For me, the most tedious task as a faculty is checking student submissions. It needs time and patience in reading and checking the assessments. The student’s submissions will be the basis of their final grades. One of the most disappointing things in checking student outputs is when you find out that they are just copying each other’s work. For an instance, this submission, the students are required to submit an Entity Relationship Diagram that corresponds to a business rule.
What have you observed in the submission of the 2 students? Yes! You are right, the diagram are just the same, they just differ in colors for the diamond shapes. Clueless of who among them is the original, I divided the scores among them.
Another one is this submission.
This is supposedly a blog post about Industrial 4.0 that should be researched and then make your own story/summary out of it but instead it is just copied and pasted word for word.
The university policy on cheating
As stated in the Student Handbook of the university, cheating is an offense which shall have punishments. Cheating can be done for any examination, quiz, test which can be online or actual face-to-face test. Instances of cheating include but are not limited to the following:
Copying from another and submitting assigned reports, assignments.
Copying from or allowing somebody to copy examination answers.
Having somebody else take the examination for another person.
Possession of notes or any other material related to the examination that is present during the examination period.
Looking on the neighbors examination papers.
Unnecessary discussions or talking during the examination period.
Penalties are given to the students who violates the policy. It depends on the number of times the offense is done. The penalties include:
1st Offense: invalidation of examination paper for the said subject and undergo counseling
2nd Offense: Failing grade in the subject and undergo counseling
3rd Offense : Suspension up to 1 month and undergo counseling.
Measures done to avoid cheating
We as faculty are doing things that would encourage students not to do the said offense.
Proper Orientation. On the orientation time, the students are oriented about the policy. They are given the right information for them to be mindful of their actions.
Making examinations on different sets. When the examination is face to face, faculty creates examinations in different sets. For online examinations, there are Learning Management Systems that allows shuffling of items and answers.
Taking video while taking examination online. Online examinations is really prone to cheating, one could just allow a classmate to take the examination for him/her. For this to be avoided, taking video or screen capture is required for online examinations.
Implementing the policy. Once a student has violated, we give appropriate action so that the said student and others would be mindful of not doing it because we are serious in its implementation. We give deductions to scores, give them no mark or in my case I divided the score among those students with same answer.
Submitting performance tasks instead of taking examinations. This is actually one of the things I usually do for my students. Most of my submissions are vlogs which I can see them explaining about the topic and then they show what they do and how are they doing laboratory works.
Conclusion
Cheating is already a long time battle in the academe. There is a policy that should strictly be implemented so that students will be mindful of their actions and should not consider cheating as an option. It is the responsibility of the student to be ready in the examinations and to submit assignments and tasks with honesty.
This is part of Writing Prompt #6: Cheating of @JonicaBradley. While others mostly write on cheating about personal and relationships, I choose to write cheating on the side of the academe. But I see and read articles related to school and cheating too, here they are:
I enjoy cheating during exam but it makes me feel guilty after by @Zcharina22
The Teachers TEACH, The Students CHEAT (Teach Yourself Not to Cheat) by @Nyctofiles
Here are some articles that that I find.
Lead Image : Image by Okta_Aderama_Putra from Pixabay
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Mas nagiging talamak ang cheating kapag iresponsable din ang teachers magcheck. Umuulit sila kasi alam nila di naman napapansin ng teachers. So it's good to know there are teachers like you who check the submissions thoroughly.
Personally takot po ako mandaya sa mga submissions na ganto, kasi kahit ako na estudyante palang, kayang kaya ko majudge kung kopya lang po sa internet ganun. Nakakatakot mapahiya, and worst magkaroon ng bagsak na grades.