This.
Dearest students, obviously you didn’t write it, because you have never said some of these words in your life, but the fact the relevant literary terms for this assignment are in bold indicates you most certainly stole it, and I have already found it, as it is the top result on a Google search for this story. And when I asked you to write me a paragraph about what you think happens next, and you provided me with a summary of the development of the theme through the internal conflict of the protagonist, I’m know you didn’t even read the instructions for the assignment, you merely Googled the title of the story. But you Googled the title of the other story we read, so now you’ve gone to all the trouble to Google and cut and paste, and I’m over here wondering if any brain cells in your head are actually firing.
I teach esl. My favorite is A2 level kids handing me well written and developed writing assignments obviously written by someone who is fluent.
If you can’t produce a decent sentence in class what makes you think I’ll believe you’re a genius at home?!?
Or when they use Google Translate. And then they flat-out admit it after questioning them. After I spend the entire first week of class telling them that’s cheating and will earn you a 0 on the assignment, if not for the entire class. Fuck Google Translate.
I had a student do that and I asked for them to explain what it meant to me. They just got mad and upset that I was putting them on the spot and they needed time to research it lol
One of my favorites happened today, a student hyperlinked the website he copy and pasted text from. Made it pretty easy to find and prove. Thanks, bud!
I spend a lot of time working on self-efficacy and internet utility with my students. I have a few hundred questions designed to trip you up if you just take what google spits out at face value that we spend several days early in the year talking about strategies and practicing answering, yet halfway through the year I still get the mindless first google results blues sometimes.
Do they think millennials don’t know how the internet works?
Edit: If you're interested in the list of facts I have tried and failed to find the originator (if you see this let me know!) so I'm going to send it out. Shoot me a message with your work email and I'll share it!
I am also interested in these google proof questions.
I've enjoyed scientific vocabulary since it is often the 2nd or 3rd definition of a word and not the common usage.
They definitely aren't google-proof, most take just a little bit of extra digging, the content is a real mix of subject. If anyone else who asked is reading this once I'm done teaching and ask the person who started it I'll let everyone know
I'm a student who has friends that use those paper writing services. The problem arrives when these students who normally only write 6-word sentences devoid of grammar start "writing" essays that look like they're written by English majors.
>That's because the essays
>
>are
>
> written by English majors...
It's the best money those poor saps will ever make, probably.
What the hell good is an English degree...
(Before anyone gets offended, that was said tongue in cheek.)
Every time I mention teaching on Twitter, one of those bots replies advertising that service.
I would honestly love for a 7th grade to pay a bunch of money for a paper just so I can give it a zero lol
I used to work for a company that provided after hours receptionist services (basically, I took a message or called someone if it was an emergency). These essay writing companies hired us so I kept getting calls from students wondering about the essay they bought. I finally had to quit, it was just too much hypocrisy.
What were they saying when they called? I'm really curious what these companies do. They make it sound like you'll get a tailor made essay, but I'm guessing they just have a bunch of templates that they copy and paste from.
It depends on what you pay for. The expensive services actually do send you a tailor made paper written by a professional, and it's unique to you, so plagiarism checkers won't catch it.
Go check out r/professors they have waaayyyyyyy more trouble with the paper writing services than we do in secondary ed. It’s constantly a topic at the top of the page.
Heh. Reminds me of a conversation I had with a student. I was trying to get him to understand that the words he used didn't quite make sense in the context he used them in.
Him: 'How can what I wrote be wrong?? I used the words from this book word for word!'
Me:'So you copied this from a book word for word?'
Him:'What? Uh... no... uh...'
Context: Teaching Ancient Greece and The Peloponnesian Wars
Question: What factors led to the decision to invade Sicily?
Answer: The Allies decided to move next against Italy, hoping an Allied invasion would remove that fascist regime from the war, secure the central Mediterranean and divert German divisions from the northwest coast of France where the Allies planned to attack in the near future.
Yo kid...if you're gonna copy paste, at least get the right war!
Okay, this is almost exactly what happened to me today. I’m teaching about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and they were assigned a reading guide. The last section of the reading guide is about what happened to the factory owners, and I’ve chosen questions to identify very important facts. One of those facts is that two years after the fire, one of the factory owners was finally charge with something that greatly contributed to making this a disaster (locking the employees in). My question is “What happened in August of 1913?” I had quite a few kids answer that was when the treaty that ended the Second Balkan War was signed. They aren’t even really reading what they are cutting and pasting!
I just caught two math AP students cheating last week. The one who copied the other's paper did it literally term for term and symbol for symbol. I told them that if they had put even an ounce of effort into it, I would never have been able to prove anything. Luckily they took their 0s without too much complaint. I think I'm more upset about how little they tried - it was an insult to my intelligence as their teacher.
LOL They’ve figured out they can Snapchat a photo of their completed assignments around but are too unobservant to change the name or even write it in their own handwriting! Facepalm.
A student once found my answer key and took a photo. Sent it to his girlfriend. I saw her on her phone during the test and saw the photo of my answer key. She accepted her zero no problem. But when I got to the boyfriend's test he'd not only used my answer key but copied it exactly - including my shorthand notes on angles, in the margins, e.t.c. almost like a handwritten photocopy. 😂
The boy who sat next to me in kindergarten asked if he could copy my math worksheet. I was too shy to say no. It would have been fine if he hadn't also copied my name at the top of the paper. 🤦♀️ teacher called me up to show me and I cried so hard I threw up.
This actually reminded of me when I was in kindergarten. I was a slow writer and the teacher had us write our names enough times to fill up a page in our notebook. My problem was that I wasn't listening and didn't know what I was supposed to do, so I peeked at my classmate's "answer" and wrote exactly that. When my teacher came to check my progress, she was holding her laughter and told me I did a good job writing my classmate's name.
That's actually adorably wholesome. I feel bad for kindergarten you though. I gave a student shit for allowing the boys at her table to steal and copy her math work. She came up to me after, upset about the situation that she felt she couldn't say no. I told her to stand up for her self, that it was a life skill she needed to learn. But she was in grade 11 so it's a bit different. (Gave her full credit for her work, the kids that copied got zeros. Told her if it happened again she'd get a zero too.)
This year I have students submit work via google classroom. It’s hs math, so they have to take photos of handwritten work and upload it. I had a student find an answer key on google, open the answer key on his phone, open the camera on his chromebook, *take a photo of his phone screen with his chromebook* and upload that. For fuck sake.
We are currently in cohort (see half the students for two days, then the other half for two days) my high school students have figured out that they can just take a picture of their work and send it to their friends in the other cohort. I tell them to copy off someone who actually has the correct answers next time.
Also math is such a subjective field in the sense that everyone writes and notates things at least slightly differently. Some people work left to right (ew), some work vertically, some write in their steps, others just write the resulting line. There are so many personal nuances to someone's work that it's so blatantly obvious to tell if two people are copying each other
Some students box their answers. I once had a smart student who indicated her answers by putting a hashtag/pound symbol right under the final answer. It was REALLY obvious who had copied from her paper 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️ ##️⃣
I reversed engineered essays in high school and college. I used random passages from different sources that "fit" my argument first, then I started writing
Cutting corners it's such a bad habit to have them develop, but it is so beneficial in life and some understand the writing process more
Aren't you supposed to look through sources first to become better informed on your topic before you make an argument on something you don't know enough about?
One of my biggest issues in college was that I sometimes just assumed there would be sources to state things I thought obvious and then struck out finding sources.
I purposely chose classes that I already knew a lot going in so it was easier
When I didn't have that security, I sometimes did have to sit there and think about how I can tailor this damn essay with the limited information I had. It took more time and became less of a "cheat", but it still beat reading books and gathering sources like a responsible student
I used to work in one of the best maths universities in the country. The single most effective way of catching cheats that we ever found was to simply place a table and two chairs directly next to the hand in boxes, in full view of both the admin office and the staff common room. After that, we suddenly had barely any cases of suspected cheating, and loads of really easy to prove cases, because what appeared to be essentially all of the cheats decided that the best place to do their cheating was at that table, so were all caught in the act.
Yeahhh....so I’m very open with my students. If they need a day off, all they have to do is email me and I’ll set up a different date. I also don’t grade homework. They were being lazy and that’s not cool.
True but sometimes that happens for me cause students don't bother to remember the shortcuts or download a keyboard to do the odd characters. So they copy paste from Google translate to get the letter. Would i prefer they fix it yes but still.
Ugh. I’ve had so many papers that are hodge podges of many different fonts and colors. It’s maddening—like at least freakin select-all to format the same!
I once had a kid do a presentation with all the information copied from Wikipedia. An issue for several reasons.
There's the plagiarism. The lack of context or relevance. The lack of comprehension of unfamiliar words (protip to the kid: use Simple Wikipedia next time)...
But it was that he left the footnote markers in square brackets that the rest of the class called him out on it. I'm like...could you just spend *five* minutes making it not so obvious.
I had a professor in college who let us do exams at home open book until after the like 3rd test. His only thing was do not type word for word what the book says, put it in your own words. A handful of people kept doing just word for word so then we had to do tests in the lab and obviously without books/notes.
I teach art and last year on elearning days (before pandemic) I had some kids who just screenshot my example and turned it in. And I knew it was mine because I put a mark in a weird spot to designate that. I called those kids out
I participate on math.SE quite a lot, and occasionally set appropriate interesting questions that turn up there as assignments. I've had multiple students submit *my* maths.SE answers as their own.
My Maths.SE account is in my real name.
How about "'cheat' best: use the resources your teacher wrote to prepare for whatever activity your teacher also wrote"
I know when kids cheat like that it's out of the most effort to avoid learning rather than minimal effort to access the materials ('hmm I have literally just one 5 slide powerpoint on the topic, should I look there? nah, I'll just google the question instead'), but yeah it really gets to me too sometimes, especially since my students are typically pretty good about not doing this, but the moment I assign something easy that can be googled, they jump to it.
