Did they use cell phones to take a picture of one exam and send to the other?  
Apparently, that is becoming a big problem in some classes.  That, and texting 
each other. I ban cell phones during exams, but it is very hard to police in 
large classes.  Anyone have a problem with cell phone cheating?  Gary




Gerald L. (Gary) Peterson, Ph.D. 
Professor, Department of Psychology 
Saginaw Valley State University 
University Center, MI 48710 
989-964-4491 
peter...@svsu.edu 

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Kulig" <ku...@mail.plymouth.edu>
To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)" <tips@acsun.frostburg.edu>
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 4:00:04 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: [tips] It's that plagiarism time of year again...


Yes, that time of year again! I have never used Turnitin.com but I want to 
introduce another problem I just encountered ...

Two students in stats both turned in an exam with the exact same multiple 
choice answers(35 out of 39 correct, and both the correct AND incorrect choices 
were identical). I have never seen this happen before. One student was aceing 
the class and the other was on the verge of failing. I have a pretty solid case 
of copying not just on this point on other parts of the exam because the poorer 
student also had correct AND incorrect answers on the computation part out to 
two decimal places (including a "proportion of variance" effect size of 2.15 
which is bogus), all without computation, just answers written down. Because I 
am grading non-stop and need a diversion, I am intrigued with guestimating the 
probability of the MC being identical on all 39 given no cheating. It's 
obviously a low probability as my MC scores average close to "optimal 
difficulty" level (in the 60 - 70% range), so it's not the case that most 
people get most of them correct. 

Anybody ever try to model this problem? I can assume they both knew 35 answers, 
get the frequencies of all the wrong answers for the class, and assume people 
guess randomly when they don't know. But they only missed 4. I can also regress 
this exam on previous exam scores and show that the poor student getting only 4 
wrong is an outlier, but that may not be convincing enough .. and thoughts 
would be appreciated.

If the student were brigher they should have changed a few answers and 
scribbled a few computations here and there on the sheet!

--------------------------
John W. Kulig
Professor of Psychology
Plymouth State University
Plymouth NH 03264
--------------------------

----- Original Message -----
From: "DeVolder Carol L" <devoldercar...@sau.edu>
To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)" <tips@acsun.frostburg.edu>
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 2:56:53 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: [tips] It's that plagiarism time of year again...

Hi,
I have a student who has done poorly on his exams but has turned in a 
stunningly good paper. Frankly, I don't think he wrote it but I'm having 
difficulty showing that. I have Googled key phrases but nothing has turned up, 
so I don't think he copied and pasted, I think he bought it. Can anyone give me 
some idea of what Turnitin.com charges for an individual license? It's the only 
thing I can think of, other than confronting the student, which will most 
likely be my next step. I hate this stuff, it takes so much time and really 
takes a toll on my enthusiasm for grading.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
Carol




Carol DeVolder, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
Chair, Department of Psychology
St. Ambrose University
Davenport, Iowa  52803

phone: 563-333-6482
e-mail: devoldercar...@sau.edu




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