Commentary: Telling Students Cheating is Not Learning, And Other Pointless Adventures in Education
Plus, a few notes on Chegg's recent court troubles. Plus, numbers on QuillBot.
Issue 281
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Commentary: Just Tell Students that Cheating Impedes Learning, and Other Ideas that Won’t Work
A paper was recently published in the journal education sciences — they don’t appear to capitalize their name, so I didn’t. The work is by Alicia McIntire, Isaac Calvert, and Jessica Ashcraft. All three are, I believe, from Brigham Young University.
Let me say from the start here that I respect educators and those who do deep thinking on important issues. I am likewise thankful that people are investing in thinking about and discussing academic integrity and cheating. We absolutely need more of it.
Let me also say that this paper — Pressure to Plagiarize and the Choice to Cheat: Toward a Pragmatic Reframing of the Ethics of Academic Integrity — is not research. There is no new data. It’s a thought exercise and essay.
And it’s silly.
I know, who am I? Sure. Fair. But this offering is not helpful. At least in my view, for whatever that’s worth.
The premise is that telling students that academic cheating is morally bad is not working. Students are still cheating. And they’re cheating, in some significant measure, because college has become transactional and there is pressure to achieve. So, the choice to cheat is calculated and rational, when measured against those conditions. And, if that is the case, the authors argue that educators should not bother with messaging on the ethics and morality of cheating but instead present an argument on logic — namely that if you cheat, you are not learning. And because learning is point of college in the first place, cheating deprives students of what they’re paying for and investing to achieve.
The authors write:
we propose that professors and administrators might speak with students about cheating in the same pragmatic terms by which many students have made the decision to cheat already. In other words, rather than appeal to a student’s sense of the moral repugnance of cheating alone, professors and administrators might either supplement or replace this argument with an appeal to the pragmatic notion that cheating is detrimental to a student’s learning
And:
in this way, an educator might invite students to consider the pragmatic repugnance of cheating as it “cheats” them, as it were, out of the very purpose for which they came to university in the first place
And:
Inasmuch as the broader purpose of taking a class is to learn, choosing to cheat on assignments in those classes rather than putting in the effort to learn material and complete assignments might be seen as antithetical to that purpose.
And:
inasmuch as students have been shown to choose academically dishonest behavior in terms of pragmatic mitigation of academic risk, we advocate for academic honesty in these same terms: that cheating, regardless of its moral or ethical wrongness, is simply detrimental to learning and pragmatically unwise in the long run.
You get it.
But here’s the thing — students who have decided to cheat, even students who are considering cheating, do not care about the learning.
It seems obvious, but it may not be. If students actually want to learn the material and develop their skills, they won’t cheat. They will do the work. They will engage. If they don’t want that — which it’s pretty clear that most students do not — they will put forth minimum effort to “check the box,” or just cheat. To them, the learning is not worth the effort. That’s why they cheat.
In other words, telling a student that they are only cheating themselves is pointless. They know. They don’t care.
Worse, such messaging implies that the only, or perhaps most significant, consequence of cheating is absorbed by the student. This, in turn, can be received as giving a student permission to make such a choice — e.g., I can hurt myself if I choose to. Or, if that’s the price, I will pay it. I’m never going to use this stuff anyway.
Further, because the suggested approach frames the consequence as personal and singular, the proposed message can also be taken to mean that a learning loss is the only consequence, that no other attention or enforcement is necessary or forthcoming. We know from existing research that messages such as that actually encourage misconduct. The authors know this too because they mention it.
Further, and this is more personal, I really worry about a message that appears to limit the negative consequences of cheating to the cheater. The truth is that cheating hurts classmates, teachers, the school, future colleagues and coworkers, and public faith in whatever career a student aspires to work. In some cases, cheating also endangers the public.
Moreover, the “tell them they’re not learning” approach feels like a form of self-absolution on the part of the educator and institution — they’re denying their own learning, and wasting their time and money. We told them. What else can we do?
The authors also say that reforming assessment and grading policies may help reduce cheating. They also suggest an admissions lottery to lessen pressure and increasing access to campus housing, to lessen life stresses.
Sure - why not? But if you think that cheating is driven by pressure to succeed, which the authors seem to accept, then I think telling students that cheating “is simply detrimental to learning and pragmatically unwise in the long run” is not going to do much. If they think they are in school to succeed, they probably don’t think they are there to learn.
I’ve gone on too long.
I’d like to pivot a bit and highlight that, as is often the case, the literature review from the BYU team is outstanding. Everyone should read it. To an expert in academic integrity, the points are probably not revelatory. But many are worth repeating as often as possible.
