But this might be Number One.
It makes it SO easy to cheat. And to charge other people money for helping them cheat.
Distance education makes it easy for students to learn nothing, while at the same time allowing people in the distance education office to supplement their salaries.
Best thing about it — Even when people get caught, the university can’t stop it from happening again!
Read and learn. But you probably already know.
A two-month UTB-TSC police investigation found school employees in 2008 had committed “gross academic fraud” after student employees and regular staff used their positions to steal test answers, according to a UTB police report obtained by The Brownsville Herald.
The wrongdoing occurred within the Blackboard Learning System, an online service commonly used at universities.
The system allows professors to post tests and course materials for students, teach entire courses online and keep online grade books. Blackboard generally serves to enrich the learning experience; however, former student employees of the school’s Office of Distance Education, the office that manages Blackboard, confessed to a police investigator that they had used the online system to access test answers to help themselves cheat, give the answers to other students, or even to sell.
… The police report shows that one student employee, who worked in the Office of Distance Education, sold test answers to another student through a student middleman for $60. The student employee got $30 and the middleman got $30. That same student employee agreed to take a test for another student in exchange for $40. A different student middleman was involved in this deal, but it’s unclear how much money that person was to receive. The student employee said he never received payment in this scam.
“The agreement was I would take the exam for a friend of (the middleman) and score no less than 96,” the student employee wrote in his confession. “The friend would then give (the middleman) $40, so that (the middleman) could give (the money) to me.”
That student goes on to give a detailed explanation of how he was able to obtain the other student’s Blackboard password, and take the test for the friend on one monitor, while pulling up the answers to the exam on a second computer screen.
“It was very easy to use this method,” he wrote. That student employee also said he stole answers for a friend to give to a girl his friend wanted to “get with.”…
— Brownsville Herald —
August 2nd, 2009 at 10:17PM
I force my online students to take proctored tests. It’s not a foolproof method but it does help. Allowing students to take tests online in an unsecured environment is scandalous. Paid testing centers is what will happen soon.
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:08PM
Interesting…that is the way standardized tests like the SAT and GRE are administered too. If you have to go to some place to take the exams, doesn’t that kinda defeat the purpose of distance ed? Maybe not…one can put the centers in any of our widely available and underused strip malls.
August 7th, 2009 at 2:33AM
Such cases happen when people do not bother about the course or the university they are enrolling initially. They should enquire completely before getting them enrolled otherwise similar cases would be coming up again n again. To avoid such happenings, I researched one website that provides pretty good info about courses as well as universities
http://www.thedegreeexperts.com/
They provide all the info without indulging money for that and you can fully inquire and then get enrolled for course you are interested in.
August 10th, 2009 at 2:42AM
Very interesting n worthy link. The students can leverage the information to move ahead.