Cheating via Google?

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 3/1/2006

Teacher Nancy Dean loves to watch as her students enthusiastically use technology during their assignments. A recent class discussion about the Jean Merrill novel The Toothpaste Millionaire (Houghton, 1972), for example, had her sixth graders at Aire Libre Elementary School in Phoenix, AZ, excitedly beaming ideas to one another using handheld devices as they considered the book’s main theme. “I think of it as peer learning,” she says of allowing students to, in effect, chat with one another while doing their work. “It’s another method, something novel.”

But letting students use a computer or access the Internet while taking a test? That’s apparently what some schools are doing. San Diego charter school High Tech High, for example, lets students search the Web during humanities tests, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Sure, one might say, pop quizzes with calculators and take-home exams have long been accepted by educators, and Web-searching is so ubiquitous today, why not let students exercise these real-life skills in the testing room? Others, however, fear the practice will further undermine the already troubled state of student ethics.

Meanwhile, SparkNotes, a publisher of study guides, has a service that answers students’ literature queries via text message. “This is not meant for cheating,” says Dan Weiss, SparkNotes’s publisher. “It’s meant to create excitement. We want to provoke an interest in literature, not undermine it.”

Dean agrees that technology can help make learning fun, but she thinks computers and handhelds should be turned off and tucked away during exams. She says the use of handhelds in her classroom is about sharing ideas, “not sharing answers.”