Irony, Texas Style

From MSNBC

Dude — you guys plagiarized an honor code?
Draft of Texas school’s code bears uncanny resemblance to other schools'
The Associated Press
March. 30, 2008

SAN ANTONIO - Their goal was an honor code that discouraged cheating and plagiarizing.

However, the wording in a draft by students at the University of Texas at San Antonio appears to match another school's code — without proper attribution.

The student currently in charge of the honor code project said it was an oversight, but cheating experts say it illustrates a sloppiness among Internet-era students who don't know how to cite sources properly and think of their computers as cut-and-paste machines.

"That's the consequence of the Internet and the availability of things," said Daniel Wueste, director of the Rutland Institute for Ethics at Clemson University. "It doesn't feel like what would be in a book. You Google it and here it comes."

Student Akshay Thusu said that when he took over the project a month ago he inherited a draft by earlier project participants, including a group of students who attended a conference five years ago put on by The Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson.

Materials from the conference, which are used by many universities, were probably the main source of UTSA's proposed code, Thusu said. That's why parts of the Texas draft match word-for-word the online version of Brigham Young University's code.

BYU credited the Center for Academic Integrity, but the San Antonio draft doesn't.

That will change, said Thusu, who plans to include proper citation and attribution when the draft is submitted to the faculty senate.

"We don't want to have an honor code that is stolen," Thusu said.

Cheating. The Conversation Continues

From the Los Angeles Times

Exam cheating goes high tech, but its causes are nothing new
Students invent new methods, schools counter with new safeguards. But the
underlying issue of honesty has changed little.

By Carla Rivera
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 30, 2008

When six Harvard Westlake students were expelled last month for stealing midterm exams at the academically rigorous school, the incident highlighted an old problem facing educators: cheating. A 2006 national survey found that more than 60% of high school students said they had cheated on a test, and the number of self-admitted cheaters has steadily risen over the years. Students today can use an array of high-tech gadgetry, challenging schools to keep pace.

One click of the Internet opens a world of possibilities and temptations, devious and ingenious, with Web sites devoted to the best cheating practices, and cheating tutorials on YouTube. One YouTube compilation offers such strategies as taping answers under a tie and designing a T-shirt with a cheat sheet printed on the front in a form that can be overlooked as a logo. In another, a young man recounts his method of stretching a rubber band over a textbook and writing answers on it. When the rubber band isn't stretched, his writing looks like harmless ink stains.

Yet another video explains how to remove a wrapper from a drink bottle and create a duplicate carrying test answers. Although camera phones with pictures of an answer sheet, and text messages from friends outside the classroom are still the most ubiquitous electronic techniques, many schools have caught on and now ban devices such as cellphones and iPods during tests.

More recent innovations are button cameras, which have a wireless connection to a laptop computer that can then capture stolen test items, and pens capable of scanning a test and sending a video signal to a remote laptop to save the images. One 17-year-old senior, who attends a Westside high school, said he once turned in an essay for English class that he had taken off a Web site. He said he probably would not do it again because he believes it is now easier to get caught plagiarizing. The student, who gave only his first name, said he receives good grades and didn't feel the need to cheat now, but admitted that sometimes there is a lot of pressure.

"I don't think there's as much [cheating] going on as people think, but yeah, it's happening," said Christopher, interviewed at the Howard Hughes Center in Westchester. "It's mainly because society puts all this pressure on teenagers, saying you better do good or you won't get to college or you'll be second-rate."

Motivating students to cheat, educators said, are factors such as the pursuit of admission to the 'best' colleges and the fear that not cheating will put them at a disadvantage. And add to that the stories in the news -- dishonest athletes, politicians and even parents ready to behave unethically, for example, to obtain Hannah Montana tickets.

In the last few weeks, married New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned amid a sex scandal, and the supposed gang memoir of a mixed-race foster child named Margaret B. Jones turned out to have been written by Margaret Seltzer, a white woman from the San Fernando Valley who attended Campbell Hall, a private school in North Hollywood. "It's a mistake to talk about school cheating without referring to society at large," said Michael Josephson, founder and president of the Los Angeles-based Josephson Institute of Ethics, a nonprofit consulting and training firm. "We need to connect these dots and ask what is our attitude toward cheating, because kids are going to absorb that attitude. . . . And cheating learned in school is habit-forming."

