Professional Cheating Websites Essay

Random interview is the method that we atomic number 18 going to procedure for gathering data beca expenditure in interviews information is obtained by dint of inquiry and enter by enumerators. Structured interviews atomic number 18 exerciseed by using survey forms, whereas raiseer interviews atomic number 18 notes capturen opus talking with respondents. The notes be subsequently merged construe foe further analysis. Open-ended interviews, which need to be interpreted and analyze fifty-fifty during the interview, survey to be carried knocked egress(p) by thoroughly-trained observers and/or enumerators. Gener exclusivelyy, structured interviews ar conducted with a well-designed form already realized. Forms atomic number 18 modify in by researches, instead of respondents, and in that it differs from questionnaires. While this come up is to a undischarged(p)er extent expensive, to a greater extent complicated questions spate be asked and data tummy be v alidated as it is collected, improving data quality. Interviews house be under detractn with phase of data sources, and th uneven alternative media, such as by call back or in person. The wad who are going to interview are the maritime assimilators of Dr,Yangas Colleges at DYCI. The interviewee came from both level of BSMT and BSMarE maritime naturalise-age child .It could be ages 16 to 18 above male or female.Confessions of a Professional College Cheater.IT WILL COME as spick-and-spans to no virtuoso who reads Dave Tomars new restrain that college kids bearded darnel as enthusiastically and ceremonially as they tailgate and copu easy, especially since Harvard recently announced that n early fractional of the 279 learners in a single Introduction to Congress trend are under investigating for give lessonsman dish mavensty. In the honourablely challenged haze of fledgeling dormitory life I did it myself, typography an occasional paper for an personable or under a cting friend, and it neer real occurred to me that this was wrong until I became a college prof and sat bring outraged on the other(a) attitude of the desk, interrogating a besides literate student who had suddenly blos or sod into an eloquent critic of Miltons promised land Lost. And after reading The Shadow educatee Im eyeing my true crop of students with an entirely new level of suspicion. Tomars book grew out of an article, penned under the name Ed Dante in The score of Higher cultivation in November 2010, that became the roughly widely read piece in the Chronicles history. The article, and at one and only(a) time the book, document the astounding scale and sophistication of deceit in todays wired world, which the author knows well he run lowed for ten years at superiorly organized profit companies, committal to writing term papers, class projects, and even a dissertation.In the wickedest of ironies, he raise his employers done a website that aims to preven t deceit by exposing the worst offenders. At this website, an interested reader get out find links to twain century such companies, all accepting Paypal, MasterCard, and Visa, and all eager to micturate your college pick up utterly painless(prenominal). adept site (CustomWritings.com) provides statistics, including (at press time) a 97 percent satisfaction rate and 1,373,890 pages written. I dont now how more to trust a union that relies on its guests willingness to lie, provided if those numbers are true, then this firm al matchless has produced every theorize 170,000 of the 7-to-10-page papers usually assign in introductory level classes. M both sites promise that their writers hold at least an M.A. or a Ph.D., and close to all of them guarantee that the customers essay will cruise through the plagiarism-detection software that almost Ameri contribute universities flummox purchased, at a tremendous cost, as the funds bullet in their anti- imposition arsenal.As Tomar describes the process, the writers for his former employer log in to the comp boths website and select an assignment from an online bulletin board. Students provide the topic and the deadline, and specialized guidelines from their instructor, and the desired citation style. Some students even ship involve blood texts to their subscribed hand Tomar claims this practice larded his shelves with thousands of dollars worth of books on constitutional history, belles-lettres, business, and psychology. exclusively that was one of the a couple of(prenominal) perks. Like a spirited-tech whipping boy, Tomar says he took on so much gain that he reproached his wellness and his relationships, all so that the pampered and unprepared could enjoy a painless college experience. The agreeable photos of carefree students on the cedeional fraud websites bear this out. As in the promotional materials distributed by the universities themselves, everyone is al federal agencys smiling. To mar is very, very angry, and although he comes to loathe the students who hire him, the real target of his ire is the universities. He is himself a graduate of Rutgers, and he seems genuinely traumatized by his witness stint on the banks of the old Raritan, which he believes left him without the skills to land any real job other than writing fraudulent college papers.From this experience he gleans several centerings that higher breeding in America has gone awry. Its