One student takes the exam, the others gather around, write down the questions, and look up answers on Google. Later, the others will use the written-down questions to look up answers before they start the timed on-line version. It's a decidedly low-tech form of cheating in the information age.
Surprising factors: how loud they are, how little shame they have, and how nobody cares. So cluelesswere the students that I drafted this entire entry while sitting next to them. The professor could allow teamwork on midterms, but I highly doubt it. Then again, since this is the GWU’s Business school, training the executives of tomorrow, so perhaps it’s a nod to the reality of the business world.
While GWU specifically prohibits this kind of activity in its Code of Academic Integrity, it's pretty meaningless when the administration admits athletes to GWU who never completed high schoool. The difference between what is said and done increases as universities try to compete athletically and academically. Both student and administrative cheating devalue the credential for which I'm paying with time and money.
Until GWU's President, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, takes a stand on one, the other is not going away any time soon.
Footnote: In Freakonomics,
Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner discuss Paul Feldman’s self-serve bagel business. Feldman’s honor-system payment and meticulous record-keeping showed that executives were more likely to steal bagels than lower-level workers. Feldman attributed the difference to an “overdeveloped sense of entitlement” while Levitt and Dubner suggest that “cheating was how they got to be executives.”
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