Cheating rates on the rise, and why they may get worse

Two items of interest to report today, relating to cheating. The first is a survey that studied cheating at the graduate level. The results are quite alarming, according to the Reuters report:

The study of 5,300 graduate students in the United States and Canada found that 56 percent of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the past year, with many saying they cheated because they believed it was an accepted practice in business.

Following business students, 54 percent of graduate engineering students admitted to cheating, as did 50 percent of physical science students, 49 percent of medical and health-care students, 45 percent of law students, 43 percent of liberal arts students and 39 percent of social science and humanities students.

Regardless of which group cheats more, this is a very scrary set of statistics. Not just because the numbers are so high, but also because it reflects admitted cheaters, as opposed to all cheaters.

Of course, I only read the Reuters summary, not the original paper, and there could be flaws in the methodology, sample size, etc.

The second item I'd like to point to describes an apparent move away from electronic cheating detection tools. From Techdirt:

... at least one university banned the use of Turnitin, one of the most popular services in this field. It seems that the student rebellion against such tools is growing, as many more students are questioning the legality of such tools, and asking their schools to stop using them. They're not just upset about the uploads, but about the assumption of guilt. While there clearly is plenty of plagiarism to go around, that doesn't mean this is the right solution to it. It's often easy to just throw technology at a problem, but it's worth recognizing that doing so always raises unexpected issues -- and those issues may not be technological on their own, but legal and cultural issues. It seems like many of the schools who jumped on the Turnitin bandwagon didn't spend much time thinking about those additional consequences, and are now facing student anger because of it.

I don't agree with Techdirt's analysis or the "cultural issues" part, but the legality issue is worth considering. If such tools are banned for legal reasons at other schools, it's quite likely that cheating will become even more pevasive.