PASTING THE GRADE

Bilver Singh has his own name for cheating in the digital age: “A and A”, or “alteration and amendment”. An associate political-science professor at the National University of Singapore, Singh grades hundreds of papers each year. In every batch, he says, there are always a few that are less than original. Nowadays, the suspect source is usually the Internet. “I’ve caught students quoting chunks of paragraphs,” says Singh. “But they are getting smarter.” Hence the rise of A and A: cutting a sentence here, pasting a phrase there, all the while using the on-screen thesaurus to replace suspiciously complicated words with more age-appropriate ones.

For all its benefits, the rise of technology in the classroom has made it far easier for students to cheat – and get away with it. In the pre-Internet days, plagiarism meant painstakingly copying paragraphs out of the encyclopedia; today kids can simply highlight the text, copy and insert. The practice is rampant around the globe; last month in Australia, the University of Newcastle was criticized for covering up a scandal in which the grades of 15 students, who had copied from the Internet were changed from failing to passing. According to a survey by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, 74 percent of US high-school students cheated in 2002. And those are just the ones who admitted it.

Fortunately, the same technology that makes it so easy for students to cheat is aiding teachers in catching them. The most popular antiplagiarism service, Turnitin.com, compares a student’s term paper with everything on the Internet. Turnitin.com has clients in 51 countries; in Britain, nearly 700 public universities – including Oxford and Cambridge – have signed up for the service. Even schools in the notoriously law-abiding nation of Singapore recently adopted the program.

Educators are trying to upgrade their in-class tactics as well. Experts say teachers should make it more difficult for students to “cut and paste” by changing the assignments every year and requiring more analysis than description. And teachers shouldn’t assume that kids even know what plagiarism is, as many just aren’t taught how to source or reference properly.

But even when they know better, kids can succumb to the intense academic pressure and mounting time constraints they face. Critics blame parents and educators for emphasizing results over academic integrity. For many school administrators, it’s easier to ignore the problem than deal with an irate parent calling to ask why they are paying $30,000 per year for Jimmy to get a failing grade. Nobody wants to get an F for effort.

(From ‘Newsweek’)

Choose the best answer to the following questions.

1. By saying “in every batch … there are always a few (papers) that are less than original”, Professor Singh means that

A. the papers are not so original as he would like them to be.

B. the papers were copied from the Internet.

C. the papers are shorter than the original materials.

2. The information given in paragraphs 2 and 3 proves that

A. cheating has become quite widespread.

B. teachers can’t determine whether their students’ papers have been copied from the Internet.

C. cheating has become quite sophisticated.

3. Which of the following is not the reason why children cheat?

A. Many of them do not know what plagiarism is.

B. They are pressed for time.

C. It is more important for kids to get good grades than knowledge.

4. The implied meaning of the article is that

A. cheating leads to lower quality of education.

B. students should be taught to use the Internet properly.

C. teachers should ignore the problem of cheating.

 

V Read the article over again, find the following words and word combinations in the text and learn their meaning. Make it a particular point to use these words in the further discussion of the problem.

Cheating, alteration (to alter), amendment (to amend), plagiarism, painstakingly (to take (great) pains to do smth), to highlight a text, (students’) grades, to aid smb in doing smth, to sign up for a service, notorious(ly), law-abiding, to assume that, to source (a source), to reference (a reference), to know better, a passing / failing grade