05.25.06

Further discussion on cheating – or not

Posted in future paradigms at 12:21 pm by sbetts

posted today on InsideHigherEd.com:

We need to face the facts. If I need a quick answer outside of school and can’t quite remember what I need to know, I will Google the topic, or I will call someone, or text someone, or e-mail someone. One of these sources will, if I know how to operate this technology efficiently and effectively, provide me with the essential information. That’s not cheating, that is life. Only in a classroom is this considered “wrong.” Everywhere else it is viewed as “intelligent,” because we all know that we cannot know everything.

Outside the classroom, cell phones, PDAs, PocketPCs, Internet access is everywhere because we need it and use it in our information driven lives. But inside the classroom, the very skills humans need to succeed are discouraged and viewed with alarm. So schools do not teach effective use of Google, of text-messaging, of instant-messaging. They don’t teach collaboration. They barely teach communication outside the stilted prose only academics use. No wonder students are prepared for nothing except more school.

“If they’d spend as much time studying” as they do cheating, a University of Nevada at Las Vegas dean says in the Times article, “they’d all be A students.” The question for the dean is, what would they have an “A” in? Rewriting Wikipedia to please a professor? Spelling? Regurgitating information that any competent search engine user could find in thirty seconds? Perhaps the skills the “cheaters” are learning are the far more valuable ones. These skills will carry them forward in ways memorization of spelling, quadratic formulas, scientific terms and historical dates simply will not.

What must be learned through education is the processing of this instantly available information. How do you find what you are looking for? How do you check for quality and accuracy? How do you cite sources and avoid plagiarism? How do you investigate the sources of others or determine when others have plagiarized? Just three days after publishing the “Cheating” article the Times itself had to publish a lengthy retraction of a front page story. The prominent printing of false information could have been avoided, the newspaper’s Public Editor noted, had the news staff simply Googled its own articles. Nothing could illustrate the changing needs of curriculums more clearly.

There is also the issue of educational discrimination. When schools fight against technology, they are fighting access to education for people who learn and function differently. Technology, from computers to calculators to classroom cellphones, enables a wide variety of students who would otherwise be left out to participate and succeed. Technology in the hands of all students allows disabilities and functional deficits to be invisibly accommodated so that knowledge can be developed, nurtured, and evaluated on terms fair to everyone.

So, no, the problem is not cheating. The problem is firmly one of instructional and evaluation technique. It will not be solved until teachers and professors figure out that understanding and the ability to work with knowledge is what counts, and that anything you can instantly Google, or store in your calculator, or retrieve via quick text-message or phone call need not be remembered, nor tested, because, obviously, you will always be able to instantly Google it, or store it in your cellphone, or get someone to text it to you.

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