Many educators are searching for their own answers. David Bryan, head of New Roads School, a private campus in Santa Monica, dealt with a cheating scandal at his own campus a few years ago and recently spoke with a student who had been expelled from Harvard Westlake for the same thing. The student's family was likable and the student contrite, Bryan said. The student ultimately did not apply for admission, but Bryan is unsure whether he would have given the boy a second chance."On the one hand, why would I want to bring this kid into our community," said Bryan. "On the other, does that mean that we're supposed to give up on this kid and not give him a second chance?"

Schools increasingly are turning to test-security firms that use computer software capable of picking out anomalies in multiple-choice exams and identifying plagiarized material. Many more, such as New Roads, are also assuming responsibility for helping students to navigate the minefield of moral and ethical behavior with character-building curricula and ethics workshops.

Bryan said he was under no illusion that his campus was free of cheating. It was established in 1995 and has more than 640 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, spread over four campuses. Under the school's policy, students caught cheating the first time must forfeit credit for the assignment or test and do the work over again. A second occurrence will get them expelled.

An ironic subtext of a Society and Ethics class he led one recent morning was that several of those present had been involved in a 2005 cheating incident at New Roads in which about 50 students were briefly suspended for exploiting a computer glitch to get answers to a math assignment."I take as a given that young people are going to make bad decisions," said Bryan. "Now is the time to catch them, when the result is not going to be a federal indictment."

There is no doubt that students are conflicted. Bryan posed a series of scenarios to his class, involving shoplifting, stealing, plagiarism, drug use and cheating, and asked: What is more important: friendship or values? Only one student admitted to cheating in the past year, and many said cheating and theft were wrong under any circumstances. But one, who said that his friends shoplift, said he would discourage them from stealing from a small mom-and-pop store but might encourage taking items from one owned by a big corporation.

Students said there is a temptation to cheat if the consequence of not cheating is a bad grade."You're afraid your parents will punish you and take things away from you, and maybe you really, really studied hard to pass," said senior Johnny Winestock, 17. The most recent survey conducted by the Josephson Institute, in 2006, found virtually no geographical or gender differences in the numbers of students who admit to cheating. Students attending parochial and private schools cheated at a slightly higher rate, as did varsity athletes.

And there is anecdotal evidence that top-achieving students also cheat at higher rates, said Josephson.The number of self-admitted cheaters peaked during a survey in 2004 at 72%, before falling to 61% in 2006. That is about the same number as 1992, when the first survey was conducted. But Josephson said it may be that fewer students are now willing to admit they cheat.

And he dismissed justifications that students are under more pressure than those of past years. "I'm appalled by that argument," he said, adding that it becomes a silent apology for cheaters. "If that's the case, then don't get mad at Enron, because they were under pressure, and don't get mad at Jason Blair [the former New York Times reporter who was found to have plagiarized and fabricated articles] because he was under pressure."

Many students themselves also discount the idea that they are overwhelmed."You have friends who are into a lot of drama," said Alyssa Atain, 16, who attends the private Vistamar School in El Segundo. "There's drugs and alcohol. You're thinking about college, and are you going away and are you strong enough to go away. But I've always pushed myself a lot to do well rather than feeling pressure from the outside. And one thing they do very well at Vistamar is teach you to take pride in who you are as a student."Richard Perlmutter, whose 16-year-old daughter Ruby attends New Roads, said he was attracted to the school in large part because "the culture here is that beating other people and getting ahead is not the primary objective."

There is an increasing body of opinion among educators that cheating may be an expression of the way schools approach teaching and learning. And as schools and teachers come to face more high-stakes standardized testing, the worse it will become, said Gary J. Niels, who has studied cheating behavior and wrote a 2003 paper on honor codes.

