Cheating Cops, Cheating Med Students
Plus, voting ends soon for SxSW Edu panels. Plus, international students and cheating in Australia.
Issue 145
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Two Separate Cases of Police Cheating on Professional Exams
In two different cases in and around New York City - reported by the New York Post here and again here - police officers cheated on tests for promotions.
In the biggest case, it seems that NYPD officers taking their sergeants test shared topics, questions and answers across the multiple test days. From the Post:
The NYPD’s sergeants exam appears to have been tainted by cheating, with those who took the test on the first day feeding information to test takers on the second
They used “messaging groups” to share details.
People around the process, tutors for example, bemoaned that test makers would give the same test to the same group across different days. Though the test providers said they changed the questions for the various test sessions. A spokesperson for the City said:
The city has zero tolerance for cheating on civil service exams.
I’m not precisely sure what “zero tolerance” means in this case.
In the second case, the Post says, police sergeants in suburban Westchester County were accused of sharing information from a lieutenant’s exam with an officer who was taking the test later due to test accommodation. All the officers involved will have to retake the test in October.
Not much to add to this beyond that this is police who are cheating - not police applicants but actual, current officers.
If there is a clearer case of exam cheating being about ethics - actually being about the difference between right and wrong - I don’t know it. For those who say cheating doesn’t matter, I feel as though police officers cheating matters. Or at least that it should.
Medical Students Cheated at Oxford
An entire class of medical students at Oxford University will be required to retake their exams after allegations of cheating, according to local reporting.
The report did not specify how many students were accused of cheating or how they were thought to be violating exam policy - the school cited an ongoing inquiry. “All the marks” from the exam in question “had been erased,” the paper reported.
What’s interesting about this from an academic integrity view is that, according to the news, the exam in question:
sees medical students having to interact with actors as though they are real patients
In other words, this was a project-based assessment, not a question-and-answer exam.
That’s important because it underscores the truth that there is no assessment design that cannot be cheated. Let me say that again. There is no form of assessment that cannot be cheated. Switching to formative or so-called authentic assessment won’t stop cheating.
Here, in a project-based assessment, cheating happened. By medical students. At Oxford.
I simply do not know what further evidence is required to take away that cheating by itself is a problem. It’s not competitive pressure, or unprecedented student stress, or assessment practices or teaching methods that underlie academic misconduct. Cheating exists and happens on its own, completely disconnected from those and other influencers.
And in case you missed it - medical students. At Oxford.
Vote Now. SxSW Panel Voting Closing Soon.
In Issue 144, we reviewed the proposed academic integrity panels at SxSW Edu and asked readers to vote some up and some down.
If you have not voted already, please jump over and vote. Public voting closes August 21.
Columnist Says Cheating in Australia is Driven by International Students
In late July a columnist for an Australian outlet offered up that a driver of Australia’s cheating problems is international students.
I’m not sure I buy the premise, although I have heard anecdotally for some time that many international students come to traditionally western colleges and universities with divergent ideas of collaboration, copying and academic integrity in general. And I do know that, as the columnist suggests, international students provide significant financial buoyancy to many schools in the States, the U.K. and Australia.
Even so, I’m sharing the article here not because of its base premise but because it neatly recaps some recent academic integrity issues in Australia. For example, it quotes someone from Australia’s academic regulator TEQSA:
“What we’re seeing and hearing anecdotally is that instead of outsourcing a paper to somebody else they will, for example, find an article written on a subject in a language that they understand and they’ll put it through a translation tool into English, then they’ll put that through a paraphrasing tool.”
Yes, running copied text through language translation tools to try to fool plagiarism checking software has been an issue.
Then there’s this, though it’s not entirely clear who or what the columnist is quoting here, though he does have it in quotes:
NSW’s two largest universities, UNSW and The University of Sydney, both say they are seeing higher rates of contract cheating since 2019.
“Higher education currently faces unprecedented challenges in dealing with the combined risks of aggressive, highly adaptable practices of contract cheating companies and the rapid shift to online assessment caused by the pandemic,” a University of Sydney spokeswoman said…
Most cases involved unauthorised communication in an exam, including posting on Chegg.com – a study help website – and communicating using WhatsApp and WeChat.
Chegg and WhatsApp? You don’t say.
The writer goes on to link to several cases of cheating that made the news, many connected to international students. I’m leaving the links in should you want to ping any of his original sources:
For example, in 2014 “functionally illiterate“ Chinese students were embroiled in an elaborate “ghost writing” scandal.
In 2015, ABC’s Four Corners’ “Degrees of deception” report documented widespread cheating by international students, with one university lecturer claiming half of their students had engaged in plagiarism.
Around the same time, dozens of international students across New South Wales were caught in an elaborate cheating racket, prompting a strong rebuke from the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
At the beginning of 2019, international student associations demanded regulation of overseas agents amid systemic cheating on English language tests.
Whereas Four Corners’ “Cash Cows” report on Australia’s international student trade highlighted systemic plagiarism and misconduct by international students.
Finally in July 2019, The AFR reported that “cheating has spread like wildfire” across Australia’s universities, driven by international students, whereas The ABC reported a “proliferation of ghostwriting” services targeted at international students.
Again, I don’t know whether the linkage between international students and cheating is real, or how strong it may be. But I will say that I am glad to see media outlets covering academic misconduct. We need more of it.