Professional Cheating Websites Essay

Random interview is the method that we are going to use for gathering data because in interviews information is obtained through inquiry and recorded by enumerators. Structured interviews are performed by using survey forms, whereas open interviews are notes taken while talking with respondents. The notes are subsequently structured interpreted foe further analysis. Open-ended interviews, which need to be interpreted and analyze even during the interview, have to be carried out by well-trained observers and/or enumerators. Generally, structured interviews are conducted with a well-designed form already established. Forms are filled in by researches, instead of respondents, and in that it differs from questionnaires. While this approach is more expensive, more complicated questions can be asked and data can be validated as it is collected, improving data quality. Interviews can be undertaken with variety of data sources, and through alternative media, such as by telephone or in person . The people who are going to interview are the maritime students of Dr,Yanga’s Colleges at DYCI. The interviewee came from any level of BSMT and BSMarE maritime student .It could be ages 16 to 18 above male or female. Confessions of a Professional College Cheater. IT WILL COME as news to no one who reads Dave Tomar’s new book that college kids cheat as enthusiastically and ritually as they tailgate and copulate, especially since Harvard recently announced that nearly half of the 279 students in a single â€Å"Introduction to Congress† class are under investigation for academic dishonesty. In the ethically challenged haze of freshman dormitory life I did it myself, writing an occasional paper for an attractive or underperforming friend, and it never really occurred to me that this was wrong until I became a college professor and sat outraged on the other side of the desk, interrogating a barely literate student who had suddenly blossomed into an eloquent critic of Milton’s Paradise Lost. And after reading The Shadow Scholar I’m eyeing my current crop of students with an entirely new level of suspicion. Tomar’s book grew out of an article, penned under the name â€Å"Ed Dante† in The Chronicle of Higher Education in November 2010, that became the most widely read piece in the Chronicle’s history. The article, and now the book, document the astounding scale and sophistication of cheating in today’s wired world, which the author knows well: he worked for ten years at highly organized Internet companies, writing term papers, class projects, and even a dissertation. In the wickedest of ironies, he found his employers through a website that aims to prevent cheating by exposing the worst offenders. At this website, an interested reader will find links to two hundred such companies, all accepting Paypal, MasterCard, and Visa, and all eager to make your college experience utterly painless. One site (CustomWritings.com) provides statistics, including (at press time) a 97 percent satisfaction rate and 1,373,890 pages written. I don’t now how much to trust a company that relies on its customers’ willingness to lie, but if those numbers are true, then this firm alone has produced over 170,000 of the 7-to-10-page papers usually assigned in introductory level classes. Many sites promise that their writers hold at least an M.A. or a Ph.D., and nearly all of them guarantee that the customer’s essay will cruise through the plagiarism-detection software that most American universities have purchased, at a tremendous cost, as the silver bu llet in their anti-cheating arsenal. As Tomar describes the process, the writers for his former employer log in to the company’s website and select an assignment from an online bulletin board. Students provide the topic and the deadline, and specific guidelines from their instructor, and the desired citation style. Some students even ship required course texts to their hired hand: Tomar claims this practice larded his shelves with thousands of dollars worth of books on constitutional history, literature, business, and psychology. But that was one of the few perks. Like a high-tech whipping boy, Tomar says he took on so much work that he ruined his health and his relationships, all so that the pampered and unprepared could enjoy a painless college experience. The cheery photos of carefree students on the professional cheating websites bear this out. As in the promotional materials distributed by the universities themselves, everyone is always smiling. Tomar is very, very angry, and although he comes to loathe the students who hire him, the real target of his ire is the universities. He is himself a graduate of Rutgers, and he seems genuinely traumatized by his own stint on the banks of the old Raritan, which he believes left him without the skills to land any real job other than writing fraudulent college papers. From this experience he gleans several ways that higher education in America has gone awry. â€Å"It’s not simply that some colleges are structured more like corporations than like places of learning,† Tomar notes, but that they are structured like failing businesses that â€Å"don’t give a crap about customer service or quality assurance.