79% of Students at California High School Say They've Cheated More During Distance Learning

Plus, that Cal-Poly GPA. Plus, Wisconsin Public Radio talks cheating. Plus, Texas A&M to increase exam proctoring. Plus, bites.

May 24, 2021

Issue 27

Menlo Atherton High School: Just 11.7% of Students Have Not Broken Integrity Rules During a Test

Menlo Atherton High School is a public school in Atherton, CA, about half way between San Jose and San Francisco. The school’s student paper has an outstanding story on academic integrity, titled “What’s the Deal with Cheating?”

Seriously, the cover art alone is award worthy.

The paper anonymously surveyed 102 students and found

81 said that cheating is easier and they have done it more since the start of distance learning

And, the paper found

that few cases are caught or reported: only five cases of academic integrity violations were logged in Infinite Campus for the 2020-2021 school year, despite both teachers and students alleging a massive spike in cheating.

The survey also found that less than half of students considered breaking the school’s integrity policy “a bad thing to do.” And, further

only 11.7% of students polled had not broken the school’s academic integrity policy on a test, and 77.7% of students polled thought that cheating is very prevalent

Students in the survey trotted out the routine rationalizations, citing the pressure to get good grades, that in “the real world” it’s possible to look things up and blaming the expectations of teachers. One student said,

during distance learning, teachers can’t expect students to fully complete the same test with the same rigor as if we were back at school normally. The fact is that people aren’t learning as well but teachers have the same expectations.

My personal favorite part of the article is when, after the students say why they’re cheating, it says, “Teachers, however, had different ideas on why students are cheating more.”

The instructors go on to say that “it’s super hard for students to be disciplined right now” and the cheating was not “malicious and more just blurred boundaries” and “because the boundaries are so fuzzy” and, of course

Teachers interviewed believed student stress was the biggest contributor to cheating.

It’s honestly hard to say whether the teachers or students are rationalizing more.

Anyway, the article is an outstanding look at the state of academic integrity in high school, the pool from which higher education establishments are recruiting.

Wisconsin Public Radio on Cheating

Bill Martens at WPR hosted a call-in program this week, interviewing Tawnell Hobbs of the Wall St Journal as a follow up to her big story on the surge in cheating.

We covered her story in Issue 25 of “The Cheat Sheet.”

Not much new ground was mapped during the show but it gets credit for being another high profile platform to raise the issue of cheating. The show also gets credit for not trying to “maybe it is, maybe it isn’t” the situation. The show’s intro starts

As we look back at the first full school year during the pandemic, one major challenge turned out to be cheating. Remote learning led to a surge in academic dishonesty among students from grade school to college

It did indeed.

Cal Poly: “GPA Jumped 7.8% During A Virtual Year”

The student paper at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) reported this week that

Data collected by Academic Affairs at Cal Poly showed a 7.8% increase in the average student GPA from fall quarter 2019 to winter quarter 2021. The data was based on the 21,812 undergraduate and graduate students attending Cal Poly.

The story quotes Beth Chance, a statistics professor, as saying there “are many explanations for why the jump in GPA could have occurred” and continuing,

Is it telling you that students perform better in courses with online learning, or does it tell you that students who enrolled in fall 2020 were stronger students than those that enrolled in fall 2019?

Students preforming better in online courses, you say? I have a theory.

Chance said an increase in overall GPA could correlate with changed grading policies, the ability of students to change their classes to credit/no credit at the last minute or the difficulty in enforcing academic integrity.

Ah, there it is.

Texas A&M to Increase Test Proctoring

KAGS TV in Texas has the follow up story to the doubling of academic misconduct cases at Texas A&M. The school plans to increase test proctoring.

The background is that, despite the “Aggie Honor Code,” reported incidents of cheating at the school doubled last year to more than 1,300. A spokesperson for A&M said

the doubled recorded instances are due to the growth of online courses during the COVID-19 pandemic and the abuse of websites designed to facilitate learning.
To address this increase, [the spokesperson] said the university is implementing proctoring groups to help monitor testing.

The University of Virginia student paper reports on student experiences taking final exams virtually and prospects for returning to in person options, reporting that, “Professors and students shared concerns for cheating with online finals.”

In Montreal, student leaders have sued Dawson College in order to block a return to in person exams. The students cite health concerns. The school did not comment on the suit but said previously that in person exams are preferred because of “either the practical nature of the assessment or a proven high risk of cheating.”
TES, a “global education business” has a story about students shifting to a new platform - Discord - to share tests and answers. “More than 2,000 users of the social media platform Discord are sharing information on "exams" in around 70 “channels” that contain information on the questions they are likely to face in a wide range of subjects,” the story says.

In the next “The Cheat Sheet” - a major proctoring provider says AI test proctoring doesn’t work and will discontinue it. Plus, more cheating.

The Cheat Sheet