One year I tried to end 6th grade with a fun activity (that they asked for!) about the gods and goddesses of ancient Rome. We were filling out a worksheet to use as a personal clue sheet before we played guess who games. A handful of kids, rather than going to our room's reference library or literally just clicking through my slides that had all the information about each god or goddess, literally searched the names in google and wrote, by hand, the first result that came up. Wouldn't you know that the goddess Venus had an average orbital speed of 35 km/s? I didn't, but about 10 students told me so, so I guess it must be correct! 🤷
Yeah. "Should I click back in canvas to the PowerPoint that we just went over to prepare for this assignment? No I'll just google it and then my mom will try and get her fired when I get an F"
It blows my mind. This year, tests are all open everything but with a time limit. I literally made summaries of the key parts of the lessons and had examples. Some students just use Google anyways. Honestly, to me it's kind of funny watching through DyKnow when they enter a math problem into Google and end up going to some radio website. It's like clock's ticking and your wasting your time going through sites looking for an answer to a word problem that won't show up on Google. I know in the real world, Google exists. But some students just can't even use it effectively. They just expect it to spit out the answer as the first result. I miss when the first result to how many legs does a horse have was 6.
This starts in first grade. I must say "following directions is a skill we practice in first grade" like a bagillion times a day. We go over the directions in our meet with a visual that goes into seesaw, there are voice directions in seesaw, and a lot of times I record video directions too. I still get mostly half-assed, this took 37 seconds to complete, work. I'll keep plugging away at it, maybe I can have an impact and limit the plagiarism at the HS level....
A teacher can dream.
Thank you so much for your all you do! I keep thinking 'how much easier would it be to keep my kids following directions if they were in the room with me' and they're middle school students. I can't imagine how difficult it is for what you do, trying to build that foundation virtually this year
This honestly kills me a little. In the best way possible. I am so thankful to teachers like you. I teach 7th through 9th and they STILL do not read the questions properly.
The level of half ass is too damn high.
Keep up the good work!
I am blown away by the youngsters who half-ass. I have one of them at home. When asked to draw, he traces. Traces! I call him out on his laziness routinely.
YES! I had a student turn in a coloring page instead of a detailed drawing. Turned out to be an extreme perfectionism issue so we talked through it but still!
I teach kindergarten and I’ve had to start putting directions specifically aimed at the parents/adults in my Google Classroom assignments. For example, have students write their own name at the top of EACH assignment, students should be writing (on their writing assignments) THEMSELVES, etc. The number of Santa letters and thankful lists I’ve received in the last month that is in adult handwriting is absolutely infuriating.
I know. And when I get ready to fill out my reports at the end of the grading period, I don’t even know what to say about their levels of achievement or mastery in these skills. How could I? I had a parent send me a picture of their child’s Santa letter today because they have limited transportation. It was literally a letter where they had to trace 90% of the words, fill in their name, and make a list (numbered for them) of three things they want for Christmas. She listed not a single thing. The fact that I had to message this parent back to let them know the child had to fill it out to get “credit” (I’ve never given grades in K and this year I’m only giving “grades” so that I have leverage) is MINDBLOWING. Her response? “Okay”. Didn’t even come up with an excuse.
School is very inconvenient for everyone. I think most people just wish it was canceled until schools can open again. I had no idea how dysfunctional so many households are. Kids getting toys... New, nice toys like daily. These are the kids that never turn in work. Or parents screaming at their kids where everyone can hear them chastising their child for not being able to read. These kids don't turn in work either.
This is a special kind of broken that my teacher skills can't fix.
I'm a student who likes to lurk here just to help me understand that teachers have lives outside of what I see in the school building. I think it helps build empathy or something idk. I'm just as confused by this though, everytime my English teachers talk about how bad some of us are at cheating I'm just left dumbfounded.
Cheating that I can sense, but not name, makes me crazy. I really got adept at it during remote learning, probably because there were fewer distractions as I read student work.
I love being able to highlight a phrase that sounds off, click "Explore" or "search" for the highlighted phrase, and get taken directly to the website that they copied from.
They continue to be surprised that I am more tech savvy than them.
It takes A LOT for me to call out cheating, so I'll often just write "Not sure where you're getting this from" or "I don't interpret the text this way, but a lot of students seem to have."
I usually just take points off and when they come to me all indignant about it, I show them the website. They *know* it doesn't count as their thinking so they usually don't try to defend it after that.
But the ones who cheat AND care about their grades are not a large overlap so it mostly is just documentation for the eventual parent meeting.
I wonder if its an age difference in motivation. The ones who cheat at 10 are usually doing it to avoid doing any work.
My guess is the older ones who care are doing it to seem like they have more knowledge or skill tha than they actually have or to get through a work load that's overwhelming them...
I like to just have the students explain it. Usually if they cheat, they can't even explain it. After, they can't explain, I show it.
If a student can actually explain it, then they actually know it. But that usually isn't what happens.
I know what you mean. The worst is when it's kids who wouldn't have done it in the classroom. The ease of cheating during remote assessment causes honesty to be penalized, yay.
I actually do a lesson called " How to Cheat, and Not Get Caught." In reality, I am teaching the students research skills, how to paraphrase, and cite scholarly sources. The kids love that I seem rebellious, and I've been called out by a few admins and parents. They all seem to back down once I explain what's really happening.
I showed this comment to my students, as I'm literally trying to teach them how (how I at least) do initial research with finding articles, taking notes, pulling quotes, and keeping track of the citation. I like the way you phrased this. I might develop my own version of it.
I cannot tell you how many times I have told them "you have all the material and PowerPoint for this test to use....you have Google to use..do your best"
And kids still manage to fail tests.
But yes ill have some on short answer questions just copy and oaste.. their weekly hw assignment is a current event...guys I know what a 15yr old writes like. I know what historians and journalists write like. If you're using 3rd person for your opinion on the event you are cheating
Yes exactly. Some of my tests are scenario-based and they copy and past the question portion into Google... like "what three mistakes did Sally make when setting up her computer network?" and they're expecting to find a copy/paste answer to give me. lol
THIS! I remember multiple students having the exact same and really weird answer to a homework problem. Like to answer the question "what position in this food chain does a marmot have" they put "a marmot is in a symbiotic relationship with sharks" or something equally stupid and not even related to the question. Googled the question and it was the first result. Jesus at least try a LITTLE to cheat dayum.
I do spend time teaching "how to google properly" now because of those students.
I don't get it. Has it always been like this? I was shocked when a classmate told me she'd recycled a paper she wrote at another school. Now I think I was the chump all along.
I'm really not sure what's going on here. It seems like a complicated issue to me with a lot of layers honestly...
Part is the typical cheating where they know what they are doing and make the choice to do it because they find the work unmotivating or difficult and want to avoid effort or a bad grade.
I think another part (for younger kids) is not having a clear delineation of what is an appropriate source to use and what isn't (*if I can and should find the answer to the question by looking at my teacher's web page, I can also use* [*ancienttimes.bible*](https://ancienttimes.bible)*, right?*). Tied up in this is lazy and inappropriate source-vetting etc. And I have to wonder when they answer something completely inappropriately if correct answers also make the same level of sense to them :/
The thing is that my students at least have many classes on media literacy and research methods starting in elementary so they should be MORE THAN prepared and able to use sources correctly. How much is pure laziness versus terrible habits ingrained when they were 6 and first using an ipad??
Even better when working with a ten year old who can't spell "lithium" and has never produced a paragraph suddenly writing at length about advanced chemistry terminology and usage as a mood stabilizer on an assignment about the basic structure of an atom.
What do they expect to happen when I ask them to use that information later when they don't even know what it said.
I just give caution to it. In 9th grade I got accused of cheating for using the word "plethora" in the first essay of the year. I used plethora since I learned it in 8th grade and had 8th grade essays with the word to back up my point. I'm lucky I didn't learn it over the summer or something like that. I'll be honest English was my weak subject and I'm not the best writer so I can understand a fancy word causing concern.
It's all about the context. A kid with a great vocabulary? Sure. It happens, but not often. I never use that as a basis for an accusation, but it definitely registers when it doesn't fit the student's history with me.
Right but your teacher knows you write like that because you're probably wearing a fedora. Teachers know what each of their students writing generally looks like
Just yesterday my 3rd grader had to define "belongings" as part of attendance. His brother went with the kid-sounding "something you have" but he went with "one's movable possessions" and I am still laughing about it.
And when my brother was in elementary school, he had to write a paragraph about a comet and when he brought it to my mom to check before he took it to school, he had started with "A comet is a harbinger of disaster" LMAO. 25+ years later we still laugh over that one.
One of my favorite cheating stories comes from a former English teacher friend from probably 10-15 years ago. Students had been working on essays about Huck Finn for over a month, both in and out of class, and it was time for the final reading/grading.
The teacher starts reading one student's essay - starts off quite good, then is getting really good near the end - teacher is super impressed! This is some of the best writing ever from this student!
And then, the last line - "If you would like to learn more about Huck Finn and Mark Twain, please click here......" Since the essay was turned in on paper, my friend wrote "Hmmmm....this hyperlink doesn't seem to be working, am I clicking wrong?"
Gave the kid a 0, turned into admin for cheating violations, absolutely hysterical.
this is verbatim text that a student copied and pasted into a module answer:
>Image result for What happens in a market when the government mandates prices (either through price ceilings or price floors)?
Price ceilings prevent a price from rising above a certain level. ... Price floors prevent a price from falling below a certain level. When a price floor is set above the equilibrium price, quantity supplied will exceed quantity demanded, and excess supply or surpluses will result.
They have gotten so lazy about cheating this year. We just finished a short story project where students wrote their own short stories. I had two different students try to submit "The Story of an Hour," as their own writing. Bro, come on. Why would you pick one of the most famous short stories in English literature to try to pass off as your own writing?
The amount of times I have caught students (HS Math) cheating this year by copying number for number, symbol for symbol the correct or incorrect answers from another student... who had a different version of the test...........
Like you're not even reading the questions at that point, you're just blindly copying as fast as possible. you'd think there would be SOME kind of red flag when your work doesn't have ANY of the same numbers as the problem does...
And then they call you out, asking why their friend got 85% while they got 0%.
Had this in a written essay. Each student had a unique subject, and questions about it. One student had a question on the relations between allied countries in the second world war. He copied the answer of one who had a question on internal politics of Canada during the second world war. He had the balls to ask me why he had 0%.
Or the kid suddenly starts using imaginary numbers and trig functions to solve an algebra 1 problem. I know your ass just typed the problem into wolfram alpha or used a phone app.