Studies found that when teachers were vague in explaining the relevance and importance of curricula, students perceived the lessons as a waste of time and were more likely to cheat. Fact-driven data that had to be "regurgitated," said Niels, also correlated to higher incidents of cheating.

Niels, who is head of the private Winchester Thurston School in Pittsburgh, also found that honor and integrity codes have little influence if they are purely adult or faculty driven. Although there are practical techniques that can reduce cheating, the entire school community must participate if it is to be prevented. Even with the ease of access to new technology, the Harvard Westlake students who were caught cheating took the old-fashioned route -- they apparently distracted teachers and stole history and Spanish exams while teachers weren't looking. School officials are dealing with the breach and are holding discussions with students about how to abide by the school's honor code. Six sophomores were expelled and more than a dozen students who allegedly viewed the tests were suspended.

Cheating among Millennials does seem consistent with some of their core characteristics and values: collaboration and high achievement. I've noticed in the last couple of years that my students seem to judge cheating off a willing participant (like a friend or someone who charges money for the information) less harshly than cheating that involves an unwitting participant. They seem to understand that cheating and plagiarism are theft and believe that they can be consented to.

When I was in college, applying for minimum-wage jobs, I remember that some companies had a kind of "honesty inventory" that applicants had to complete. I wonder if there's something like that that could be made part of the law school application. If cheating is going to rise (if these attitudes are prevalent in high school students now, we can expect it to continue at least until these folks get out of law school, 8-10 years from now), we ought to get on the ball in figuring out how to not only detect and punish actual cheating (which law schools are woefully deficient at -- more on that another time), but we probably also ought to figure out how to detect attitudes that could lead to cheating.

More of those Nice Young People

Starting with Life Before Noon, I stumbled onto a network of Millennial blogs that paint a very different picture of Millennials than the media portrays. These nice young people are much more of what I was expecting (and experiencing for the most part) and far less of what I've been hearing about until very, very recently. Here are a few of their blogs worth checking out (and even recommending to your students; a little peer pressure couldn't hurt):

Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist: Advice at the intersection of work and life

Penelope Trunk writes career advice for a new generation of workers. She explains why old advice - like pay your dues, climb the ladder, and don’t have gaps in your resume - is outdated and irrelevant in today’s workplace. She has a reputation for giving advice that is counterintuitive but effective, like take long lunches, ignore people who steal your ideas, and stop vying for a promotion.

Trunk is known for test-driving her advice before spewing it. Her own career choices have been featured by Time magazine and the Guardian as examples of the new issues people face at work today. Both the New York Times and Business Week cited Trunk’s writing as especially in tune with this new workplace. In her personal life, Trunk routinely (often awkwardly) demonstrates buzzwords before they buzz, like the quarterlife crisis, portfolio career, and shared-care parenting.

Her book is Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success (Warner Books, May 2007.)

Trunk spent ten years as a marketing executive in the software industry and then she founded two companies of her own. She has endured an IPO, a merger and a bankruptcy. Prior to that she was a professional beach volleyball player.

Brazen Careerist

What’s this site all about?
Remember those college career centers that you never used? You probably wish you had taken advantage of them (like we do), but now (maybe) it’s too late. Well that’s what we’re here for. We’re an online career center aimed at Generation Y — young professionals who want to design and define their careers using the new rules for success.

What’s a Brazen Careerist?
A Brazen Careerist knows that defining your own career, finding the right field, and pursuing it are key ingredients to a fulfilling life. Like the tag line suggests, when you define your career on your own terms first, you control your life.

Where are all the good bloggers?
Right here, of course. The Internet is loaded with talented writers, but there is no way to easily search for them. The Brazen Careerist network is made up of a vibrant, curious and ambitious group of career-minded bloggers, passionately covering a variety of fields: personal development, entrepreneurship, public relations, technology, marketing, and politics, each blog offers a unique, informed perspective to our ever-expanding audience.

Are all the network bloggers writing about careers?
No! We believe that everyone should write about their passion. If your current job isn’t focused on your passion, then you should do whatever you can to turn your passion into your career. Whether you want to be a fashion designer or the next great pro volleyball player, then you should be actively writing and reading about those interests. So join our conversation and make your voice heard!

