Students Sue Anti-Cheating Service. Your opinions?

[Fabula]

Quite a few of my students seem to cheat because they do not know any better.
You can set them a research task, and they hand in 1000 words copy and pasted straight from wikipedia. You try explaining why this is unacceptable, so they go back and change 7 words in it somewhere. Even after introductory classes on plagarism, they still don't seem to get the idea. It can be a real problem.

[badass]

LazyGit, don't you think that catching people cheating and punishing them accordingly is a very negative way to deal with the issue? I'm not saying this shouldn't happen but I think you need to work out why people are cheating and try to deal with it in a more positive way. For example, if people are cheating because they find the work too hard then extra support should be provided such as extra lessons, tutorials, problem classes, etc. This way people will feel less of a need to cheat.

Disagree. At university level, if you cant take the heat, get out of the oven. Or are we going to move to a fail free system?
The whole point of a degree it that the person is independant enough to do their work with very little guidance.
Putting support fro people that cant handle university simply devalues the degrees it hands out. I.E. make those that are capable of getting a degree suffer for people that aren;t up to the qualification.

[badass]

Quite a few of my students seem to cheat because they do not know any better.
You can set them a research task, and they hand in 1000 words copy and pasted straight from wikipedia. You try explaining why this is unacceptable, so they go back and change 7 words in it somewhere. Even after introductory classes on plagarism, they still don't seem to get the idea. It can be a real problem.

How old are your students? If they are of university age then they are too thick to be going to university.

[Fabula]

How old are your students? If they are of university age then they are too thick to be going to university.

They range from about 16-40. And some of the worst offenders will be going to uni. And it scares me that they are able to get in.

And the idea that someone could be too thick to go to university? That is obviously going against this government's wishes.
One of my students is on year 2 of a HND. That's degree level, just a 2 year rather than 3 year course. He had to do some research on how sound works, talking about things like frequency, amplitude and how the ear interprets signals. 3 weeks of research and he came up with some vague information, which I could literally have bettered off the top of my head in about 10min. And I am not a specialist in the area. It was probably GCSE level physics. Yet in all probability he will be getting his HND.

[TheAnimus]

LazyGit, don't you think that catching people cheating and punishing them accordingly is a very negative way to deal with the issue? I'm not saying this shouldn't happen but I think you need to work out why people are cheating and try to deal with it in a more positive way. For example, if people are cheating because they find the work too hard then extra support should be provided such as extra lessons, tutorials, problem classes, etc. This way people will feel less of a need to cheat.

***k off.

The amount of cheating that went on at every stage of higher education i've gone through is absurd.

I know people who paid people too do their dissertations for them. One person was suprised when i said i'd need a lot more than my going rate too do their code content for them. He didn't get that it was against my morals (not too mention the lecturer in question would probably recognise my code).

There is a difference between a group of people sitting round helping each other through an assignment, where everyone can bring something too the table, or at least understand whats going on, to plagerisim verbatum. The system there using would be piss easy too fool. You could steal someones whole argument, reduce it too a flow of bullet points, reconstruct into an x thousand word essay and your done. With no understanding what so ever.

This is why i think exams are important, but for the *real* subjects praticals, where its a combination of prerpation, comprehension and ingenuity that are been examined are the best way to test and ultimately classify/rank people.

[Saracen]

They still don't have copyright. If the work has been commisioned by someone then it is their copyright too.

I'm afraid you're wrong there. Until the US acceded to the Berne convention, that was generally the case, but under both UK and current US copyright law (and anywhere else where national laws reflect the requirements of the Berne Convention) the commissioner does NOT own the copyright, the person creating the work does.

Some examples :-

1) You engage a wedding photographer. The photographer owns the copyright to HIS images of your wedding.

2) You engage a consultant to design you a website. The designer owns the copyright, not you.

3) You're a magazine editor and you commission an article from a freelance journalist. That freelance owns the copyright, not the commissioning magazine.

This is not quite the same with an employee, where generally the employer owns the copyright. But I can tell you that you are categorically wrong in thinking that commissioning work gains you the copyright. IT DOES NOT.

Take example one. You pay the photographer to attend the wedding, to take the photographs, and then to make those photos available to you. But you have to buy each copy. If you want 10 copies of an image, you have to buy 10. If you buy one and then have it copied, you are breaching his copyright and are risking getting sued.

