Best and Worst in Academic Integrity - 2023

Person of the Year. Quote of the Year. Biggest Stories. And More.

Jan 01, 2024

Issue NY23/24

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Happy New Year. Welcome to 2024.

Before we begin, Happy New Year. And thank you for being here and being part of our effort to raise awareness and action on this crucial issue.

We began 2023 with 2,777 subscribers and 10 supporters on Patreon. I had not activated the paid subscription option. We end the year 3,730 subscribers, 15 supporters on Patreon and 29 paid subscribers. That feels like really incredible growth and I thank you for subscribing, reading, and sharing.

Thank you.

Our most-read Issues this year were:

This year, in addition to pushing out more than 100 issues with more than 300 separate pieces of news and analysis, I was honored to join a half dozen panels and discussions, be interviewed a dozen times, and keynote a major education conference — all on academic integrity.

Again, thank you.

The Numbers

As we’ve done in 2021 and in 2022, here is a list of colleges and universities that reported cheating incidents this past year — 47 in all, about the same as last year.

It’s an honor roll of sorts — the schools that are transparent and honest enough to share information.

Harvard College (University), Yeshiva University, University of Glasgow, University of Oxford, University of New South Wales, Western University (CAN), Queen's University (CAN), University of Toronto, Fanshawe College (CAN), Deakin University (AUS), Northern Michigan University, Stanford University, University of Alberta, University of Saskatchewan, McMaster University (CAN), University of British Columbia, Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, Tufts University, Boston University, Dartmouth University, Yale University, University of Manitoba, Northern Arizona University, West Virginia University, Cardiff University, Middlebury College, Jacksonville State University (Alabama), Queen’s University (IRE), Ulster University (IRE), University of Rochester, Texas A&M at Commerce, Sacramento State University, University of Cambridge, University of California, Davis, University of California, Riverside, University of Kent (UK), Furman University, Conestoga College (CAN), Indiana University, Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), Virginia Tech University, University of Sydney, University of Maryland, University of North Georgia, George Washington University

Naturally, this is not the whole list. Every school, everywhere had cheating issues in the past 12 months. Every one. I share the list anyway in hopes that seeing these schools listed together will make it clear that academic misconduct is a large and universal problem.

Big Stories

Setting aside that generative AI conversationally dominated absolutely everything last year, the most-read Issues hit, to my mind, most of the big issues in academic integrity in 2023.

That Copyleaks partners with cheating providers while claiming to be an integrity company was big. And a story you did not see anywhere else. A school suing Course Hero, also first reported here. Also big.

I still do not understand why any school contracts with Copyleaks, why schools and professors have not joined the Course Hero challenge, or why people keep saying AI detectors do not work.

Even so, equally big stories this year, though overlooked, were the financial implosion of Chegg (Issue 206), cheating companies using content farms to sneak their ads into credible websites (Issue 202), and Stanford University moving to amend its honor code to allow for test proctoring (Issue 209).

Quote of the Year

This is always one of the most fun categories. Well, it is for me.

Nominees

From way back in January, Issue 179, Noam Wasserman, Dean at Yeshiva University, regarding cheating:

if you get a job based on fraudulent grades, every dollar you make is geneiva [theft]. Think about that: Every paycheck is filled with aveiros [sins].

Straight fire.

From an unnamed professor at Harvard University, in Issue 194:

“Generally, I trust students. I personally don't go super out of my way to try to detect student cheating,” he says. “And I am not going to start.”

And its twin, from Issue 234, from Daniel Higgins, director of journalism programs and an assistant professor at Canisius University:

“I don’t even know if I will try to figure out if students cheated using AI,” Higgins said. “I don’t want to spend a lot of time being a detective. I want to teach, and that’s not teaching.”

Schools love to say how seriously they take academic integrity while some of their professors obviously can’t be bothered to go super out of the way or spend a lot of time on it. Not great. Not great at all.

