Tech Search

"I caught a kid last year, or the year ... before. The teacher had left a test answer key on her desk, and the kid walked up to get a Kleenex and took a picture" with a cellphone, said teacher Lisa Green, coordinator for Robinson Secondary School's International Baccalaureate program. Other students, who were furious that the cheater was getting a leg up, turned him in.

"The kids see it, and they really resent that they've worked so hard and this kid has taken an advantage," Green said.

Last month, the Fairfax County School Board voted to tighten regulations on the use of privately owned electronic devices in schools. Even before the new regulations, students were allowed to carry a cellphone but not to use them in school. The board ruled that students should be prohibited from using cellphones to access certain Web sites, such as social networking ones, that already are blocked from use on school devices.

In math classes, students have preprogrammed calculators with formulas, which they can gain access to at the touch of a button, Robinson teacher Coulter Weaver said.

"For me, whether it's a crib sheet or a calculator, it's just so obvious. It's in their posture," he said of the slumped shoulder and downward glances that give cheating students away.

In April, Chantilly High School's newspaper, the Purple Tide, reported that Advanced Placement U.S. history students used the Internet to cheat on a take-home test. The unusually high number of A's gave them away, wrote student journalist Marcelo Aranibar.

For the most part, teachers say they try to handle cheating in the classroom on a case-by-case basis. Depending on the severity of the case, students can receive anything from a reduced grade or zero on an assignment to suspension or expulsion from school.

Weaver said that in his IB psychology class, plagiarism is the most common form of electronic cheating.

"It is so easy for these kids to cut and paste or pay for a paper," he said. "In my circumstances, the kids are lifting whole papers and switching out the names on it."

Plagiarism is the most common form of cheating on major assignments, teachers said. Students have been found liberally using the copy and paste buttons on their computers to steal from SparkNotes or similar Web sites.

Cheating is in every school, teachers said. But for plagiarism, schools such as Robinson have an edge. Teachers have been using Turnitin, a Web-based program developed in 1996 by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. The program has ties to more than 500,000 educators in about 9,000 high schools and universities. More than 100 million student papers have been processed through the site.

Schools that have the program ask students to submit electronic copies of their work, which is loaded into the program and checked for authenticity. That means kids are finding it harder to use research papers submitted during previous years by a sibling or older student, teachers said.

"It highlights the paragraphs that could be plagiarized. You have to be very careful, though," Green said. "I had a student whose paper came up [as] 40 percent plagiarized, and it wasn't."

The student, she said, had used lines of text from sources that had been properly cited.

Teachers noted that cheating is not a new problem.

"I don't know if cheating is any more prevalent than in previous years; it's just more accessible. . . . Kids are 'borrowing' from the Web," Green said.