So, when you commission someone, be VERY clear what you're getting. If you commission a website, you get the licence to use that website. You do NOT get the right to copy and/or modify it for someone else to use. Technically, you can't even modify it yourself, because you have the rights to use what you've paid for, not to amend or create derivative works.

In example 3) (the journalist one) the commission will include what rights the journalist is selling. It might be FBSR (First British Serial Rights). In that case, the commissioning editor has bought the rights to first publication in the UK. But he hasn't bought the right to publish it in other countries, or to sell reprints to commercial advertisers and he hasn't bought the right to stop the journalist publishing in other countries, or for that matter, publishing on a website himself.

Or, of course, the commission might be for all rights. But it is is, then the price goes up. But make no mistake, the CREATOR owns the copyright, unless that creating is done as part of employment, or has explicitly assigned some or all of the rights to someone else.

That's the legal situation. In practice, it's often somewhat different. A journalist will find increasing difficulty in finding mainstream editors who will commission UNLESS that includes all rights. But, they pay for that in the rate you get. So if you want the work, you agree to it.

Many popular photographers, on the other hand, won't agree to sell the copyright, period. If they have more offers of work than time to do it, you accept that they retain copyright or you hire someone else. They won't sell the copyright because they don't need to. So, it's about market forces.

But in any of those situations, it's the creator that owns the copyright and ANYBODY else only gets what the creator agrees to assign.

[Saracen]

LazyGit, don't you think that catching people cheating and punishing them accordingly is a very negative way to deal with the issue? I'm not saying this shouldn't happen but I think you need to work out why people are cheating and try to deal with it in a more positive way. For example, if people are cheating because they find the work too hard then extra support should be provided such as extra lessons, tutorials, problem classes, etc. This way people will feel less of a need to cheat.

I think people are cheating for the same reason a lot of people are downloading 'free' music and films of the net - because they can.

Over the last 20 or 30 years, we seem to have developed into an entitlement society, where people think they're entitled to it (whatever "it" is), just because other people have "it" .... and never mind that they might have worked for years to get it.

And it also seems to have been accompanied by a general lowering of standards in society, with a general change in tone from disapproval of dishonesty, to firm adherence in the 11th Commandment i.e don't get caught.

A degree is supposed to be hard work. It's supposed to challenge the individual, to push, to drive them, to see what they're capable of. And it used to be something that meant something. These days, it's just another "me too" qualification, which in many walks of life you have to have just because everybody else has got one. No wonder employers are increasingly disregarding degrees (or at least, first degrees).

Personally, I think people cheating at their degrees says something very clear about that person's personality - they want "it" and don't care how they get it. It's the entitlement society. I'd be more than happy to see deliberately submitting plagiarised work for your degree become a criminal offence ... and in some countries, it is. It certainly ought to be one that carried heavy academic penalties, up to and including getting booted out of the Uni.

Everyone that cheats to get their degree is showing contempt for their contemporaries, the honest students that work, and often work damn hard, for their own degree.

I agree with Blair and Labour that everyone ought to have an equal chance to earn a degree, and that neither financial standing nor race, colour or class ought to be any form of an impediment. But, students have to EARN the degree, not cheat their way to it. If you don't have what it takes, then you don't have what it takes. Anything else, like providing tea and sympathy for cheats, merely serves to lower standards and devalue the degree for everybody else.

NOBODY is entitled to a degree. If you have the ability, put in the effort, serve your time and EARN it, then great. It means something. But cheats do for academic standards and the value of academic qualifications exactly what counterfeiters do for the currency - they devalue and destroy it.

[McClane]

Firstly, I don't quite understand why everyone is suddenly talking about degrees when the original story was to do with high school. Secondly, I am 100% against cheating. I'm coming towards the end of my second year of uni and all I do is work every hour of the day. I'm lucky if I get 1 proper meal a day. So for someone to cheat their way to a degree pisses me off as much as it pisses the rest of you off. I am not trying to defend these people!

When I talk about offering support, I talk about offering it at every level (yes, this does include university as well). If you start helping the weaker students earlier on in areas where they struggle then they might not think about cheating in the future.

