Is it illegal for an adult to abet a high school student in cheating? Cheating as in simply writing papers for the HS student - not cheating as in breaking and entering and stealing tests, etc.
Illegal, as in against the criminal law? It’s not against any law that I’m aware of. The student, no doubt, has violated school and classroom rules. And both parties have done something “wrong” in the larger sense.
Shhh… somehow someone will come up with a law.
OTOH - seems like if you do it for money, you are committing a crime in Pennsylvania at least. The way I read this, it applies to high schools too.
http://law.onecle.com/pennsylvania/crimes-and-offenses/00.073.024.000.html
Unlawful sale of dissertations, theses and term papers - 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 7324
That PA law sounds like it could be interpreted overbroadly, with its prohibition of “assistance”.
Does that mean that one could be arrested for tutoring Junior with his algebra?
IANAL, but I see a difference between tutoring algebra and writing someone’s dissertation, thesis, and term paper.
Personally, I’d have no issue typing someone’s paper for them (for a fee). And I’d probably be okay with throwing in spell checking for free. But that’s not writing the paper for them. In my opinion.
Indeed. In the days before everyone had computers it was standard and accepted practice to pay someone to type out your dissertation for you. (The original would usually have been handwritten.)
In the days of typewriters, there were secretaries and professional typists and professionals were expected to have access to a secretary or typist to type for them. For a couple of generations now, we’ve largely expected professionals to do their own word processing and printing, and those are skills students are building alongside the intellectual ones. But go ahead, undermine the educational system to make a quick buck. It’s not that difficult, and Junior will figure it out on his own (on the boss’s dime) eventually.
On the other hand, I can envision a paid tutoring service where the student turns in the paper (before the deadline) to the tutor, and the tutor then grades the paper and gives it back, so the student can improve it before turning it in to the actual teacher. This doesn’t strike me as being academically unethical (unfair, in that not all students can afford such a service, but that’s life), but it could certainly be construed as “assistance in the writing of a paper”.
I have actually operated such a tutoring service, using a college English professor to go the grading.
We had a borderline illiterate student in an online Master’s in [a certain social science] program.
Her first revision looked like a tweet. No tabs or paragraph breaks.
The college paid us for the service, considering it part of their ‘disablity services’ benefits package for her.
One of my nephews (in PA, coincidentally) writes college-level term papers, along with several other jobs. The term papers he writes are meant to be “study aids”, although for the price people pay I assume they are turning in his product.
As always, the main ethical difference is whether the service helps the student develop skills or avoid developping skills. If the student has the skills but is making an executive decision to delegate them (like typing), that’s a grey area: sometimes that’s a sensible decision, and sometimes it’s because the student doesn’t have the full perspective to appreciate the value of that particular skill.
I’ve had plenty of classes (both as a student and a teacher) where work assigned to the entire class was not particularly valuable to the top students, and I wouldn’t blame them in such a case. But it’s usually not the top students who are paying people.
It seems that there are general traditions in academia as to what sort of assistance is allowed and what sort of assistance constitutes cheating. Certainly, asking a librarian where they keep the New England Journal of Medicine doesn’t constitute cheating, nor does using Spell Check in Microsoft Word. My alma mater had a writing center where there were tutors who would help you revise a paper, but wouldn’t write the paper for you. You could get help with citation style, choice of language/phraseology/vocabulary, identifying awkward statements, etc. The fundamental rule was that you had to take the feedback and go and apply it yourself rather than asking, “Please sir, review my paper and correct it for style and structure problems and fix all citations then give it back so I can turn that in.” There was a critical boundary which might not be easily definable in a policy document but becomes easier to understand over time. One simple piece of advice I’ve been given is to ask the instructor beforehand if you are thinking about doing something that might be questionable.
This.
Being functionally illiterate now qualifies a person for disabled student privileges? Or was there more to it than that?
There were some underlying learning and psychological challenges in this case.
It probably went:
ADD + something else = Trouble Learning to Read = 30-something Master’s Candidate who writes a capstone thesis that reads like a very long tweet
I was in charge of billing and payroll, so I didn’t see the full student file, but that was my understanding based on speaking to my senior tutor.
Well, there’s that great catch-all “Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor”. Look up how your jurisdiction defines that. It may hinge on whether the student is breaking any law by cheating.
Sounds a lot like the old “corrupting the youth” charge a certain Greek philosopher was charged with and sentenced to death for (among other things).
I think it matters if the skills are relevant to the class: typing is a skill, sure, but it’s not the skill being taught or evaluated.
I think the litmus test is if you could tell the professor about it, and if you aren’t sure, you need to tell the professor about it and see what he says.
I always struggle with the line in editing college essays. There is a long tradition of teachers helping edit college essays, but it’s not clear to me when helping turns into cheating, and I don’t know who to ask. Can I tell a kid “You know what I think is interesting about you? Blah-blah. Write about blah-blah.” Can I tell a kid: “Don’t say “pride myself”, say 'I take pride in”. That flows better here."? Can I tell a kid:“You need to add a paragraph about blah blah and the topic sentence needs to be something like yaddy-yaddy-ya”? To me, all that is gray.
It is a difficult one as a parent - I reviewed a number of essays for my daughter while she was at university, and always tried to stick to using comments (not direct editing) and advising on style/phrasing/structure/punctuation and not on actual content (although I did comment heavily on repeated phrasing and jargon).
I did smile to myself when she texted me to say “I got a first on that essay” - I had spent two hours reviewing and commenting on it, turning what I thought was initially a good essay let down by some poor style and phrasing into (had she accepted all my comments and acted on them) a much better one. But I hadn’t had to read all the material and make something coherent from the question - I just tidied it all up, and I never saw the final essay.
Agreed. Further it also depends on the level of the program the student has reached. For example, in law school, in first year legal research and writing, the student is expected to do his own research, his own typing, his own proofreading, and is forbidden from discussing the issue with anyone else.
Many students complain that this is unrealistic as in the real world, it is encouraged that lawyers discuss problems with each other, have secretaries proofread, etc. but the whole friggin’ point of the limitation on first year students is so the student can develop these essential skills. If someone else helps you, that prevents the student from developing those skills.
Then in the second and third year, help is not only allowed, but encouraged.
I hate to sound like my mother, but when anyone helps a student cheat, it is the student who is getting cheated. Follow the rules of the school and let the kid learn.
He didn’t answer their questions, though; he asked them.