† This is one of Tomar’s more astute observations. While nimble businesses, from Lego to Apple, have made customers fall in love with their reinvented products, universities still persist in replicating the early twentieth-century factory model espoused by Henry Ford: customers can have a car painted any color they want â€Å"so long as it is black.† As a teacher of Shakespeare, I benefit from this model all the time: students from across the disciplines are forced to take my classes to fill various requirements, whether or not they will ever use iambic pentameter. It pays my bills. But where such requiremen ts do not correspond to clearly defined and valuable outcomes for students, they also contribute to the truly frightening $1 trillion in outstanding U.S. student debt that, as Tomar notes, has mostly been accumulated in the past four years. The driving engines of that debt remain the for-profit degree mills such as theUniversity of Phoenix, which do not escape Tomar’s fury. â€Å"The work assigned at such institutions was so easy, the standards so low, and the priorities so far removed from the interests of honest student evaluation† that students might be forgiven for turning to the free market to meet their intellectual needs. As the Harvard cheating scandal has affirmed, however, even the best universities have some such slack in the system. Students caught up in the investigation have reported that the course was notoriously known as â€Å"an easy A† with take-home exams and low standards. Combine such factors with the universities’ generally sluggish stance toward technology, Tomar suggests, and the cheating he documents is nearly inevitable. These points are well made, but not much else in this padded book has the same force. In discussing his erstwhile career, Tomar has called himself a master â€Å"bullshit artist,† and he boasts that he knows all the â€Å"little tricks† for churning out papers, â€Å"like fluffing sentences with unnecessary clauses or adding gratuitous lines summarizing previous claims.† Yet Tomar’s book may prove to be his bullshitting pià ¨ce de rà ©sistance, as it employs these same techniques at length, including notes and a bibliography drawn mostly from blogs and websites. For a brief moment, it seems as if this might be some sort of brilliant meta-narrative: a Joycean performance of the sloppiness, clichà ©, and superficial analysis that passes for writing in our universities today. But as Tomar reaches his solemn conclusion, explaining that he has attempted to describe â€Å"the things that I had come to know, with the hope that it could help all of us,† this begins to seem less likely. The problem is that The Shadow Scholar’s argument never really achieves the escape velocity that would propel it beyond the author’s own miscellaneous grievances. By his own admission, Tomar doesn’t know how to use a library and doesn’t have â€Å"a fuck’s clue how to do research if my Internet is down and my phone battery i s dead.† For Tomar this is a point of pride, because the ease with which he manipulates the system—tricking all those doddering professors—shows that libraries and library-based curricula are hopeless anyway. Again, I half-sympathize: if any professors still ask students to conduct research without online resources, they are clearly acting negligently. But surely the more responsible—and the more common—approach is to guide students through the digital archives, accepting that they use Wikipedia and Google, but teaching them that this should be the beginning rather than the end of their research. But Tomar obviously never learned this lesson, and his argument rarely reaches beyond the level of Googling, like one of those machine-authored books that use an algorithm to collate information about a given topic. (If this is unfamiliar, see the 345,000 titles by â€Å"Lambert M. Surhone† on Barnesandnoble.com.) When arguing, for example, that American education l oads students with debt without providing the skills to pay it back, Tomar writes that â€Å"according to the Guardian, ‘student loans have been stripped of nearly all basic consumer protections.’† Nothing wrong with that, except that after continuing this quotation for some length, he launches directly into a new paragraph on â€Å"An article in Mother Jones,† and this takes us to a paragraph relating what â€Å"the Washington Post† surmises, before a final section provides the truth â€Å"according to the New York Times.† The already underdeveloped argument must also share space with a memoir of the author’s misguided youth, and while Dave Tomar finds his lead character fascinating, his will probably be a minority response. After the tenth account of Tomar getting stoned, or reeling out of a bar to vomit, it seems worth asking whether he may have borne some responsibility for his failure to find academic fulfillment and develop marketable skills on campus. One suspects that Tomar was very good at churning out â€Å"C-† papers and that some of his clients got exactly what they deserved. Although The Shadow Scholar is a failed invective, it is an extremely timely reminder that we would be unwise to brush off accounts of cheating at Harvard or our local junior college as a few bad apples. To prevent the offenses that Tomar describes, professors will also need to become more proficient at pedagogies both old and new. Our first priority may be teaching students to navigate an online world where