Twenty Set

Twenty Set was created by Monica O’Brien. Monica originally had the idea to start a blog about topics she was interested in, such as gaining wealth and becoming an adult, in order to build her personal brand and establish a name for herself in social media circles. As a younger member of the twenty set, she struggles with the concept of success and how to achieve it, and wanted to share what she has learned with other people in their twenties who may have the same questions.

Young Go Getter

YGG began as a small forum back in August of 2005. It was originally created as an alternative to the other entrepreneur forums available at that time.

Since then, it’s grown into a large community of young go getters spread across the globe. It’s no longer just a forum. It’s exactly what our tagline says it is, the business playground for entrepreneurs young at heart.

We’re now on version 4 or so, built upon the lessons learned from the mistakes we made in the previous versions and the invaluable feedback from all of our members. It will continuously evolve as we make more mistakes and experiment with the standards implied upon most communities.

Hopefully YGG becomes a daily read for you and enables you to develop contacts and businesses that you normally wouldn’t.

Millennial Women Speak

As with many areas in the blogosphere (except feminism and parenting, it seems), male bloggers outnumber female bloggers. The same is true of blogs by Millennials about Millennials. But I've just found a great blog written by women: "Life Before Noon: A Millenial's Manual."

Life Before Noon is meant to be a voice for and by the Millennial Generation.

All five creators are college seniors with our looming graduation date fast-approaching. We want to foster an environment that promotes a dialogue about Millennials’ transition after college.

Through this dialogue we hope to generate a positive, respectful community that is open to all opinions. We don’t claim to be an authority, but we hope to help guide the conversation, while we ourselves navigate this period of life.

Here's just a sample of what these impressive collegiate women have to say:

On leadership

Leadership is about stepping outside of yourself. While our generation is inherently concerned with failure (myself included), we often focus too much on our personal advancement.

Throughout my college years, I have done minimal volunteer work. Granted I have volunteered a couple hours here and there each semester and donated money to causes, but that’s where my volunteering and philanthropic work ended. I was engrossed in advancing my studies, my activities, my internship, my job, my work, my blog, me, me, me, me. Of course I cared for the community and environment, but I was so overly consumed with advancing myself that I was blind to advancing the people in need around me. I had a case of Millennial passion and fear of failure to the max. I also wanted to wear that fancy suit.

On professionalism

What is professionalism? Wouldn’t it be great if you could buy it in a book, find it on the Internet or take it in pill form?

While trying to find myself over the past 3.5 years, I have transformed from a student into a young professional-in-training by taking several critical steps, mostly without even knowing. By becoming more professional in school situations, I have felt more prepared to enter the working world. Here are a few ways I have tried to become a young professional-in-training while still in college:

Having a mindset of a professional. Go to work, the library and class to get school work done. Set aside other times for socialization on or off campus. Meet with other students to work on group projects in a professional manner. Write e-mails to professors and peers in a timely manner.

Asking questions and listening. Knowledge is power.

Dressing the part. Sweatpants are for the gym and sleeping.

Finding a job or internship. Having a job or internship on or off campus requires the time management that is necessary for success in college and the working world. Jobs and internships allow students to gain technical and interpersonal skills.

Following the “24 hour rule”. Aim to get major assignments done at least a day in advance. This will leave time for editing or review, both in school and on the job.

Getting there early. Follow the old “if you are five minutes early you are on time, if you are on time, you are late” adage.

Having confidence. College is usually a welcoming community. Take advantage of everything your school has to offer, you may gain skills, knowledge and friendships.

I think of professionalism as a mindset that can be practiced in college. By taking simple steps to change our mindsets while in school, hopefully the transition into the real world will come easier during our first”real” job.

And in that post, the headings were even grammatically parallel!

If you want to see the best of what this generation has to offer, check in periodically with Life Before Noon. I wonder if any of the women want to go to law school . . .