not simply that few colleges are structured more corresponding corporations than handle places of information, Tomar notes, but that they are structured kindred dissecting businesses that dont give a crap close customer service or quality assurance. This is one of Tomars more astute observations. While nimble businesses, from Lego to Apple, deliver make customers fall in love with their reinvented products, universities still persist in replicating the early twentieth-century factory model espoused by Henry Fo rd customers advise induce a car painted any color they involve so long as it is black. As a teacher of Shakespeare, I bring in from this model all the time students from across the disciplines are forced to take my classes to fill various requirements, whether or not they will ever use iambic pentameter. It pays my bills. but where such requirements do not correspond to go along defined and valuable outcomes for students, they to a fault contribute to the truly f payening $1 trillion in outstanding U.S. student debt that, as Tomar notes, has mostly been accrued in the past four years.The driving engines of that debt remain the for-profit degree move such as theUniversity of Phoenix, which do not escape Tomars fury. The recreate assigned at such institutions was so easy, the standards so low, and the priorities so far-off removed from the interests of honest student evaluation that students might be for wedded for play to the free market to meet their intellectual needs. As the Harvard victimize turd has affirmed, however, even the scoop up universities have nigh such slack in the clay. Students caught up in the investigation have reported that the quarrel was notoriously kn let as an easy A with take-home exams and low standards. flux such factors with the universities generally sluggish stance toward technology, Tomar suggests, and the trick he documents is nearly inevitable. These points are well made, but not much else in this hyperbolize book has the same force. In discussing his erst bandage career, Tomar has called himself a master shite artist, and he boasts that he knows all the little tricks for churning out papers, like fluffing sentences with unnecessary clauses or adding gratuitous lines summarizing previous claims.Yet Tomars book whitethorn prove to be his bullshitting pice de rsistance, as it employs these same techniques at length, including notes and a bibliography drawn mostly from blogs and websites. For a apprize momen t, it seems as if this might be some sort of brilliant meta-narrative a Joycean performance of the sloppiness, clich, and superficial analysis that passes for writing in our universities today. that as Tomar reaches his solemn conclusion, explaining that he has attempted to describe the things that I had come to know, with the fancy that it could help all of us, this catchs to seem less likely. The job is that The Shadow Scholars argument never sincerely achieves the escape velocity that would be active it beyond the authors own miscellaneous grievances. By his own admission, Tomar doesnt know how to use a library and doesnt have a fucks clue how to do research if my meshing is deck and my phone battery is dead.For Tomar this is a point of pride, because the ease with which he manipulates the systemtricking all those doddering professorsshows that libraries and library-based curricula are trustless anyway. Again, I half(prenominal)-sympathize if any professors still ask s tudents to conduct research without online resources, they are clearly performing negligently. unless indisputablely the more responsibleand the more commonapproach is to guide students through the digital archives, accepting that they use Wikipedia and Google, but article of belief them that this should be the beginning rather than the end of their research. But Tomar overtly never discloseed this lesson, and his argument rarely reaches beyond the level of Googling, like one of those machine-authored books that use an algorithm to collate information close to a given topic. (If this is unfamiliar, see the 345,000 titles by Lambert M. Surhone on Barnesandnoble.com.) When arguing, for example, that Ameri weed raising scads students with debt without providing the skills to pay it back, Tomar writes that tally to the Guardian, student loans have been stripped of nearly all basic consumer protections.Nothing wrong with that, except that after continuing this quote for some le ngth, he launches directly into a new paragraph on An article in Mother Jones, and this takes us to a paragraph relating what the capital of the United States Post surmises, before a final section provides the truth according to the brisk York Times. The already underdeveloped argument must also fate space with a memoir of the authors misguided youth, and while Dave Tomar finds his lead character fascinating, his will probably be a nonage response. After the tenth account of Tomar getting stoned, or reeling out of a bar to vomit, it seems worth asking whether he may have borne some responsibility for his failure to find academic fulfillment and develop merchantable skills on campus. One suspects that Tomar was very good at churning out C- papers and that some of his clients got exactly what they deserved.Although The Shadow Scholar is a failed invective, it is an passing timely re intelligenceer that