the meaning of intellectual property is in flux. Universities clearly must also do a better job teaching students actual skills rather than running them through hoops until they accumulate enough seat time, measured in dollars and hours, to graduate. Just as important as such innovation, however, is the very traditional work of forming tutorial relationships that will model intellectual responsibility and demonstrate that thinking, rather than paying someone to do it for you, can be its own reward. Studies find more Students Cheating, with High Achievers no Exception. Large-scale cheating has been uncovered over the last year at some of the nation’s most competitive schools, like Stuyvesant High Schoolin Manhattan, the Air Force Academy and, most recently, Harvard. Studies of student behavior and attitudes show that a majority of students violate standards of academic integrity to some degree, and that high achievers are just as likely to do it as others. Moreover, there is evidence that the problem has worsened over the last few decades. Experts say the reasons are relatively simple: Cheating has become easier and more widely tolerated, and both schools and parents have failed to give students strong, repetitive messages about what is allowed and what is prohibited. â€Å"I don’t think there’s any question that students have become more competitive, under more pressure, and, as a result, tend to excuse more from themselves and other students, and that’s abetted by the adults around them,† said Donald L. McCabe, a professor at the Rutgers University Business School, and a leading researcher on cheating. â€Å"There have always been struggling students who cheat to survive,† he said. â€Å"But more and more, there are students at the top who cheat to thrive.† Internet access has made cheating easier, enabling students to connect instantly with answers, friends to consult and works to plagiarize. And generations of research has shown that a major factor in unethical behavior is simply how easy or hard it is. A recent study by Jeffrey A. Roberts and David M. Wasieleski at Duquesne University found that the more online tools college students were allowed to use to complete an assignment, the more likely they were to copy the work of others. The Internet has changed attitudes, as a world of instant downloading, searching, cutting and pasting has loosened some ideas of ownership and authorship. An increased emphasis on having students work in teams may also have played a role. â€Å"Students are surprisingly unclear about what constitutes plagiarism or cheating,† said Mr. Wasieleski, an associate professor of management. Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said that over the 20 years he has studied professional and academic integrity, â€Å"the ethical muscles have atrophied,† in part because of a culture that exalts success, however it is attained. He said the attitude he has found among students at elite colleges is: â€Å"We want to be famous and successful, we think our colleagues are cutting corners, we’ll be damned if we’ll lose out to them, and some day, when we’ve made it, we’ll be role models. But until then, give us a pass.† Numerous projects and research studies have shown that frequently reinforcing standards, to both students and teachers, can lessen cheating. But experts say most schools fail to do so. â€Å"Institutions do a poor job of making those boundaries clear and consistent, of educating students about them, of enforcing them, and of giving teachers a clear process to follow through on them,† said Laurie L. Hazard, director of the Academic Center for Excellence at Bryant University. In the programs that colleges run to help new students make the transition from high school, students are counseled on everything from food to friendships, but â€Å"little or no time is spent on cheating,† she said. A 2010 survey of Yale undergraduates by The Yale Daily News showed that most had never read the school’s policy on academic honesty, and most were unsure of the rules on sharing or recycling their work. In surveys of high school students, the Josephson Institute of Ethics, which advises schools on ethics education, has found that about three-fifths admit to having cheated in the previous year — and about four-fifths say their own ethics are above average. Few schools â€Å"place any meaningful emphasis on integrity, academic or otherwise, and colleges are even more indifferent than high schools,† said Michael Josephson, president of the institute. â€Å"When you start giving take-home exams and telling kids not to talk about it, or you let them carry smartphones into tests, it’s an invitation to cheating,† he said. The case that Harvard revealed in late August involved a take-home final exam in an undergraduate course with 279 students. The university has not yet held hearings on the charges, which may take months to resolve. Officials said similarities in test papers suggested that nearly half the class had broken the rules against plagiarism and working together; some of the accused students said their behavior was innocent, or fell into gray areas. Mr. McCabe’s surveys, conducted around the country, have found that most college students see collaborating with others, even when it is forbidden, as a minor offense or no offense at all. Nearly half take the same