Cheating in College

Trip Gabriel of the NYT writes about the formidable crisis facing colleges and universities in the form of plagiarism and cheating at tests and exams. Unsurprisingly, as the sources of and ease of acquiring information has expanded, the temptation and ability to cheat at tests has grown as well. Most colleges are now adopting almost draconian surveillance methods to keep students from gaining unfair advantage at tests and assignments.

While it is beyond doubt that the colleges bear responsibility to remind students that they ought to study and to make attribution for information that they use, I am sure that this is case where a new approach to the meaning of results is due. For instance, colleges can neither control nor prevent students from finding access to sites that provide answers to assignments, the mechanism for determining the level of understanding and mastery of the subjects should be tried.  While the college professors quoted seem to be questioning the integrity of pupils, perhaps they ought to spend time questioning the exam-driven college courses.

So while I find the claim that only the less-capable students cheat in higher numbers, my suggestion is that colleges should provide students with an exam free option. This will then leave it to whoever cares about the diploma's to interpret the student's ability as they wish. College students may also choose the courses for which they consider themselves sufficiently prepared to face the tests.