we would be unwise to brush off accounts of treason at Harvard or our local j unior college as a few bad apples. To prevent the offenses that Tomar describes, professors will also need to fabricate more proficient at pedagogies both old and new. Our first priority may be pedagogics students to navigate an online world where the meaning of intellectual seat is in flux. Universities clearly must also do a crack job teaching students actual skills rather than running them through gird until they accumulate enough seat time, measured in dollars and hours, to graduate. scantily as serious as such innovation, however, is the very traditional work of forming tutorial relationships that will model intellectual responsibility and demonstrate that thinking, rather than pay individual to do it for you, evoke be its own reward.Studies find more Students cheater, with High Achievers no Exception. Large-scale darnel has been uncovered over the brave year at some of the nations most hawkish schools, like Stuyvesant High developin Manhattan, the Air Force Acad emy and, most recently, Harvard. Studies of student behavior and attitudes show that a major(ip)ity of students violate standards of academic fairness to some degree, and that high achievers are honest as likely to do it as others. Moreover, thither is evidence that the problem has worsened over the function few decades. Experts say the reasons are relatively simple deceiver has become easier and more widely tolerated, and both schools and parents have failed to give students unwavering, repetitive messages close what is allowed and what is prohibited.I dont think theres any question that students have become more competitive, under more pressure, and, as a case, tend to excuse more from themselves and other students, and thats abetted by the adults around them, give tongue to Donald L. McCabe, a professor at the Rutgers University Business School, and a leading researcher on beguiler. There have always been struggle students who cheat to survive, he said. But more and mor e, there are students at the top who cheat to thrive. Internet access has made cheating easier, modify students to connect instantly with dos, friends to consult and works to plagiarize. And generations of research has shown that a major factor in unethical behavior is simply how easy or unuttered it is.A recent study by Jeffrey A. Roberts and David M. Wasieleski at Duquesne University found that the more online tools college students were allowed to use to complete an assignment, the more likely they were to copy the work of others. The Internet has changed attitudes, as a world of instant downloading, searching, cutting and pasting has unsnarled some ideas of ownership and authorship. An increased emphasis on having students work in teams may also have played a role. Students are surprisingly unclear about what constitutes plagiarism or cheating, said Mr. Wasieleski, an associate professor of management.Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said that over the 20 years he has studied professional and academic integrity, the ethical muscles have atrophied, in part because of a culture that exalts success, however it is attained. He said the attitude he has found among students at elite colleges is We want to be famous and successful, we think our colleagues are cutting corners, well be damned if well lose out to them, and some day, when weve made it, well be role models. But until then, give us a pass. Numerous projects and research studies have shown that ofttimes reinforcing standards, to both students and teachers, usher out lessen cheating. But experts say most schools fail to do so.Institutions do a poor job of making those boundaries clear and consistent, of educating students about them, of enforcing them, and of giving teachers a clear process to follow through on them, said Laurie L. Hazard, managing director of the schoolman Center for Excellence at Bryant University. In the programs that colleges run to he lp new students make the transition from high school, students are counseled on everything from food to friendships, but little or no time is spent on cheating, she said. A 2010 survey of Yale undergraduates by The Yale occasional News showed that most had never read the schools insurance policy on academic honesty, and most were unsure of the rules on sharing or recycling their work. In surveys of high school students, the Josephson Institute of Ethics, which advises schools on ethics rearing, has found that about three-fifths admit to having cheated in the previous year and about four-fifths say their own ethics are above average.Few schools place any meaningful emphasis on integrity, academic or otherwise, and colleges are even more indifferent than high schools, said Michael Josephson, president of the institute. When you mystify giving take-home exams and telling kids not to talk about it, or you let them carry smartphones into tests, its an invitation to cheating, he sai d. The faux pas that Harvard revealed in late August involved a take-home final exam in an undergraduate course with 279 students. The university has not yet held hearings on the charges, which may take months to resolve. Officials said akinities in test papers suggested that nearly half the class had broken the rules formerly morest plagiarism and working together some of