Australia Looks to Expand Landmark Anti-Cheating Law

Plus, a guilty plea in fixing the SAT. But not for fixing the SAT. Plus, more victim blaming in academic misconduct.

Issue 84

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Call to Expand Anti-Cheating Laws in Australia

The Sydney Morning Herald has a long article on requests to expand the country’s anti-cheating laws to cover vocational and career education programs at private schools. The existing law bans providing or advertising cheating services and - I did not entirely realize - applied only to university settings.

The piece is mostly about how some students appear to be taking advantage of vocational programs that neither require attendance nor check too hard for cheating in order to get or keep student residency visas. Leaders in Australia think extending the anti-cheating laws to cover all students will help.

Even though it’s not entirely about misconduct, the cheating portions of the story are of note. Here are few:

An international student in Australia said she chose her school because it was “flexible with attendance” saying also,

However you have to submit assignments and the only thing they check is plagiarism

In other words, if you pay for custom assignments, you probably won’t be caught.

This arrangement was more or less confirmed by the school in question - Australian Pacific College - when a spokesperson said,

“We have detected plagiarism from time to time, usually amongst the students,” the spokesman said. “Those students are marked as ‘failed’ and are required to resubmit their work at additional fees to them. We do not have resources to monitor third-party services providing cheating services.”

In other words, even if you’re caught submitting plagiarized material, the penalty is to do the assignment again and pay student fees of some kind. Not much of a disincentive, it seems. And - the kicker - the school simply isn’t checking for other kinds of cheating. Yikes.

One more. Phil Honeywood, Chief Executive of the International Education Association of Australia told the paper,

In a minority of cases, the need for some colleges to keep their doors open, has led to a lack of focus on quality provision

Oh boy. That’s the kind of thing we all know is true - some colleges, in order to stay in business, recruit foreign students and don’t really care if they cheat or even study. But no one ever says it aloud.

In any case, Australia actually takes academic misconduct seriously. They talk about it. They see it as the threat that it is. They have laws and, in this case, want to expand them.

A Guilty Plea in “Varsity Blues” Exam Cheating

It’s not all the time that a news item sets up another news item so perfectly - but considering the news above on Australia, this one does.

The Associated Press reported this week that a California couple entered a guilty plea in the “Varsity Blues” cases. They were accused of paying $25,000 to cheat on their son’s SAT.

For academic integrity folks, this is the key passage:

Dr. Gregory Colburn, 63, and Amy Colburn, 52, of Palo Alto, agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to money laundering and mail fraud conspiracy charges.

Money laundering and mail fraud.

Why?

Because the United States has no federal law against cheating.

There are a few - 18 or so - state laws that prohibit academic cheating but not one of those has ever been enforced.

The Enduring Mystery of Blaming Teachers for Student Cheating

One of the folks paid by cheating provider Course Hero (see Issue 29) has written a new article for Higher Ed Dive in which he lays out, again, why teachers are to blame when students cheat.

He gets credit for acknowledging that Course Hero paid him. But that does make it stand out when he writes that “courseware help sites” are

often derided as cheating

They are. Because they are.

Let’s take two seconds to be clear. Using a coursework “help site” such as Chegg or Course Hero to get answers to homework and exam questions is cheating.

Anyway, the author repeats that students are cheating because teachers suck. He did not say it that way, of course. But here are some excerpts - things he either wrote or repeated from others. You can judge whether that’s what he’s saying or not.

Many people, he says, now see students as:

users responding to a system that is, at best, struggling to meet their needs. 

The system is struggling, the “users” are just responding.

He also says “a growing number of scholars” now see academic integrity as related to

institutional factors such as depersonalization and professors' inadequate training in good assessment.

Professors are trained inadequately.

And that, according to someone’s blog post, students who cheat have “a good rational reason for doing so,” namely that:

Most instructors aren't trained in how to use and grade homework and assessments properly. 

Instructors are not trained “properly” which is a “good rational reason” to cheat.

You get it.

But here is what I don’t get.

If you liken cheating to theft - stealing scores and grades and degrees that were not paid for or earned - this is blaming the shopkeeper for shoplifting.

Actually, it’s worse. This line of thinking does not blame a shopkeeper because they did not prevent theft. In this blame-the-teacher premise, trying to stop cheating is not recommended. Trying to hold the shoplifters accountable, also not recommended.

Instead, this line of logic blames the shopkeeper for not knowing how to sell things, for being so bad at running their store that people have little choice but to steal. Cheaters aren’t bad actors, they are the victims, just responding to a bad system and bad teacher training.

Were I a professor or other college leader, I’d be incensed.

The piece goes on to talk about how, to address cheating, assessments need to be changed and the foundations of teaching should likewise be reconsidered. That’s because, again, today’s bad teaching and assessments trigger the logical response of cheating. And if we just fix those, people won’t cheat so much.

Ridiculous.

Real Quick - Toronto Police May Have Cheated on Promotion Exams

A story out of Toronto says that an investigation is ongoing into cheating on assessments for workplace promotions. According to the article:

Multiple sources who spoke to the Star on condition of anonymity said the alleged wrongdoing involves cheating: specifically, exam questions being provided to some of the applicants who had put their name forward for promotion from constable to sergeant.

The inquiry, the paper reported, has caused a suspension of all promotions.

We see again that cheating hurts those who do not cheat.

Tags - #Australia #Canada #professionaltesting #rationalization #assessmentdesign #lawsoncheating