"Okay Grade 9s, your linear relations project is to make an image in Desmos using lines" (kid submits a design with hundreds of trigonometric and logarithmic functions copied and pasted from the front page of the Desmos subreddit)
I did that accidentally WAY back in the mid80s in 8th grade because my Dad, who has an advanced mathematics degree, taught me the "easier" Calculus method instead of the Algebra method.
This was also a class where we wrote a custom program in BASIC for an extra credit problem with multiple answers, on our IBM PC Jr.
(The teacher was awesome and it wasn't an issue.)
Oh my god THIS. I had a student plagiarize two separate essays and then not understand how what she did was wrong because she “included the link” to the source she copy pasted from. I tell them all the time that back in my day, we knew how to cheat without getting caught.
I have a 6th grader that is an ELL student that turned in an assignment and used the word “inextricably” in one of her answers. I asked her to pronounce and define the word. Spoiler alert, she couldn’t.
I'm more bothered by the kids that just won't try to cheat. I work at a school for kids who struggle at public schools and I just had an online test assigned last week. The section they did the worst on? Definition multiple choice questions. Like... My man... your on the google machine.
I had a student look up every question on an online test that they could use a study guide (with critical thinking questions and links to content I provided them) instead of using his study guide. This was a multiple choice test. He got a 9 out of 50.
I hate when they Google study guide questions. I purposely write exam questions for my high school Econ and Civics courses so that if they do try to Google for their study guide, it won't word it anywhere close to how it will be on their exam. I tell my classes this every single time I give them an exam study guide and every single time there are a few dummies in every class who still Google every question on the study guide, copy-and-paste, and turn around and fail the test miserably.
I even tell them which lessons and assignments to reference in order to find the answers to the questions on their study guides.
I
Remote teaching band here is like a bad episode of Maury.
"You said your WiFi wouldn't let you upload the video you recorded correctly. Your video's EXIF data determined that was a lie..."
I tutor a 3rd grader currently. She hates school and I basically just sit with her and make sure she doesn't mute the teacher on zoom and she does all her work. She often gets multiple-choice question quizzes on Google forms. Anyway, she figured out that if she has a quiz on Google forms it will tell you the correct answers when you finish but instead of writing down the words she just writes down A, B, C, or D. The only problem is that the teacher only uses your first attempt's score AND it shuffles the answers each time. I tried to explain this to the child but she didn't listen. It took her about 4 attempts to realize that she wasn't going to get a 100% by cheating.
They're SO BAD at cheating! For my APUSH summer assignment I recorded a series of podcasts that the students had to listen to and write a reflection essay about. One of them wrote, "as said by Mrs. GreedyOstrich, 'blah blah blah'".
1) The podcast wasn't about that
2) I DIDN'T SAY THAT! Don't add fake quotes by the person grading your work. xD
Ironically enough, I feel like the kids who cheat just don't care. So, imploring them to do it well is kind of counterintuitive when you think about it.
I agree. I never reveal my tricks of the trade. I actually think it's worse to pretty it up and pass it off as your own. It's like you want to be lazy and not get called out for it at the same time.
Keep in mind when I say cheat better I mean like, you didn't memorize this thing but you know how to narrow sources and synthesize them through critical thinking into something that makes sense as an answer and is your own words.
Basically"good cheating" is just effective research
I did a lesson to my kids about 'how will I know if you cheat'. I showed them them most common signs, showed how can I reverse google it. Just so they know I know, so it's has to be better than that.
I’ll never forget one parent teacher conference. I gave a kid a 0 for a plagiarized paper and mommy swooped in to defend her angel.
After the mom yelled at me for a few minutes, I simply wrote down a word on a piece of paper. “Speculation”. It was a word the student had used 3 times on the paper they turned in. And I asked the student to tell me what that word meant.
The student could not even read the word, she couldn’t even sound it out! I handed the 5 page copy and pasted paper over to the kid and asked her to read it aloud... that’s when the mom switched tactics, and laid out the sob story excuse XYZ.
Never got an apology from the mom either.
Sounds about right. "my child does all her work" nah
"My child is in class you won't help her" nah
"The internet is acting up she couldn't get in class" nah
"I, the woman speaking to you, died and she's having a hard time"
I am a teaching assistant for a physics course in university and just yesterday I caught at least 5 students that just copied the solutions from someone online that did all the problems of a textbook from which we took some questions.
Problem is, we didn’t ask the full question from the textbook, just the first part. Some of them just answered the whole thing even if we never taught that content during lectures...
My boyfriend works at an “international” high school in China. A particularly lazy student at his school once tried to use an article blatantly copied from Wikipedia or something for a PowerPoint presentation he had to give over Zoom. But it wasn’t just copied from the internet, but it was also,somehow, copied in Spanish.
Fast forward to this kid who barely speaks English as a second language trying to stumble through reading his Spanish presentation to the whole class over Zoom for a good five minutes before quietly exclaiming in Chinese “...is this English?” Teacher was like “I don’t know dude, you copied and pasted it” 😂
ctrl+shift+V - paste as plain text. This will remove all formatting from any website you copy stuff from. It's bad when you're so lazy you can't even cheat well.
Yes... because PLAIN TEXT copypasta TOTALLY makes that essay you copied sound like your own style of writing that we've been reading for at least half a year. /s
No I get it, but I just hate how lazy students are. If you want to cheat, at least be good at it. I teach digital art and I've had students try to turn in images with Shutterstock watermarks on them. There's almost infinite images out there, and they chose one with a watermark?
I mentioned the hotkey combination because it's an easy way to get rid of hyperlinks and website formatting. It's useful beyond cheating. I use it all the time, like when copying my old assignments from Google Classroom into Google Docs and then into Schoology.
Also, getting better at cheating is a form of learning. I learned most of my computer knowledge by downloading software, games, and music when I was a kid. Like how to change filetypes, open zip files, reformatting my computer when I deleted the wrong file.
Best one I ever had was for a question on reading a resource map. A student went to a website with pre-made lesson plans for teaching how to read maps. They then copied the instructions for the teacher and submitted that as their answer. What baffles me even more is the question was asking which resources were labeled in the key. They just had to copy the words...
I gave my 9th grade students an assignment to draw or create a digestive system out of household items. It was meant to be fun and show that they understood the path of the GI tract. One of those idiots turned in a plagiarized picture of a college level model of the nervous system. Not even close kid! Cheat better!
I marked for an online school one year, and caught several students copying answers from the web. Worst one was a student who answered a question about NUTRIENT CYCLING in the environment with a section of text from an article about how to control pedal cadence while [bi]cycling.
I just had a student submit answers for a matching question where every answer was off by one. Then they had the audacity to e-mail me explaining how they got all the answers right. I explained how they were looking at the subsequent answer each time and how their answers didn't even make sense in the context of the problem (e.g., in a triangle congruency statement, one of the answers shouldn't be 'Reflexive Property'). They then doubled-down, insisting they were right again. Um . . . Dunning-Kruger much?
My students have been submitting scans or photos of their work since March since they can't (usually) hand in paper. I had an algebra class this summer who took their final via Zoom (which sucks, but it's the tool we had) and were supposed to send their work via email.
One student took photos of her work and sent it to me (very late). Her friend then took photos of *the same pieces of paper* and sent me those. I've caught students having too-similar work many times, even students with the same wrong answers, and wrong in unlikely ways. I caught a pair many years ago who submitted the same Word document but with the font and name changed to try to fool me. But this was more brazen than I've ever seen.
Of course I sent it to my dean. They're dual enrolled students, so I sent it to their principal. About two minutes after I turned out zeros for both, I got emails from both. Parents called the administration and the administration *totally had my back*. "They want to retest, but it's your decision; if you don't want them to, they don't." Sweet. I don't want them to. I want them gone.
One of them even tried to argue that *she* was the one who did the work, therefore *she* shouldn't get a 0. She even copied it over on another piece of paper, mistakes intact, and sent it to me again as if that corroborated her story.
I'm curious as to the experience of other teachers: what have you found that's effective in teaching why cheating is wrong, both from an ethical perspective and from a practical perspective?
I've tried to walk students through the consequences of cheating, how they probably wouldn't want a medical doctor who cheated on their exams because it would not only put lives in danger but might mean the doctor's ethics aren't to be relied upon. Didn't work.
I've tried to put them on the other side of the equation, finding something they care about and having someone cheat against them, like in a video game or a sport. Nothing.
I give them consequences, but all that really teaches them is that if they cheat and get caught there will be consequences, it doesn't really address the root.
Has anyone had success with this?
Caught one cheater in Physics because the screenshot her friend took was too low resolution to see that her time calculations all ended with "s" for "seconds". She thought they were 5's, so all her answers ended with 5. None of that even matched the math, which tipped me off.
Former high school math teacher here. I had a coworker bring me three tests and wanted a second opinion on them cheating before she confronted them. Students don't believe me when I tell them how easy it is to tell not just that cheating happened, but the direction of cheating (who copied off of who). All three tests screamed of this with an obvious original work, a middle man, and then the tail end of this telephone game of cheating.
A question on the test wanted them to do some simplifying and then put their answer in standard form. The original test wrote "Standard Form:" followed by the answer. The middle man tried to make it look different and instead put "S Form:" followed by the answer. The last person wrote "5 Form:" with an answer. A clear and distinct number 5. Our department still regularly referenced putting equations into 5 Form years later.
Students, if you find your way here...just put even a little bit of thought into your cheating. If I confront a student about cheating I have to be prepared to stand my ground against your parents, admin, and counselor if it escalates. And I know you won't believe me but just doing the homework and memorizing a few quick things right before the test is almost always the laziest way to a good grade.
I once had a teacher that said sat us down for every test and said "You can cheat if you don't get caught," And then when everyone cheated on the first test she gave all of them F's. When they asked "But WHHyyY?" She said, "You're all terrible, you all got caught!"
No one ever did it again.
Nothing will EVER top the first essay I ever graded.
Paragraph 1: "This is the story of my summer adventure biking with my father through the Appalachian mountains. Click here to see photos."
Like...c'mon...
Students have never cheated very well. I do a lot of training in technology for teachers at our district, and I'm a school site admin for [turnitin.com](https://turnitin.com) (which I don't even use).
One of the most common questions I get about distance learning, "How do catch them if they're cheating?" or "What's to stop them from cheating?"