the accused students said their behavior was innocent, or fell into gray areas. Mr. McCabes surveys, conducted around the country, have found that most college students see collaborating with others, even when it is forbidden, as a child offense or no offense at all. Nearly half take the same view of paraphrasing or copying psyche elses work without attribution.And most high school teachers and college professors surveyed fail to pursue some of the violations they find. Experts say that along with students, schools and technology, parents are also to blame. They cite surveys, anecdotal impressions and the wor k of researchers like Jean M. Twenge, author of the book Generation Me, to make the case that since the 1960s, parenting has shifted away from emphasizing obedience, honor and respect for authority to promoting childrens felicity while stoking their ambitions for material success. We have a culture now where we have real trouble accepting that our kids make mistakes and fail, and when they do, we tend to blame someone else, said Tricia Bertram Gallant, author of Creating the Ethical Academy, and director of the academic integrity office staff at the University of California at San Diego.Thirty, 40 years ago, the parent would come in and grab the kid by the ear, yell at him and whiff him home. Educators tell tales of students who grew up taking for granted not only that their exceedingly involved parents would help with schoolwork but that the help would strain the comment of the word. Ms. Gallant recalled giving integrity counseling to a student who would perpetrate research p apers to her render to review before turning them in and saw nothing wrong in that. One paper, it turned out, her mother had extensively rewritten and extensively plagiarized.The Good News in the Atlanta and D.C. School swindling Scandals With the possible exception of tot-murdering moms and professional basketball players who jilt their fans on live television, there is no more reviled figure in American life than Bernie Madoff. Portrayed on the cover of New York magazine in Heath-Ledger-as-Joker makeup, he has been variously described as a sociopath, a financial serial killer, and the devil incarnate. What nobody has said, however, is that Madoff was the victim of a profession that puts dark pressure on money managers to worldly concernly report their success in the market. And, while plenty of deserved scorn has been heaped on the auxiliary financial institutions and hapless federal regulators who allowed his fraud to unfold for decades, nobody has suggested that those la pses in any way mitigate Madoffs culpability in his crimes. Society has interpreted away all of Madoffs money and freedom, but it has left him with one thing the dignity underlying in possessing moral responsibility for doing wrong. It has been less respectful, unfortunately, to educators in our public schools.Recent weeks have seen reports of a terrible cheating scandal in Atlanta a Georgia state investigation implicated scores of teachers and principals of systematically falsifying student test scores. in the beginning this year, USA Today revealed evidence of test score manipulation in the District of Columbia. Similar scandals have erupted over the years in Houston, Oakland, Dallas, Chicago, and elsewhere, all tied to the pressure educators feel to show evidence of student learning on interchangeable tests. And, every time news of cheating breaks, opponents of standardized interrogation and accountability in public education have been degenerate to deflect blame from morall y challenged educators and aim it toward the tests themselves. When asked about Atlanta, noted school reform apostate Diane Ravitch pointed the finger at the federal No pincer Left Behind law, saying that, when high-stakes incentives are attached to test scores, we are virtually inviting teachers to cheat. At the Daily Kos, readers were told that the tests, and the stakes attached to them, are the issue. No rational person can look at cheating this widespread and decide its existence is about the individuals, however blameworthy their behavior may be.One Atlanta-area teacher put it this way Anybody whose job is tied to performance, it is a setup. In search of a theory to back up these assertions, testing opponents often invoke Campbells Law, an adage put forth in the 1970s by societal scientist Donald Campbell. It holds that the more any quantitative social indicator e.g. standardized testing is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to degeneration pressu res. As a way of understanding education policy, or anything else, Campbells Law is both inaccurate and banal. In reality, most people are quite adept at resisting corruption pressure, which is wherefore the vast majority of teachers whose students take standardized tests do not cheat. And, while some do, the fallibility of humankind has been known for a long time. So I hereby coin Careys Law, which holds that trite observations are more likely to be shamed as sacred principles if someone happens to describe them as laws. TO BE SURE, people (and teachers) will succumb to dishonesty. They cheat on their taxes, spouses, and golf partners.Cheating corrodes trust in all things, especially education. Students whose test scores are manipulated upward dont the get the extra attention they need. And, since