There’s a famous story about a student who, when assigned to write a report about a topic, started his report as a Wikipedia article. Then, over the following days, he watched while Wikipedia editors fleshed out his article, until, on the due date, he copied the text from the online encyclopedia,pasted it into his word processor and confidently turned it in. [Image ((Duhem-Verdière, Romy. “SPIP Coding Party.” Romytetue’s Photostream. 4 Mar 2006. 28 Jun 2008
He got caught! But in listening to the story we either respond, “Oh! That’s dreadful!” or “Woe, that’s resourceful!” I talk about this in my video games presentation, that we really need more than one word for cheating, that some of the cheating that gammers engage in is actually quite resourceful, figuring out how to accomplish the goals by changing the rules.
We don’t do this in real life?
Anyway, this brings me to something I read this morning in Slashdot, a quote from an anonymous reader…
“Students studying computing in the UK and US are outsourcing their university coursework to graduates in India and Romania. Work is being contracted out for as little as ?5 on contract coding websites usually used by businesses. Students are outsourcing everything from simple coursework to full blown final year dissertations. It’s causing a major headache for lecturers who say it is almost impossible to detect.”
Clearly, this is cheating, taking credit for someone elses work. I’m wondering though, Where is the line? At what point do we forgive, or even encourage resourceful and inventive shortcutting, and at what point does it become … well, cheating?
Interstingly, if those students graduate and get their jobs, much of their work will be outsourced to India or Romania.
The distinction that immediately come to mine is not the mechanism in which the work is done but what the work is meant to be used for. The goal of a company is to get the work done. That in itself is the goal. There is no relevance to the credit or what not associated with it. The work is the goal. But for a student, the work is not the goal. The work is the means by which a student’s, for lack of a better way to to say it, competency is judged. That in terms flag the student pass/fail, graduate/not graduate and what have you. Who did the work is important in that case.
The simplest response is, “Good job and thank you for getting the work done. But the A goes to the person who did the work.”
Over and over again I read about these kinds of issues, and it keeps reminding me that as an educator, I need to rethink the way I assess my students. Even in elementary school, this kind of problem has been around for years–except in our case the “outsourcing” often means that the parents did the work for the child.
They are often well-meaning, to a point, wanting the best for their child–meaning of course the best grade. But rather than bemoaning the fact that our students (and parents) try to find the loopholes in the assignment, we need to find different ways of getting at what our kids know, understand, and are able to do.
I think it’s also important to be much more transparent about exactly what we’re looking for and why we want them to do what we’re asking. Tell them up front that the goal is not a working computer program, for example, but that it’s about the problem solving process they used to get there. So maybe we need to assess the student’s whole process–including notes and false starts and bug-filled code that won’t compile–and ask them to write about how they were able to get it working.
I also think it’s important to teach students how to use resources effectively. Instead of scolding someone for going out and getting other people involved in a project, design assignments/assessments that encourage or even require it, and assess how well the student is able to integrate the help they get into the final product.
Good point Alan, and I’d take it one step further as well. If the point of the paper were to simply regurgitate information that is already readily available, then the point of the paper was to take others ideas and give them credit. There is little to nothing substinative about that kind of assignment- it does nothing but promote plagiarism. If we want our students to actually come up with original ideas we need to rethink our assignments and make them more meaningful.
http://www.collaterallearning.com
-Bryan