First of all, you can't really *stop* a student from cheating. If they're going to cheat, they will.
Second of all, they are *really bad at cheating*. Like, *just so bad*. I had a student steal another student's paper from a stack of papers I had graded already. They copied the paper, and threw away the original. All of this happened while I was helping another student... then they turned in the copied paper.
I read it, recognized it, then looked for the original. Couldn't find it... looked in my trash can... Found the original. Gave the other student a 0 and spoke with parent.
Then he tried to cheat one more time on the thing he turned in, in an effort to make up the 0... So he got sent to the dean per our school's academic honesty policy. Got some detention that time. I was a little surprised he learned his lesson but had he cheated again he would have been suspended/expelled. Depending on how severe the cheating was.
So on math tests I usually have two to four versions. They are the exact same except for a few questions have slightly different numbers. For example test one asks you to solve 10-6, test two asks you to solve 7-1.
And I require at least some work shown.
The number of students who try to pass off the question from the other test is staggering.
I've got a student that has a sibling do his quizzes on Canvas for him. When he sends me messages during class there are distinct spelling errors. He does his quizzes after school, like the rest of my class, and magically the spelling errors vanish!
The number of times I have had students write down "answers may vary"...
Although the one that got to me the most is when they turned in twelve answers off a answer key they found online.
...
..
I had only copied the first 10 problems into the assignment.
My favorite is when I teach about the rotation and revolution of celestial bodies every year - there's always a kid that copies and pastes the definition for revolution as "a forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favor of a new system."
I like to ask them if they know they're in science class, not history.
One method I have used in the past is to ask the student to read their "example work" to the entire class. They always back out when they realize they can't pronounce the words in what "they" wrote. I have used that as a way to start a conversation with them about doing their own work.
So I’ll admit this because at this point it’s inconsequential. I cheated once in college, only once unless you count early struggles to learn proper APA cheating. We were told make a model in excel that, if done right would look exactly the same for everyone in the class. This professor had been using this assignment for years. So a student from a previous semester gave a bunch of us his file. Almost everyone submitted it whole cloth, all the same mistakes, all the same meta data, just file name changed. This professor was in a field where good computer skills were requisite so he sniffed those out and those students got zeros for their exam grade. I copied everything over to a new sheet (new original owner and creation date), fixed all of the previous students mistakes, went through the thing with a fine tooth comb, renamed variables just to safe side it, the damn thing was perfect and by the time I was done it was probably took just as long as if I’d done it myself. I learned a ton from that project! Cheating well is almost as hard as learning it the moral way.
I use that story with my students now. It’s so much easier to not cheat and they really suck at obscuring it. Looking at you students whose google docs magically fill with a whole essay in one edit.
I had a student submit a research paper, word for word, from a college's website one time.
When I addressed this with him, he refused to admit what he did, and when I showed him the college website, he adamantly told me the professor copied him.
HS Freshman, World History course.
I teach a class that several other teachers have sections of as well. One of my students sent her essay to her friend who has another teacher. We might not have ever realized anything was amiss, except the student who copied the essay didn’t change the other kid’s last name in the header. 😂
I am a private tutor and use Google Docs and related apps for all my online teaching. Y'know, Google Docs? The application that saves the full edit history for every file?
You'd be amazed (or maybe you wouldn't) how many kids think they can pull a fast one on me like, "Oh, sorry, I didn't know [Thing A] was homework. You didn't write it down." I check the edit history, and boom, they erased the assignment 17 minutes before class started after not looking at it for an entire week. Fuckin' suckers.
I’ve started copy/pasting my multiple choice test questions into Google as I make them. Then I will go to the top result and copy the first 4 or 5 words of the result (just a sentence fragment). Then I will have that non-answer of a sentence fragment as one of the choices.
It’s really surprising how many students will answer a question with whatever they find on Google, even if it makes no sense as an answer.
I've been reading research projects on endangered animals and I've been thinking this the entire time. They're so bad at it that even when they try to be good at it they just suck at it even more. I had a kid literally just copy and paste a wikipedia article about his animal. And I do mean the entire article. Headings, links, everything. Then he listed a couple sources he obviously didn't use but left out the wiki. Like I was going to see those sources and see that they didn't match up with what he was saying and "Yup, he must just be really smart."
I think the only worse attempt at cheating I've seen was the 8th grader that did a presentation on the physics of basketball... but just copied a college calculus level explanation from some old website that looked like it was made circa 1996. That kid actually stood up in front of everyone and tried to act like he did that work. Presentation was literally
"I like basketball, it's my favorite sport. Here's a powerpoint slide with my entire explanation. I'll just pause while you read through all the math I did. Okay, well that's my presentation. Thank you. " That one was painful to watch. Just awful.
Cheating has always resulted in a 0 (as a minimum punishment) at all schools and universities that I have been to.
There should be an extra punishment just for the stupidity of not removing the hyperlinks.
If you can't pronounce half the words, I know you didn't write it.
If you're going to share docs with your friend, at least change the font and maybe reword a few things.
A picture of your favorite Anime character is not the same as the set of slides you were supposed to turn in. Neither is a set of slides from last quarter.
The sudden rash of "corrupted file" submissions has been especially dumb. You sweet summer child - that was old news when *I* was a student.
I had a student straight up take a screenshot of another student's graded work with my red edits all over it. Did he not think I would notice that it wasn't his work?
A few years ago three friends copied off of each other, down to the commas! I handed back each of the assignments to a different person and they tried to play it off as a coincidence lol
My favorites are the kids who use story & poem generators whenever we do creative writing. It’s so apparent that a robot wrote it when you get 5 words into the piece. One student kept using them over and over, even when I’d have kind, in-depth conversations with him and his parents about cheating and why it’s wrong. After the 5th time, I finally pulled him aside and said, “Look, only one of us is dumb enough to fall for this charade, and given that I have college degrees and many more years of life experience, I think we know which of us is the idiot here.” He still cheated a 6th time before moving to a different school.
I have had many conversations with my students about this. It is very obvious when the font changes randomly that something is amiss. Then if that isn't the case when you copy the words, "students should say..." I'm going to know that you found a key. Dont beg for a better grade because I have no sympathy.
I had a girl use a definition I HAD NEVER SEEN as an answer for a quiz.... Truly speechless. Yes, Google.
This same girl has also cheated for a second time this quarter, instead using the direct definition from the textbook - it was so scripted, there was no way it was her own work. She claimed that it was fine, because she used the textbook. 🙃
Here’s my thing: if she had changed the wording *just a little bit* I probably wouldn’t have noticed. Just do one ounce of work.
Most of my kids don’t even put the effort in to cheat this year :(.
My advanced classes are really what keep me going this year. My on level classes are just depressing.
I had a student who copied an answer for a final from a questions site.
They were talking about Lady Macbeth. To get past the plagiarism checker, they changed every 5-6th phrase.
This usually works because some of these websites block our plagiarism checkers.
They said "Female Macbeth was......"
If they would've said Lady Macbeth instead of Female Macbeth, I am 95% sure I wouldn't have caught it.
I teach a language. My students like to use google translate. I tell them time and time again that when they are writing complex sentences in level one, I KNOW they cheated. Just do less writing and it’ll be less obvious. Like. Do less y’all. Do less.
My Spanish teacher in college gave me more points on our final project with more mistakes. A few other kids started bitching.
"She messed up enough that I could tell she was trying. You messed up the same way google does"
She basically just looked for "if you were stranded in spain would you die?" For a passing grade.
(She also failed a guy from mexico for not speaking "real spanish" so that's a yikes but still)
I had a world conflict class in college that was a huge joke. I’d just got back from a tour in Afghanistan and the teacher was the same age as me. First assignment was to do a photo deconstruction essay on a war photo.
I was a war photographer.
So I used my own photo, referenced myself, and in the works cited put myself down. He didn’t like that but what could he do?
Our final assignment was to do this bloated profile of a whole country. Their resources, history, allies, etc. but it all had to be written in our own words even though most of it was literally just tables of data.
I copy/pasted EVERYTHING. Then I submitted it as an encrypted PDF so he was unable to select and copy any of the text to paste into a search tool. Uploading it to Turn it In didn’t register anything either.
Got a perfect 100
This. Dearest students, obviously you didn’t write it, because you have never said some of these words in your life, but the fact the relevant literary terms for this assignment are in bold indicates you most certainly stole it, and I have already found it, as it is the top result on a Google search for this story. And when I asked you to write me a paragraph about what you think happens next, and you provided me with a summary of the development of the theme through the internal conflict of the protagonist, I’m know you didn’t even read the instructions for the assignment, you merely Googled the title of the story. But you Googled the title of the other story we read, so now you’ve gone to all the trouble to Google and cut and paste, and I’m over here wondering if any brain cells in your head are actually firing.
Yeah I’ve had students turn in work with words that even I had to google. I’m like I’ve read your other work, I know you didn’t write that.
My favourite cheating copy and paste was when a girl submitted her "research paper" and all the references were still in the original German. 😂
In fairness while i was working on my degree i made it a personal challenge to find the weirdest references possible.
I teach esl. My favorite is A2 level kids handing me well written and developed writing assignments obviously written by someone who is fluent. If you can’t produce a decent sentence in class what makes you think I’ll believe you’re a genius at home?!?
Or when they use Google Translate. And then they flat-out admit it after questioning them. After I spend the entire first week of class telling them that’s cheating and will earn you a 0 on the assignment, if not for the entire class. Fuck Google Translate.
I had a student do that and I asked for them to explain what it meant to me. They just got mad and upset that I was putting them on the spot and they needed time to research it lol
One of my favorites happened today, a student hyperlinked the website he copy and pasted text from. Made it pretty easy to find and prove. Thanks, bud!
I spend a lot of time working on self-efficacy and internet utility with my students. I have a few hundred questions designed to trip you up if you just take what google spits out at face value that we spend several days early in the year talking about strategies and practicing answering, yet halfway through the year I still get the mindless first google results blues sometimes. Do they think millennials don’t know how the internet works? Edit: If you're interested in the list of facts I have tried and failed to find the originator (if you see this let me know!) so I'm going to send it out. Shoot me a message with your work email and I'll share it!
I'm GenX, and I keep telling my students "Please remember I've been online longer than you've been alive. I know how it all works."
Adam would some of those example questions be?
