Artifact #7

This article is something really has to deal with me and my peers because we are all college students. Its about they way teachers are using the newer technologies to catch their students red handed while cheating. It explains the trend in cheating when it said that in the mid 1900’s it was only twenty percent of students that admitted to cheating to fifty percent in 2002, which is a major increase. It did say that this number has come down some because of these advances in the ability to catch the students that try and cheat. Then it goes on telling us what the ways of catching the cheaters are, whether it is making the testing rooms more cheat resistant to running papers through software that can check it for plagiarism. The way they said the way to make the testing rooms harder to cheat in is not letting the students bring in anything like a bottle of water to any electronically devices in the testing room, because of the numerous ways that students have figured out how to cheat. It also talks about the cheat catching computers and software, and what the way that these work is that they take the paper that the student turns in and checks it with a very large database to see if it has any similarities to any other paper that is out there. Then, it talks about the way they can make online classes more cheating resistant by locking down the computers while testing, or having the teacher use a web cam to watch the student to make sure there is no cheating going on. Lastly, the writer explains how they feel about the article that they were writing about.
I feel like this is a very good article for myself to read because it has to deal with me and the people around me. The fifty percent of students that admitted to cheating in 2002 is remarkable to me and I’m sure that not every student that has cheated admitted to it, so that number could even be higher which blows my mind. This means that it is almost a normal thing for a student to cheat, which makes me understand why all the teachers have to go over their policy of cheating on the first day of schools and why everyone makes such a huge deal about it. I also feel that if you are in school to be expanding your knowledge and trying to learn, there is no reason for you to cheat, so I am on the teachers and schools side when they want to crack down on cheaters. I would just hope that the tactics that they use, like the software, works how it should so that if they do find a problem with a paper or something that the student turned in it is legit cheating and not a mistake. That would be all I would ask, is to be careful to what you use because I am sure that it would be easy to write something “like” another essay that someone has written in the past because there are so many papers out there about everything and anything. All in all, I learned some new things about cheating in schools, and I know I will be more careful as I go along my path of education.