A recent study in Maclean’s magazine is questioning whether or not universities are losing their academic recognition and value.
Research done in 2007 indicates more than half of university students admitted to some form of cheating.
Three years later, it does not appear the situation has changed. According to a report done at the University of Guelph, 53 per cent of Canadian students have been caught cheating and rates are as high as 70 per cent in the United States.
David Noble Harpp, professor of chemistry at McGill University, said there are two zones of cheating.
“The first is on multiple choice exams and the other through term papers being accessed through the Internet. There are companies emerging to charge money for papers and making a profit.”
McGill’s policies are one of the strictest in Canada. Several copies of an exam are made and multiple choice answers are scrambled so that very few of the existing exams are the same.
Harpp said McGill does this because cheating is a lot easier to do than most would think.
“When writing an exam, students have to be set up in a reasonable way so that they are not next to each other,” he said. “It’s next to impossible to cheat on a scrambled exam but [still] possible. [Most] students don’t even try it get around it, but most don’t want to anyways.”
Some students admit the Internet makes it easy to get away with cheating.
“Cheating is becoming far too easy because of all of the online schoolwork that has come up lately. Online quizzes or assignments are far too easy to cheat on because the Internet is right at our fingertips,” said first-year McGill student Taylor Berce.One of the main concerns is whether or not educational institutions will have a future if issues dealing with the lack of integrity in the university system continue to exist.
“Student are providing participation in questionable behaviors continues to be a concern. We need to make sure we the kind of learning environment where students are motivated to engage meaningfully with course material, their peers and faculty,” said Guelph’s dean of management and economics Julia Christensen Hughes.
Liz Sopher is a first-year psychology student at Guelph who said she feels cheating has become a huge issue.
“I think people cheat because we are told to overachieve in courses.”
Deborah Eerkes, director of the student judicial affairs at the University of Alberta, said universities use strict policies to try and deter cheating, although it may inevitable.
“We can . . . create better pressure so people don’t cheat,” she explained, but regardless “I don’t think we can ever stop it.”