view of paraphrasing or copying someone else’s work without attribution. And most high school teachers and college professors surveyed fail to pursue some of the violations they find. Experts say that along with students, schools and technology, parents are also to blame. They cite surveys, anecdotal impressions and the work of researchers like Jean M. Twenge, author of the book â€Å"Generation Me,† to make the case that since the 1960s, parenting has shifted away from emphasizing obedience, honor and respect for authority to promoting children’s happiness while stoking their ambitions for material success. â€Å"We have a culture now where we have real trouble accepting that our kids make mistakes and fail, and when they do, we tend to blame someone else,† said Tricia Bertram Gallant, author of â€Å"Creating the Ethical Academy,† and director of the academic integrity office at the University of California at San Diego. â€Å"Thirty, 40 years ago, the parent would come in and grab the kid by the ear, yell at him and drag him home.† Educators tell tales of students who grew up taking for granted not only that their highly involved parents would help with schoolwork but that the â€Å"help† would strain the definition of the word. Ms. Gallant recalled giving integrity counseling to a student who would send research papers to her mother to review before turning them in — and saw nothing wrong in that. One paper, it turned out, her mother had extensively rewritten — and extensively plagiarized. The Good News in the Atlanta and D.C. School Cheating Scandals With the possible exception of tot-murdering moms and professional basketball players who jilt their fans on live television, there is no more reviled figure in American life than Bernie Madoff. Portrayed on the cover of New York magazine in Heath-Ledger-as-Joker makeup, he has been variously described as a sociopath, a financial serial killer, and the devil incarnate. What nobody has said, however, is that Madoff was the victim of a profession that puts relentless pressure on money managers to publicly report their success in the market. And, while plenty of deserved scorn has been heaped on the auxiliary financial institutions and hapless federal regulators who allowed his fraud to unfold for decades, nobody has suggested that those lapses in any way mitigate Madoff’s culpability in his crimes. Society has taken away all of Madoff’s money and freedom, but it has left him with one thing: the dignity inheren t in possessing moral responsibility for doing wrong. It has been less respectful, unfortunately, to educators in our public schools. Recent weeks have seen reports of a terrible cheating scandal in Atlanta; a Georgia state investigation implicated scores of teachers and principals of systematically falsifying student test scores. Earlier this year, USA Today revealed evidence of test score manipulation in the District of Columbia. Similar scandals have erupted over the years in Houston, Oakland, Dallas, Chicago, and elsewhere, all tied to the pressure educators feel to show evidence of student learning on standardized tests. And, every time news of cheating breaks, opponents of standardized testing and accountability in public education have been quick to deflect blame from morally challenged educators and aim it toward the tests themselves. When asked about Atlanta, noted school reform apostate Diane Ravitch pointed the finger at the federal No Child Left Behind law, saying that, when high-stakes incentives are attached to test scores, we are â€Å"virtually inviting† teachers to cheat. At the Daily Kos, r eaders were told that â€Å"the tests, and the stakes attached to them, are the issue. No rational person can look at cheating this widespread and decide its existence is about the individuals, however blameworthy their behavior may be.† One Atlanta-area teacher put it this way: â€Å"Anybody whose job is tied to performance, it is a setup.† In search of a theory to back up these assertions, testing opponents often invoke â€Å"Campbell’s Law,† an adage put forth in the 1970s by social scientist Donald Campbell. It holds that â€Å"[t]he more any quantitative social indicator [e.g. standardized testing] is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures.† As a way of understanding education policy, or anything else, Campbell’s Law is both inaccurate and banal. In reality, most people are quite adept at resisting corruption pressure, which is why the vast majority of teachers whose students take standardized tests do not cheat. And, while some do, the fallibility of humankind has been known for a long time. So I hereby coin Carey’s Law, which holds that trite observations are more likely to be regarded as sacred principles if someone happen s to describe them as laws. TO BE SURE, people (and teachers) will succumb to dishonesty. They cheat on their taxes, spouses, and golf partners. Cheating corrodes trust in all things, especially education. Students whose test scores are manipulated upward don’t the get the extra attention they need. And, since teachers are increasingly being evaluated by how much their students’ test scores improve, a teacher who inflates scores could potentially cost her colleagues in the next grade of their job performance. But cheating also means that public schools finally care enough about student