Tutoring
services, online study guides, and digital forums where students can request help
on their homework abound, with some students posting copyrighted homework
assignments on the sites, and some “tutors” supplying entire finished papers
for users. In response, some faculty members are changing how they conduct their
courses.
Some
instructors expend added time to craft a fresh set of homework questions for
each new semester of a course, or only allow students a quick look at their graded
assignments before having them turn the work back in so it can’t be posted
online. Others are altering their grading scales to give more weight to
in-class exams rather than written papers, which leaves them fewer measurements
for calculating a final grade.
While
many student-support sites have policies and honor codes in place regarding
copyrighted content and completion of students’ work for them, actual self-policing
appears to be minimal or nonexistent. It’s up to faculty themselves to search
out whether their copyrighted intellectual property has been posted illegally and
then file a takedown request via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.