teachers are increasingly being evaluated by how much their students test scores improve, a teacher who inflates scores could potentially cost her colleagues in the next marker of thei r job performance. But cheating also means that public schools last care enough about student performance that some ethically challenged educators have chosen to cheat. This is far better than the alternative, where learning is so incidental expense and non-transparent that people of low character cant be fazed to lie about it. Blaming cheating on the test amounts to infantilizing teachers, moving teaching 180 degrees away from the kind of professionalization that teacher advocates often profess to support. Instead of doing away with the pressures of a performance-based system, the best way to combat cheating is by building institutions that have systems and organizational cultures that minimize the amount of corruption and abuse that occurs.This is harder to do in some places than in others. The District of Columbia, for example, is not exactly a bastion of civic virtue. Half the members of our city council before long stand accused of some form of misconduct, including council p resident Kwame Brown, who is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney for matters regarding the use of hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds. Nobody, by the way, is blaming the corruption pressures inherent to our vote-intensive election system for Browns alleged misdeeds. Indeed, its not a coincidence that cheating scandals tend to erupt in municipalities whose public institutions suffer from corruption. But, when the Atlanta police department was rocked by accusations that officers falsified warrants, planted evidence, and gunned down a 92-year old woman in a botched dose raid, national commentators didnt pin the blame on a system that holds police departments accountable for solving crimes. Corruption, educational or otherwise, should be fought with strong law enforcement, the election of public officials with integrity, and the vigilance of citizens groups and a open-eyed press.The Securities and Exchange Commission exists because lawmakers correctly assume that th e pressures and temptations of making money are so great that companies and financial actors cant be trusted. new(prenominal) than lunatic objectivistsand Wall Street water-carriers, nobody reacted to Madoff, Enron, or WorldCom by trade for less enforcement and public reporting of information. Instead, they in effect(p)ly called for more. Finally, we should never forget that cheating in public education long predates the advent of standardized testing and accountability.Back then, it happened in the form of students who were ill-taught and passed along through grades until they were handed a diploma despite their inability to read, write, work with numbers, or otherwise perform any of the skills and tasks necessary to make a decent life in the modern world. Often, their children were sent back into the very same dysfunctional systems to begin the cycle anew. The only difference was, that kind of cheating didnt result in state investigations, newspapers headlines, and calls for th e responsible parties to be thrown in jail. The new way we structure testing and reward and punish people for their actions with regard to that testing is better for studentsand even teachersin the long run. Kevin Carey is the policy director of Education Sector, a think tank in Washington, D.C.Cheating is Cheating is Cheating.MANILA, Philippines DEAR CHICO AND DELAMARI do a little tutoring on the side to earn some extra money while in college, and Ive become friends with most of my students as they are mostly just a few years younger than I am. We often still make it with each other even after Ive stopped tutoring them. One of the guys that Ive become close to has recently come to me and tearfully confided that he cheated in an exam and ended up winning an award because of it. I was very disappointed by what he did, because hes a very smart kid and has a generally sterling academic record. He says that he only did it because his family was going to a really rough patch and he did nt want an academic failure to compound their problems. He sure seems guilty over it, and has promised me to never do it again because it wasnt worth the guilt. What Im torn about is whether I should tell the school about it. I feel bad about what hes done, but telling the school would possibly ruin his reputation and his chances at getting into a great college. Should I just let it go and trust that he wont do it again? -Leonard CHICO SAYSI must admit, this is a tough one. Its the guiltless choice between doing the kind thing and doing the right thing.I cant tell you what is the right thing to do, but what I can do is tell you is what Id do. I dont know if Id have the heart to turn him in. tied(p) if I knew that on paper its the right thing to do, I dont know if Id muster the resolve. If you cant choose between the two, you can always try and induce him to do the right thing for himself. Besides, its his misdeed thats cause all this guilt, so he is the best person to right th is point wrong. Im sure most people would be like, whats the big deal? Hes lgain his lesson, and everybody cheats every now and then, so why ruin a promising future? But remember, somebody who deserved