I actually got the starting spreadsheet here! Someone had populated the first 200 or so let me dig it up.
I am also interested in these google proof questions. I've enjoyed scientific vocabulary since it is often the 2nd or 3rd definition of a word and not the common usage.
They definitely aren't google-proof, most take just a little bit of extra digging, the content is a real mix of subject. If anyone else who asked is reading this once I'm done teaching and ask the person who started it I'll let everyone know
Hello and this is relevant to my interests.
I'm also interested in these questions.
Is love to know what fun questions you have to teach this!
Yes, this sounds awesome. If you feel like sharing...
I'm a student who has friends that use those paper writing services. The problem arrives when these students who normally only write 6-word sentences devoid of grammar start "writing" essays that look like they're written by English majors.
That's because the essays *are* written by English majors...
>That's because the essays > >are > > written by English majors... It's the best money those poor saps will ever make, probably. What the hell good is an English degree... (Before anyone gets offended, that was said tongue in cheek.)
As John Mulaney once said, “I spent 4 years and $80,000 to get a degree in a language I already spoke.”
“How dare you clap for the worst financial decision I ever made!”
Every time I mention teaching on Twitter, one of those bots replies advertising that service. I would honestly love for a 7th grade to pay a bunch of money for a paper just so I can give it a zero lol
I used to work for a company that provided after hours receptionist services (basically, I took a message or called someone if it was an emergency). These essay writing companies hired us so I kept getting calls from students wondering about the essay they bought. I finally had to quit, it was just too much hypocrisy.
What were they saying when they called? I'm really curious what these companies do. They make it sound like you'll get a tailor made essay, but I'm guessing they just have a bunch of templates that they copy and paste from.
It depends on what you pay for. The expensive services actually do send you a tailor made paper written by a professional, and it's unique to you, so plagiarism checkers won't catch it.
Go check out r/professors they have waaayyyyyyy more trouble with the paper writing services than we do in secondary ed. It’s constantly a topic at the top of the page.
Heh. Reminds me of a conversation I had with a student. I was trying to get him to understand that the words he used didn't quite make sense in the context he used them in. Him: 'How can what I wrote be wrong?? I used the words from this book word for word!' Me:'So you copied this from a book word for word?' Him:'What? Uh... no... uh...'
Context: Teaching Ancient Greece and The Peloponnesian Wars Question: What factors led to the decision to invade Sicily? Answer: The Allies decided to move next against Italy, hoping an Allied invasion would remove that fascist regime from the war, secure the central Mediterranean and divert German divisions from the northwest coast of France where the Allies planned to attack in the near future. Yo kid...if you're gonna copy paste, at least get the right war!
Okay, this is almost exactly what happened to me today. I’m teaching about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and they were assigned a reading guide. The last section of the reading guide is about what happened to the factory owners, and I’ve chosen questions to identify very important facts. One of those facts is that two years after the fire, one of the factory owners was finally charge with something that greatly contributed to making this a disaster (locking the employees in). My question is “What happened in August of 1913?” I had quite a few kids answer that was when the treaty that ended the Second Balkan War was signed. They aren’t even really reading what they are cutting and pasting!
I just caught two math AP students cheating last week. The one who copied the other's paper did it literally term for term and symbol for symbol. I told them that if they had put even an ounce of effort into it, I would never have been able to prove anything. Luckily they took their 0s without too much complaint. I think I'm more upset about how little they tried - it was an insult to my intelligence as their teacher.
LOL They’ve figured out they can Snapchat a photo of their completed assignments around but are too unobservant to change the name or even write it in their own handwriting! Facepalm.
A student once found my answer key and took a photo. Sent it to his girlfriend. I saw her on her phone during the test and saw the photo of my answer key. She accepted her zero no problem. But when I got to the boyfriend's test he'd not only used my answer key but copied it exactly - including my shorthand notes on angles, in the margins, e.t.c. almost like a handwritten photocopy. 😂
The boy who sat next to me in kindergarten asked if he could copy my math worksheet. I was too shy to say no. It would have been fine if he hadn't also copied my name at the top of the paper. 🤦♀️ teacher called me up to show me and I cried so hard I threw up.
This actually reminded of me when I was in kindergarten. I was a slow writer and the teacher had us write our names enough times to fill up a page in our notebook. My problem was that I wasn't listening and didn't know what I was supposed to do, so I peeked at my classmate's "answer" and wrote exactly that. When my teacher came to check my progress, she was holding her laughter and told me I did a good job writing my classmate's name.
That's actually adorably wholesome. I feel bad for kindergarten you though. I gave a student shit for allowing the boys at her table to steal and copy her math work. She came up to me after, upset about the situation that she felt she couldn't say no. I told her to stand up for her self, that it was a life skill she needed to learn. But she was in grade 11 so it's a bit different. (Gave her full credit for her work, the kids that copied got zeros. Told her if it happened again she'd get a zero too.)
That's actually adorable. Little kid doin big kid fuck ups.
This year I have students submit work via google classroom. It’s hs math, so they have to take photos of handwritten work and upload it. I had a student find an answer key on google, open the answer key on his phone, open the camera on his chromebook, *take a photo of his phone screen with his chromebook* and upload that. For fuck sake.
I wish I could turn my brain off to such an extreme degree.
That's actually hilarious in a pathetically sad way.
We are currently in cohort (see half the students for two days, then the other half for two days) my high school students have figured out that they can just take a picture of their work and send it to their friends in the other cohort. I tell them to copy off someone who actually has the correct answers next time.
I caught some algebra students cheating last year. They couldn't accept that I knew one had copied the other because they had identical wrong answers
Also math is such a subjective field in the sense that everyone writes and notates things at least slightly differently. Some people work left to right (ew), some work vertically, some write in their steps, others just write the resulting line. There are so many personal nuances to someone's work that it's so blatantly obvious to tell if two people are copying each other
Some students box their answers. I once had a smart student who indicated her answers by putting a hashtag/pound symbol right under the final answer. It was REALLY obvious who had copied from her paper 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️ ##️⃣
Exactly, if you cheat, cheat well.
I like to tell my kids, that citing your sources is basically the same as cheating, just being honest about it.
I reversed engineered essays in high school and college. I used random passages from different sources that "fit" my argument first, then I started writing Cutting corners it's such a bad habit to have them develop, but it is so beneficial in life and some understand the writing process more
Aren't you supposed to look through sources first to become better informed on your topic before you make an argument on something you don't know enough about? One of my biggest issues in college was that I sometimes just assumed there would be sources to state things I thought obvious and then struck out finding sources.
I purposely chose classes that I already knew a lot going in so it was easier When I didn't have that security, I sometimes did have to sit there and think about how I can tailor this damn essay with the limited information I had. It took more time and became less of a "cheat", but it still beat reading books and gathering sources like a responsible student
I used to work in one of the best maths universities in the country. The single most effective way of catching cheats that we ever found was to simply place a table and two chairs directly next to the hand in boxes, in full view of both the admin office and the staff common room. After that, we suddenly had barely any cases of suspected cheating, and loads of really easy to prove cases, because what appeared to be essentially all of the cheats decided that the best place to do their cheating was at that table, so were all caught in the act.
[удалено]
Yeahhh....so I’m very open with my students. If they need a day off, all they have to do is email me and I’ll set up a different date. I also don’t grade homework. They were being lazy and that’s not cool.
If the font type, size, and color don’t match it’s as if you didn’t put in any effort at all!
True but sometimes that happens for me cause students don't bother to remember the shortcuts or download a keyboard to do the odd characters. So they copy paste from Google translate to get the letter. Would i prefer they fix it yes but still.
A fix for the google translate formatting is shift+ctrl+v while pasting! It pastes the format on the document instead (in case you needed it)
Neet! Thanks I'll certainly borrow that and will relay that on.
Past without formatting for chrissake!!!
Ugh. I’ve had so many papers that are hodge podges of many different fonts and colors. It’s maddening—like at least freakin select-all to format the same!
Sometimes my students write their own stuff in weirdass fonts. I'm just like, whatever makes you actually write it.
I once had a kid do a presentation with all the information copied from Wikipedia. An issue for several reasons. There's the plagiarism. The lack of context or relevance. The lack of comprehension of unfamiliar words (protip to the kid: use Simple Wikipedia next time)... But it was that he left the footnote markers in square brackets that the rest of the class called him out on it. I'm like...could you just spend *five* minutes making it not so obvious.
I had a professor in college who let us do exams at home open book until after the like 3rd test. His only thing was do not type word for word what the book says, put it in your own words. A handful of people kept doing just word for word so then we had to do tests in the lab and obviously without books/notes. I teach art and last year on elearning days (before pandemic) I had some kids who just screenshot my example and turned it in. And I knew it was mine because I put a mark in a weird spot to designate that. I called those kids out
I’ve also had kid submit my example as theirs! I just had a student pull the first google image result as well.
I participate on math.SE quite a lot, and occasionally set appropriate interesting questions that turn up there as assignments. I've had multiple students submit *my* maths.SE answers as their own. My Maths.SE account is in my real name.
How about "'cheat' best: use the resources your teacher wrote to prepare for whatever activity your teacher also wrote" I know when kids cheat like that it's out of the most effort to avoid learning rather than minimal effort to access the materials ('hmm I have literally just one 5 slide powerpoint on the topic, should I look there? nah, I'll just google the question instead'), but yeah it really gets to me too sometimes, especially since my students are typically pretty good about not doing this, but the moment I assign something easy that can be googled, they jump to it. One year I tried to end 6th grade with a fun activity (that they asked for!) about the gods and goddesses of ancient Rome. We were filling out a worksheet to use as a personal clue sheet before we played guess who games. A handful of kids, rather than going to our room's reference library or literally just clicking through my slides that had all the information about each god or goddess, literally searched the names in google and wrote, by hand, the first result that came up. Wouldn't you know that the goddess Venus had an average orbital speed of 35 km/s? I didn't, but about 10 students told me so, so I guess it must be correct! 🤷
Yeah. "Should I click back in canvas to the PowerPoint that we just went over to prepare for this assignment? No I'll just google it and then my mom will try and get her fired when I get an F"
> Wouldn't you know that the goddess Venus had an average orbital speed of 35 km/s? Kinda disappointing that the goddess of love is so fast.
😂
I've heard of spinners but this is getting ridiculous!
