Colleges chase as cheats shift to
higher tech
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
May 18, 2006
The New York Times
LOS ANGELES — At the University of California at Los Angeles, a
student loaded his class notes into a handheld e-mail device and tried
to read them during an exam; a classmate turned him in. At the
journalism school at San Jose State University, students were caught
using spell check on their laptops when part of the exam was designed
to test their ability to spell.
And at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, after students photographed
test questions with their cellphone cameras, transmitted them to
classmates outside the exam room and got the answers back in text
messages, the university put in place a new proctoring system.
"If they'd spend as much time studying," said an exasperated Ron
Yasbin, dean of the College of Sciences at U.N.L.V., "they'd all be A
students."
With their arsenal of electronic gadgets, students these days find it
easier to cheat. And so, faced with an array of inventive techniques in
recent years, college officials find themselves in a new game of cat
and mouse, trying to outwit would-be cheats this exam season with a
range of strategies — cutting off Internet access from laptops,
demanding the surrender of cellphones before tests or simply requiring
that exams be taken the old-fashioned way, with pens and paper.
"It is kind of a hassle," said Ryan M. Dapremont, 21, who just finished
his third year at Pepperdine University, and has had to take his exams
on paper.
"My handwriting is so bad," he said. "Whenever I find myself having to
write in a bluebook, I find my hand cramps up more, and I can't write
as quickly."
Mr. Dapremont said technology had made cheating easier, but added that
plagiarism in writing papers was probably a bigger problem because
students can easily lift other people's writings off the Internet
without attributing them.
Still, some students said they thought cheating these days was more a
product of the mind-set, not the tools at hand.
"Some people put a premium on where they're going to go in the future,
and all they're thinking about is graduate school and the next step,"
said Lindsay Nicholas, a third-year student at U.C.L.A. She added that
pressure to succeed "sometimes clouds everything and makes people do
things that they shouldn't do."
In a survey of nearly 62,000 undergraduates on 96 campuses over the
past four years, two-thirds of the students admitted to cheating. The
survey was conducted by Don McCabe, a Rutgers professor who has studied
academic misconduct and helped found the Center for Academic Integrity
at Duke.
David Callahan, author of "The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are
Doing Wrong to Get Ahead" (Harcourt, 2004), suggested that students
today feel more pressure to do well in order to get into graduate or
professional school and secure a job.
"The rational incentives to cheat for college students have grown
dramatically, even as the strength of character needed to resist those
temptations has weakened somewhat," Mr. Callahan said.
Whatever the reasons for cheating, college officials say the battle
against it is wearing them out.
Though Brian Carlisle, associate dean of students at U.C.L.A., said
most students did not cheat, he spoke wearily about cases of academic
dishonesty.
He told of the student who loaded his notes onto the Sidekick portable
e-mail device last fall; students who have sought help from friends
with such devices; students who have preprogrammed calculators with
formulas. Some students have even deigned to use the traditional cheat
sheet, he said.
"One of the things that we're going to be paying close attention to as
time goes on is the use of iPods," Professor Carlisle added, pointing
out that with a wireless earpiece, these would be hard to detect.
The telltale iPod headphone wire proved the downfall of a Pepperdine
student a couple of years ago, after he had dictated his notes into the
portable music player and tried to listen to them during an exam.
"I have taught for 30 years and each year something new comes on the
scene," Sonia Sorrell, the professor who caught the student, said in an
e-mail message.
At the Anderson School of Management at U.C.L.A., the building's
wireless Internet hotspot is turned off during finals to thwart
Internet access.
Richard Craig, a professor at the School of Journalism and Mass
Communications at San Jose State, who caught students using spell check
last year, said that for tests, he arranged the classroom desks so that
the students faced away from him but he could see their desktop screens.
"It was just a devilishly simple way to handle it," Professor Craig
said.
At the University of Nevada, Professor Yasbin, the dean, was not the
only one upset by the camera phone cheating episode there, which
occurred in 2003; honest students were appalled, too. They suggested
that they police one another, by being exam proctors.
"The students walk around the classroom, and if they see something
suspicious, they report it," Professor Yasbin said.
Amanda M. Souza, a third-year undergraduate who heads the proctor
program, said her classmates had decidedly mixed reactions to the
student monitors.
"The ones that aren't cheating think it's a great idea, " she said.
"You always see students who are really well prepared covering their
papers. But the ones that aren't prepared, probably don't like us."
At Mercer County Community College in West Windsor, N.J., students must
clear their calculators' memory and sometimes relinquish their
cellphones before tests. At Brigham Young University, exams are given
in a testing center, where electronic devices are generally banned.
In some classes at Butler University in Indianapolis, professors use
software that allows them to observe the programs running on computers
students are taking tests on. And some institutions even install
cameras in rooms where tests are administered.
To take a final exam last week, Alyssa Soares, a third-year law student
at U.C.L.A., had to switch on software that cut her laptop's Internet
access, wireless capability and even the ability to read her own saved
files. Her computer, effectively, became a glorified typewriter. Ms.
Soares, 28, said she did not mind. "This is making sure everyone is on
a level playing field," she said.
Several professors said they tried to write exams on which it was hard
to cheat, posing questions that outside resources would not help
answer. And at many institutions, officials said that they rely on
campus honor codes.
Several professors said the most important thing was to teach students
not to cheat in the first place.
Timothy Dodd, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity,
said creating a "nuclear deterrent" to cheating in class, and perhaps
implying that it is acceptable elsewhere, "is antithetical to what we
should be doing as educators."