that award was robbed of it. No matter how big or small the accolade, someone else deserved to get that award. And if a young mind gets the idea that he can get away with robbing someone of something as long as he doesnt get caught, then who is to say that it will stop here? Who is to say that some of the crooked people in high places didnt get their start with petty crimes like cheating in exams? Leave this sliding doors moment for him to decide.He can opt to leave things as they are and move on, or he can step up to the plate and right the wrong with his own hands, the very hands that caused the injustice in the first place. If he thinks the right thing for him to do is to own up to the cheating, then there is no other recourse but to bite the bullet and confess, just like if you f eel it is your duty to report him, then you are beholden to yourself to do so. For all you know, him confessing may be a bitch to handle now, but it could also be the best thing that ever happened to him. Character is hard to come by these days. Something like this could actually build him some. Do what feels right to you at this moment in difficult situations like these, its the best you can do. DELAMAR SAYSThere is no way you can be sure he wont do it again. There is no way that you can be sure that the next time a similar situation happens he wont take the easy way of cheating again. In his mind he might justify cheating as long as he can say he did it for his family. And did he really do it just to not add on to his family problems? And would it really have added to his familys problems?Isnt it understandable that when families go through problems childrens school work do suffer? Did he really do it for family? Or, did he do it for himself? If there was a way to make sure this r eally was a one time and only a one time thing, most people will say why not let it pass without resolution? But thats the thing, there is no way you can tell. And the one thing that needs to be considered more than just whether he will do it again or not is this him cheating earned him an award. Which means his cheating deprived someone of an award that would have been legitimately earned. He took it from somebody else who would have justly earned it. And in my sight, that is certainly not fair. I think this problem is a question of being understanding to someone who was just really pushed to the edge or do you consider this as a great opportunity to learn a very hard lesson too. The lesson that cheating is cheating is cheating.No matter what your justification is it is still a wrong that has consequences. The consequence that is so great, at the cost of his good reputation being tarnished and risking his fascinate to a good college, that he will never cheat again. Cheating can destroy all your previous honest efforts. That is a great lesson he will never forget. And also he has to learn that his cheating deprived someone of that award. And these things if he has to pay the consequence will sure as shooting send a message that cheating isnt worth it. He will learn that he just has to live with not performing well when his family is going through something rather than to automatically cheat. Your decision lies with how well you know your student. Will this serve as a lesson he will never forget and never do again?Or, is this his chance to learn at this point and painfully that there are consequences to the actions we do? What can your conscience live with? Whatever you decide I just hope the person who might have been deprived of that award the student earned with his cheating efforts will still get what he deserves. Maybe you can figure out a way to punish the act of cheating but at the same time give him some border because he did come forward to admit his wrongdoing? In my opinion the best way is to show him that this act cannot go without consequence, some consequence. You can argue on his behalf that the punishment be less severe so as not to risk his college entrance but he certainly has to understand that he cannot get away with cheating without paying the price. sendup or Cheat.Cheat.Its probably something that weve done at least once in our academic life. Whether through hidden answer sheets, information dual-lane with friends from different sections, or just taking a peek at a seatmates paper, not very many of us can claim to be innocent in this regard. Penelope (not her real name) a college senior at a school in manilla papers University Belt, admits to be cheating in exams since she was in fourth year high school. I needed to, she justifies. We had to memorize the formulas in our Physics class and we werent allowed to have an index card to look at. I was a scene to become an outstanding student at the time and I didn t want to fail that exam. Aside from looking at her seatmates paper, she also had a small paper with all the needed formulas hidden in her socks. Penelope has never been caught, but on the occasion that she is, she says she plans to apologize to the teacher. But that doesnt mean Ill stop.I believe cheating is one of the elements of being a student, she says. Penelopes story is something that is replicated in the lives of other students across the city. Just like Penelope, Nicole (not her real name) began cheating in exams in high school, mainly because everyone else in her class was doing it. It