Education News and Observations

Just yesterday I posted a couple of links about the growing problem of plagiarism in our academic institutions. Professors now estimate that more than 50% of their students cheat. Now students are complaining when institutions use information systems to encourage academic integrity, according to today's Washington Post. The Post didn't have space to cover the legal and copyright issues that have already been settled, and didn't mention any of the institutions that use Turnitin, like Georgetown, Tulane, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. I imagine West Point doesn't want their honor code to become meaningless. Turnitin doesn't say a paper is "guilty or innocent" -- it just points out sections that are just like other works. Turnitin isn't the only company that provides this service -- iThenticate does it too, although iThenticate is geared more towards publishers and peer reviewers doing due diligence.

The New York Times did this story last year. The only real news in the Post's story is that almost 1200 students have signed a petition complaining about their "intellectual property rights". If they had a real case, they could sue.

Given that academics estimate that 60% of high school students plagiarize some of their work, what do you do about it? How do you protect your non-plagiarising students? Can you imagine going from a high school that doesn't use Turnitin to a university that does?

Posted by Larry at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

The early-decision process at colleges has been troubled for some time, and colleges might be reforming their system. The Atlantic's James Fallows wrote about this five years ago: "Everyone involved with the early-decision process admits that it rewards the richest students from the most exclusive high schools and penalizes nearly everyone else."

Early decision programs helped colleges increase their rankings in the annual U.S. News and World Report Survey by increasing their selectivity and yield. While publicly dismissing the importance of the U.S. News survey, colleges will do anything in their power to improve their rank. Universities are concerned with looking good on paper just as much as their applicants are.

My own grad school, the GWU School of Business, is trying to get a better ranking. Initially, this would theoretically improve my chances of getting a better job after graduation, but the Atlantic cited studies showing that a few years out, pay is merit-based.

Didn't some Ivies just change their early decision processes a few years ago in response to the Fallows article? In 2002, Yale and Stanford, but not Princeton, eliminated binding early admission, as if lots of students, once into the school of their choice, would then opt to fill out additional college applications. Harvard never had a binding early admissions process, but it didn't need to, since it won in most cases.

The University of Delaware elimintated its ED program in June 2006, but since they are not in the Ivy League, nobody noticed. On June 15 2006, a group of liberal arts college presidents gathered in New York to discuss admissions reform. Since the meeting was private, we don't know for sure what the results will be.

This fall, Harvard is eliminating its early decision process, and other schools are following, maybe. The NYT's David Leonhardt reported, "Officials at Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton and Yale, for their part, suggested last week that they had no immediate plans to make a change." (Sept. 17 2006) The next day, Princeton ended its binding early admissions program, according to the AP.

Posted by Larry at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I posted a while ago on what appears to be rampant open cheating at GWU. An anonymous professor wrote a single-entry blog about cheating in July that estimated half his students cheat that got Slashdotted. Now someone else on Slashdot has followed up with a link that shows Business School students cheat the most -- but only a little more than everyone else. The spin on this story is that B-schoolers cheat the most. The really shocking part is that admitted cheating is about 50% in several fields, including med school. You can see last year's undergraduate study data here, but the current grad school study isn't online yet.

Schools have countermeasures such as Turnitin and iThenticate. Turnitin can scale enough so that all students in a University handing in papers in any online form will automatically have their content checked for plagiarism. Turnitin claims to have the US Military Academy at West Point as a client, so even organizations with strong honor codes will "trust but verify."

As with any battle, as one side grows more sophisticated, the other side will need to work to keep up.

Posted by Larry at 1:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

Many adults don't "get" a lot of what's on the Internet, so their chances of understanding children's use of the Internet are low. Fortunately, there are more studies to help. One of the first significant, scientific studies came from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Kids don't just use online media a lot, they use multiple forms of media -- TV, music, chat, web -- all at once. KFF has since followed up with another study on how families use media to manage their young children.

Social networking sites are starting to cause worry for parents while their use is exploding. New Scientist has a great primer on social networking and the Internet. It's almost a given that all 2008 U.S. presidential candidates will have their own social networking pages. New Scientist continues a series of stories on social networking and its impact on attitudes and privacy.

Posted by Larry at 3:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Students might think their iPods are for entertainment purposes only, but Apple and Stanford University have changed that. Apple's new iTunes university allows professors to post lectures onto a university's own iTunes store for downloading by students. Some universities, like my own, don't have much yet, but Stanford already has an array of interesting lectures.

One of my latest favorites is Denise Clark Pope's Getting Ahead in School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students. You can find her book here.

While I'm not sure how helpful podcasts will be helpful for students outside of large lecture classes, I love being able to pick and choose good lectures at my convenience. The integration of the iPod into the university system might also help Apple's lower-priced online music sales competitors figure out why Apple is succeeding where they are failing.

Posted by Larry at 1:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The study that the Department of Education tried to bury is available on the Department's web site.

Full text is here.

NPR commentary.

Posted by Larry at 3:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Both Scientific American Mind and Nature Magazine covered recent research into stress, the prefrontal cortex and adolescence. Simply put, the theory is this: adolescents have less developed connections within their brain and under stress, the adolescent prefrontal cortex is overloaded. In adults, brain activity under stress is distributed out to several sections of the brain for faster processing.

We are quick to blame adolescents for getting themselves into predicaments that adults believe could be easily avoided. But recent research indicates that simple irresponsibility may not be the full explanation. When teenagers perform certain tasks, their prefrontal cortex, which handles decision making, is working much harder than the same region in adults facing the same circumstances. The teen brain also makes less use of other regions that could help out. Under challenging conditions, adolescents may assess and react less efficiently than adults.

-- Leslie Sabbagh, Scientific American, August 2006.

Neuroscientists probing the teen brain have found that it undergoes a major remodelling that may be responsible for the teenager's propensity to take risks, seek out new experiences and fail to restrain inappropriate responses. Their work suggests that, even before you add raging hormones and peer-group-driven rebelliousness-without-a-cause to the mixture, teenagers may simply be unable consistently to make decisions the same way adults do. This could well be one of the reasons that, although most people are healthier during their adolescence than at any other time in their lives, adolescents are three or four times more likely to die than children past infancy2: they take risks, have accidents and pay the prices.

-- Kendall Powell, Nature 442, 865-867(24 August 2006)

Posted by Larry at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

WAMU did an interesting story on Sidwell Friends School and its new green building. After running by the construction pit for two years, it's neat to hear about it. When do they give tours?

Posted by Larry at 2:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Steven Berglas has a great piece in Harvard Business Review this month about handling type A personalities. While type As are difficult to work with, they are productive and overachieve. Berglas has his opinion on what might cause this:

In my observation of many A players, I have concluded that childhood really matters. Often these high performers come from demanding backgrounds where unconditional approval was withheld. Getting As, for example, did not meet with admiration from parents. The achievement was typically followed up with the message, “You can do better,” which is never rewarding and often damaging. From your star’s perspective, feedback of this sort obligated him to work endlessly to reach an unattainable goal. The psychologist Anna Freud (Sigmund Freud’s daughter) and others who studied children raised in this manner discovered that these individuals end up with extraordinarily punishing superegos. At first, the pressure comes from outside authority figures; later, A players impose it on themselves and on others. Winston Churchill, who adored his often abusive father, is a case in point. As an adult, Churchill ended each day with a merciless ritual: “I try myself by court martial to see if I have done anything effective during the day.”

Not quite my parents, but close.

Posted by Larry at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)