performance that some ethically challenged educators have chosen to cheat. This is far better than the alternative, where learning is so incidental and non-transparent that people of low character can’t be bothered to lie about it. Blaming cheating on the test amounts to infantilizing teachers, moving teaching 180 degrees away from the kind of professionalization that teacher advocates often profess to support. Instead of doing away with the pressures of a performance-based system, the best way to combat cheating is by buil ding institutions that have systems and organizational cultures that minimize the amount of corruption and abuse that occurs. This is harder to do in some places than in others. The District of Columbia, for example, is not exactly a bastion of civic virtue. Half the members of our city council currently stand accused of some form of misconduct, including council president Kwame Brown, who is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney for matters regarding the use of hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds. Nobody, by the way, is blaming the corruption pressures inherent to our vote-intensive election system for Brown’s alleged misdeeds. Indeed, it’s not a coincidence that cheating scandals tend to erupt in municipalities whose public institutions suffer from corruption. But, when the Atlanta police department was rocked by accusations that officers falsified warrants, planted evidence, and gunned down a 92-year old woman in a botched drug raid, national commentators didn’t pin the blame on a system that holds police departments accountable for solving crimes. Corruption, educat ional or otherwise, should be fought with strong law enforcement, the election of public officials with integrity, and the vigilance of citizen’s groups and a watchful press. The Securities and Exchange Commission exists because lawmakers correctly assume that the pressures and temptations of making money are so great that companies and financial actors can’t be trusted. Other than lunatic objectivistsand Wall Street water-carriers, nobody reacted to Madoff, Enron, or WorldCom by calling for less enforcement and public reporting of information. Instead, they rightly called for more. Finally, we should never forget that cheating in public education long predates the advent of standardized testing and accountability. Back then, it happened in the form of students who were ill-taught and passed along through grades until they were handed a diploma despite their inability to read, write, work with numbers, or otherwise perform any of the skills and tasks necessary to make a decent life in the modern world. Often, their children were sent back into the very same dysfunctional systems to begin the cycle anew. The only difference was, that kind of cheating didn’t result in state investigations, newspapers headlines, and calls for the responsible parties to be thrown in jail. The new way we structure testing and reward and punish people for their actions with regard to that testing is better for students—and even teachers—in the long run. Kevin Carey is the policy director of Education Sector, a think tank in Washington, D.C. Cheating is Cheating is Cheating. MANILA, Philippines — DEAR CHICO AND DELAMAR†¦I do a little tutoring on the side to earn some extra money while in college, and I’ve become friends with most of my students as they are mostly just a few years younger than I am. We often still communicate with each other even after I’ve stopped tutoring them. One of the guys that I’ve become close to has recently come to me and tearfully confided that he cheated in an exam and ended up winning an award because of it. I was very disappointed by what he did, because he’s a very smart kid and has a generally sterling academic record. He says that he only did it because his family was going to a really rough patch and he didn’t want an academic failure to compound their problems. He certainly seems guilty over it, and has promised me to never do it again because it wasn’t worth the guilt. What I’m torn about is whether I should tell the school about it. I feel bad about what heà ¢â‚¬â„¢s done, but telling the school would possibly ruin his reputation and his chances at getting into a great college. Should I just let it go and trust that he won’t do it again? -Leonard CHICO SAYS†¦I must admit, this is a tough one. It’s the classic choice between doing the kind thing and doing the right thing. I can’t tell you what is the right thing to do, but what I can do is tell you is what I’d do. I don’t know if I’d have the heart to turn him in. Even if I knew that on paper it’s the right thing to do, I don’t know if I’d muster the resolve. If you can’t choose between the two, you can always try and convince him to do the right thing for himself. Besides, it’s his misdeed that’s causing all this guilt, so he is the best person to right this particular wrong. I’m sure most people would be like, what’s the big deal? He’s learned his lesson, and everybody cheats every now and then, so why ruin a promising future? But remember, somebody who deserved that award was robbed of it. No matter how big or small the accolade, someone else deserved to get that award. And if a young mind gets the idea that he can get away with robbing someone of something as long as he doesn’t