E-Cheating: Combating a 21st Century Challenge.

When I began teaching college English four years ago, I was enthusiastic about new opportunities for using technology in the classroom. I had visions of students learning to write essays with a computer rather than a pencil, realizing the ease of editing their work; enjoying the speed with which they could write and rewrite; discovering how to research using online databases and search engines; and submitting their work and receiving comments and grades electronically. I was not naive, though; I anticipated challenges with reluctant or skeptical students and inevitable technical problems with hardware and software. I did not, however, envision the difficulties I would encounter with electronic cheating. Yes, computers have made many tasks easier. No longer must a student retype an entire paper just to add in a paragraph or even a footnote. No longer must a student visit a library to use a card catalog for research, or to read a journal article or even a book. But also, no longer must a student retype a paper that someone else has written in order to put their own name on it. The student can just copy the text from the Web, paste it into their word processing program, type their name at the top, print it out and hand it in; or in some classes, submit it digitally to the professor online or by e-mail. As Lisa Renard said recently in an Educational Leadership article (vol. 57, no. 4), "Educators unaware of the possibilities and resources available to computer-age students are at the mercy of these technologically hip kids. " The Frequency of Plagiarism The purpose of this article is not to discuss ethical issues or to examine the downfall of American values, but let me give you some statistics. First of all, it's impossible to determine the actual frequency of cheating. Out of the 61 students in my English composition classes in spring 1999, I caught five plagiarists, all of whom had downloaded papers from the Web. That's 8 percent and there may have been more plagiarized papers I did not catch, copied from books or journals, sold by another student, etc. But we do have the self-reports of students, which offer a glimpse of the problem. For example, a 1998 survey from Who's Who Among American High School Students reported that of 3,123 students, 80 percent of them "admitted to cheating on an exam, a 10-point increase since the question was first asked 15 years ago" (Bushweller 1999). In addition, 50 percent of them "did not believe cheating was necessarily wrong," and 95 percent of those who had cheated "said they have never been caught" (Kleiner and Lord 1999). According to the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, 75 percent of all college students "confess to cheating at least once" (Kleiner and Lord 1999). This finding confirms earlier studies by Baird, and by Stern and Havlicek, who reported that between 70 percent and 85 percent of American college students "engaged in some form of cheating" (Lupton, Chapman and Weiss vol. 75, no. 4). Cheating and the Web There are several ways a student can use the Internet to cheat on a writing assignment. The easiest way is to type a topic into a search engine like Yahoo! , find a Web page that someone has posted on that topic with the requisite number of words, copy the text and paste it into a word processing program. Another possibility is to share assignments with friends at other schools -- one student can simply e-mail a paper as an attachment to another student. For example, one of my students submitted a paper that I found to be the text from an online magazine article. When I confronted the student about it, he said he had never seen the online article; a friend at another college had e-mailed him the paper, and he assumed that his friend had written it. But the most blatant form of e-cheating is the use of "Web paper mills," sites that collect and distribute papers on the Web, either free or for a fee. In a cursory search for these paper mill sites, I found more than 30. …