At the end of last class we mentioned the copy/paste issue that Internet raised these past few years. I wanted to share with you a funny story on this topic.
Two years ago, a French teacher did an experiment with his students. He had noticed that his students massively used to cheat thanks to the Internet : they bought online "essays", they did a lot of "copy/paste" from Wikipedia pages and forums, etc.
So he
decided to trap them. During the summer break, he found an old poem from the
17th century, which was almost impossible to find on the internet. He created
an account on Wikipedia and changed the biography of the poem author. On
several forums, he posted questions about the poem, pretending he was an high
school student with a class assignment. Then, pretending to be a literature
expert, he posted very detailed answers which really seemed real and smart.
Then, he pretended to be another student and wrote a simple but detailed answer,
filled with false information and spelling mistakes. Then he sent this comment
to online websites which sell "essays" and they published it without verifying
the content. Finally, he posted links to these tricked pages in order to optimize
SEO on Google.
Back to
school in September, he gave an assignment to his students. Within 2 weeks they
had to write a personal comment about the poem. When he got back the papers, he
easily noticed which websites were visited, which students had cheated, etc. He
noticed that 51 students out of 65 cheated on the Internet.
The teacher did not give a grade to the assignments. For sure, the objective of
this experiment was not to punish them but to highlight that : copy / paste is
used without thinking or verifying information, that cheating on the internet is
very easy, and that the Internet can be easily manipulated.
Went to a lot of trouble, but I guess he made his point :)
ReplyDeleteWhat people have to take in consideration also is that each educational institution follows different rules and that students may be held accountable for copyright misconduct not only because they deliberately cheated but also because they didn't have clear directions on how to do an Internet research. Every issue always has two sides.
ReplyDeleteWhat people have to take in consideration also is that each educational institution follows different rules and that students may be held accountable for copyright misconduct not only because they deliberately cheated but also because they didn't have clear directions on how to do an Internet research. Every issue always has two sides.
ReplyDelete