August 17, 2001

Designing Courses to Make Cheating Hard

To the Editor:

Articles such as Ellen Laird's "Internet Plagiarism: We All Pay the Price" (The Review, July 13) -- which decry the spate of plagiarism and other forms of cheating, often facilitated by the Internet -- all seem to overlook a key ingredient of the problem: Courses and assignments are often structured so that cheating is entirely too easy. When vice is far easier than virtue, it should be no surprise that many harried, procrastination-prone students will eschew the