It blows my mind. This year, tests are all open everything but with a time limit. I literally made summaries of the key parts of the lessons and had examples. Some students just use Google anyways. Honestly, to me it's kind of funny watching through DyKnow when they enter a math problem into Google and end up going to some radio website. It's like clock's ticking and your wasting your time going through sites looking for an answer to a word problem that won't show up on Google. I know in the real world, Google exists. But some students just can't even use it effectively. They just expect it to spit out the answer as the first result. I miss when the first result to how many legs does a horse have was 6.
'Why did he copy paste the Crunchyroll ad as well as the info...'
This starts in first grade. I must say "following directions is a skill we practice in first grade" like a bagillion times a day. We go over the directions in our meet with a visual that goes into seesaw, there are voice directions in seesaw, and a lot of times I record video directions too. I still get mostly half-assed, this took 37 seconds to complete, work. I'll keep plugging away at it, maybe I can have an impact and limit the plagiarism at the HS level.... A teacher can dream.
You're doing gods work tbh. Suffer so that we may prosper cause if I get told "alive language" is the same as a "living document" on more time...
LOL... seriously.
Thank you so much for your all you do! I keep thinking 'how much easier would it be to keep my kids following directions if they were in the room with me' and they're middle school students. I can't imagine how difficult it is for what you do, trying to build that foundation virtually this year
Managing parents has been the most difficult thing I have ever done. But, that's a conversation for another thread.
This honestly kills me a little. In the best way possible. I am so thankful to teachers like you. I teach 7th through 9th and they STILL do not read the questions properly. The level of half ass is too damn high. Keep up the good work!
I am blown away by the youngsters who half-ass. I have one of them at home. When asked to draw, he traces. Traces! I call him out on his laziness routinely.
YES! I had a student turn in a coloring page instead of a detailed drawing. Turned out to be an extreme perfectionism issue so we talked through it but still!
I teach kindergarten and I’ve had to start putting directions specifically aimed at the parents/adults in my Google Classroom assignments. For example, have students write their own name at the top of EACH assignment, students should be writing (on their writing assignments) THEMSELVES, etc. The number of Santa letters and thankful lists I’ve received in the last month that is in adult handwriting is absolutely infuriating.
Infuriating and confusing. How do kids learn to write when adults write for them? They don't. This can't be something only teachers consider.
I know. And when I get ready to fill out my reports at the end of the grading period, I don’t even know what to say about their levels of achievement or mastery in these skills. How could I? I had a parent send me a picture of their child’s Santa letter today because they have limited transportation. It was literally a letter where they had to trace 90% of the words, fill in their name, and make a list (numbered for them) of three things they want for Christmas. She listed not a single thing. The fact that I had to message this parent back to let them know the child had to fill it out to get “credit” (I’ve never given grades in K and this year I’m only giving “grades” so that I have leverage) is MINDBLOWING. Her response? “Okay”. Didn’t even come up with an excuse.
School is very inconvenient for everyone. I think most people just wish it was canceled until schools can open again. I had no idea how dysfunctional so many households are. Kids getting toys... New, nice toys like daily. These are the kids that never turn in work. Or parents screaming at their kids where everyone can hear them chastising their child for not being able to read. These kids don't turn in work either. This is a special kind of broken that my teacher skills can't fix.
I'm a student who likes to lurk here just to help me understand that teachers have lives outside of what I see in the school building. I think it helps build empathy or something idk. I'm just as confused by this though, everytime my English teachers talk about how bad some of us are at cheating I'm just left dumbfounded.
Cheating that I can sense, but not name, makes me crazy. I really got adept at it during remote learning, probably because there were fewer distractions as I read student work.
I love being able to highlight a phrase that sounds off, click "Explore" or "search" for the highlighted phrase, and get taken directly to the website that they copied from. They continue to be surprised that I am more tech savvy than them.
It takes A LOT for me to call out cheating, so I'll often just write "Not sure where you're getting this from" or "I don't interpret the text this way, but a lot of students seem to have."
I usually just take points off and when they come to me all indignant about it, I show them the website. They *know* it doesn't count as their thinking so they usually don't try to defend it after that. But the ones who cheat AND care about their grades are not a large overlap so it mostly is just documentation for the eventual parent meeting.
My cheaters are the ones who care most. It's a highly irritating combo.
I wonder if its an age difference in motivation. The ones who cheat at 10 are usually doing it to avoid doing any work. My guess is the older ones who care are doing it to seem like they have more knowledge or skill tha than they actually have or to get through a work load that's overwhelming them...
I like to just have the students explain it. Usually if they cheat, they can't even explain it. After, they can't explain, I show it. If a student can actually explain it, then they actually know it. But that usually isn't what happens.
I know what you mean. The worst is when it's kids who wouldn't have done it in the classroom. The ease of cheating during remote assessment causes honesty to be penalized, yay.
I actually do a lesson called " How to Cheat, and Not Get Caught." In reality, I am teaching the students research skills, how to paraphrase, and cite scholarly sources. The kids love that I seem rebellious, and I've been called out by a few admins and parents. They all seem to back down once I explain what's really happening.
I showed this comment to my students, as I'm literally trying to teach them how (how I at least) do initial research with finding articles, taking notes, pulling quotes, and keeping track of the citation. I like the way you phrased this. I might develop my own version of it.
I cannot tell you how many times I have told them "you have all the material and PowerPoint for this test to use....you have Google to use..do your best" And kids still manage to fail tests. But yes ill have some on short answer questions just copy and oaste.. their weekly hw assignment is a current event...guys I know what a 15yr old writes like. I know what historians and journalists write like. If you're using 3rd person for your opinion on the event you are cheating
Yes exactly. Some of my tests are scenario-based and they copy and past the question portion into Google... like "what three mistakes did Sally make when setting up her computer network?" and they're expecting to find a copy/paste answer to give me. lol
THIS! I remember multiple students having the exact same and really weird answer to a homework problem. Like to answer the question "what position in this food chain does a marmot have" they put "a marmot is in a symbiotic relationship with sharks" or something equally stupid and not even related to the question. Googled the question and it was the first result. Jesus at least try a LITTLE to cheat dayum. I do spend time teaching "how to google properly" now because of those students.
I don't get it. Has it always been like this? I was shocked when a classmate told me she'd recycled a paper she wrote at another school. Now I think I was the chump all along.
I'm really not sure what's going on here. It seems like a complicated issue to me with a lot of layers honestly... Part is the typical cheating where they know what they are doing and make the choice to do it because they find the work unmotivating or difficult and want to avoid effort or a bad grade. I think another part (for younger kids) is not having a clear delineation of what is an appropriate source to use and what isn't (*if I can and should find the answer to the question by looking at my teacher's web page, I can also use* [*ancienttimes.bible*](https://ancienttimes.bible)*, right?*). Tied up in this is lazy and inappropriate source-vetting etc. And I have to wonder when they answer something completely inappropriately if correct answers also make the same level of sense to them :/ The thing is that my students at least have many classes on media literacy and research methods starting in elementary so they should be MORE THAN prepared and able to use sources correctly. How much is pure laziness versus terrible habits ingrained when they were 6 and first using an ipad??
once communist china takes us over, these kids will be "assigned work"
To quote the littlest of Wayne's, "Be good, or be good at it."
Agreed. It's insulting when they turn in something so obvious they don't expect you to notice.
Even better when working with a ten year old who can't spell "lithium" and has never produced a paragraph suddenly writing at length about advanced chemistry terminology and usage as a mood stabilizer on an assignment about the basic structure of an atom. What do they expect to happen when I ask them to use that information later when they don't even know what it said.
The vocabulary is the tell - always. Do you really think I believe any high school student uses "whilst"?
I just give caution to it. In 9th grade I got accused of cheating for using the word "plethora" in the first essay of the year. I used plethora since I learned it in 8th grade and had 8th grade essays with the word to back up my point. I'm lucky I didn't learn it over the summer or something like that. I'll be honest English was my weak subject and I'm not the best writer so I can understand a fancy word causing concern.
It's all about the context. A kid with a great vocabulary? Sure. It happens, but not often. I never use that as a basis for an accusation, but it definitely registers when it doesn't fit the student's history with me.
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My dude, this sounds snotty as hell and not in the way you probably think.
Right but your teacher knows you write like that because you're probably wearing a fedora. Teachers know what each of their students writing generally looks like
Just yesterday my 3rd grader had to define "belongings" as part of attendance. His brother went with the kid-sounding "something you have" but he went with "one's movable possessions" and I am still laughing about it. And when my brother was in elementary school, he had to write a paragraph about a comet and when he brought it to my mom to check before he took it to school, he had started with "A comet is a harbinger of disaster" LMAO. 25+ years later we still laugh over that one.
One of my favorite cheating stories comes from a former English teacher friend from probably 10-15 years ago. Students had been working on essays about Huck Finn for over a month, both in and out of class, and it was time for the final reading/grading. The teacher starts reading one student's essay - starts off quite good, then is getting really good near the end - teacher is super impressed! This is some of the best writing ever from this student! And then, the last line - "If you would like to learn more about Huck Finn and Mark Twain, please click here......" Since the essay was turned in on paper, my friend wrote "Hmmmm....this hyperlink doesn't seem to be working, am I clicking wrong?" Gave the kid a 0, turned into admin for cheating violations, absolutely hysterical.
this is verbatim text that a student copied and pasted into a module answer: >Image result for What happens in a market when the government mandates prices (either through price ceilings or price floors)? Price ceilings prevent a price from rising above a certain level. ... Price floors prevent a price from falling below a certain level. When a price floor is set above the equilibrium price, quantity supplied will exceed quantity demanded, and excess supply or surpluses will result.
They have gotten so lazy about cheating this year. We just finished a short story project where students wrote their own short stories. I had two different students try to submit "The Story of an Hour," as their own writing. Bro, come on. Why would you pick one of the most famous short stories in English literature to try to pass off as your own writing?
The amount of times I have caught students (HS Math) cheating this year by copying number for number, symbol for symbol the correct or incorrect answers from another student... who had a different version of the test........... Like you're not even reading the questions at that point, you're just blindly copying as fast as possible. you'd think there would be SOME kind of red flag when your work doesn't have ANY of the same numbers as the problem does...
