At the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) , a student loaded his class notes into a handheld e-mail device and tried to read them during an exam: a classmate turned him in. At the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV) students photographed test questions with their cell phone cameras and transmitted them to classmates. The university put in place a new examination-supervision system. "If they’d spend as much time studying, they’d all be A students," says Ron Yasbin, dean of the College of Sciences of UNLV.
With a variety of electronic devices, American students find it easier to cheat. And college officials find themselves in a new of eat and mouse. They are trying to fight would-he cheats in the exam season by cutting off Internet access from laptops(笔记本电脑), demanding the surrender of cell phones before tests or simply requiring that exams be taken with pens and paper.
"It is annoying. My hand-writing is so bad," said Ryan Dapremont, 21 who just finished his third year at Pepperdine University in California. He had to take his exams on paper. Dapremont said technology has made cheating easier, but plagiarism(剽窃) in writing papers was probably the biggest problem. Students can lift other people’s writings off the Internet without attributing them.
Still, some students said they thought cheating these days was more a product Of the mindset, not the tools at hand. "Some people put too much emphasis on where they’re going to go in the future, and all they’re thinking about is graduate school and the next step," said Lindsay Nicholas, a third-year student at UCLA. She added that pressure to succeed "sometimes clouds everything and makes people do things that they shouldn’t do. "
Some professors said they tried to write exams for which it was hard to cheat, posing questions that outside resources would not help answer. Many officials said that they rely on campus honor codes. They said the most important thing was to teach students not to cheat in the first place.
Which of the following is probably the most significant measure to fight cheating