Stop Chasing High-Tech Cheaters

In classroom after classroom, all across the nation, students are being asked to memorize and regurgitate trivia at the expense of time spent learning what is essential in the 21st Century. As one letter to the Times editors asked, “In today’s information age, where a body of information in all but the narrowest of fields is beyond anyone’s ability to master, why aren’t colleges teaching students how to research, organize and evaluate the information that is out there?” Why, one must ask, would a journalism professor in 2006 be testing skills from the Remington typewriter and linotype era?

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We need to face the facts. If I need a quick answer outside of school and can’t quite remember what I need to know, I will Google the topic, or I will call someone, or text someone, or e-mail someone. One of these sources will, if I know how to operate this technology efficiently and effectively, provide me with the essential information. That’s not cheating, that is life. Only in a classroom is this considered “wrong.” Everywhere else it is viewed as “intelligent,” because we all know that we cannot know everything. —Ira SocolStop Chasing High-Tech Cheaters (Inside Higher Ed)

The author makes a good point.

My wife thinks I have a poor memory because she says I forget important things. While I’ve never been good with names, I’m very good at finding things based on a clue or a half-remembered detail. When she sees the eight or ten overlapping windows on my tiny laptop screen, she sees chaos, but I see information.

I don’t carry the facts in my head; instead, I carry the processes that I use in order to get the facts that I need.

In defense of the journalism professor who issued a spelling test, it’s very true that you can’t get very far if you have to look up every word. But if the assignment is designed properly, those students who do have to use their spell-checkers will take up time that will prevent them from working on some other area of the test. But a spell-check won’t solve the “affect/effect” or “than/then” confusion; so that’s the kind of thing that it makes sense to teach.

Another telling quote from the article: “Just three days after publishing the ‘Cheating’ article the Times itself had to publish a lengthy retraction of a front page story. The prominent printing of false information could have been avoided, the newspaper’s Public Editor noted, had the news staff simply Googled its own articles.”

And to Socol’s confession, let me add that I rely heavily on Wikipedia when I first encounter new information.

5 thoughts on “Stop Chasing High-Tech Cheaters

  1. Dennis, This could turn into a more serious topic. Personally, I think people are mold by society. To survive, People learn from the society. Loopholes will be learned if no bad consequence are evidenced. A society rewards skin-deep beauties, is likely to lack the taste of fine arts. So. It’s hard to be a good teacher, a good parent and a responsible citizen. I constantly feel my influences on my child.

  2. Duncan, I agree with you about the ultimate goal students “should” have. By the time they get to my freshman comp classroom, however, they’ve already internalized a set of survial skills that have worked for them. Regurgitation, applying details from the author’s biography, relating the protagonist’s experiences to events from their own lives, and getting “the right answer” printed in the back of the book.

  3. It’s all about teaching. The real point is what is the goal of that class. Did student learn what need be learn in that class. If the goal is to learn to research, I don’t see anything wrong using the google for finding info – of cause, research also require you verify the info. On the other hand, if this is a writing class, you better write it in your own language. This turn to the point that the most important thing in education, in my view, is the building of ethics and responsibilities. Students’ goal should be learning and not be getting high scores.

  4. With the high-profile scandals hitting Enron, I’m not so sure the business world is the best place to look for examples, but certainly ethics and the consequences of misbehavior are important topics.

  5. I think the issue should not be looking up information but using that information incorrectly. If you are writing a paper for school and you google a topic or use spell check it should not matter. What I am concerned with in school today is cheating via plagiarism. Students in schools seem to think it is perfectly fine to take information off the internet and paste it into their papers as if it was their own work. Or use one of the paper writing websites. They can have some amazing justifications for this as well. What they need to realize is they will one day be caught. Colleges are using better and better technology to catch plagiarism. If they do not learn in college what happens when they get into the working world? Do they think their bosses are going to let them copy their neighbors work as their own, or steal their competition?s ideas? This should be the focus of schools, not spelling tests.

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