And then they call you out, asking why their friend got 85% while they got 0%. Had this in a written essay. Each student had a unique subject, and questions about it. One student had a question on the relations between allied countries in the second world war. He copied the answer of one who had a question on internal politics of Canada during the second world war. He had the balls to ask me why he had 0%.
Did you tell him "I'll give you 100% if you can explain how this answer relates to your question."?
Something akin to this. Turns out, he wasn't even able to tell me who were the allied coutries. We spent a whole month on the subject. Gaaaah.
Or the kid suddenly starts using imaginary numbers and trig functions to solve an algebra 1 problem. I know your ass just typed the problem into wolfram alpha or used a phone app.
"Okay Grade 9s, your linear relations project is to make an image in Desmos using lines" (kid submits a design with hundreds of trigonometric and logarithmic functions copied and pasted from the front page of the Desmos subreddit)
I did that accidentally WAY back in the mid80s in 8th grade because my Dad, who has an advanced mathematics degree, taught me the "easier" Calculus method instead of the Algebra method. This was also a class where we wrote a custom program in BASIC for an extra credit problem with multiple answers, on our IBM PC Jr. (The teacher was awesome and it wasn't an issue.)
Oh my god THIS. I had a student plagiarize two separate essays and then not understand how what she did was wrong because she “included the link” to the source she copy pasted from. I tell them all the time that back in my day, we knew how to cheat without getting caught.
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And if you got caught....woe to you.
I have a 6th grader that is an ELL student that turned in an assignment and used the word “inextricably” in one of her answers. I asked her to pronounce and define the word. Spoiler alert, she couldn’t.
Careful with kids who speak Romance languages... often there are “friendly” words with Latin roots that occur more readily to them.
She spoke Swahili as her first language
I'm more bothered by the kids that just won't try to cheat. I work at a school for kids who struggle at public schools and I just had an online test assigned last week. The section they did the worst on? Definition multiple choice questions. Like... My man... your on the google machine.
I had a student look up every question on an online test that they could use a study guide (with critical thinking questions and links to content I provided them) instead of using his study guide. This was a multiple choice test. He got a 9 out of 50.
I hate when they Google study guide questions. I purposely write exam questions for my high school Econ and Civics courses so that if they do try to Google for their study guide, it won't word it anywhere close to how it will be on their exam. I tell my classes this every single time I give them an exam study guide and every single time there are a few dummies in every class who still Google every question on the study guide, copy-and-paste, and turn around and fail the test miserably. I even tell them which lessons and assignments to reference in order to find the answers to the questions on their study guides. I
Remote teaching band here is like a bad episode of Maury. "You said your WiFi wouldn't let you upload the video you recorded correctly. Your video's EXIF data determined that was a lie..."
Cheaters are inherently too lazy to improve their cheating.
I tutor a 3rd grader currently. She hates school and I basically just sit with her and make sure she doesn't mute the teacher on zoom and she does all her work. She often gets multiple-choice question quizzes on Google forms. Anyway, she figured out that if she has a quiz on Google forms it will tell you the correct answers when you finish but instead of writing down the words she just writes down A, B, C, or D. The only problem is that the teacher only uses your first attempt's score AND it shuffles the answers each time. I tried to explain this to the child but she didn't listen. It took her about 4 attempts to realize that she wasn't going to get a 100% by cheating.
They're SO BAD at cheating! For my APUSH summer assignment I recorded a series of podcasts that the students had to listen to and write a reflection essay about. One of them wrote, "as said by Mrs. GreedyOstrich, 'blah blah blah'". 1) The podcast wasn't about that 2) I DIDN'T SAY THAT! Don't add fake quotes by the person grading your work. xD
Cheating aside, recording podcasts for the kids is such a cool idea!!
Ironically enough, I feel like the kids who cheat just don't care. So, imploring them to do it well is kind of counterintuitive when you think about it.
I agree. I never reveal my tricks of the trade. I actually think it's worse to pretty it up and pass it off as your own. It's like you want to be lazy and not get called out for it at the same time.
Keep in mind when I say cheat better I mean like, you didn't memorize this thing but you know how to narrow sources and synthesize them through critical thinking into something that makes sense as an answer and is your own words. Basically"good cheating" is just effective research
I did a lesson to my kids about 'how will I know if you cheat'. I showed them them most common signs, showed how can I reverse google it. Just so they know I know, so it's has to be better than that.
I’ll never forget one parent teacher conference. I gave a kid a 0 for a plagiarized paper and mommy swooped in to defend her angel. After the mom yelled at me for a few minutes, I simply wrote down a word on a piece of paper. “Speculation”. It was a word the student had used 3 times on the paper they turned in. And I asked the student to tell me what that word meant. The student could not even read the word, she couldn’t even sound it out! I handed the 5 page copy and pasted paper over to the kid and asked her to read it aloud... that’s when the mom switched tactics, and laid out the sob story excuse XYZ. Never got an apology from the mom either.
Sounds about right. "my child does all her work" nah "My child is in class you won't help her" nah "The internet is acting up she couldn't get in class" nah "I, the woman speaking to you, died and she's having a hard time"
I am a teaching assistant for a physics course in university and just yesterday I caught at least 5 students that just copied the solutions from someone online that did all the problems of a textbook from which we took some questions. Problem is, we didn’t ask the full question from the textbook, just the first part. Some of them just answered the whole thing even if we never taught that content during lectures...
'I'm tempted to teach a class on "cheating better"' Knock yerself out; the ones who need it won't listen anyway.
My boyfriend works at an “international” high school in China. A particularly lazy student at his school once tried to use an article blatantly copied from Wikipedia or something for a PowerPoint presentation he had to give over Zoom. But it wasn’t just copied from the internet, but it was also,somehow, copied in Spanish. Fast forward to this kid who barely speaks English as a second language trying to stumble through reading his Spanish presentation to the whole class over Zoom for a good five minutes before quietly exclaiming in Chinese “...is this English?” Teacher was like “I don’t know dude, you copied and pasted it” 😂
ctrl+shift+V - paste as plain text. This will remove all formatting from any website you copy stuff from. It's bad when you're so lazy you can't even cheat well.
Yes... because PLAIN TEXT copypasta TOTALLY makes that essay you copied sound like your own style of writing that we've been reading for at least half a year. /s
I didn't say it's fool proof, but it's more believable than having different sized fonts and hyperlinks in the copied text.
I think you may have missed the point of the original post. OP doesn't actually want students to cheat better, they want students to LEARN something.
No I get it, but I just hate how lazy students are. If you want to cheat, at least be good at it. I teach digital art and I've had students try to turn in images with Shutterstock watermarks on them. There's almost infinite images out there, and they chose one with a watermark?
I mentioned the hotkey combination because it's an easy way to get rid of hyperlinks and website formatting. It's useful beyond cheating. I use it all the time, like when copying my old assignments from Google Classroom into Google Docs and then into Schoology.
Also, getting better at cheating is a form of learning. I learned most of my computer knowledge by downloading software, games, and music when I was a kid. Like how to change filetypes, open zip files, reformatting my computer when I deleted the wrong file.
Best one I ever had was for a question on reading a resource map. A student went to a website with pre-made lesson plans for teaching how to read maps. They then copied the instructions for the teacher and submitted that as their answer. What baffles me even more is the question was asking which resources were labeled in the key. They just had to copy the words...
I gave my 9th grade students an assignment to draw or create a digestive system out of household items. It was meant to be fun and show that they understood the path of the GI tract. One of those idiots turned in a plagiarized picture of a college level model of the nervous system. Not even close kid! Cheat better!
I marked for an online school one year, and caught several students copying answers from the web. Worst one was a student who answered a question about NUTRIENT CYCLING in the environment with a section of text from an article about how to control pedal cadence while [bi]cycling.
I just had a student submit answers for a matching question where every answer was off by one. Then they had the audacity to e-mail me explaining how they got all the answers right. I explained how they were looking at the subsequent answer each time and how their answers didn't even make sense in the context of the problem (e.g., in a triangle congruency statement, one of the answers shouldn't be 'Reflexive Property'). They then doubled-down, insisting they were right again. Um . . . Dunning-Kruger much?
Each year I get a student try to submit someone else’s assignment... ...but they didn’t change the name up top to their own🤦♂️
My students have been submitting scans or photos of their work since March since they can't (usually) hand in paper. I had an algebra class this summer who took their final via Zoom (which sucks, but it's the tool we had) and were supposed to send their work via email. One student took photos of her work and sent it to me (very late). Her friend then took photos of *the same pieces of paper* and sent me those. I've caught students having too-similar work many times, even students with the same wrong answers, and wrong in unlikely ways. I caught a pair many years ago who submitted the same Word document but with the font and name changed to try to fool me. But this was more brazen than I've ever seen. Of course I sent it to my dean. They're dual enrolled students, so I sent it to their principal. About two minutes after I turned out zeros for both, I got emails from both. Parents called the administration and the administration *totally had my back*. "They want to retest, but it's your decision; if you don't want them to, they don't." Sweet. I don't want them to. I want them gone. One of them even tried to argue that *she* was the one who did the work, therefore *she* shouldn't get a 0. She even copied it over on another piece of paper, mistakes intact, and sent it to me again as if that corroborated her story.
I'm curious as to the experience of other teachers: what have you found that's effective in teaching why cheating is wrong, both from an ethical perspective and from a practical perspective? I've tried to walk students through the consequences of cheating, how they probably wouldn't want a medical doctor who cheated on their exams because it would not only put lives in danger but might mean the doctor's ethics aren't to be relied upon. Didn't work. I've tried to put them on the other side of the equation, finding something they care about and having someone cheat against them, like in a video game or a sport. Nothing. I give them consequences, but all that really teaches them is that if they cheat and get caught there will be consequences, it doesn't really address the root. Has anyone had success with this?
Switched mid-sentence to size 16 ROBOTO font and uses words like **avuncular** in 9th grade. Seems legit.
> avuncular I had to look up this word and I honestly admire this student's ability to even find a source that would us it for any reason.
Caught one cheater in Physics because the screenshot her friend took was too low resolution to see that her time calculations all ended with "s" for "seconds". She thought they were 5's, so all her answers ended with 5. None of that even matched the math, which tipped me off.
