FSU Reports Increase in Cheating

Plus, Dartmouth Med School drops its cheating investigations. Plus, medical students in New Zealand faked required internship posts to go on vacation. Plus, Fordham clarifies recent cheating.

Issue 33

Cheating Increases at FSU

According to data released by Florida State University this week, like most schools around the world, incidents of academic misconduct increased substantially over the past year.

In the 2018-19 academic year, the school clocked 586 incidents of reported misconduct. In the 19-20 year, the number was up to 726. This year, 2020-21, the schools says there have been 855 cases of reported, suspected misconduct.

The number of reported misconduct incidents at FSU has increased each of the past five years. In 2016-17, for example, the school reported 414 cases, meaning incidents have more than doubled at FSU in five years.

Credit is due to FSU for releasing their data. Most schools don’t.

Fordham Deans Clarify Cheating at Business School

The Fordham Observer has a follow up story to alleged cheating at the Fordham University business school, Gabelli School of Business.

See “The Cheat Sheet” Issue 26, but the skinny is that about 650 students in an online accounting class had to retake their exams due to “widespread” cheating on Chegg.

According to the new story, Academic Deans Laura Auricchio and Maura Mast:

attributed the increase in academic dishonesty to the escalation in the usage of third-party platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic. Auricchio cited a consensus amongst college administrators across the country that there have been increases in academic dishonesty. 

The Deans also said they,

have seen an uptick in academic integrity violations linked to the use of third-party online platforms.

I don’t know, that seemed pretty clear from the beginning.

Dartmouth Medical School Drops Cheating Inquiries

Even in the mass and variety of recent cheating scandals, allegations of cheating at Dartmouth Medical School became a national story.

So, it was big news this week when the school announced it was dropping the inquiry into cheating against the remaining 10 accused students, going as far as to apologize. The New York Times, among many others, covered the decision.

The situation was interesting from the outset for two reasons. One, Dartmouth does not proctor exams by policy. As part of the school’s Honor Code, even in-person exams are not proctored. Instead, the recent accusations of cheating were based on students accessing the school’s learning management system (Canvas) during exams. Those two things set the school up to fail.

One, not proctoring exams is foolish. Research shows it actually encourages cheating and the school should revise its policy immediately. Two, Canvas is not designed to detect cheating and should never have been used for that. The school should have known better. It’s an embarrassment all the way around.

Nonetheless, here is the most important part of the story, from the New York Times:

While some students may have cheated, these experts said, it would be difficult for school administrators to distinguish cheating from noncheating based on the kind of Canvas data snapshots that Dartmouth used.

N.B., “some students may have cheated” but, given what Dartmouth was doing, it was difficult to tell. That’s exactly right. Dartmouth had a bad system - nearly no system - and bungled this from the start. But that does not mean no one was cheating.

New Zealand Medical School Students “Scam” Their Requirements

Speaking of cheating at medical school, a paper in New Zealand has the story of medical students at University of Otago who, instead of completing a required overseas medical residency, faked their attendance and went on vacation instead.

The reporting is:

Fifty students were later found to have committed academic misconduct. The findings from an independent investigation was released on Wednesday.

The inquiry found was it was “likely that some insufficient attendance did occur in prior years”.

Fifty.

Further, the reporting on the investigation included that:

A “high-trust culture” was in place giving students responsibility to organise their placements and supervisors in the host medical school/hospital, but this led to a “lack of quality control”.

In the next “The Cheat Sheet” - What some attendees are, or are not, saying about that upcoming summit by Course Hero. Plus, a 12-year old in the UAE develops an anti-cheating system. Plus, more cheating.

Also, did you know that past issues of “The Cheat Sheet” are searchable? Go to the newsletter homepage - https://thecheatsheet.substack.com/ - and use the search icon below the main logo.

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