July 7, 2010--Cribbing

Even cheating on exams has gone ultra high-tech. If thus inclined, in my day we would try to sneak a peek at some smart kid's answer sheet or, if there were no smart kids in our class, we'd write the Pythagorean Theorem with a ballpoint pen on the palm of our hand. If along the way we experienced brain lock we'd have a2 + b2 = c2 ready at literal hand.

Now, according to an article in the New York Times (linked below) desperate studntes are doing things such as chewing gum to disguise speaking into a hands-free cell phone while trying to get a friend to phone in answers; or using a camera hidden in a pen to photograph the computer screen of a neighbor test taker, also to be wirelessly sent out to a confederate or to digitalize and then copy onto the cheater's own screen.

Faced with these new forms of perverse cleverness, to deter cheating, schools are forbidding gum chewing during exams (proctors roam the room to confiscate any illegal Juicy Fruit); computers used for test taking are recessed in desk tops so as to make it difficult for miscreants to read or photograph their buddies' work; and, lower-tech, kids are forbidden to wear caps with brims turned forward since the underpart of the brim is an ideal place to write crib notes.

High schools and colleges are making a big investment to stop cheating on exams and plagiarizing term papers. Early on in the development of the Internet, realizing that one could make almost as much hustling school essays as from on-line pornography, Web entrepreneurs were so clever at their craft that they were able to stay many steps ahead of faculty and school administrators in selling papers and take-home finals.

But then school officials struck back. They turned to other Websites and anti-cheating services to help stamp out the problem. The best of these is the cleverly named Turnitin.com which helps with the plagiarism plague. Its database, in effect a giant search engine, is now used by 9,500 high schools and colleges. It can compare something a student has allegedly written with billions and billions of archived Web pages to see if he has copied something from the Internet.

And a big problem it is--at least 60 percent of undergraduates confess to having cheated on assignments and exams.

I'm sure that Turnitin does an excellent job, but students continue to try to outsmart it. And it appears quite a few succeed. My favorite scam, not easily detectable by high-tech surveillance (some institutions are even videotaping students taking exams and then review the tapes to see if anyone can be seen cheating) is the one pulled off by the well-tattooed student who wrote notes all over his arms, blending them in with his tatts--a2 + b2 = c2?

I can't help but wonder how school officials figured that one out.