AmericanPapist Comments
I cheat on the daily Jumble. ;-)
...And even that doesn't feel right. ;-)
As someone who has graded both high school and college assignments, I concur. But when all kids ever hear is about the importance of success (no matter how it is achieved), why should they feel more than a small pang of guilt when they're caught?
Where I've taught or been a teacher's assistant, I've never seen any social stigma from students attached to cheating on a test/essay.
About 15 years ago, my prof husband wrote a spreadsheet which gave his students individual homework problems so that they could not cheat. They were free to try to work the problems together, but the answer and the data were unique. It is even worse now.
Also, the children in the grade school my son attended would cheat and lie at the drop of a hat-first graders!!! It comes from a pagan upbringing. The children in the grade school did not know about God and His commandments and weren't being exhorted to follow them.
The internet is a problem, too. It is hard for people to distinguish between licit and illicit use of information from it. Some have the feeling that if it is on the internet, it is public and free.
Technology certainly facilitates cheating. But I'm not so sure that Amp's zeitgeist approach is valid. After all, Augustine went to the orchard, and not even for his own gain.
Perhaps it is just human nature in its different manifestations across time and space?
Plagiarism is so bad, that if you get caught . . . you might wind up as Vice President of the United States.
Every student I have ever caught plagiarizing did so by using the internet. I deliberately tell them to not use internet sites as sources when writing papers. The bottom line why college kids cheat, at least in philosophy classes: they can't (or won't) read.
Find me someone who panics and plagiarizes and I will show you someone who is confused and lost because they didn't properly do their reading, don't know how, and didn't ask for help when they got confused.
Oh, and Thomas, from a friend and educator, I concur with your assessment that this problem rests squarely on the shoulders of teachers. Why is it that they can't read in the first place? Lousy high school English classes, that's why. Find me someone who knows what the heck an indirect object is as a freshman in college and I will show you someone who was smart enough to take Latin in high school, not someone who merely did well in English classes. To make matters worse, conversing with TAs from other departments at my institution of higher learning frequently shocks me: some of the professors they work for are push-overs and cowards when it comes to giving kids Fs for plagiarism. I don't know whether I should believe reports like this or not, but it makes me want to give up from time to time.
Now, this is at a catholic institution mind you. One where "omnia vincit veritas" is carved over the doorway to the library. Too bad truth is supposedly conquering through the mediation of such limpid agents. Thinking about this makes me want to reread Closing of The American Mind again as comfort reading, despite my reservations about Herr Bloom. Thanks for getting my blood up right before I start my last grading plunge of the semester. No. Really.
lol, Teep. :)
When I was in high school and college, if you were caught cheating or plagarizing, you received an automatic "F"!
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