Cheater, Cheater, Pumpkin Eater, part 2

Law21, a blog by Canadian lawyer and journalist Jordan Furlong, has an interesting take on the question of cheating versus collaboration. It's interesting to see Xer logic ("be practical; this is how law practice works") applied to Millennial behavior (collaborating in as many aspects of life as possible) on an ethical issue that I don't think either generation full "gets."

All I can say is, I’d love to see the law school that tries to flunk a student for setting up a Facebook study group, as Ryerson University in Toronto did this week. Maybe this is a generational thing — I’m officially an X’er, though my leanings are more millennial — but I can’t see how an online discussion group does anything but facilitate learning, not circumvent it. And more to the point, how it’s any different from students gathering in an empty room on campus to do exactly the same thing. I expect Ryerson will change course within a matter of days.

What strikes me, though, is that the way in which we expect students to accomplish tasks in school is very different from how we actually accomplish tasks in our workplaces. If you’re working on a factum or a memo and you’re not sure about something you’re writing, do you head down to the library for an afternoon of thrashing through the authoritative source materials till you’ve learned what you need, “showing your work” as you go? No. You walk down the hall and ask a colleague who’s more familiar with the subject to explain it to you. It’s faster, easier, cheaper for the client, and almost certainly more effective in understanding the concept.

Teamwork is how things get done now, without exception, in the professional world. Law firms boast about “open-door policies” whereby lawyers exchange ideas with each other, and they make great efforts to pool collective knowledge into KM systems. New recruits are quizzed on their ability to work well in groups and contribute towards successful team dynamics. Corporate deals and major litigation require concerted, collective efforts to achieve goals. Online listservs like Solosez are a lifeline for sole practitioners. Corporate law departments want closer working relationships with their outside counsel. In short, no one succeeds in the legal environment by shunning collaborative efforts.

Yet law schools still devote the majority of their time to testing what an individual student can do on her own, not what she can accomplish in a group setting. Unlike MBA programs, where students work on cases in group after group, many law students can graduate without ever having contributed to a team project, learning how to integrate their expertise into a diverse set of personalities and workflow preferences. If there’s any truth to the old charge that law schools “don’t prepare students for law practice,” it’s not in failing to teach professional skills per se, but in failing to train students to learn from each other, to treat knowledge as a gift to be shared, and to give the best of themselves towards the success of the team.

Any law school that wants to earn a real competitive advantage, in terms of producing graduates ready to professionally collaborate, should think seriously about revamping its curriculum to encourage the academic equivalent of Facebook groups: live, in-person, problem-solving working groups, with rotating memberships to ensure you’re not just working with people you like. Increasingly, lawyers will succeed or fail on their teamwork skills; law schools have an obligation to reflect that.

Cheater, Cheater, Pumpkin Eater

The New York Times offers lesson plans and other tools for educators at its NYT on the Web Learning Network. Of particular interest to me is the one on academic honesty and plagiarism. Setting aside the irony of having the New York Times provide a curriculum on plagiarism (just Google "New York Times" and "plagiarism") and the fact that it's designed for primary and secondary education, it still looks like a handy resource for any professor looking for resources to teach about the ethics of learning. And it couldn't come at a better time.

Certainly cheating and plagiarism have always been with us, but it seems like previous generations at least knew when they were cheating and made a decision to cross the line or not. And previous generations seemed to self-police better (not my particular generation; Xers know that it's only cheating if you get caught). But these days, I hear more and more stories of Millennial students who cheat in various ways but seem to either not know they're cheating or -- because of a scale of moral relativism where some cheating is not as bad as other cheating -- just don't care that they're cheating. The moral relativism concerns me as does the oblivion to which acts are honest and which are dishonest.

I'm wondering if at least a piece of the problem isn't that the word "honor" doesn't seem to mean what it used to. For these kids, "honor" just means smart, as in "Honor Society." You don't have to be particularly honorable to get into the Honor Society; you just have to have good grades. But I hasten to add that no generation makes up its own values out of whole cloth. The Millennials are the product of the generation that raised them . . . Governor Spitzer. Surely the pressure by parents to excel, excel, excel has something to do with the Millennial attitude that cheating just isn't the sin it used to be.