Confronting cheating

Last week, it was revealed that about 100 first-year chemistry students at the province’s largest university were found to have cheated on an online exam by gaining access to the solutions in Blackboard. I heard the university’s Dean of Science, Ken Taylor, interviewed on CBC radio and was impressed with how the university is taking advantage of the “teachable moment” that the incident offers. Any student found cheating will be attending a session on integrity & professionalism in the fall (in addition to getting a zero on their assignment). Taylor also seems to be very available to the media and, without doubt, this is forcing a bit of conversation and reflection among students about the need for honesty.

The incident raises a few questions about the prevalence of cheating in online courses so I did a bit of digging.

In fact, there are studies that show that academic cheating of all kinds is fairly common and rarely detected. For example, I’ve seen a study that cites the somewhat surprising figure that 70% of high school seniors in the U.S. admit to cheating on a test and 95% of those students were never caught.

Despite the perceived ease of cheating online, studies show that cheating is no more prevalent in online courses than it is in face-to-face courses. However, whether online or face-to-face, students are more likely to cheat as the amount of communication decreases between them and their assessor. That’s a great argument for the need for more contact and interaction between faculty and students (something that may be lacking in many first-generation online courses).

When cheating does happen, it may be easier to detect in an online course since every visit to a campus server is logged and detecting plagiarism in essays is as easy as a Google search. With the case of the chemistry students cheating in Blackboard, I imagine it was just a simple matter of checking to see whose computers had visited the site with the exam solutions and when (if we choose to do it — in the case of the chemistry students, professors were notified by students, not technology).

There are lots of strategies to combat cheating including asking students to integrate their own experiences to their responses or putting more emphasis on the process rather than a product, but I wonder whether we’re just “band-aiding” a larger problem. Unfortunately, with technology, it’s very tempting for faculty to resort to using easy, automated objective tests. It saves a lot of time in marking. And those kinds of tests are popular in online courses. But the feedback is automated and often gives students little more than a grade. To what extent are we cheating students when we reduce their learning to nothing but a number?

It’s also common (especially in universities) to rely on high-stakes, end-of-term testing like the example above. That puts a lot of pressure on students, and often ends up in a kind of academic bulimia — students cram in the information and then purge. Again, with all the other options open to us, is this the most meaningful way we can assess learning? After all, the idea of objective testing just doesn’t fit with the ways their work will be assessed they leave school. What we often call cheating in the school world is called collaboration in the work world. After graduation, students are rarely put in situations where they need to complete projects without using resources and without asking someone for help.

So, do we need to rethink evaluation? Valencia Community College in Florida has some great suggestions for testing with technology and basically suggests that we need to bring a new “mindset” to testing including the idea that every test online should be treated as an open book test and need to be designed to accommodate that reality. Stephen Downes has taken that idea one step further and suggested that all our tests should be “open source” or freely available online. Now there’s a thought.

What do you think? How do you confront cheating? Any suggestions for lessening its likelihood?

(Photo, 250208textcheating, by Stephen Dembo)