This next nominee is from Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, who has become one of the most vocal critics of AI detection in education. Some may have forgotten that back in February, in Issue 187 he said:

I think everybody is cheating ... I mean, it's happening. So what I'm asking students to do is just be honest with me

As I wrote at the time, asking students to be honest about academic fraud does not feel like a sound policy.

Honorable Mentions

Finally, we have two honorable mentions for Quote of the Year and, at the top, a tie.

Honorable mention number one is in Issue 249. It’s Dr. Laura McLary, Provost at Hollins University (VA), proving that school leaders will do nearly anything to avoid even admitting that cheating happens at all, telling a local TV station:

students might feel pressured into ways of completing assignments that we might not consider to be optimal.

Goodness.

Number two is in Issue 236 and it’s Francois Jordaan, an “academic integrity specialist” at the University of Manitoba, who says:

If you're not going to put in that work, that has consequences. Maybe not right now, but one day, when you are an engineer having to build a bridge … you won't necessarily know those skills.

The classic admonition — don’t cheat because after you get your degree, you may not be able to do your job and people could die. We could stop that, of course, by not awarding you a degree in the first place. But skip that. We’re not going to. Instead, let’s allow the marketplace of inherent public danger be the counterweight to cheating. Good plan. Well done.

Quote(s) of the Year

Issue 257 had a disaster of a byline opinion piece by Mariët Westermann, Vice-Chancellor of New York University Abu Dhabi in which she really wrote:

The question we need to think about is whether plagiarism or cheating are even useful categories of pedagogic concern

Wow.

We need to think about whether cheating is a useful concern to teaching and learning — like whether the person getting the degree did the actual work or can actually demonstrate skills or knowledge. I am astonished that anyone would think that, let alone write it, let alone consent to it being published. How embarrassing.

The co-winner for academic integrity Quote of the Year comes from Issue 179 — way back in January. Then, ChatGTP was still rather new and a spokesperson for OpenAI, the maker of ChatGTP, said:

We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else, so we’re already developing mitigations to help anyone identify text generated by that system

Since, ChatGPT has watermarked nothing. It has partnered with Chegg (Issue 203), dishonestly claimed that its bot-created text cannot be detected (Issue 241), and is driving cheating surges worldwide.

What a difference a year makes.

Worst Coverage of Academic Integrity

Nominees and Mentions

I don’t know that I can pick a winner for worst coverage this year. There were so many that were so bad.

Issue 186 noted that EdTech Digest bafflingly gave a “cool tool” high-five to cheating engine Quillbot — the AI-powered paraphraser owned by Course Hero. In it, EdTech Digest dutifully tells its readers:

On average, QuillBot helps students save 75% of their time spent on a writing project

Gee — that is cool. I wonder how it can do that? Oh, by doing the writing for you. Got it. EdTech Digest never mentions cheating.

Issue 192 has two terrible stories, one each from CalMatters and HigherEd Dive. They’re too error-ridden and lazy to break apart again. But if you have a strong stomach for awful journalism, you have the link.

The Washington Post really butchered things on its coverage of the ChatGPT story at Texas A&M story, in Issue 211.

In one example, it declared that, “AI-generated writing is almost impossible to detect” and the headline of the story first read, “A prof falsely accused his class of using ChatGPT. Their diplomas are in jeopardy.”

Both are wrong. The Post eventually changed its headline.

Worse, the paper quoted Ian Linkletter as an expert on cheating and academic integrity, which he is not. The Post quoted him without even mentioning his ongoing litigation with remote test proctoring providers, as if the “emerging technology and open-education librarian” was a simple neutral observer.

Then there’s Forbes and its shameless fawning over cheating provider Course Hero, from Issue 238. It’s really sickening and includes lines such as:

Andrew Grauer, the cofounder of Course Hero, and CEO of parent, Learneo, has cash in the bank and a strategy that might keep him up with the changes.

By changes, they mean that students can now cheat for free with ChatGPT.

