Don McCabe has surveyed 45,000 of America’s college students over the past three years, asking them to come clean about whether they cheat on their tests and term papers.
Many cheaters in the classroom are surprisingly honest in the surveys, said McCabe, the founder of the Center for Academic Integrity and a foremost authority on academic fraud. About 37 percent have admitted to what’s called “cut- and-paste” plagiarism, the practice of creating term papers by copying information available over the Internet.
“It’s becoming a pervasive problem,” said McCabe, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School in New Jersey. “It happens a lot in last-minute situations. The paper isn’t done, and it’s the night before it’s due. If they don’t get caught, it’s tempting to do it again.”
University authorities consider this practice to be a violation of conduct codes, and the penalty can range from a failing grade on an assignment to expulsion.
David Hoffman, assistant dean of student affairs at Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo., said it’s important for faculty to root out cheating.
“I don’t want my surgeon, my structural engineer, my airline pilot thinking it’s OK to cut corners,” he said.
Universities now have tools to uncover Internet cheating.
Hoffman said faculty at Truman State use a service called turnitin.com, which matches a student’s paper with text found on the Internet, whether cut and pasted into the student’s own work or purchased wholesale. The service costs the university between $3,000 and $4,000, he said.
The service has uncovered several instances of cut-and-paste plagiarism at Truman State. But Hoffman said when a case of cheating comes to light, educators generally want to work with students to correct the behavior rather than punish them outright.
“We have small class sizes and focus on student development. We don’t have the Wal-Mart heiress going here,” he said, referring to Paige Laurie, who returned her degree from the University of Southern California after cheating allegations surfaced earlier this year.
McCabe favors tailoring assignments to make it harder for students to copy parts of generic essays and hand them in as original work. He regards that as better than relying on services such as turnitin.com.
He credited the anti-cheating services with starting a new trend: old-fashioned plagiarism from books found in a library.
“We’re starting to see the first rumblings of that now in our survey,” he said.