Students building academic Web of deceit

Campus cheating isn't restricted to the classroom anymore. It's also found in cyberspace, where some college students are convinced they can plagiarize term papers and cheat on Web-course tests away from the in-room scrutiny of faculty.

"Some students think it is easier to cheat online," said Dr. David Starrett, director of the Center for Scholarship in Teaching and Learning at Southeast Missouri State University. But he said that perception doesn't match the reality.

"We're more on top of this than students give us credit for," he said.

Southeast Missouri State University officials and faculty say the school has taken steps to help prevent cheating in online courses and detect those who do cheat.

Southeast spends nearly $5,000 a year subscribing to turnitin.com, an anti-plagiarism site on the Internet that allows faculty to automatically compare students' term papers with ones found online and in publications.

As of 2001, an estimated 1,800 schools across the country had subscribed to the service.

Southeast's Center for Scholarship in Teaching and Learning advises faculty on how to detect and prevent cheating in Web classes.

Faculty often include fake students on the rolls in online classes as a way to spot cheating.

Last summer, three students were caught participating in an online cheating ring. The cheating was uncovered when the ringleader sent an e-mail to what he thought was another student in the class. It turned out to be a fake student, and the e-mail ended up in the hands of the faculty member, Starrett said.

While most Southeast students still get their education in traditional classroom settings, Starrett estimated between 2,000 to 2,500 students a semester take online courses.

Faculty know some students view the Internet as a willing accomplice and will try to cheat.

"It is a seductive kind of temptation," said Dr. Susan Swartwout, associate professor of English and chairman of Southeast's Faculty Senate.

And it's not just college students that engage in such academic dishonesty. About four years ago, a fourth-grader from St. Louis plagiarized a poem off a cereal box to win a writing competition at Southeast.

Another teacher spotted the plagiarism, and Swartwout notified the student's teacher. The student ended up sending her a letter of apology and returning his writing awards, T-shirt and certificate.

Swartwout said faculty don't tolerate any kind of academic cheating. "Scholarship is our life. We don't want that stolen."

Cheating comparison

Nationwide there's debate on just how much academic cheating occurs on college campuses online or in the classroom.

On most campuses, over 75 percent of students admit to some cheating, according to the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

The center cites a 1999 survey of 2,100 students on 21 college campuses. About one-third of those students said they had cheated on tests, and half admitted to cheating on writing assignments. How many of those involved online cheating is unclear.

Some students at Southeast believe there's little online cheating at their school.

"I don't really hear it talked about a lot," said Trish McFerrin, 22, a senior at Southeast from Washington, Mo.

McFerrin took an online course on management information systems last semester. She said she believes faculty make online course tests harder because they allow students to use their textbooks to answer the questions.

Still, she said, students have to study in advance of the tests because once they log on to the class Web site, they have only a short time to take an exam.

"Usually most of my quizzes were 30 minutes," McFerrin said. "That makes it more difficult to cheat."

But Dr. Russell Renka, a longtime political science professor at Southeast, believes academic cheating is widespread on all college campuses.

But online courses do pose a special problem.

"You never actually see the students in online classes," Renka said. "That gives them an opportunity to cheat by looking at each other's work."

When it comes to academic cheating, plagiarism is the biggest problem, he said. Term papers often include text copied directly from some online Web page without any attribution. That occurs with students in both online and classroom courses.

"A lot of them really don't think there is any problem with that," he said.

Renka said he sees at least two or three incidents of plagiarism in his classes each semester. He failed one student who repeatedly submitted plagiarized work despite being warned.

Catching cheats

Starrett said faculty often contact him when they suspect cheating in their online classes. But proving it can be difficult, he said.

The university can check computer logs and determine that several students in the same class sat at adjacent computers in a campus computer lab. They all logged on at the same time to take an online test.

While suspicious, it doesn't prove the students cheated, Starrett said.

The issue of cheating is a "sexy" topic of conversation but not a widespread problem at Southeast, he said. "My gut feeling is it is not as bad as people think it is."

Swartwout agrees. She has detected little cheating in her writing classes. "I have maybe an incident a year of cheating," she said.

But there are no solid statistics on academic cheating since most of the cases are dealt with by the classroom faculty and are never referred to the university's judicial affairs office or the dean of students.

School officials said students caught cheating risk receiving failing grades on assignments or even for the entire course. Such grade punishments are handed out by faculty.

The most serious cases are referred to judicial affairs. The university, in such cases, can suspend or expel students, said Dr. Irene Ferguson, dean of students.

In the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2003, Ferguson's office dealt with only two cases of academic cheating: The three-student online cheating ring and a plagiarism case involving a student in a traditional classroom setting.

Ferguson won't discuss the specific punishments handed down in those cases, citing federal privacy rules governing educational institutions. But she said students have been suspended before for academic cheating. Expelling students is a last resort, she said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 123