Thing 7c: Google reader–David Warlick’s 2 cents
In David Warlick’s post Where’s the Line? from his blog entitled 2 cents worth, he talks about how it is getting harder and harder to prevent students from cheating given the technology today. He gives the example of the student who wrote a partial article for Wikipedia and waited for editors to add to it before printing it out and turning it in as his own. Secondly, he talks about students outsourcing their college coursework to other countries from minor assignments to final projects for small fees. Most of this happens and is very hard to detect, if at all. This is interesting and all so true on the high school front as well.
I think back to how in high school I felt so lucky and rebellious getting a hold of a coveted copy of Cliffnotes (the paper version—we didn’t have Internet then). As far as technology making it easier to cheat, I remember the closest I came to it in college occurred when I saved a research paper on a neighbor’s computer, and she printed off her own copy and handed it in as her own.
The web can be a scary and frustrating place for a teacher. Trying to catch students cheating can be a Mission Impossible scenario unless they copy and paste something word for word from the Internet, which they sure don’t anymore. You can tell without a doubt a student didn’t write his paper but you couldn’t keep spending hours (I have done this) doing Google searches on various paragraphs and sentence variations. You just have to hope that some of them are still learning something and move on.
