By Rahul Garg
Dear T-birds,
Welcome to the Ethics Corner sponsored by the Thunderbird Honor Council. In an effort to better educate our student body on ethical business practices, we will present to you an article, news link, or story from our own students that helps to showcase what is going on in the business world with ethical business behavior. We hope to create a dialogue between students to better prepare themselves for what might lie ahead in their careers. Moreover, we hope to provide information to better prepare you for your life ahead.
This week’s featured article offers solutions to an age old question in education, “How to prevent students from cheating?” regarding a new trend in online education called massive open online courses, or MOOC.
“The concern [about online cheating] has been around for awhile, but MOOCs’ scale is so large it really magnifies the issue,” said Cathy Sandeen, a vice president at the American Council on Education. Highlighted in the article, is the “scale” which Cathy Sandeen refers to – an estimated three million students from at least 160 countries with some classes having a student enrollment of 150,00 at a time.
While some ‘old fashioned’ solutions such as test centers and honor codes remain, more ‘advanced’ solutions to this problem are being tested such as keystroke systems to analyze student typing patterns and palm-vein scans.
The article, “Web Classes Grapple With Stopping Cheats” by Douglas Belkin can be found in the print edition of the Wall Street Journal (2/15/13, A3) or on WSJ online at the following link: