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osugrad21

Capo Regime
Staff member
ONN

1/17

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Ohio State toughens punishments for cheaters[/FONT]

<!-- -->COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Ohio State University has toughened punishments for students caught cheating, handing out failing grades and suspensions for violators who used to commonly receive probation.
Faculty complained the penalties needed to be tougher as the number of cases increased.The university heard 539 cases of academic misconduct last school year, with 85 percent resulting in discipline, according to an annual report on campus cheating presented to the University Senate last week. There were 287 cases five years ago."If somebody is caught cheating, they ought to receive at the very least a failing grade on the course. This certainly represents an advance over the previous pattern," said professor Marilyn Blackwell, who teaches Scandinavian languages, literature, culture and film.Students who plagiarize, copy from classmates or break course rules now usually fail the course and are put on probation for at least one academic quarter, The Columbus Dispatch reported Tuesday in an analysis of the cheating report.The most common punishment used to be probation and a zero on the assignment.Six students were expelled last school year for cheating and 40 were suspended for at least one quarter.It's unclear why the number of academic misconduct cases has grown, but many professors now use computer software to catch cheaters. They also can type a suspicious phrase into an Internet search engine."There are a lot of students doing things on the Internet they don't consider cheating," said Don McCabe, founding president of the Center on Academic Integrity at Duke University and now a business professor at Rutgers University. "It allows them to take some shortcuts."Ohio State students caught cheating are most likely to be taking chemistry, computer science and engineering, or statistics courses, The Dispatch said. They're also more likely to be male and seniors.Faculty are trying to be clearer about how to cite other people's work and the rules for working in groups. One of the choices for mandatory freshman reading this year was "The Cheating Culture.""We want students to understand _ anytime you turn in an assignment, you have choices. If your choices are to cheat or to turn in nothing, the right choice is to turn in nothing," said Peter Pappas, coordinator of the university's Committee on Academic Misconduct.___
 
There is a group of 3-4 students in my major (Electrical Engineering) who have continued to cheat their way through exams, sharing answers quietly in the back of the room in almost every class. Most professors catch them but assume it to be a one time thing and don't get harsh...
 
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I remember walking into a group presentation in grad school and gathering the sections of the written report we were each supposed to have written. To my horror, I realized that all four of the others were turning in word-for-word copies of the research materials I'd printed from the internet the week before. With ten minutes and visions of losing my degree in my very last class, I stuck all of the mess behind a cover sheet that said "Compiled research used to support the oral report - not original work," with just five pages of unplaigerized material at the front of the report. We limped through the presentation and I walked out shaking, figuring that at the very least it would be a failed course.

Received full marks... my professor never even bothered to look at the papers.

It was an ethics course.
 
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I had an open-note exam once where a friend and I were basically arguing in the back of the class. We were checking our answers with each other, simply by peaking over at each other's tests. We got to one that we got different answers on, and he poked me to ask me to change it. I looked at it and thought about it, but didn't change it because I was right. So I poked him to make him change his answer. But he poked me again. This went on for maybe four more rounds, and finally, in a pretty loud whisper (in a pretty small room), I said, "What the hell are you talking about?"

I realized then that I said that pretty loud. I looked up to the front of the class and saw the teacher looking right at me. I ducked back down and pretended I wasn't done with my test. Out of the corner of my eye, though, I saw that the teacher got up and was walking back to us. Just before he got to us, I looked up with an "Oh.. you surprised me" look, expecting him to take the tests out of our hands and recommend that we re-take the class next semester. Instead, he simply gave us some pieces of paper and said, "Here.. I've finished grading your homework. You may want to use it to help with your exams."
 
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My eyesight was so bad I couldn't cheat in college... but for some reason I didn't care if others scoped off mine...

Micro-econ test comes back.. and one question was 30 points... I got 10 !!! and I nailed it... Prof just wrote "great answer - 1/3 credit" ... on two other guys papers around me.. he wrote "1/3 credit - see NJ's paper"... :(
 
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My greatest cheating feat was in a medieval lit class I had in McPherson Lab. Wasn't so much into it at the time, so during the midterm and final, I would go to the bathroom a couple times during the exams. Of course, by 'go to the bathroom', I mean 'sprint across that little mini-quad to Denney Hall, pop inside to the computer lab and look up as many answers as I could'. I'm sure I looked ridiculous, coming back from the bathroom flushed and slightly out of breath, but the prof either didn't care or didn't know. Got a B- in the class, I think.
 
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I always had a good way to overcome that trick. You had to have samples, meeting expected criteria for quantity, physical and visual properties.

I did note some distressed faces amongst the students whose work I graded.

Of course, on some labs, they graded you on % yield. So, then you doubled all the starting reagents and threw some of the final product away to get a yield of around 80%...
 
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Ohio State is following an international trend.

The majority of cheating concerns plagiarism from electronic sources. At my University, every student hand-in (e.g, dissertation, thesis, student project, group assignment, etc) must be submitted physically and electronically. The electronic version is submitted to www.turnitin.com, which is a service that checks for similarity to Internet sites. Get caught and you are out. Punishment is automatic, formal and decisive. One student was caught using paragraphs that had been cut from other obscure unpublished papers in an MBA thesis and "did not graduate with the class"!

Exam venues in South Africa are separate buildings with professional invigilators. Dedicated rest rooms are linked to venues and students must show that they have nothing with them when they enter or leave. Cases of cheating are punished swiftly and publicly.

Swift, sure, and immediate punishment for plagiarism and academic misconduct protects the value of everyone's degree and it should be non-negotiable.
 
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I remember for a biochem midterm the dude left to me was doing everything he could to read all the answers on my paper. Definately started puttin down all the wrong answers. I busted my ass studying for that midterm and I knew I was gonna ace it after browsing through the test. I sure as shit wasn't gonna let this guy get a free ride. After he darted to the front of the room to turn in his exam I erased everything back to the right answers.

Usually I don't care about cheatin but damn I put so much time into studying for that exam.
 
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Of course, on some labs, they graded you on % yield. So, then you doubled all the starting reagents and threw some of the final product away to get a yield of around 80%...

Double starting reagents? Work-around - not likely.:tongue2:

Simply issue key ingredients in exact quantity + about 5% for spillage. One chance to get it right, one chance to fail. ('Course this is not at tOSU - so if their Graduate Assistants fail to avoid the cheapest of ploys, that's their fault).
 
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Simply issue key ingredients in exact quantity + about 5% for spillage.
There were also labs like that at OSU. If I recall correctly, most of the OChem labs limited some of the reagents.

Other than data fudging every once in a while in chemistry, I was one of the people with an arm around their paper during tests. Get your own answers! :grr:
 
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