get caught, then who is to say that it will stop here? Who is to say that some of the crooked people in high places didn’t get their start with petty â€Å"crimes† like cheating in exams? Leave this sliding doors moment for him to decide. He can opt to leave things as they are and move on, or he can step up to the plate and right the wrong with his own hands, the very hands that caused the injustice in the first place. If he thinks the right thing for him to do is to own up to the cheating, then there is no other recourse but to bite the bullet and confess, just like if you feel it is your duty to report him, then you are beholden to yourself to do so. For all you know, him confessing may be a bitch to handle now, but it could also be the best thing that ever happened to him. Character is hard to come by these days. Something like this could actually build him some. Do what feels right to you at this moment; in difficult situations like these, it’s the best you can do. DELAMAR SAYS†¦There is no way you can be sure he won’t do it again. There is no way that you can be sure that the next time a similar situation happens he won’t take the easy way of cheating again. In his mind he might justify cheating as long as he can say he did it for his family. And did he really do it just to not add on to his family problems? And would it really have added to his family’s problems? Isn’t it understandable that when families go through problems children’s school work do suffer? Did he really do it for family? Or, did he do it for himself? If there was a way to make sure this really was a one time and only a one time thing, most people will say why not let it pass without consequence? But that’s the thing, there is no way you can tell. And the one thing that needs to be considered more than just whether he will do it again or not is this — him cheating earned him an award. Which means: his cheating deprived someone of an award that would have been legitimately earned. He took it from somebody else who would have rightly earned it. And in my opinion, that is certainly not fair. I think this problem is a question of being understanding to someone who was just really pushed to the edge or do you consider this as a great opportunity to learn a very hard lesson too. The lesson that cheating is cheating is cheating. No matter what your justification is it is still a wrong that has consequences. The consequence that is so great, at the cost of his good reputation being tarnished and risking his entrance to a good college, that he will never cheat again. Cheating can destroy all your previous honest efforts. That is a great lesson he will never forget. And also he has to learn that his cheating deprived someone of that award. And these things if he has to pay the consequence will surely send a message that cheating isn’t worth it. He will learn that he just has to live with not performing well when his family is going through something rather than to automatically cheat. Your decision lies with how well you know your student. Will this serve as a lesson he will never forget and never do again? Or, is this his chance to learn at this point and painfully that there are consequences to the actions we do? What can your conscience live with? Whatever you decide I just hope the person who might have been deprived of that award the student earned with his cheating efforts will still get what he deserves. Maybe you can figure out a way to punish the act of cheating but at the same time give him some leeway because he did come forward to admit his wrongdoing? In my opinion the best way is to show him that this act cannot go without consequence, some consequence. You can argue on his behalf that the punishment be less severe so as not to risk his college entrance but he certainly has to understand that he cannot get away with cheating without paying the price. Trick or Cheat. Cheat. It’s probably something that we’ve done at least once in our academic life. Whether through hidden answer sheets, information shared with friends from different sections, or just taking a peek at a seatmate’s paper, not very many of us can claim to be innocent in this regard. Penelope (not her real name) a college senior at a school in Manila’s University Belt, admits to be cheating in exams since she was in fourth year high school. â€Å"I needed to,† she justifies. â€Å"We had to memorize the formulas in our Physics class and we weren’t allowed to have an index card to look at. I was a candidate to become an outstanding student at the time and I didn’t want to fail that exam.† Aside from looking at her seatmate’s paper, she also had a small paper with all the needed formulas hidden in her socks. Penelope has never been caught, but on the occasion that she is, she says she plans to apologize to the teacher. â€Å"But t hat doesn’t mean I’ll stop. I believe cheating is one of the elements of being a student,† she says. Penelope’s story is something that is replicated in the lives of other students across the city. Just like Penelope, Nicole (not her real name) began cheating in exams in high school, mainly because everyone else in her class was doing it. â€Å"It wasn’t intentional at first. The examiner was out of the room, and I took the liberty to check my notes in Biology and compare if my answers were correct. I found it really rewarding to get a perfect score,† she recalls. But unlike Penelope, Nicole was unlucky enough to get caught. â€Å"I decided not to do it anymore and try to rely on my full capacity to answer all subsequent tests,† she says. However, â€Å"try† is the important word in Nicole’s statement. When asked if getting caught stopped her from cheating, her reply is short and direct to the point: â€Å"Not really.