DATE: Saturday, November 8, 1997            TAG: 9711070096

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY LORRAINE EATON, STAFF WRITER 
                                            LENGTH:   98 lines

CHEATING GOES HIGH-TECH ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES

WHEN OLD DOMINION University's Honor Council canvassed the campus this fall to uncover new forms of cheating, engineering students talked about hand-held calculators capable of communicating across a classroom via infrared sensors.

At the University of Virginia, the Honor Committee is weighing whether buying class notes from the Internet is dishonest.

And colleges here and across the country are reckoning with a growing tendency among students to take information off of the Internet and call it their own.

A shift of the eyes, a sleight of hand - cheating was once so crude. But those days are gone. New technology is providing students with new ways to cheat, and in some cases, is blurring the once sharp line between right and wrong.

High-tech cheating ``is going to be one of the most problematic areas in higher education today,'' said Arthur R. Jackson, vice president for student affairs at Norfolk State University. ``We all know it's an issue that we have to address.''

Boston University last month sued eight online term-paper providers charging that they sold works to students who intended to submit them for class credit. Locally, educators said they have seen little, if any, evidence of students buying papers. They and educators across the country are more troubled by other forms of cyber-plagiarism.

One frequent complaint is that students do not credit cybersources.

``Many students feel that they aren't cheating,'' said Donald L. McCabe, associate provost of Rutgers University-Newark and founding president of the national Center for Academic Integrity. ``They feel like the Internet is a source of public information. It's almost like it's for the public good.''

It's not always intentional, educators said. Students sometimes become confused about where they found the work.

``Some really have no idea where they got things,'' said Rene Perez-Lopez, vice president for information systems and librarian at Virginia Wesleyan College. ``They go through three or four or five links and don't know. The challenge to us is to educate them about the new medium.''

Perez-Lopez reminds students to keep track of the changing addresses on their computer screens as they move from site to site on the Internet. He also requires his students to research the author of any material they use in their papers to assure the credibility of the information.

ODU faculty and honor council members recently met to discuss ways to stem online abuses. Many faculty members favored requiring students to turn in research papers one draft at a time. One even mused that the Internet might lead to wholesale scrapping of research papers for undergraduates, but he wondered what could take their place.

The problems extend beyond the footnotes.

Carol Locke, ODU's hearing officer, told of a graduate student who copied the annual report from a company off of the net, changed some names and turned it in as a marketing project. The result: Expulsion.

Other situations aren't so cut and dry.

At UVa., a student entrepreneur offered class notes for sale on the Web this fall. Although he doesn't believe it was wrong, he has decided to hold off on the business until next semester while the honor council and school officials talk about whether such a system is ethical.

Some believe the notes are study aids, said Jennifer Erickson of Virginia Beach, a fourth-year student and Honor Committee chair. Others argue that the ability to purchase notes would encourage students to cut class. Still others consider it an infringement on the intellectual property of the instructors.

Even roll call has become controversial.

At ODU and other universities where classes meet in large lecture halls, students swipe identification cards through a machine that records attendance. If a student leaves 10 minutes later, is that a form of cheating?

``That's one of those gray areas,'' said John H. Stover III, chair of the ODU Honor Council.

Stover has not handled a case of a student using calculators to communicate answers across classrooms, nor have there been reports of ODU students buying papers off of the net. But the Honor Council knows the technology is out there and has embarked on a campus-wide educational campaign for students and faculty about all types of cheating.

Of course cheating is nothing new. In a 1963 survey, 39 percent of college students admitted to cheating on tests. McCabe surveyed students in 1993 and found that the number had risen to 64 percent.

In this new age of technology, McCabe has been amazed at how far students will go.

He used as an example two engineering students at an East Coast school. Both entered class to take an exam, but one soon left and took a copy of the test. Shortly after, a security guard noticed a van circling the building and discovered the student who had left the exam transmitting answers electronically to the student in the class.

McCabe believes that technology may have reduced cheating on written assignments because original sources are easier to find with computerized card catalogs. The Internet and hand-held calculators probably won't have the same effect, he said, because make it easier for students to cheat and harder for teachers to detect.

``This (high-tech cheating) scares me,'' McCabe said, ``just because it's so easy.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]

John Stover heads the ODU Honor Council, which has an anti-cheating

campaign.

VICKI CRONIS/The Virginian-Pilot

Old Dominion senior John Stover is chairman of the Honor Council.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu