Catching The Cheaters

from the they're-out-there dept

The Economist has an article about a piece of technology that can catch students who are plagiarizing their papers. That, by itself, isn't all that interesting. There have been similar technologies we've spoken about in the past. The interesting part is near the end of the article where they talk about who's buying the software. They point out that research has shown that dishonesty in publishing positively correlates to high academic achievement. In other words, the cheaters do much better in school (which may or may not be surprising, depending on how you look at it). Thus, some of the "top notch" universities (as described by the article) don't want to use it, because it will shame them and their best students. However, the article does mention that instead of the "top notch" schools, plenty of just "good" schools (including my alma mater, Cornell) are happily using the technology. Of course, I take offense to the idea that Cornell is just a "good" school as opposed to a "top notch" one, but at least we're honest. The creator of the technology says, "You apply our technology at Harvard and it would be like a nuclear bomb going off."