The Daily O’Collegian

Putting answers on your hat might seem clever to you, but it’s probably not going to fool your professors, mostly because you aren’t the first, or the last, to try it.

The black market offers a variety of merchandise.

AK-47s, nuclear warheads, narcotics and solution sets to last week’s calculus assignment, to name a few.

An underground market for homework exists — a concept educators such as professor Glenn Brown know all about.

“A lot of problems started when book publishers started sending digital copies of solution sets to professors,” the biosystems and agriculture engineering professor said. “Then they give the teaching assistants the solutions sets. All it takes after that is a TA trying to make a few quick bucks.”

Once that teaching assistant starts selling the answers on the Internet, a Paypal account and an e-mail address are the only necessary measures needed to seal the deal.

However, some professors are one step ahead of students who try this method.

“I graded the homework and I notice the answer in the solution set and the student’s answer are exactly the same,” Brown said. “These are problems with multiple equations and answers that are [a paragraph] long.”

Brown has also taken other measures to prevent these problems such as changing books every three years and writing his own homework.

Geography professor Steve Stadler said he tries to make cheating more trouble than it’s worth.

“I write new lab manuals every semester, and I write all my own tests,” he said. “I mean, if you want to go through all that to try to get an advantage … you might as well study.”

Not all forms of cheating in college are so elaborate, though.

Michele Tillman and Gail Gates at the Academic Integrity Office have seen just about everything students can think of.

Students taking pictures of exams with their phone in the middle of that same exam, going in before class and covering their desks with notes, or recording notes on MP3s and trying to convince the professor that it’s just music are a few common methods.

Others have posed as a TA to get their teacher’s manuals only to realize that the professors are notified of all such purchases.

You name it, the Academic Integrity Office has dealt with it.

“The reason that people get into this situation is they rush and they get careless,” Tillman said. “They end up doing it on the fly and that’s what gets students in trouble.”

Students can get caught up in what is going on in the here and now and fail to think about the big picture. The Office of Academic Affairs created a campaign to help students take these things into account.

“We want students to think about why they are here and what they are trying to accomplish,” Gates said.

Employees at the Office of Academic Affairs said they want to make a degree from OSU desirable to employers. When students come out of college without being properly prepared, it hurts that goal.

“We want the students to know that they are earning a degree of respect and we want that to be something to be proud of,” Tillman said.

The Academic Integrity Office has been going to greater measures to protect the reputation of Oklahoma State graduates since 2006 when new policies were put into place.

The professors have noticed the improvements.

“If we have to take a student to sanction we will. It’s not what we want to do, there’s paperwork involved,” Stadler said. “But when you come from a university where academic integrity is taken seriously, it adds value to your degree.”

The next time you think about cheating, remember what the consequences could be. Namely: tarnishing your degree, your friends’ degrees, your university and your ability to do your future job.

“Academic Integrity isn’t as much ‘don’t cheat’ as it is ‘plan ahead,’” Tilman said. “Learn to love what you’re going to be doing. Plan for a lifetime.”