Cheating

I remember in the good old days cheating meant a few things:  On a test, you cheated by taking in an answer sheet or crib sheet, and on a paper it meant that you copied something.  Nowadays I imagine that the assignments I used to get could not be given because information is so freely and easily available electronically.  It is just a matter of copying and pasting huge sections of essay or paper.

I prepared fun problems for an extra curricular computer club a couple of years back for my wife.  One problem involved calculating the greatest common denominator.  I expected the Jr High kids to implement some variation on the methods they knew from elementary.  One kid came back with something very advanced, so I suspected he cheated.  My wife was not sure as she doesn't know as much about computer science.  It was very easy to prove it to her by taking a snippet and putting it into google.  I was able to find the exact program, right down to the same variable names.

I've heard of kids texting each other answers and plagiarizing by buying papers on the Internet.

I wonder how schools prevent cheating nowadays.  In my mind, it should be easy to do by creating very specific assignments.  For example, instead of asking the student to write about whales in general, they should write about the specific whale in the local aquarium.  Instead of asking for a position paper on the ethics of euthanasia, they should write about a specific real or hypothetical case.  Tests too could probably be made more cheat-proof but it would require more work on the part of teachers.

Maybe the question is, "Who cares?"  If students don't want to learn then maybe that's fine.  I doubt if they will become geniuses by being afraid to cheat.  For teachers, it may be a lot of work taken away from the real work of teaching.  The ones who cheat will raise the average and that's about it.