too are also being punished.  The suggested recourse for Mr Quinn, according to the makers of the video, “Just formally apologize for laziness and give ALL the students an extra letter grade higher on our final grades.”

I have to admit, there is a double standard in claiming to write the questions for an exam and then pirating them from a publisher’s test bank.  But, if you watch the video closely you notice that Mr Quinn claims to create the exam, which I would contest can be interpreted to mean he selects the questions.  He does, however, state that he occasionally writes bad questions.  If 100% of the exam comes from the test bank, then Mr Quinn is not being honest.  If he contributes his own questions, in addition to the publishers questions, then there’s no problem here.  I don’t have enough knowledge about the situation to distinguish these two scenarios.

Now for the big question, is it academically dishonest to use available resources from the publisher to study for an exam?  There are two answers to this question.  There are certain materials that publishers produce that are meant to be used by students as study aids outside of the classroom. In the case, it’s not cheating.  However, there are other materials that are for instructors’ eyes only.  These materials should not be used or even seen by students. It would be academically dishonest to use such materials as study aids, even if they are readily available. What is not clear from the information I can find is which of the two types of materials the exam questions were pulled from.  I suspect, based on the reaction of Mr Quinn and the students, that the questions came from a test bank meant for the instructors use only.

Personal Experiences with Academic Dishonesty

This last issue is one that hits close to home.  In physics and astronomy, we use textbooks that have end-of-chapter problems. It’s very convenient to just assign a handful of these and call it a homework assignment. What makes it even easier is that solutions sets for the problems are available from the textbook publishers. But these are exactly the types of materials that find their way into student hands.  Worst yet is that with the internet students don’t even have to get the entire solution set.  By simply copying the question into a Google search engine, answers to individual questions can be found.

Is the use of Google academic dishonesty? If a student is willfully using material that states that it’s meant for instructors only, and most of these materials do, then it’s clearly cheating.  It’s also cheating if the instructor, or the syllabus, explicitly state that the use of Google or whatever other resources are forbidden. This assumes, of course, that the students are modifying the information they receive from Google. If, on the other hand, they are simply transcribing what they found on the internet and turning it in as their own, they are committing academic fraud. They’re essentially using an academic mercenary without paying for it.

I can honestly say that I’ve never cheated.  I never saw value in it.  I’m someone that’s driven by gaining new knowledge. I’ve also come to realize that the best way to understand something new is by doing the work myself.  Consequently I’ve pulled all-nighters, I’ve turned in partially completed and sometimes crappy assignments, I’m embarrassed by some of the horrible typos in my dissertation, but I can proudly say that it’s my work.

As a college professor I have caught students cheating and I would be ignorant to think others did not get away with it.  It does happen. That doesn’t mean I don’t proactively attempt to short-circuit cheating.  There are a number of techniques I’ve tried, some have appeared to work while others have not necessarily had an affect.

One approach that I’m particularly proud of is using assessments that are not simple factual regurgitation. Most of my homework assignments, in-class activities, exams, etc. don’t ask students knowledge based questions like, “What does Kepler’s First Law state?” but rather application or analysis questions such as, “Why was Kepler’s Law so revolutionary?”  By requiring students to apply knowledge (i.e. going to a higher level of Bloom’s Taxonomy), they’re put into situations that are not readily available from other resources.  That isn’t to say that there isn’t support out there to answer these questions for students to “borrow”.  The hired mercenary is one example.  But if it’s a lot more work and/or if the student is under a time constraint, then these sources are less appealing.

I also have an advantage in that I teach relatively small classes, less than forty students a semester.  This affords me the opportunity to get to know my students individually. By about two-thirds of the way into a course I can assign final grades to within a half letter grade accuracy.  By personally addressing their questions, listening to them work in groups, and grading their assignments I’m able to build a fairly accurate profile for the abilities within the content of the class.  I can easily imagine that for a professor at a large state school, with classes of literally hundreds of students, students don’t have to struggle to blend into the scenery which allows for better opportunities for cheating.  I can what I’m saying is that one way to flag possible cheating is to get to know your students.

It would be nice if instructors could catch more offenders. Then we could send them to the chalkboard and make them repeat the mantra:

By the way, I solemnly swear that I wrote this article.  I’m sure there are plenty of my signature grammatical issues that support my claim.