While putting the CEO of a cheating empire on its cover, Forbes also quoted Michael Horn, who framed the CEO’s “approach as a smart strategic choice” while neglecting to mention, as I outlined in Issue 238:

Course Hero sponsors Horn’s podcast (see Issue 164). Or that Horn is on the Advisory Board for GSV Ventures, which invests in Course Hero.

All while interviewing not one teacher or one expert on academic integrity. It’s as shallow as it is shameless.

Winner for Worst Coverage of Academic Integrity

Finally, is this, from The Verge — which mindlessly, breathlessly, and uncritically repeats the propaganda of cheating provider Quizlet. It’s in Issue 235.

It’s really just an ad for cheating, saying, for example:

I could see how students can find these AI-powered study tools helpful. It breaks down concepts and saves time when reading denser material.

And:

Magic Notes lets users upload or copy-paste text, and Quizlet summarizes it, then offers an outline, sample essay questions, creates flashcards, and even puts together a practice test.

Neato! How cool is cheating!

Best Coverage of Academic Integrity

Nominees and Mentions

Unfortunately, most of the best pieces this past year were first-person, byline articles from professors. The actual news coverage was not great.

Even so, do yourself a favor and go read these four articles from actual educators and students about what’s really happening and what they’re seeing and dealing with in their classes and courses. They are some of the best of the year.

Inside Higher Ed opinion piece from Frank Vahid, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, Riverside. Issue 202
A student at Middlebury College (VT), wrote a compelling op-ed in her student paper asking the college to start proctoring exams because cheating is common.
Issue 204
Another must-read opinion piece is in The Chronicle of Higher Ed from Joseph M. Keegin, a doctoral student at Tulane University. Issue 212
The Hill has this piece by Mark Massaro, who teaches “composition and literature courses at a state college in Florida.” Issue 234

I’m not kidding — if you want to really understand what’s happening, go read those. I am not above begging.

An honorable mention goes to this news article from the Australian Broadcast Corporation, featured in Issue 258. It is really good.

Winner for Best Coverage of Academic Integrity

In March, the Detroit Free Press delivered what was the best academic integrity article of the year. We covered it in Issue 193. It is the article I wish I had written and absolutely needed to be written. If I could name it best-of-the-year twice, I would.

You really should read it but if you cannot, at least jump over to Issue 193 for the summary.

Person of the Year in Academic Integrity

Nominees and Mentions

It’s not a person, I know. But an honorable mention has to go to Post University for saying enough is enough and suing Course Hero for selling its intellectual property in aid of cheating — see Issue 252.

Where is everyone else? Where is anyone else?

Personally, I am so tired of hearing how much schools care about academic integrity while doing absolutely nothing about it.

Another honorable mention to Frank Vahid, professor at University of California, Riverside. Vahid not only penned one of the must-read articles of the year, linked above, he also authored one of the strongest pieces of research on academic integrity, linked below.

Go get ‘em, Frank.

POY

My Person of the Year in Academic Integrity for 2023 is Garret Merriam, associate professor of philosophy at Sacramento State University.

Professor Merriam, you may recall, found a copy of one of his exams on a cheating site — Quizlet. His property, being sold to his students to cheat. The professor had the exam removed and replaced it with a fake one, with fake answers. After which, he caught more than 40% of the students in his ethics class — yes, ethics — using the fake exam answers.

As we covered in Issue 214, the professor’s actions stirred up pearl clutching among some academics and observers.

He’s my POY because, much like Post University, he did something. He invested in stopping the cheating, stopping the theft and illicit selling of his time and expertise. He acted to protect the value of his grades and the work of honest students.

Worst Research of 2023

I’m always surprised by bad research. I just assume that people want to do good work and that someone, somewhere is reviewing these things before they see daylight. And I hate that it’s not true.

Most of this year’s bad research came in the same form — people testing the absolute bottom of the garbage bin of AI classifiers to declare that all AI classifiers don’t work. These works seemed to be willfully blind to issues of quality. Or limitation. It was so common, so brazen, that it felt intentional. In a few cases, I have no doubt that it was.