wasnt intentional at first. The examiner was out of the room, and I took the liberty to check my notes in biota and compare if my answers were correct. I found it really rewarding to get a perfect score, she recalls. But unlike Penelope, Nicole was unlucky enough to get caught. I decided not to do it anymore and try to rely on my full capacity to answer all subsequent tests, she says. Howeve r, try is the important word in Nicoles statement. When asked if getting caught stopped her from cheating, her reply is soon and direct to the point Not really.MODERN CHEATINGThe temptation to cheat is even easier for todays technologically-advanced youth. With mobile phones making the transmission of messages easier and the Internet making the sharing of information much quicker, todays Filipino student can just as easily download his answers from a computer as he can from looking at his seatmates answers. However, it would seem that the tried and tested technique of looking at the answer of seatmates, passing around notes, and reliable classmates are the methods preferred by todays young Filipinos. If you give people answers, they give you answers back, says Elle (not her real name). My two friends and I would form a triangle with our seats we call it the trigon Offense. It gave us good angles. I also ask people whove taken the tests earlier for questions and answers.Mark (not his real name) also relied on his classmates to get a higher grade than the one he would have otherwise received on his tests. Back in high school, teachers would have us counterchange papers with our fellow classmates and we would have to honestly mark each others tests. It wasnt me who changed the answers, but my seatmate whos marking it. Thats what made it possible, he says. Just like Nicole, Elle has already been caught cheating. And just like Nicole, Elle says this hasnt stopped her from cheating. Ive been caught, and I just made pa-cute and joked around. I charmed the teacher, she says. Getting caught didnt stop me from cheating. It empowered me even more.CHEAT BUSTERSIf cheating seems unavoidable, what can school administrations do? Preventing behavior like this from occurring in the first place seems to be the approach being taken by educational institutions. The De La Salle University, for instance, has a purify Office (DO), which promotes students discipline, maintains peace, order and cleanliness in the University, and seeks to prevent, rather than correct, unseemly student behavior. Nimpha Baldeo, the DO head, says that her office conducts regular seminars and lectures on values for teachers, parents, and students, and comes out with publications on these topics such as modules, a DO Guide, and a DO Bulletin. Discipline awareness is also celebrated every October by the academic lodge with exhibits and forums to intensify the information drive on University policies, rules and regulations, she says.The University also recently established the Compliance Office to ensure that all significant requirements necessary for configuration with law, regulation, or other binding rules in and outside the University are in place. Students who are caught cheating are not immediately suspended or expelled, rather, they are put under probation and exposed to a series of seminars and link activities on values formation and clarification. DLSU also curbs plagi arism and protects intellectual rights. Academic papers have to cite its sources, whether from open source references like Wikipedia or from traditional materials, and written permission from concerned faculty members are required if a student intends to submit the same work to another course for extra credit.A MATTER OF TRUSTAlexandra (not her real name), a literature professor for two years at a prominent university in Quezon City, has a much more personal view of how to stop cheating among the student body. Alexandra says that in her short years of teaching, she has not yet encountered a case of cheating in her class. While part of this is because most of her examinations are essay-based, she also says that this is because she trusts that her students know better than to cheat. When I give objective tests, I dont patrol. You could say I dont even really check, she reveals. I feel its a very obvious sign of not trusting them.These kids are in college. its no longer high school or grade school. What they do with their education is their business. Im there to guide and instruct, but Im not there to be their mother. Show them that you trust them somehow, and hopefully, theyll live up to it. Alexandra says that rather than looking to change how students behave, educators should instead look into themselves and find out if they are the ones contributing to the problem. I think cheating can be curbed, because I honestly think that students cheat if they feel that its impossible, she says. And impossible action is a result of demanding too much output when you havent even put much in to begin with. If youre a good educator, students wont feel the need to cheat. 1 . New Republic, by Blaine Greteman, September 12, 2012 2 . The New York Times, by Richard Perez-Pea, September 7, 2012 3 . New Republic, Kevin Carey, July 19, 2011 4 . Manila Bulletin Publishing Corporation, Chico and Delamar, November 9, 2011 5 . Manila Bulletin Publishing Corporation, Ronald S. Lim, N ovember12, 2009