With Good Reason

So, when is cheating not really cheating? Has the goal post moved or is it the changing technology that is making defining cheating that much harder? And, what exactly are study groups and peer tutoring and when are they considered cheating?

For example, is it okay to work with a group of fellow students if you are working in a university library or at the kitchen table? Would that be considered a study group? Or, if only one or two people are working together, would that be considered peer tutoring? Or, is it cheating?

Or, is it only cheating when you are working online — a relevant question given the fact that a group of Ryerson students found out the hard way that the powers that be at Ryerson think so? In fact, a student administrator of a Ryerson Facebook site is now fighting allegations of cheating that Ryerson has made against him.

As many of my regulars know, I used to teach university. It used to be relatively easy to spot plagiarism or copying. I had a good memory and would remember previous papers that I had marked. I also had a good eye for recognizing when writing style changed, typically improved, all in the same paper. In all my years I only actually found three people who eventually admitted to cheating. They had a note put on their university record, a note that would stay for life. That threat hangs over the head of the Ryerson student mentioned above.

Is that fair? I can recall working on my doctoral comprehensive exams. U of T actually arranged graduate student study groups. We would get together once or twice a week and share what we had each read and compare notes. Most of what we did was verbal but that was 1988. That was before the Internet. We were also paired with a partner which involved sharing notes and having lengthy discussions. Then, we each went our separate ways and wrote the exams. Everyone in my study group was in a separate room.

But, the bottom line is that I learned many things from my fellow students. If that was not considered “cheating” how is what the Ryerson students did any different? Getting the answers to a problem is not the end result. In an assignment or exam the students will still have to know how they got that answer.

Moreover, I taught entire university courses on “how to peer tutor.” Most who took the course were helping fellow students who had special needs. Would we now consider that sort of accommodation and support cheating?

To me there are clear differences between going online and finding a paper that fits the topic a student is supposed to write about and then fiddling with it and calling it your own. There is also a big difference when students actually hire a ghost writer to do their work for them.

And, you know what, professors know when that has happend. We know because when a student writes an essay in an exam situation, what they write is representative of their own voice. If their hand-in papers are different, then…..

Is cheating getting harder to define or are our society’s values changing? Certainly there are times when students cheat and they shouldn’t.  Don’t get me wong. I would be the last person to condone cheating. But, college and university’s are going to have to be very careful how they define cheating because there are always exceptions — such as the group work and peer tutoring I talked about above.

In the Ryerson case, the university is going to have to look at what really transpired on that Facebook site because sharing is not necessarily cheating. Do, for example, the students go on to write papers and exams on their own. If so, it was not cheating.

See other points of view here and here.

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C/P at Crux-of-the-Matter.