For example, at secondary school I was in the top band and when it came to GCSE I was put in the top class for French. However, I wasn't very good at foreign languages and didn't really apply myself as I had no encouragement or support. In the second year of my French GCSE the teachers started giving extra lessons at lunch time. The funny thing was, the extra classes weren't for the people who were doing badly, they were for the people they thought could get an A*. This was pretty much everyone in the class accept for myself and one other. Now don't you think that sends out totally the wrong message? With the pressure that young people are under to succeed these days means that a rise in cheating is to be expected. There is so much to lose from doing badly.
I personally think they should be teaching people about plagiarism at secondary school as early as year 7 or 8.

When it comes to supporting people at university there are a couple of good reasons for doing this. Firstly, something could happen to you while at university such as a death in the family, an accident, parents getting divorced, etc. This can make a perfectly capable student struggle to manage their work. As I said previously, I'm working my arse off and if something happened to me now I think I would struggle to get the work done. It is desperate situations that can lead people to cheat.

I know in these situations you can fill out an extenuating circumstances form and probably get extensions on your coursework deadlines. However, this does not necessarily help resolve the issue of completing the work to the standard you are capable of. A friend of mine has recently been given coursework extensions but these seem like a quick fix to me as he doesn't have any extensions on deadlines towards the end of the term. This just means he doesn't have to work as hard now but will have to work harder later. That's an unsatisfactory solution in my mind.

My second reason is to do with the type of work involved in the course you're on. For example, you may really enjoy your course and be good at 90% of the modules. However, if you are really struggling with the other 10% of the modules and you fail them then you can risk not getting an honours degree. That hardly seems fair to me that you can do 90% of the course and you get penalised for finding 10% of your course hard.

Before you all get hot and bothered again, I do think university is about working hard and learning to do the work for yourself instead of being spoon fed. I also think that the value of a degree these days is a joke. People are almost being forced to do a degree and this is making it impossible for employers to use them as an accurate guide when employing people. Finally, I don't think offering extra support would eradicate cheating but I think it would help minimise it. For the people that still feel inclined to cheat, they should get caught and punished appropriately.

[Saracen]

I have no problem with people that need support getting support, and certainly not when there are external circumstances like bereavement.

But I don't accept that there should be any linkage between that and cheating. Neither finding it tough, nor personal problems, is an excuse for cheating, even if that were a major contributory factor in the apparent proliferation of cheating ... and I'm not convinced it is.

[TooNice]

Regarding the topic in question, my impression is that those students are trying to make a quick buck with the lawsuits. Though I can not prove their intentions, it just seem a bit odd to copyright a high school paper, as it is about to go through a system known to archive papers. If that is the case, then I wouldn't gives them a moral high ground.

[midzt]

Whatever the students' motives are to sue this company, most likely to make money, their point does stand. And I think I'm on their side, although this system supposedly helps cheating, they are nonetheless making money off other peoples' copyrights, and in my opinion, that is morally more wrong than the students apprently supporting cheating.

Just because I side with the students doesn't mean that I condone cheating of any kind, I worked hard to get my grades and I'm annoyed when I find out people do cheat, but how effective is this system anyway? It's very difficult to prove cheating unless it is word for word, which most students would know not to do. The concept is a good one, and I think its the step in the right direction to stop cheating in the education system, but they shouldn't be making money out of it and a government run system would make much more sense.

[TooNice]

The students may have a legal high ground (depending on Turnitin's T&C, and how much that stands in court), but I disagree that the profit aspects of the company render all other arguments redundant, at least from a moral point of view.

Yes, it makes most sense to me that institutions get together and set up their own system. And I doubt that it was never considered. However, for one reason or another (I can think of management issues amongst others), most institutions chose to go with Turnitin. It seems reasonable to me to assume that they find Turnitin to be the most efficient solution in terms of resource (cost/management etc.) and effectiveness (which, for all I know, may not be great, but presumably deemed acceptable by all the institutions who uses it).

Basically, I do not believe that profit organisation are automatically worse than the 'little guys' (especially malicious ones). If their system save institution costs (from setting up and maintaining their own system with a similar level of effectiveness), while providing themselves with a level of profit, then it's a win, win situation. Such savings can be passed back to the students through improved teaching facilities and such. Of course, it may be that the profit organisation is charging extortionate fees (hence the bolded if). Under such circumstances, I am may be able to turn a blind eye. But I question the likeliness, given it's common use.