Academic Misconduct Up 46% at University of Arkansas

Plus, A4EOE. Plus, declines at nation's largest campus test center.

Issue 71

Spike in Misconduct at Arkansas Driven by Online Exams

According to local reporting, the University of Arkansas saw a 46% jump in cases of academic misconduct last year, driven by cheating during online exams.

The reporting showed:

Academic misconduct findings for 2020-21 increased to 675, an increase of 46% compared with the 461 findings in the 2019-20 year.

According to Chris Bryson of the school’s Academic Initiatives and Integrity Office,

The increase is all related to exams and online exams specifically

We’ve heard that before.

Bryson also shared a report showing that just three incidents of misconduct, “involved a total of 231 students.”

BYU Test Center Declines

The student paper at Brigham Young University reported recently on long-term and significant declines in tests being administered at the school’s testing center. The declines pre-date the pandemic.

A spokesperson said the BYU center is the nation’s largest but the number of test sessions held there has declined:

In the Fall 2015 semester, 243,799 tests were administered. In the final semester before the pandemic shutdown, the Fall 2019 semester, 203,030 tests were administered.

These statistics show that each fall semester saw fewer and fewer tests in the Testing Center, with a 16.7% decrease in administered tests since 2015. The Winter 2019 semester experienced the lowest number since 2015, with only 194,254 tests administered.

The center was closed, along with campus classes, in 2020.

The decline in in-person testing is no doubt related to the rise in online assessment options, about which a spokesperson for BYU said,

the main concerns are test security and preventing and catching cheating behaviors, and that testing centers and live proctors will continue to provide important services in maintaining test security and promoting academic honesty.

If cheating prevention is the main value in test centers, declining use may indicate a reduction in integrity measures or an increasing reliance on shifting those tactics - live proctoring, for example - online. But since not all remote proctoring is live, it’s probably worth paying attention to how these tests are being conducted once they leave the in-person test center.

Online Seminar on “Academic Integrity in the Online Environment” Drops Some Truth

An organization called The Alliance for Excellence in Online Education (A4EOE), held an online micro-summit on academic integrity. Judging by the moderator’s appearance as a pirate, the session took place on or around Halloween. But the YouTube recording is available now.

The 50-minute session is interesting and informative in that it presents new voices from mostly smaller schools - and those specifically interested in elevating online learning, which has been shown to be more susceptible to cheating.

A few of the presenters drop some truth bombs, as the kids say.

Terri Richards, a professor of Information Technology at Walsh College (MI), says for example that to raise integrity standards professors should,

Avoid test bank questions. If you Google some of them, they’re almost all compromised on Chegg and some of the other sites.

Fine. That’s not a truth bomb. But it is true.

Richards added that teachers should check the IP addresses of students taking online exams, saying,

I did catch a student once who really excelled on a paper, on an exam they turned in and I thought it was suspicious … I went into IP address log of where they took the exam and found out they were taking it from somewhere in Europe … they were getting someone overseas to take the exam for them, not thinking that I would check the IP address.

Yup. Online exam impersonation is real and checking IP addresses is very easy and can be quite effective.

Joanna Palmer, Director of Online Academic Affairs & Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Baker College (MI) said bluntly that to prevent cheating,

An academic honor code is not enough.

And, on the need to keep an academic integrity policy updated, Palmer said later,

It wasn’t until we had a group really going through and digging into this for awhile that we realized that we didn’t have anything that even spoke to … the Course Hero and Chegg and stuff. So we actually had to add to our policy that uploading or downloading any completed Baker College assignment on the Internet is in and of itself a violation

Chegg and Course Hero spurring schools to revise their integrity policies may not be a bomb either, but it’s worth repeating - these are not study tools. They are cheating providers.

And finally, Michelle Reiter-Miller, Dean of the Colleges of Education and Social Sciences at Baker College spoke about how faculty are - or are not - using academic integrity tools correctly. Or at all. She said,

One of the first things I see is that our faculty do not use [our plagiarism system] Unicheck. Or, worse, they ignore the option when it’s turned on.

This is another significant yet unspoken truth about academic integrity - faculty rarely use the tools that would detect misconduct. Maybe it’s not fair that faculty have to. But if they don’t, or if they don’t use them correctly, bad things happen. Reiter-Miller continued,

I look in the gradebook at some of the courses and [the faculty] don’t visit, they also don’t take the time to learn how to use it. They see a high percentage and so they automatically  assume it’s plagiarism and they don’t look into it

Further, she said,

They are also not transparent with their students – they just give a zero without talking about it. They make assumptions about what the student did or didn’t do – and they are not being transparent. When faculty don’t pay attention, it impacts our credibility with students, it allows students to get away with plagiarism and reinforces the unethical behavior … it gives the message that we don’t care as an institution

Boom.

Truth. Bomb.

It’s difficult to be more clear. If you’re not enforcing integrity, using the tools that exist, you are telling your students that cheating isn’t a big deal (see Issue 66).

Anyway, good for A4EOE for having this conversation.

In the next “The Cheat Sheet” - A few more opinion pieces that mostly miss on academic integrity. Plus, a new article on proctoring lets me re-visit one of my biggest complaints and best examples of what people simply don’t get about it.

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