by Cindy Lewis
Daily Lobo
Every semester students spend hours writing papers and studying for exams, but it's hard for them to know if their peers are doing the same.
The rapid growth of technology has made it easier for students to cheat. With just a couple clicks of a button, students can obtain University-level papers from around the world.
Richard Johnson-Sheehan, director of rhetoric and writing in the UNM English department, said although the Internet has made it easier for students to plagiarize, it has made it just as easy for professors to check their works' originality.
The most popular antiplagiarism service on the Internet is Turnitin. According to Turnitin's Web site, www.turnitin.com, the program electronically prevents plagiarism by comparing a paper's content to millions of papers and publications on the Internet and to every student paper ever submitted to Turnitin.
It also prevents students from cutting and pasting passages from previously used sources.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Johnson-Sheehan said the system is one effective way to detect cheaters.
"When I have been suspicious that papers were plagiarized, I have run them through it (Turnitin)," Johnson-Sheehan said. "If it can find other papers in the database, it shows what percent of the paper was plagiarized."
Johnson-Sheehan said English professors use other methods to prevent cheating such as requiring students to turn in several drafts before a final paper is due.
"A way we prevent cheating is by using local issues so it's harder to find previously used papers on the Internet," he said.
A recent study by the Center for Academic Integrity shows 80 percent of college students admit to cheating at least once.
"I hear about a lot of students cheating," said Marina Weisert, a UNM sophomore majoring in nursing. "I would say about 75 percent of students have at least used some type of small cheat sheet for something like remembering a formula."
Randy Boeglin, dean of students, said he sees anywhere from two to six cases of "academic dishonesty" a year.
"There are certainly a lot more of them out there," Boeglin said. "But in those cases, the teacher simply fails them (the student)."
If a case of academic dishonesty reaches the dean's office, it comes as a referral, Boeglin said. If a student is found to have cheated, a range of sanctions from a warning to expulsion could apply, he said.
Along with the Internet, technology has made another type of cheating possible: the cell-phone method.
Last January, 12 students at the University of Maryland were caught cheating using their cell phones to cheat. An outside person looked up the answers on the class Web site, which posted the answers to the exam, then sent text messages to the students in the class. At least six of the 12 accused students were given failing grades in the class as a result.
"What you can do with a cell phone is so extensive," Weisart said. "I can understand how it could be easy to go online, get information and save it or text message each other with answers."
Boeglin said cheating is taken very seriously at UNM and there are consequences.
"I would think academic integrity is a core value at the University," he said. "Any kind of cheating is considered a serious violation of the student code of conduct."