Nominees and Mentions

In any case, starting off our list of bad research was the paper by James Zou of Stanford University. Covered in Issue 216, it’s the paper that said AI detection was biased against non-native English speakers — an assertion that has been repeated like a drumbeat.

As mentioned at the time, I am inclined to agree with the central premise that AI detectors can, and likely do, over-flag written work from non-native speakers. But this paper is not good. It had made-up citations, flatly wrong. It did not test the most-used detection systems, had serious integrity questions around its control group, and the text it tested was just 150 words — far too short to be reliably assessed. I seriously doubt anyone read past the headline.

Also terrible was a “study” of academic misconduct allegations from a professor at Drexel University (see Issue 242.)

His study, I kid you not at all, was based on 49 Reddit posts and discussions between December 2022 and June 2023. Reddit. I know that when I think of quality data for academic research the first thing that comes to mind is Reddit. Spoiler alert: people who post on Reddit are not thrilled about being accused of cheating.

The Worst Research of 2023

The worst was this research by Jason C. K. Chan and Dahwi Ahn of Iowa State University. Their key finding was that online assessments can be decent measures of learning even when they are unsecured, though it was misreported as showing that cheating was not occurring in online assessments (see Issue 229).

Totally missed by nearly everyone was that the research team said that unsecure online assessments had value because they assumed that everyone was cheating — and that good students still did best in an open cheat-fest. In other words, good students will still get As if you let everyone cheat. Solid pedagogy if ever I heard it.

Though they absolutely buried the data in a separate report that you had to download, the team found that test scores in the unproctored online assessments were higher than those given in person — surprise, surprise.

In fact, this paper was so bad that it triggered an unprecedented rebuttal letter, discounting it entirely (see Issue 243).

Best Research of 2023

Nominees

One of the best papers of 2023 was this paper by a small team of scholars led by Frank Vahid at University of California, Riverside. In it, the team introduced a series of small, low-effort interventions that they show, pretty conclusively, reduce cheating.

I absolutely love this paper and its suggestions. When I spoke at the National College Testing Association, I cited it in detail. Please go read about it in Issue 216.

One of my favored interventions was a policy that allows students to “take back” a paper after its been submitted, receiving a zero but escaping any integrity inquiries or actions. In their study, about 10% of their class used this “take back” policy. To me, that says plenty.

Another paper that merits attention was published research from Philip M. Newton (no relation) and Keioni Essex of Swansea University (UK). It found that “online exam cheating was self-reported by a substantial minority (44.7%) of students in total. Pre-COVID this was 29.9%, but during COVID cheating jumped to 54.7%.”

More than half.

I feel like we knew this just by having lived through it. But it’s great to have real numbers. More details are in Issue 230.

Honorable Mention

In June, a team of researchers headlined by Debora Weber-Wulff of the University of Applied Sciences HTW Berlin, released a paper on their efforts to test AI detection systems.

Even though the author disagrees with the findings and conclusions (see Issue 250), it’s on my list for best research because it showed conclusively that AI detectors work. This is my writing, from Issue 250:

three of the 14 tested detectors were more than 96% accurate overall — getting the human work perfect and missing just one of 18 AI works. Another was 92% accurate overall - getting all the human work right but missing two of 18 AI submissions.

For a detection system, those results are downright remarkable.

The Best Research of 2023

But my winner for Best Academic Integrity Research for 2022 was this new research by Jenelle Conaway, an accounting professor at George Mason University.

At the topline, it showed that cheating with Chegg during an accounting exam was common — an incident rate as high as 25%. But where it really stands out is in its cataloged impacts of exam security interventions.

By incrementally increasing security provisions, the paper showed that exam cheating with Chegg eventually dropped to zero. For details, see Issue 255 and Issue 256.

It’s an insightful blueprint and even more evidence that it’s possible to significantly reduce academic misconduct if educators and schools actually want to. If you give or supervise assessments, please go read Issue 256.

Thank You

And that’s it. May 2024 be your best year yet. Happy New Year.