Cyber-Cheating

by Mary Ellen Flannery

Montana high school English teacher Steve Gardiner still remembers finding the perfect Macbeth paper in the middle of his stack almost five years ago. It screamed out for an A. And then, right below it, another fantastic analysis of Shakespeare's cursed play—exactly the same as the first.

When Gardiner confronted the devious duo the next day, he expected to find one creator and one copier. Instead, each sheepishly admitted to finding the paper on the Web and downloading it independently. It was mere chance that they ended up in consecutive order on his desk.

"I was devastated," he recalls.

At that, Gardiner put down his pencil and sharpened his wits. After plugging a few sentences into an Internet search engine, he quickly found the plagiarized Macbeth paper for sale. Then, within just minutes, he found a half-dozen more that had been sold and submitted for his grade book.

"It was a real eye-opener for me to realize how easy it was to (download student papers.) At that point I wasn't even aware that those sites exist," Gardiner says. Now he and his colleagues at Billings Senior High School routinely check papers and warn their students to beware.

Bluster and threats aside, Gardiner still finds plagiarized papers. The problem is, more and more, kids cheat.

It's easier these days, for one thing. Cell phones make it a cinch to send or store test answers or, with a few keystrokes, even search for hints on the Internet. Outside of class, dozens of companies sell "Grade-A" essays on the Web: www.schoolsucks.com, www.ivyessays.com, www.lazystudents.com, and more.

In a 2002 survey by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, 74 percent of high school students admitted to cheating on at least one exam within the last year, up from 61 percent in 1992. Perhaps more troubling, almost half agreed with the statement: "A person has to lie or cheat sometimes to get ahead."

Facing that kind of attitude, what are educators to do? Students are becoming more sophisticated stealers, relying on spy strategies that seem positively CIA-ish, sometimes with little remorse. Still, NEA members say there are ways to pluck out the plagiarists, using time-tested techniques that have worked for years, and also by turning their new-age weapons back on them.

Policing the Plagiarists

Turn the tables

Just like their students, teachers can turn to technology for help. It doesn't cost anything but a few minutes to take a few phrases from your student's unusually savvy essay and run them through Google, AltaVista, or any other search engine, says Patti Tjomsland, a Washington media specialist who has conducted seminars on treating the plagiarism epidemic.

"(A quick search) has led us to the source more times than I care to think about," says Don Mack, technology facilitator at Laramie High School in Wyoming.

Hire a detective

If you'd rather leave it to the pros, a number of companies, like iParadigms and CaNexus, also sell products that chase cheaters. Submit a paper, and these programs search for matching text strings in books and journals, online sources, and databases of essays, including those offered by the so-called paper mills.

"It's not fair to let honest students get out-competed by their dishonest peers," says iParadigms founder John Barrie, whose expanding service checks about 20,000 student essays a day, at a cost of about 60 cents per student per year. About one-third raise red flags—many from your finest students, who desperately want good grades and the best colleges, he adds.

Use More writing

Feeling frugal? "We don't have a lot of money to spend on things like that," says Wyoming's Mack of anti-cheating products. His teachers assign papers early in the year, including in-class jobs, so they can become familiar with each student's skills and style.

Last year, an essay-winner at Van Nuys Middle School in Sherman Oaks, California, lost his prize when a sharp-eyed teacher noticed that the winning entry didn't much resemble the student's regular work, says English teacher Emily Ettinger.

"You can usually tell," she says.

Watch for clues

Frequently bought papers sound "too good," Gardiner says. (Or bizarre—a few years ago, Tjomsland heard about a plagiarized paper on drug use. When the pre-teen author claimed to have written, "Yes, I was a cocaine addict for five years," it was a dead give-away!)

Always check the citations—if a student buys or borrows, the citations often will be old or absent. Look carefully at its presentation—are the margins skewed? Are the fonts odd? At Laramie High, one particularly lazy looter printed his paper off the Internet with the Web address still scrawled across the top.

Just ask

Simplest of all, just ask students to talk to you about the assignment. If they can't summarize their paper's main points, they probably didn't write it.

Gardiner knows some teachers who'd rather not assign research papers anymore—they've thrown up their hands in frustration. He doesn't blame them, but it still seems a shame, he says. Being able to find relevant evidence and compile it coherently, "is an important skill that they'll need in life," he says.

