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Academic Dishonesty: What Is It & How to Avoid It
Feature from the week of May 6, 2002

College professors have always been concerned with academic dishonesty, but now they are able to rely on plagiarism detection services (used by professors at Foothill as well) and plagiarism detection software.

But, why do students cheat?  A look at our one-minute survey revealed similar responses. The answers varied from "I was young and foolish," to "Because I didn't want to get a bad grade," and "I didn't know the answer." But, overwhelmingly, students wrote, "I didn't have time to study." (See more student comments and the total results of the short survey).

The following story from Washington Post is all too familiar: "The rumors had circulated among University of Virginia students who packed the auditoriums for Physics 105 and 106: Some people weren't writing their own papers. Finally, one student took her suspicions to the professor. . . . [Lou Bloomfield] designed a simple computer program to look for any common phrases and set it loose on his electronic database of 1,500 term papers. His heart sank as his computer churned out one match after another. "It was a little more common than I hoped," he said. (Learn more)

Why do students cheat? Geoff Isaacs, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (from November 30, 2001, University of Georgia listserv) suggests that "when students plagiarize or cheat in any way we ought to ask to what extent elements of their situation that are under our control (eg workload, the nature of the assessment tasks) might contribute to this." He urges faculty to consider "assessing less, but better -- the pressure of excessive assessment workload certainly will predispose students to cheat in order to survive ...," suggesting that faculty "ought to be looking for new modes of assessment for new modes of learning.... 'evaluation' exercises for which sensible answers will not be available from the paper mills....

If we must put effort into the 'plagiarism problem' then let's put it into _pre-empting_ plagiarism rather than detecting it," says Issacs. Educating students about the consequences of plagiarism and how to avoid it are steps in the right direction.

Quite timely is also an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (from the issue dated May 17, 2002), "Plagiarism-Detection Tool Creates Legal Quandary: When professors send students' papers to a database, are copyrights violated?" 

Related Useful Resources & Documents:

Plagiarism: What It is and How to Recognize and Avoid It
Foothill Academic Honor Code
Foothill Student Code of Conduct for ETUDES - Internet Based Courses
Foothill Student's Right to Know

Other Weekly FGA Features:

Sandi Watkins
Lyn Paulos
Jerry & Angie
Rick Martinez
Dolores Davison
Mimi Will
Academic Dishonesty