The authors, for example, underscore that self-reported rates of academic misconduct are unreliably low. I had not seen this example:
One survey distributed by the Josephson Institute of Ethics to middle and high school students in the United States revealed that while more than half of the participating students reported cheating behaviors, over 25% admitted to having lied on one or more questions within the survey
The authors also repeat the findings that being able to externalize or rationalize cheating is important (citation notes removed for ease of reading):
Additional studies have suggested that students are more likely to cheat when they can place moral responsibility for these actions on something other than themselves. In such instances, blame is often shifted to teachers who may have presented assessments that students judged to be unfair or simply failed to implement measures to prevent cheating. Students might also shift blame to some other contextual factor of the situation, as well. Seen in this light, although students may recognize the moral wrongness of cheating, many demonstrate a willingness to cheat regardless so long as they can justify their choice by shifting the responsibility for doing so away from themselves. In other words, if some aspect of a situation is seen to weigh unfairly against a student, they may be more willing to rationalize cheating by shifting the blame to the source of the perceived unfairness.
Yes.
And I’m sharing this as well from their research summary because the topic of transactional thinking among students does not receive nearly enough consideration as a cheating driver:
the students suggest that they should be allowed to cheat because they had entered into mutual agreements with the university for the delivery of a product. They imply that if the university does not uphold its end of those agreements to provide professor involvement or passing grades, then the student should not be expected to abide by their previous agreements with regard to academic honesty. This set of possible responses treats university education as a commodity—a thing that can be obtained via payment either in-kind or in cash
I’d argue that the commodity is the degree or credential, and the grade which facilitates it, instead of a “college education.” Transactional thinkers want to buy the symbol and prestige of the education without doing the work that actual learning requires. But the point is still valid. It is a problem.
Finally, I’ll leave you with this, also from the literature review of the BYU paper:
University students have even posted papers about plagiarism on Course Hero, a website specifically designed to facilitate student plagiarism
Love it. Course Hero - “a website specifically designed to facilitate student plagiarism.” True. Well, not just plagiarism. But true.
QuillBot Numbers
As mentioned recently, a few readers of The Cheat Sheet signed up for and sat through whatever that “QuillBot University” thing was (see Issue 266).
QuillBot, as you may know, is a massive re-writing deception engine owned by the aforementioned Course Hero.
But in that university thing that QuillBot tried to pull off, the company shared some numbers on its usage, passed along by one of our readers.
Here it is, in a graphic, from QuillBot:
Please note that this graphic says their “mission” is to “make writing painless with AI.” Nothing about learning. But painless. They’re selling pain-free shortcuts. In a borrowed analogy, QuillBot and Course Hero are selling the steroids of education.
I’m also not sure how QuillBot can have 35 million monthly users and just 50 million total users. Something seems off there, which is not too surprising. This is QuillBot we’re talking about. Rigor and attention to detail aren’t their “mission.”
Either way, I think it’s important to peg that, whether it’s 35 million or 50 million, industrial cheating providers such as QuillBot are compromising educational quality at a nearly unimaginable scale. They’re doing it day in and day out. For profit.
A Note, or Two, on Chegg and the Recent Court Ruling
In the last Issue of The Cheat Sheet, we covered that a federal judge ruled that an investor fraud lawsuit against Chegg can move ahead, rejecting Chegg’s effort to have the case thrown out.
Part of that ruling was that the plaintiffs could show that there was “substantial cheating” on Chegg. And that the company knew it. And denied it.
Since you read The Cheat Sheet, it’s nearly certain that you knew all that already. Personally, I’ve been harping on it for years. But there is a big difference between me saying it and when a federal judge confirms it. And I don’t think the academic community, or the academic integrity community, has fully absorbed the potential impact of this development.
For one, the ruling may influence regulators in places such as Australia — where there is such a thing as a regulator (see Issue 210). I can see the ruling impacting Chegg’s long-suspicious relationships with partners such as Sally Mae (see Issue 14) or The Varkey Foundation (see Issue 25). I could see a fraud lawsuit and legal confirmation of Chegg’s cheating services as finally being the reason that education publications and conferences finally stop taking Chegg ads and sponsorships (see Issue 195). I can see this ruling being the reason that schools finally block Chegg from their campus servers and Wi-Fi networks.
At least those are some of the things I’d like to see. At worst, conversations may finally be had, some pause may settle in that Chegg is actually what we said it was all along — a company that sells cheating services, nearly exclusively. Especially now that a federal court has ruled that it may be possible to prove that Chegg’s denials about cheating were:
a mental state that not only covers intent to deceive, manipulate, or defraud, but also deliberate recklessness.
Yikes.
Finally, I’ll mention quickly that, so far as I can tell, not a single education publication has shared this news. Two legal publications — law360 and Bloomberg Law — were the only places to cover the ruling.
Given how much everyone has insisted that Chegg is “an education company,” you’d think education outlets would at least mention that a judge has sanctioned a credible accusation of investor fraud and academic cheating. But so far, no. And I cannot explain it.