Preventing Plagiarists

Develop Creative assignments

In a study published this year, researchers at Santa Clara University suggest kids plagiarize, at least in part, because traditional assignments like term papers seem irrelevant to them. Rather than focus on nabbing cheaters, they suggest teachers try to create assignments that interest kids.

Using alternative media, like storyboards, comic strips, or digital slideshows, or asking kids to develop Web-based portfolios of their work could be engaging. Students usually love to work together—figure out a way to fairly grade a team's research paper and try it.

Define plagiarism

The California study suggests prevention may be a better tactic than detection—and there are plenty of effective ways to deter cheaters, Washington's Tjomsland says. First of all, kids need to understand what plagiarism is. Just like they download hit songs and video clips without consequence, some may believe there's no foul in cutting and pasting without attribution.

"They think if they change a word, they've fixed it," she says.

Define its consequences

Developing a policy on plagiarism could avoid some innocent mistakes and also make clear the consequences. At Gardiner's school, soon after he caught the Macbeth moochers, teachers wrote a policy for online plagiarism. On their first offense, kids get a zero. Try it again and you'll fail the class.

(Or take a hint from Shanghai, where police arrested more than 20 students suspected of using text messages to cheat on a university entrance exam. Handcuffs and jail cells, anyone?)

At Tjomsland's school, Mark Morris High School in Longview, Washington, a similar policy under consideration will ask students to sign a personal pledge not to plagiarize. While such an "honor code" may not stop the kids without honor, at least it'll give teachers something to wave under their red hands.

Make it impossible

Codes and computerized assistance aside, the most effective strategies rely on good, creative (and time-consuming) teaching, Tjomsland says. If you ask your kids to submit an outline and multiple drafts of a paper, then do some work on it during class time, and finally turn it in with photocopies of their research material, the problem is essentially solved.

"We're trying to have students do more of their work at school," Wyoming's Mack agrees. "It's not so much to prevent cheating—although it does—but to provide advice and counsel to the student....It's just good teaching."

It's also possible to create assignments that defy plagiarism, teachers say. "A standard 'Write the biography of George Washington,' just invites them to cheat," says Tjomsland. Instead, ask kids to use their personal experience or community life in their analysis, she suggests. Or require them to compare and contrast two different subjects, Mack says.

"It's hard—especially if you've been teaching for a long time and you've got your curriculum set," Tjomsland acknowledges. It's particularly difficult, she adds, if your school or district doesn't support teachers with time off to seek professional development in these areas.

But it can be done—just remember Montana's Gardiner and his Shakespearean sneaks. These days, he's less often a victim than an advocate for watchfulness. Colleagues come up to him all the time, recall his sleuthing work, and ask, "How did you do that?"

It's elementary, my dear Watson!  

Right Under Your Nose

Even as educators deal with plagiarists who turn their home computers into counterfeiting machines, they also have to catch up with the latest trends in cheating taking place inside the classroom. Turns out cheating has gotten a lot more sophisticated than crumpled notes in shirtsleeves or penned answers on sweaty palms.

With a cell phone, a finger, and a few seconds, students can send text messages to another kid across the classroom—"Hey buddy, what's the answer to #18?" They can even log on to the Internet and search for the formula to solve your gotcha math problems.

During an exam at one Wisconsin high school, kids were caught listening to tape-recorded notes on hidden earphones. At another, Racine history teacher Scott LaPlante nabbed a girl snapping photographs of an exam with a camera cell phone. She had slid the paper onto the classroom floor when LaPlante caught her leaning over with the lens pointed at his stumpers.

It wasn't too hard to catch her—unless a class is incredibly overcrowded, most teachers will see a kid whip out their phone, LaPlante says. Still, it'd be better if school policies could take action first.

"I can see why parents might want kids to have cell phones, but let's look at who they're calling—it's not their parents," says LaPlante, who'd like to ban phones from his school. "We're paid to protect the integrity of the learning environment, and I don't think they're conducive to learning."

Some states, including Florida and Massachusetts, have banned phones during the administration of state exams. In a South Florida high school, one student's graduation plans were ground out last spring when she was caught with a phone during a bathroom break. Likewise, the College Board has told schools to prohibit phones from desktops during Advanced Placement exams.

It's a sign of the times, LaPlante says.

"You go back to the good old days of cheating and they wrote the answers on their hands. There's just new ways of cheating and more of them," LaPlante says. "Look at corporate America! My kids tell me that people cheat all the time."