Net Gen kids cheat, they say….
OK, this annoys me. Apparently, we learn very little through the millennia.
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” ( Attributed to SOCRATES by Plato ~400BC)
Seems to me there are at least two problems that are skewing the results here.
First, after reading the article and some of the exhibits, I have to wonder if the problem is not that we are defining ‘cheating’ in a manner not appropriate for the times?
In one exhibit, students were told they could not work together so for that study students working together was considered cheating. Whether they become future academics or other professionals, these students will end up working in teams for the rest of their careers. It doesn’t make any sense to call that cheating.
The other problem – and one that is not given nearly as much scrutiny – has to do with the kinds of test students are given and the manner in which many faculty create them. I have been in academia for 30 years, and I rarely come across faculty who take the time to create good exams. Many routinely recycle the same questions year after year; they use multiple choice exams because they are easy to mark but they do not take the time to make sure their questions are good ones; and they use strategies for safeguarding their exams that were appropriate 40 years ago but make little sense now. Given that, it is not surprising that students have little respect for exams or the system that perpetuates this approach. How we as academics approach assessment must change, and when it does, how we define cheating will necessarily also change as will the students’ reaction to it.