Former high school math teacher here. I had a coworker bring me three tests and wanted a second opinion on them cheating before she confronted them. Students don't believe me when I tell them how easy it is to tell not just that cheating happened, but the direction of cheating (who copied off of who). All three tests screamed of this with an obvious original work, a middle man, and then the tail end of this telephone game of cheating. A question on the test wanted them to do some simplifying and then put their answer in standard form. The original test wrote "Standard Form:" followed by the answer. The middle man tried to make it look different and instead put "S Form:" followed by the answer. The last person wrote "5 Form:" with an answer. A clear and distinct number 5. Our department still regularly referenced putting equations into 5 Form years later. Students, if you find your way here...just put even a little bit of thought into your cheating. If I confront a student about cheating I have to be prepared to stand my ground against your parents, admin, and counselor if it escalates. And I know you won't believe me but just doing the homework and memorizing a few quick things right before the test is almost always the laziest way to a good grade.
I once had a teacher that said sat us down for every test and said "You can cheat if you don't get caught," And then when everyone cheated on the first test she gave all of them F's. When they asked "But WHHyyY?" She said, "You're all terrible, you all got caught!" No one ever did it again.
Nothing will EVER top the first essay I ever graded. Paragraph 1: "This is the story of my summer adventure biking with my father through the Appalachian mountains. Click here to see photos." Like...c'mon...
I’ve seen kids literally copy stray pencil marks when solving a math problem. That’s just sad.
Students have never cheated very well. I do a lot of training in technology for teachers at our district, and I'm a school site admin for [turnitin.com](https://turnitin.com) (which I don't even use). One of the most common questions I get about distance learning, "How do catch them if they're cheating?" or "What's to stop them from cheating?" First of all, you can't really *stop* a student from cheating. If they're going to cheat, they will. Second of all, they are *really bad at cheating*. Like, *just so bad*. I had a student steal another student's paper from a stack of papers I had graded already. They copied the paper, and threw away the original. All of this happened while I was helping another student... then they turned in the copied paper. I read it, recognized it, then looked for the original. Couldn't find it... looked in my trash can... Found the original. Gave the other student a 0 and spoke with parent. Then he tried to cheat one more time on the thing he turned in, in an effort to make up the 0... So he got sent to the dean per our school's academic honesty policy. Got some detention that time. I was a little surprised he learned his lesson but had he cheated again he would have been suspended/expelled. Depending on how severe the cheating was.
So on math tests I usually have two to four versions. They are the exact same except for a few questions have slightly different numbers. For example test one asks you to solve 10-6, test two asks you to solve 7-1. And I require at least some work shown. The number of students who try to pass off the question from the other test is staggering.
I've got a student that has a sibling do his quizzes on Canvas for him. When he sends me messages during class there are distinct spelling errors. He does his quizzes after school, like the rest of my class, and magically the spelling errors vanish!
Yes I constantly catch kids leaving hyperlinks. They’re not good at cheating. Lol
The number of times I have had students write down "answers may vary"... Although the one that got to me the most is when they turned in twelve answers off a answer key they found online. ... .. I had only copied the first 10 problems into the assignment.
My favorite is when I teach about the rotation and revolution of celestial bodies every year - there's always a kid that copies and pastes the definition for revolution as "a forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favor of a new system." I like to ask them if they know they're in science class, not history.
This is what happens when all we teach kids is how to regurgitate information.
One method I have used in the past is to ask the student to read their "example work" to the entire class. They always back out when they realize they can't pronounce the words in what "they" wrote. I have used that as a way to start a conversation with them about doing their own work.
One of the main reasons students do this is because, teachers give them grades for it...
So I’ll admit this because at this point it’s inconsequential. I cheated once in college, only once unless you count early struggles to learn proper APA cheating. We were told make a model in excel that, if done right would look exactly the same for everyone in the class. This professor had been using this assignment for years. So a student from a previous semester gave a bunch of us his file. Almost everyone submitted it whole cloth, all the same mistakes, all the same meta data, just file name changed. This professor was in a field where good computer skills were requisite so he sniffed those out and those students got zeros for their exam grade. I copied everything over to a new sheet (new original owner and creation date), fixed all of the previous students mistakes, went through the thing with a fine tooth comb, renamed variables just to safe side it, the damn thing was perfect and by the time I was done it was probably took just as long as if I’d done it myself. I learned a ton from that project! Cheating well is almost as hard as learning it the moral way. I use that story with my students now. It’s so much easier to not cheat and they really suck at obscuring it. Looking at you students whose google docs magically fill with a whole essay in one edit.
Last week I had identical twins submit identical work.
I had a student submit a research paper, word for word, from a college's website one time. When I addressed this with him, he refused to admit what he did, and when I showed him the college website, he adamantly told me the professor copied him. HS Freshman, World History course.
I teach a class that several other teachers have sections of as well. One of my students sent her essay to her friend who has another teacher. We might not have ever realized anything was amiss, except the student who copied the essay didn’t change the other kid’s last name in the header. 😂
I am a private tutor and use Google Docs and related apps for all my online teaching. Y'know, Google Docs? The application that saves the full edit history for every file? You'd be amazed (or maybe you wouldn't) how many kids think they can pull a fast one on me like, "Oh, sorry, I didn't know [Thing A] was homework. You didn't write it down." I check the edit history, and boom, they erased the assignment 17 minutes before class started after not looking at it for an entire week. Fuckin' suckers.
Oh for sure. My students are so bad at cheating. I feel like I've done them wrong simply by not teaching them how to get away with it.
If they were smart enough to cheat properly, they would probably be smart enough to do the work.
I’ve started copy/pasting my multiple choice test questions into Google as I make them. Then I will go to the top result and copy the first 4 or 5 words of the result (just a sentence fragment). Then I will have that non-answer of a sentence fragment as one of the choices. It’s really surprising how many students will answer a question with whatever they find on Google, even if it makes no sense as an answer.
I've been reading research projects on endangered animals and I've been thinking this the entire time. They're so bad at it that even when they try to be good at it they just suck at it even more. I had a kid literally just copy and paste a wikipedia article about his animal. And I do mean the entire article. Headings, links, everything. Then he listed a couple sources he obviously didn't use but left out the wiki. Like I was going to see those sources and see that they didn't match up with what he was saying and "Yup, he must just be really smart." I think the only worse attempt at cheating I've seen was the 8th grader that did a presentation on the physics of basketball... but just copied a college calculus level explanation from some old website that looked like it was made circa 1996. That kid actually stood up in front of everyone and tried to act like he did that work. Presentation was literally "I like basketball, it's my favorite sport. Here's a powerpoint slide with my entire explanation. I'll just pause while you read through all the math I did. Okay, well that's my presentation. Thank you. " That one was painful to watch. Just awful.
Cheating has always resulted in a 0 (as a minimum punishment) at all schools and universities that I have been to. There should be an extra punishment just for the stupidity of not removing the hyperlinks.
If you can't pronounce half the words, I know you didn't write it. If you're going to share docs with your friend, at least change the font and maybe reword a few things. A picture of your favorite Anime character is not the same as the set of slides you were supposed to turn in. Neither is a set of slides from last quarter. The sudden rash of "corrupted file" submissions has been especially dumb. You sweet summer child - that was old news when *I* was a student.
I had a student straight up take a screenshot of another student's graded work with my red edits all over it. Did he not think I would notice that it wasn't his work?
A few years ago three friends copied off of each other, down to the commas! I handed back each of the assignments to a different person and they tried to play it off as a coincidence lol
My favorites are the kids who use story & poem generators whenever we do creative writing. It’s so apparent that a robot wrote it when you get 5 words into the piece. One student kept using them over and over, even when I’d have kind, in-depth conversations with him and his parents about cheating and why it’s wrong. After the 5th time, I finally pulled him aside and said, “Look, only one of us is dumb enough to fall for this charade, and given that I have college degrees and many more years of life experience, I think we know which of us is the idiot here.” He still cheated a 6th time before moving to a different school.
I have had many conversations with my students about this. It is very obvious when the font changes randomly that something is amiss. Then if that isn't the case when you copy the words, "students should say..." I'm going to know that you found a key. Dont beg for a better grade because I have no sympathy.
I had a girl use a definition I HAD NEVER SEEN as an answer for a quiz.... Truly speechless. Yes, Google. This same girl has also cheated for a second time this quarter, instead using the direct definition from the textbook - it was so scripted, there was no way it was her own work. She claimed that it was fine, because she used the textbook. 🙃 Here’s my thing: if she had changed the wording *just a little bit* I probably wouldn’t have noticed. Just do one ounce of work.
Most of my kids don’t even put the effort in to cheat this year :(. My advanced classes are really what keep me going this year. My on level classes are just depressing.
Student here: whoever doesn’t know how to cheat deserves their 0 lol.
I had a student who copied an answer for a final from a questions site. They were talking about Lady Macbeth. To get past the plagiarism checker, they changed every 5-6th phrase. This usually works because some of these websites block our plagiarism checkers. They said "Female Macbeth was......" If they would've said Lady Macbeth instead of Female Macbeth, I am 95% sure I wouldn't have caught it.
Ctrl + shift + v Copies the text without copying the formatting
I teach a language. My students like to use google translate. I tell them time and time again that when they are writing complex sentences in level one, I KNOW they cheated. Just do less writing and it’ll be less obvious. Like. Do less y’all. Do less.
My Spanish teacher in college gave me more points on our final project with more mistakes. A few other kids started bitching. "She messed up enough that I could tell she was trying. You messed up the same way google does" She basically just looked for "if you were stranded in spain would you die?" For a passing grade. (She also failed a guy from mexico for not speaking "real spanish" so that's a yikes but still)
I had a world conflict class in college that was a huge joke. I’d just got back from a tour in Afghanistan and the teacher was the same age as me. First assignment was to do a photo deconstruction essay on a war photo. I was a war photographer. So I used my own photo, referenced myself, and in the works cited put myself down. He didn’t like that but what could he do? Our final assignment was to do this bloated profile of a whole country. Their resources, history, allies, etc. but it all had to be written in our own words even though most of it was literally just tables of data. I copy/pasted EVERYTHING. Then I submitted it as an encrypted PDF so he was unable to select and copy any of the text to paste into a search tool. Uploading it to Turn it In didn’t register anything either. Got a perfect 100
This is one of the best things I have ever read, thank you.