New for your iPod... it's iCheat!!!

Wedging Cliff's Notes into your copy of The Scarlet Letter to take with you to the open-book essay exam just got a whole lot easier.

Introducing iPREPpress at http://ipreppress.com/Pages/studyguides.htm where, for only $4.95, you can download an entire copy of a Sparknotes study guide to your iPod.

At the moment, there are only eleven, only two of which are Shakespeare plays, but in the "Coming Soon" section we learn that the entire Sparknotes library is to be added. I can't help but think that this is a bad idea. We already have a blurring of the lines between scholarship and plagiarism with hypertext links. It's not cheating, Prof. Thrasher; it's an immediate form of citation wherein I link the original online text that I cut and pasted into my paper. There are already a few Universities in the US that do not accept hardcopies of papers and insist that students insert hypertext links to their sources. MLA Guide? We don't need no stinkin' MLA Guide. With iPREPpress, a student can now surrepticiously bring to bear ev'erything he or she might need to have on deck for the win.

Of course, the simple answer to this problem is to allow no form of electronic device into the testing environment. Sure, that's what CollegeBoard does, but the iPod has already wormed its way into the culture, not unlike the Sony Walkman of the '80's, such that the little white wires trailing down from the ears has become ubiquitous. What the hell? It's just a little vocabulary quiz. If listening to music while he tests helps him to focus, why that's because his learning style is auditory in nature; therefore, to remove the very focusing device for him would be no less a crime than taking an AlphaSmart from a special ed. kid. This is the slippery slope that we now tread: to say no electronic devices are allowed in the classroom is foolish, especially when teachers are evaluated based on their ability to integrate technology. Toward the bottom of this perilous downward spiral is allowing students their iPods.

Are we enabling cheaters? In a world where somewhere around a quarter to a third of high school seniors and entering freshmen do not believe a little bit of cheating is bad, am I turning into a Luddite?

By the way, smooches to the Apple propeller-heads for the iPod. I just got one for Christmas (at long last), and the musical clarity is A-MAZING!