High School Survey: Most Students Cheated in Past Month, Most Find Cheating at Least Occasionally Ethical
Plus, why bad reporting matters. Plus, more to worry about.
Issue 265
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High School Survey: Most Students Cheated in Past Month
In December, the Lake Forest High School (Illinois) school paper, The Forest Scout, ran an article on student cheating, based on a survey of students and faculty.
I cannot remember if I wrote about it already. I cannot find it if I did, and I figure, worst case, you are subjected to it a second time.
Thing is, it’s really outstanding just for quality — worthy of anything the New York Times or Wall Street Journal puts out there. No, really. Go look. And I’m not just talking about presentation. I mean the actual journalism as well.
The survey is of just fewer than 200 students and teachers and the headline finding is that:
While not a scientifically accurate poll, the survey results show that most students have cheated in the last month, and many see no ethical problem with cheating.
Specifically that:
59% of 195 students responded that they had cheated this school year.
If you follow academic integrity at all, that’s not surprising. And sure, it’s high school. But, as the saying goes, no one cheats in college for the first time. What starts in high school is a pattern, a learned and rewarded course of conduct. In other words, what happens in high school will happen in college. And likely beyond.
The piece continues:
for many students, according to the survey, cheating has become a habitual practice.
And that:
Many students do not believe that cheating is morally wrong. In fact, 79% of student respondents to The Forest Scout’s survey believe that cheating is ethical to some degree, whether that be “totally ethical,” “mostly ethical,” or “rarely ethical.”
I don’t know what to tell you. I wish I could offer words of comfort or context, but I can’t.
According to the reporting:
One respondent said, “I think it is ethical to cheat on tests because it is a spit in the face to the corrupt and greedy education system.”
It’s also interesting that, in their survey, about half the students said cheating happened because of the competitive nature of school and/or expectations. About a third (34%) said that student cheating was because, “they are lazy and cheating saves them time,” and 15% said that cheating happened because of “teachers’ failure to adequately teach the subject matter.”
Also according to the survey, teachers are aware of the challenge — more than 86% said cheating was either a moderate or serious problem. The paper also noted that learning and assignment requirements had already been altered because of cheating:
Just this year, the social studies department removed the U.S. history research paper from the curriculum – a paper that was once a graduation requirement.
Related, the piece also touched on generative AI use for misconduct:
Among survey respondents who admitted to cheating, 33% say they use ChatGPT, AI, or other online resources as their primary method of cheating.
I want to highlight as well that the survey also asked specifically about using Photomath to cheat. Tools like it and Quizlet have a larger cheating footprint among pre-college students.
Anyway, there’s a ton of information in this outstanding piece of reporting and delivery. It’s worth a read.
Great, I Didn’t Have Enough to Worry About
AI technology has ushered some new tricks into various markets that may have legitimate uses, but may also complicate and frustrate academic integrity safeguards if used for illicit purposes.
A relatively new one is a tool that can change live video of someone’s face to look like another person, as demonstrated on LinkedIn. Honestly, I don’t know what the legitimate use of that would be. But for remote test proctoring, it could present an issue during ID verification checks, especially if those are run outside a secure test environment.
The second is technology, as demonstrated by this company, that can alter the focus of your eyes on video, aligning them with a camera even when you’re looking elsewhere. The tool gives the appearance of eye contact while reading, for example, notes off to the side of your camera or screen.
Like the first modifier, I can imagine it presenting issues for even active proctoring of tests and assessments. Both, quite obviously, are designed to be deceptive.
The few proctoring professionals I’ve asked about these technologies focus on spotting their usage, and potentially blocking it, as part of a secure operating system rather than through video proctoring. A system that isolated and blocked extensions or concurrently running software, for example, could do the trick.
But if test security is limited to educator observation over Zoom, or video review only, more interventions and deterrents may be necessary. They probably always were. Just more so now.
Great, right?
Why Bad Reporting Matters, Example 47,432
In Issue 261, we looked at reporting from the New York Times that really, in my view, screwed up some basic things about data and academic integrity. But mostly about research and survey data.
The quick and dirty is that a long-running survey out of Stanford has not shown an uptick in self-reported cheating since ChatGPT emerged. The Times reported this as cheating with generative AI being “overblown” or not a real thing. There are, as outlined in Issue 261, many reasons why you cannot get to one place from the other.
Even so, and entirely predictably, the bad reporting by the Times has rippled through a very long list of other publications that have repeated the ill-formulated initial premise as fact. This one, from CNN, is just one example. The CNN headline is:
ChatGPT did not increase cheating in high schools, Stanford researchers find
Nope. Flatly not true. For a dozen reasons.
But here we are. In an era of echoes passing as news, one bad report becomes zombie fact — impossible to kill, never really alive.