Another Study Shows Cheating Increase

Plus, University of Oregon drops their proctoring company. Or did they? Plus, a review of the cheating numbers.

Issue 23

Survey Shows 20% Increase in Admitted Cheating During Pandemic

If you just read the news coverage of the recent student survey from Missouri State University professor James Sottile, you may miss why it’s actually important.

First, Sottile says,

We found that about 20 percent more students admitted to cheating during the pandemic, which is very surprising, and kind of scary

Sottile isn’t new to academic integrity research, which is why this news is important. But before we get to that, he also said in this article,

When we started getting into it, I was surprised by how there's been a huge industry in cheating through tech. There's a lot of resources that students now have the opportunity to use in order to cheat, and that has greatly changed within the last ten years.

No surprise, he mentioned Chegg by name.

And honestly, if anything, a 20% increase in cheating is understated. Other surveys and data support a multi-fold increase in academic misconduct over the past year, though it does vary by type. And this is self-reported, which is always undercounted.

What makes this bit of news important is that Sottile is half of the duo who, 11 years ago, published the wildly misquoted paper on cheating in online classes - the paper many have used to dishonestly say that cheating is less common in online classes. The paper found that only certain kinds of cheating were less common online.

For the record, that 2010 Sottile/Watson paper found

slightly more students admitted to cheating in on-line courses

And

The results showed that students felt they were almost four times more likely to be dishonest in on-line classes than live classes (42.2% to 10.2%) and that their classmates were over five times more likely to cheat (61.0% to 11.5%)

So, that Sottile is out with new data showing a cheating increase, directly linking it to the shift to online courses during the pandemic, that’s actual news.

University of Oregon Drops Proctoring Company, Kind Of

News that the University of Oregon is changing its proctoring arrangement at the end of this term is indeed news - just not the news many thought it was.

Some people, for example, read only the headline of the story which said, “UO to discontinue proctoring services at end term.” But, when you read the whole thing, it’s clear that is not what UO is doing. The article says the school will

stop using all remote proctoring services that rely on artificial intelligence at the close of the spring 2021 term

So, they’re not stopping proctoring, or even remote proctoring. It’s impractical and implausible that any school could. They’re just dropping the AI variety of proctoring.

And that’s good news. If you follow the news on academic integrity, you know that AI-only proctoring is fast, cheap and not very good.

The particular service mentioned in the UO news is ProctorU’s AI service. But since ProctorU primarily provides human, live proctors, it’s entirely possible that remote proctoring will continue at Oregon and that ProctorU may continue to do it.

The article says

Originally, the Office of the Provost hoped artificial intelligence proctoring would help professors provide fair examinations without imposing any extra costs on students. 

Exactly, AI proctoring is cheap. The good kind costs more. It’s good news that UO has figured that out.

Numbers Update - 31 schools, 90 days

In the 90 days since the end of February, “The Cheat Sheet” has chronicled public or publicized incidents of academic misconduct at 30 different colleges and a high school. That continues the pace of one every 72 hours or so.

Added to the list in the past 30 days are:

University of Toronto, Aberdeen University, Robert Gordon University, University of the Highlands and Islands, SRUC, NE Scotland College (NESCOL), University of Buffalo, University of Calgary, Dartmouth Medical School, Ohio State University, and University of California Berkeley

These are just instances that are in the public record - where papers wrote about them. Sadly, that’s usually happened in student-run publications. And since most cheating incidents go unreported and most schools don’t disclose or discuss the level of misconduct, what we know is just a fraction of a fraction.

In the next “The Cheat Sheet” - Chegg hosts a “Student Summit” with a well-known philanthropy organization, including speakers from Dartmouth, Harvard Business School, Carnegie Mellon and others. No, I’m not kidding. Plus, (surprise!) more students caught cheating with Chegg.

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