Keeping Evaluations in the Classroom Of course, even in this technological age, some students are so lazy they won’t even bother to match the font and the type size for one section of an assignment to another, as they indiscriminately cut and paste material from assorted websites. A Spanish teacher I know once told me of a student who handed in an essay she clearly plagiarized from a Web site. Unfortunately, the girl could not explain why her essay was written in the Catalan language as opposed to Spanish. Yet, we can’t count on incompetence. Many students are so wily and crafty that they’ve learned to mask their cheating to impressive levels. Some can find answers on handheld devices while looking you straight in the eye or appearing to be in deep, philosophical contemplation; others plagiarize from a dizzying array of sources and cover their trail with vigilance worthy of a CIA operative. So what must educators do? Start with limiting most evaluations to the classroom. Home assignments allow students to run amok with Internet materials.The legwork required to check assignments for plagiarism can siphon away a teacher’s time from doing the real work of teaching — preparing lessons and evaluating student work. By taking evaluations in the classroom, students are much more limited in how they can cheat, especially if teachers follow basic rules: all electronic devices must be put away,
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Alas, catching a cheater is not so easy anymore. A few years ago, students would write the answers on the inside labels of water bottles they brought into tests. Today we have students photographing the tests from their phones in an earlier period of the day, so that students in subsequent periods could know the questions before they walk into the classroom. Now catching the cheaters requires a level of vigilance and research better suited for the corridors of the National Security Agency than the cluttered desk of a humble teacher. Today, students wouldn’t have to rely merely on CliffNotes to provide them with handy, if highly unoriginal, commentaries on Hamlet. They have other choices, including study guides from SparkNotes, PinkMonkey, ClassicNotes, and BookRags, as well as a seemingly endless supply of articles online from both paid and unpaid sources. Just Google “Hamlet Essay,” and you’ll receive a listing of 1,460,000 results, the first page of which is teeming with free essays. Sure, you can track down some of the cheaters by typing in an excerpt of their essays on the very same Google search engine to discover the source. And such Web sites as Turnitin.com, which checks student papers against a massive archive of published and unpublished work for signs of plagiarism, can also be useful. But the available materials are so vast, and the opportunities for students to create hybrid papers so easy, that students are now one step ahead, especially since underground networks of materials are constantly cropping up, concealed from the peering eyes of teachers.
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SouthEast Education Network SPRING 2011
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