Cheating as Crypsis
Earlier, I posted a video about teachers cheating to achieve higher scores on standardized tests. These tests are used to judge performance, which must be outdone every year in order to show progress. Therefore, if you cheat one year, you must cheat better the next or else you will look like you've slacked. This kind of rationale is straight out of the student's playbook. Often, if you cheat once, you must continue to cheat in order to outshine your last stellar performance. This is why it is necessary to acquire a range of techniques for cheating. Do not expect that the same method will produce the same results every time; even the laws of physics are fallible.
I have asked some other TAs from different majors to share experiences of catching cheaters in order to help you succeed. Here is a bit of info from the sciences: "Physics and math are pretty hard subjects to cheat in, because it's never about the formula, it's about how the formula is derived and how it applies to the problem at hand. People cheat all the time on their homework (at least in the classes that i TA'd) but would get totally killed on the tests." So, how can we come up with ways to cheat on these types of exams? Are in-class exams the only bastion of hope for the teacher to measure your ability? Should you just get a friend to take the test for you?
Another TA from the humanities reports, "In a class, I had a case where the exam was open notes. I discovered one student had lifted many sentences from several web sites including Wikipedia. In her appeal hearing, the student claimed that she may have visited Wiki in her quest to gain understanding, but that her exam answers came entirely from her head, and that the similarity was either due to coincidence or subconscious memories. Believe it or not, she actually got off. I was pissed. In addition the faculty jury claimed that the exam was not clear enough that outside sources were not allowed." Here, we have another interesting problem: what should you do if you get caught? What are your options for making up the right excuse? What kinds of excuses have succeeded and which have failed? I will be scouring the internet to find answers to these questions and post them as they develop.
For now, I'd like to relate another story about cheating from my own experiences as a TA. I do not like catching cheaters. It is a lot of work to find your stolen sources and it rarely produces gratitude from professors. In fact, I suspect that professors hate it when we catch you. It is just so much effort to bring you to justice that reducing a grade and/or "giving the benefit of the doubt" are our first responses.
For example, last year I was TAing a course that had a student who already dropped the class the year before because it was "too hard." She was a theater major and taking the class to meet her liberal arts credit. She was a 54 year old housewife, who had not written a paper in 30+ years. She had the benefit of almost all the notes from the previous year to back her up and the essay questions had not changed. In a way, she was best positioned to actually learn something. As the essay deadline drew near, she stopped attending class and discussion. She handed in her paper on the due date (a hardcopy to me and one to turnitin.com). Without fail, the turnitin.com reported back plargarism from gradesaver.com. It was nauseating to see this because I knew that if she had just written what she knew, she could have probably pulled a C. Now, I was forced to hand the paper over to the prof and he would deal with it. The professor, obviously empathetic to her situation, allowed for a rewrite. Yet, even with the almost two full semesters of lectures and notes, she dropped the class.
This kind of situation was terrifically annoying. Instead of asking for help, coming to office hours, or trying, she just gave up. But, the real issue arose a few weeks later when I ran into the student at a coffee cart. She tried to pretend not to see me when she was getting her brew, but I walked right up to her and asked how she was doing in a welcoming tone. She immediately burst out, "I didn't cheat, you know!" I was caught off guard and replied "Ok well, that's fine cause you didn't get a grade anyway." She then explained that she had asked her daughter for help on the paper and the daughter "supplemented" her paper with some "clarifications" from the internet. She said she did not realize that you couldn't do that because when she wrote papers in high school nearly 35 years ago, no one cited anything to the degree that we want citations now. And it dawned on me, of course, the rules had changed since then. But how? And why?
Plagiarism is, for lack of a better phrase, learning by replication. We have many examples of this all around us. In the biological sciences, we prize mimicry as the way that we learn to adapt AND to survive in harsh environments. In the social sciences, G.H. Mead suggests that taking on the role of others and assuming their qualities and behaviors is the way that children become socialized into adulthood. The case of this student showed me that she had honestly believed she was following the rules when "supplementing" her words with the text of others. She said that it helped her to clarify what she was trying to say in a way that the reader could better understand. This is similar to the way a chameleon will change colors to better blend into the environment. She believed that her words alone would not get her the desired outcome, so she modified what she wrote to better blend in with the other students.
Can you spot the frog in this picture?
However, today's students need to adapt in novel ways due to plagiarism detection software. I propose that thinking about cheating through a notion of crypsis, the ability to avoid detection, might yield better results. Like animals that want to avoid being eaten, there are four critical stages to getting away with cheating:avoid detection (be slick in the way that you cheat), avoid attack (if caught try to make the predator think they saw something else), avoid capture (either be part of a heard or run like hell), and avoid punishment (if caught, distract, misdirect, cry, or feign injury). At each of these stages a range of techniques and excuses must be available to you. For the student whose daughter got her into a tight jam, she ran away to avoid punishment, but really she should have rewritten the paper for grade because she had successfully deflected my initial attack claiming that she was a willful plagiarizer. Knowledge of these stages may only help you survive longer, but may not lead to better grades unfortunately.