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Home › Articles › Back to School Headquarters › A Wangled, Wired Web

A Wangled, Wired Web

What You Need to Know About Online Cheating

By Tracy L. Doerr

Pages:  1  2  3  

  • Check Internet Browser's bookmarks. Plagiarized.com suggests if cheating sites are bookmarked, it could be a sign that someone is making use of them. Ask your family who bookmarked it and why. Your having asked indicates you are keeping track, and that you care about what they see and do on the 'net.

    • Professor Bruce H. Leland, of Western Illinois University, offers suggestions to educators that may benefit parents, too:

    • Take your child to one of the sites. Have them look at a weak paper (There are plenty of these on the Web!) and analyze its failures. They will learn something about writing and also see that what's available to download may not impress their teacher.
    • Discuss. Don't preach. Approach it as an issue of intellectual property. Discuss the ways people use one another's ideas. A "Don't Plagiarize" rule will generally be ignored like other rules (i.e. put commas between items in a list) and students are genuinely surprised when plagiarism carries a stiffer penalty than not using a one-inch margin.
      • Don't complain. Do not write to the maintainers of the Web sites to complain or threaten. Cheater sites turn complaints into publicity and gain enough recognition to attract advertisers.

    And finally, Joan Brockman, professor of criminology and coordinator of the University Board on Student Discipline at Simon Fraser University, observes that she regularly runs into third and fourth year students who either don't know how to reference material or ignore what they have been told.

    "How does one convince anyone to follow the law?" she says. "Some appeal to morality, others appeal to the threat of getting caught."

    The Pew Internet & American Life Project's study reveals that 73 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds have access to the Internet – that is 17 million children. And 94 percent of online youth use the Internet for school research. But a student can be overloaded by the sheer volume of knowledge online. Here are a few sites that students will find useful:

    • www.britannica.com: This good old encyclopedia has moved with the times since its first publication in 1768. Pick a topic and you'll find entries with related Web sites and magazine articles. There is also a thesaurus, dictionary and atlas.
    • www.about.com: This site is good for knowledge-seekers of all ages. Information is organized in 23 broad categories, including Homework Help. You'll find frequently asked questions, clip art, forums and articles.
    • www.mathforum.org/dr.math: Elementary school to university students ask Dr. Math (a.k.a. college math students) to help solve conundrums. Students can submit their own question or search the site.
    • www.nationalgeographic.com: This site has a Homework Helper section that is perfect for reports or presentations. Sections include animals, history/culture, science/nature, maps/geography, places and photos/art.
    • www.chuma.cas.usf.edu/~olson/pms/: Punctuation Made Simple


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