Cheating Skyrockets in New Zealand
Plus, cheating the GED in Arkansas. Plus, University of West Virginia re-organizes its academic integrity office.
Issue 148
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Cheating Cases at New Zealand Universities “Soar” - Up 30x at One University
In what has become the most predictable of patterns, cheating cases at several colleges and universities in New Zealand have increased substantially since the pandemic. That’s according to reporting in the New Zealand Herald.
The first paragraph of the piece is an eye-opener:
One New Zealand university has caught about 30 times as many students cheating on exams since the pandemic began, new data shows.
Thirty times.
That’s from the University of Auckland, where, the paper says:
While coursework cheating was down at Auckland during the pandemic, there was an almost 27-fold increase in exam cheating cases from 2019 to 2020 - from 27 cases to 723 - and 831 in 2021.
I am sorry to repeat all this but seriously - from 27 to 831. What are we doing here?
The school said the jump reflected:
"the Examinations Office's diligence in detecting breaches of academic integrity in the new online examinations"
Honestly - good. But if you’re catching 700, 800 “breaches” with “diligence” - I have to ask what exactly was going on when you had 27 cases. Moreover, if anything ever proves the point that you will find misconduct if you look for it, this does. Lack of cheating cases does not mean lack of cheating. In nearly every case, it means lack of “diligence.”
Auckland also noted that when the pandemic and remote learning set in, the school gave 24-hour windows to take exams. The result, predictably, was:
That extra time had given students a chance to discuss answers or even sit the exam together, as well as posting questions to third-party cheating sites and getting answers.
A school spokesperson said:
“And of course, a lot of students took advantage of that. So we did not repeat that."
Pulling back a bit, the article is quite good and reports on several schools, not just Auckland:
On average, during pandemic years, cheating cases upheld at the University of Auckland were up 153 per cent from 2019 and Canterbury's were up 214 per cent. Victoria University of Wellington was up 9 per cent, Waikato up 5 per cent and Otago up 19 per cent. But cases upheld at Massey University were down 4 per cent and Auckland University of Technology (AUT) down 27 per cent. Cases investigated at Lincoln were down 61 per cent, though not all of these were upheld.
I am not sure why the distinction between “upheld” and “investigated” here, or what it means, to be honest. But I think the distribution is nonetheless insightful.
And citing the drop at some schools, the article quotes University of Auckland Professor Jason Stephens who it says, “has researched cheating for two decades.” He says, among other things that Auckland’s cases of exam cheating were probably only half the real number. And:
Stephens believed those universities that weren't seeing a spike in cheating in the past two years were "not doing their job, quite frankly".
"I can guarantee you their students are cheating just as much as students anywhere else."
Exactly. As already mentioned, the “drop” in cheating cases at some of the New Zealand schools does not mean there was less misconduct. It means that the school wasn’t looking for it. A blind eye, in other words, catches nothing.
The article is also noteworthy in that it captures a discussion about NZ following Australia in blocking internet access to popular cheating sites (see Issue 142).
And finally, and perhaps most importantly, the piece quotes my new favorite expert on cheating - Professor Stephens - again:
Higher education was locked in an arms race with companies providing cheating services, Stephens said.
He was seeing more frequent use of "study" platforms like Chegg and Course Hero, where students could post questions and get the answers. But a new service called Assignment Watch was promising to combat this by monitoring key sites and alerting professors if their assignment or exam questions had been posted online.
Universities were also ramping up their use of Turnitin, a computer program that checked for plagiarism.
However, artificial intelligence technology was getting more sophisticated - from paraphrasing services like QuillBot to AI that could spit out realistic-sounding paragraphs with a one-sentence prompt.
Arms race is a phrase I’ve used before. And note here, again: Chegg and Course Hero. And QuilBot, which Course Hero owns.
I’ll end here with another contender for academic integrity quote of the year. It’s going to a tough category this year. Professor Stephens said:
"Ultimately it's an arms race we're going to lose."
Cheating in Arkansas GED Program
This article in an outlet called the Louisiana Illuminator highlights cheating on the GED - the high school equivalency program and exam - among incarcerated youth in Arkansas.
The article opens:
Arkansas officials last year noticed a suspicious increase in incarcerated juveniles earning GEDs.
A review of classroom surveillance footage during a preliminary GED test at Mansfield Juvenile Treatment Center confirmed their fears. An educator for the contractor that runs Arkansas’ youth lockups provided answers to students, state records show.
Sarah Gober, a then-teacher for Rite of Passage, read the test questions aloud and would provide the answer.
For example, she’d say, “I have an aunt and her name is Aunt B” to indicate “B” was the correct answer, according to the previously unreported probe completed by the Arkansas Division of Youth Services’ Internal Affairs Investigation Unit in April.
Yikes.
The article also says that:
Gober didn’t lose her teaching license, and the students who earned their GEDs were able to keep them.
The story further details that other teachers gave answers to students during tests, including working math problems for them. But my favorite bit is when two administrators said:
they believe the cheating was isolated. They viewed the [Test for Adult Basic Education] test as an instructional tool, and the teachers were trying to help the students learn.
“It was totally well-intentioned,” [one] said.
Well-intentioned cheating. I love it.
West Virginia University Reorganizes Student, Academic Integrity Departments
West Virginia University has announced a renaming and restructuring of several departments and services, including its academic integrity unit.
The newly named “Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities” will include:
the Office of Academic Integrity, recently merged with the CARE Team, Student Legal Services, the Student Advocacy Center, the Off-Campus Housing Office and Commuter Student Programs
Further, the announcement says the new office will have a focus on “restorative justice” which:
replaces traditional punitive methods by offering a supportive environment where students can learn the skills needed to acknowledge and accept responsibility for their actions and ultimately change their negative behavior.
Class Notes:
In Issue 147, I wrote about the challenge in identifying faked or contracted written work:
doing more comparisons of more writing samples across applications and disciplines will improve the ability to spot outliers. But again, the problem is that who has time for that? No professor on Earth is going to go compare and contrast written work from a student’s application or from their other classes - assuming they could access them in the first place.
A few people wrote to me or nudged me on social media to point out that Turnitin, has an app for that, called Authorship Investigate.
Not to brag here, but I did know that. I didn’t include it in that piece because I wanted to highlight the challenge more than spotlight any specific solution. But there is at least one tool that can help meet the challenge of spotting outliers in written material, helping pinpoint potentially fake academic work. Schools and professors should use it more.
Also, just a note that yesterday’s Special Edition on the Ohio “room scan” case was the most-read edition of The Cheat Sheet. So, that’s cool. More Special Editions are on the way.
Also, The Cheat Sheet now has nearly 2,200 subscribers. So, thank you.