Online cheaters need a lesson in academic ethics

For those of us growing up in the 20th century, words such as “plagiarism” and “cheating” were discussed in campus corridors in hushed tones. Students who copied usually did so from a book, or over the shoulder of another; it didn’t get more advanced than that.

Now tech-savvy students are using the web to share assignments, giving an added meaning to the term “outsourcing”. Students farm out their coursework to anonymous online bidders. Business school professors at the University of Central England (UCE) in Birmingham unearthed what they termed “online cheating” when an assignment they had given to their students found its way to an auction website.

The trend of online cheating is mostly prevalent among those aspiring to be IT professionals since programming code is more difficult to spot than English prose. Students regularly use sites usually frequented by firms, to source low-cost developers. Thomas Lancaster and Robert Clarke from UCE conducted a study on one such website (www.rentacoder.com) and found that 10 per cent of all bids tendered were from students. The researcher duo called online cheating “the natural successor of plagiarism”.

As outsourcing your homework becomes more popular, the cost of buying an assignment online is coming down. An essay can be obtained for as little as $5 (Dh18.3). It is a win-win situation for students who are too lazy to do their own work and have the disposable income to offload it.

This growing phenomenon leads one to question the validity of degrees awarded by universities. But bringing culprits to task is not an easy job given that plagiarism detection tools, such as Turnitin, are unable to detect outsourced work if a student submits “original work” bought at a premium price from a website. In addition, it is not feasible for the teaching fraternity to monitor all websites for student postings. It would be pointless to try since students use fake names.

The popularity of outsourcing coursework defies logic since the quality of assignments in many cases is extremely poor. Cheap assignments are copied word for word from an existing source, and in some cases a single assignment is recycled many times by bidders, claim academics. Poor quality of assignments defeats the very purpose of outsourcing since they fetch low grades. However, many outsourcing websites charge a hefty amount to create original, bespoke assignments.

A partial solution probably lies in giving customised assignments to students. Those would be easy to detect on auction websites with the help of search engine alerts. Changing academic regulations and taking strict action against those found guilty might also work in the short-term to get students back on track.

However, neither technology nor draconian rules will offer long-term solutions. It is time for academic institutions to come up with out-of-the-box ideas to teach the Y-generation the ABCs of academic ethics.

 

online@business24-7.ae

- The writer is the Online Deputy Editor