Cheating: The Institutions Strike Back
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.