Cheating - How to teach - Articles about education

The scourge of cheating is growing every year, especially with the increased availability of papers on the Internet. It is no secret that students would rather pay than write a paper. How can you tell if a student is cheating?

A discussion among various colleagues has offered the following possible ways of determining whether a student has cheated.

When the students start the class, ask the students to write just submit a writing sample to write about themselves, about the course, and how much they know. This will serve as a writing sample. The students don't have to know what the real purpose of this assignment is, but after they write it you will know what to expect of them. By the end of the semester or the year when they submit their paper you can compare it to their writing sample. If the writing is much different or better then you have a reason to suspect cheating.

If you suspect cheating, then you can Google the phrase that you suspect that they cheated on, write the phrase in quotes. Goodgle is likely to have spidered the article and it may well turn up.

You may ask them to submit two parts to their paper. The paper itself and a kit with the resources that they had.

You may ask them to submit the paper in sections. First the topic, then a more detailed topic, and then a basic outline, then a more detailed outline, and so on until you get to their rough draft and then till you get to the final paper. Each item has to be submitted separately. That way you can see that the students worked on it and developed it. In the final stages the students will complain that they work on the computer and they don't have a rough draft and a final draft and you will have to demand separate printouts. You can ask each student to submit the paper separately and as they submit it you can ask them questions, general questions, like what did you learn or gain from the project? Has it improved your understanding of the topic? How will it help you in your profession? After asking questions such as these the students, you can see the look of panic on the student's face when he does not know the answer. Of course, as time goes on the students will get used to this. Students from one class will tell the others about what to expect and you will lose the advantage. A way to overcome this problem is to ask different questions of different students. That way they will know that you will be asking questions but they don't know which questions they will be asked. They can prepare but only to a certain degree and at a certain point it may be worth actually writing the paper or at least reading the parts that they have plagerized.

Another way is evaluate the writing in the paper itself. If there seems to be a part that is written much better than another part, it could mean that the well-written part was plagerized.