Academic Dishonesty and Student Cheating
Academic dishonesty has existed as long as organized schooling, whether in the form of glancing at a neighboring student's examination, copying a classmate's homework, or plagiarizing source material in written assignments. According to many reports, academic dishonesty has increased dramatically in over the last several years and three factors, in particular, have been implicated as contributing factors.
The widespread availability of Internet sources represents a convenient opportunity to plagiarize online material, especially where instructors are less familiar with the Internet medium than students. Similarly, recent technological advances in communication technology (and the miniaturization thereof) has enabled students to devise clever new strategies to facilitate cheating during in-class examinations.
Interviews with students who admit to cheating reveals that many of them justify their academic dishonesty by reference to high profile accounts of corporate dishonesty and widespread deterioration of business ethics, in general (Boon). Others maintain that their demanding schedules and overlapping assignments make it impossible to complete all their assignments without some shortcuts. Finally, some students claim that so many other students cheat that they would be at a disadvantage if they failed to take advantage of the opportunity to do so, themselves.
The recent explosion of the availability of information available online via the World Wide Web represents an invaluable academic research tool. On the other hand, the convenience of so much information lends itself to academic dishonesty by sheer virtue of the abundance of sources and...
Professor Donald M. McCabe of Duke University is an expert on academic dishonesty who founded the Center for Academic Integrity, a consortium of two hundred colleges and universities dedicated to preserving academic integrity. According to McCabe, one of the most important tools in the fight against academic dishonesty (and plagiarism in particular) is well- informed instructors who are equally adept with the relatively new Internet medium as their students. Among McCabe's suggestions for combating the problem is for instructors to discuss the issue and define plagiarism in addition to assigning unique ics for research that are less likely to be published in usable form online. Finally,
McCabe suggests that teachers require outlines and synopses of all submitted papers to be submitted at periodic intervals prior to completion of the final version of written papers (Innerst). Still, there is comparatively little that teachers can do to combat other similar forms of academic dishonesty, such as the growing online industry of custom research" whereby students pay a premium for professional writers to write their assignments and furnish them for submission as their own academic work.
Another avenue readily exploited by students is wireless communication technology in the form…
