Michael Smerconish ’14: While we as a school impose numerous means of deterring cheating in a classroom setting, EA possesses an unexplainable naivety when it comes to the role of the internet in take home assignments. By underestimating the power of Google in finding a similar or exact copy of a student’s assessment, teachers only fool themselves and weaken the school’s stance on academic integrity.
In 0.48 seconds, I was able to find an identical AP problem set to the one I was recently assigned as part of a take home test. In 0.32 seconds, I came across the entirety of an online quiz that my class was given for homework. True that the temptation to cheat has always been present, but I do not believe that it has ever been so simple.
In addition to how easy it is to use the Internet to cheat, it is also extremely difficult for a teacher to detect. With the detailed, step-by-step solutions provided by many websites, it seems nearly impossible for students to stray from the correct answer nor indicate to the teacher in any way that they did not solve the problems themselves.
And yet, the teachers’ knowledge of the Internet’s potential seems to lag far behind that of the students. Either that, or the faculty at Episcopal possesses too much faith in the academic integrity of its pupils. I feel terrible in suggesting that our teachers trust us too much, but there is no way around it.
The theory behind many take home assessments is to give students slightly more difficult material that they can theoretically spend greater time on if they are allowed to work on it outside of class. With the harder assignment, however, the knowledge that the answer lies only a click away becomes that much more enticing.
One of the simplest ways to eliminate this temptation altogether is for teachers to stop using material that is directly recycled from the Internet. Whether the decision to do so is a matter of laziness or appreciation of that specific assignment, I am unsure. Either way, it is not worth the risk that students will cheat.
In many cases, the slightest alteration to the assessment in question would remove the opportunity for students to so easily find the answers. For that reason, it is still shocking every time I find a class assignment online that is word for word identical to the one my teacher handed me. Using such exact copies not only suggests a lack of commitment from the teachers, but a more general ignorance of the academic pressure felt by EA students.
Can I entirely blame the school faculty for what is an issue with the students’ integrity? Absolutely not. But I would question why teachers decide to play this risky game in the first place. In an already competitive and difficult academic environment, they are providing a nearly risk-free, effortless alternative for students to get by. It should not be a surprise then should the student choose to not pass up such an opportunity.