Creative Cheating
I require my students to type out their homework. Sometimes I get the exact homework with minor alterations like a font change or even numbered slightly different. The funny thing is that they forget to change their grammatical errors and this really give them away. I call this creative cheating and give them half points the 1st time and if it ever happens again, they get a zero. Why do students think they are sneaky?
Giving students different forms of the test is a good idea and I have used it with my students at times. What do you do when a student accuses another of cheating, but you did not observe it yourself? I had this happen in a recent course and thereafter had the students remove all books, papers, and phones from their desks and made sure their computers were closed and really kept a sharp lookout.
This has happened to me many times. We now have 3 different exams and each student gets a different form of the exam. This has helped a lot.
I agree with these scenarios... the students are not to be trusted because most of the time the cheaters are being lazy because of lack of time management. I try to sho the students that it is doing a disservice to not at least attempt to learn the work ... if the attemp is made and the student still does not understand then the student & I are able to see where additional help is needed
I agree with not fully trusting students, I had a student cheat from a neighboring student and unfortunately for this student, copied incorrect answers for the questions that they were unsure of. While discussing the issue with the student, I asked him the questions again and he was able to correctly answer the questions. Hard way for this lesson to be learned by this student, he didn’t need to cheat, just thought he needed to pass the test
That is a good point. I believe tht studentys that do this have probably been doing it most of their life and getting away with it and that is why they continue to do it. I agree that it is especially prevalent in the earlier courses as opposed to the more advanced courses.
Only research papers are typed in my course. Everything else is hand written. I don't trust my students. When I allowed them to type their definitions or outlines, none of them could hold a discussion during class. So THEY WILL CHEAT GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY!
Hi Jami,
They think they are sneaky because they think we are not smart enough to catch them cheating.
Patricia Scales
Typos is the #1 way I spot these too!
I used to set the two (or three) papers side by side and write the note across both student's pages so to read the message they would need to get together with their partner in crime. Then it turned out some students were saving their work to the drive of the computer lab computers and not deleting it before they left, others discovered this and would come in after them, change the name/font and submit the work as their own.
Now I've added, "and save your work to your own USB drive" to my anti-plagiarism spiel.