† MODERN CHEATING The temptation to cheat is even easier for today’s technologically-advanced youth. With mobile phones making the transmission of messages easier and the Internet making the sharing of information much quicker, today’s Filipino student can just as easily download his answers from a computer as he can from looking at his seatmate’s answers. However, it would seem that the tried and tested technique of looking at the answer of seatmates, passing around notes, and â€Å"reliable† classmates are the methods preferred by today’s young Filipinos. â€Å"If you give people answers, they give you answers back,† says Elle (not her real name). â€Å"My two friends and I would form a triangle with our seats — we call it the Triangle Offense. It gave us good angles. I also ask people who’ve taken the tests earlier for questions and answers.† Mark (not his real name) also relied on his classmates to get a higher grade than the one he would have otherwise received on his tests. â€Å"Back in high school, teachers would have us exchange papers with our fellow classmates and we would have to honestly mark each others tests. It wasn’t me who changed the answers, but my seatmate who’s marking it. That’s what made it possible,† he says. Just like Nicole, Elle has already been caught cheating. And just like Nicole, Elle says this hasn’t stopped her from cheating. â€Å"I’ve been caught, and I just made pa-cute and joked around. I charmed the teacher,† she says. â€Å"Getting caught didn’t stop me from cheating. It empowered me even more.† CHEAT BUSTERS If cheating seems unavoidable, what can school administrations do? Preventing behavior like this from occurring in the first place seems to be the approach being taken by educational institutions. The De La Salle University, for instance, has a Discipline Office (DO), which promotes students discipline, maintains peace, order and cleanliness in the University, and seeks to prevent, rather than correct, unseemly student behavior. Nimpha Baldeo, the DO head, says that her office conducts regular seminars and lectures on values for teachers, parents, and students, and comes out with publications on these topics such as modules, a DO Guide, and a DO Bulletin. â€Å"Discipline awareness is also celebrated every October by the academic community with exhibits and forums to intensify the information drive on University policies, rules and regulations,† she says. â€Å"The University also recently established the Compliance Office to ensure that all significant requirements necessary for compliance with law, regulation, or other binding rules in and outside the University are in place.† Students who are caught cheating are not immediately suspended or expelled, rather, they are put under probation and exposed to a series of seminars and related activities on values formation and clarification. DLSU also curbs plagiarism and protects intellectual rights. Academic papers have to cite its sources, whether from open source references like Wikipedia or from traditional materials, and written permission from concerned faculty members are required if a student intends to submit the same work to another course for extra credit. A MATTER OF TRUST Alexandra (not her real name), a literature professor for two years at a prominent university in Quezon City, has a much more personal view of how to stop cheating among the student body. Alexandra says that in her short years of teaching, she has not yet encountered a case of cheating in her class. While part of this is because most of her examinations are essay-based, she also says that this is because she trusts that her students know better than to cheat. â€Å"When I give objective tests, I don’t patrol. You could say I don’t even really check,† she reveals. â€Å"I feel it’s a very obvious sign of not trusting them. These kids are in college. it’s no longer high school or grade school. What they do with their education is their business. I’m there to guide and instruct, but I’m not there to be their mother. Show them that you trust them somehow, and hopefully, they’ll live up to it.† Alexandra says that rather than looking to change how students behave, educators should instead look into themselves and find out if they are the ones contributing to the problem. â€Å"I think cheating can be curbed, because I honestly think that students cheat if they feel that it’s impossible,† she says. â€Å"And impossibility is a result of demanding too much output when you haven’t even put much in to begin with. If you’re a good educator, students won’t feel the need to cheat.† ——————————————– [ 1 ]. New Republic, by Blaine Greteman, September 12, 2012 [ 2 ]. The New York Times, by Richard Perez-Peà ±a, September 7, 2012 [ 3 ]. New Republic, Kevin Carey, July 19, 2011 [ 4 ]. Manila Bulletin Publishing Corporation, Chico and Delamar, November 9, 2011 [ 5 ]. Manila Bulletin Publishing Corporation, Ronald S. Lim, November 12, 2009