Homework copying can turn As into Cs, Bs into Ds

Copying a few answers from another student's math or science homework assignment occurs much more frequently than copying during examinations or plagiarism on term papers. It is rarely prosecuted by discipline committees and is regarded by many American college students as either not cheating at all or simply a minor infraction. Now educators at MIT have shown that homework copying is associated with greatly decreased learning ? and have developed changes in instructional format that reduced copying by a factor of four in certain physics classes at MIT. This research was conducted by the Research in Learning, Assessment, and Tutoring Effectively (RELATE) program headed by David E. Pritchard, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics. By analyzing records of student submissions to Mastering Physics, an online homework and tutorial system, a team led by graduate student David Palazzo developed algorithms to detect copied answers based on earlier work led by Postdoctoral Fellow Rasil Warnakulasooriya. Postdoctoral Fellow Young-Jin Lee also contributed to the research, published today online in . The group investigated the effect of homework copying on students? performance.