Majority of College Students Admit to Cheating Behaviors

Plus, Chegg collects $207 million in revenue in Q4 alone. Plus, "The Score" podcast drops Episode 6.

Issue 94

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Preliminary Findings: 55% of College Students Admit to Cheating

The International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) dispatched a press release this week regarding its intent to complete a major survey of college students in the US, Canada and Latin America. The release says the survey will be the largest such instrument in the world.

A bit further down in that release is a pretty big item - during “a test of the survey methodology,” ICAI says:

Of the 5,700 respondents we surveyed so far, 55 percent acknowledged a behavior that is considered academic misconduct. Twenty-five percent admitted to using outside materials on an exam, and 40% acknowledge working together on assignments that are supposed to be individual. Two percent of students reported having purchased a paper or other assignment and turning it in as their own. 

To start, 5,700 responses is a large, large sample.

Accordingly, a finding that more than half of college students “acknowledged a behavior” that is cheating - well, that ought to stop some presses. That one in four students admitted to “using outside materials on an exam” is - frankly, I just don’t know what to say anymore.

Given that people under-report their own acts of misconduct, those numbers are likely understated. There are ways to mitigate that under-reporting and, since I have not seen the questions or methodology, I can only speculate that these ICAI numbers may be a low estimate of actual cheating events.

Dr. David Rettinger of University of Mary Washington and, “the study’s lead investigator” called the preliminary results,

quite eye-opening

To some people, I am sure they are.

Others have seen this already, repeatedly. This is, I modestly add, the 94th Issue of “The Cheat Sheet.”

But I hope Rettinger is right and that, if the final results are anywhere near those released this week, maybe we can all move past the stage of debating whether cheating is a problem and faithfully engage the conversation about what to do about it.

Positions such as “it’s a very small percentage of students who cheat” or “cheating has always been around so it’s nothing new to worry about” or “our definitions of cheating are outdated” were never really based on evidence or grounded in reality. There have been plenty of closed eyes, to be sure.

We have a serious cheating problem, one that too few people are doing far too little to address. One that isn’t going away on its own and will, in all likelihood, continue to grow until we get serious about stopping it. So far, in the United States at least, we simply haven’t been.

Chegg Reports $207.5 Million in Income in Q4

Chegg, the well-established provider of cheating services, is a public company with shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange. As such, it reports profits and earnings regularly and did last week.

According to coverage of the report, Chegg:

said revenue in the fourth quarter totaled $207.5 million, compared with $205.7 million the year before

Chegg’s profit - for those 90 days alone - was about $24 million.

According to the report, Chegg also said it:

increased its subscriber base to 4.6 million users, or a 5% increase compared with the year before. International subscribers rose to 1.5 million, exceeding their 2021 goals.

“The Score” Podcast Releases Episode 6

“The Score,” the outstanding podcast on academic integrity hosted by long-time education writer Kathryn Baron, has dropped Episode Six.

This edition of the series features a shared interview with Dr. Amy Smith, Chief Learning Officer at StraighterLine and a leader in online education and Dr. David Emerson at Salisbury University. Emerson and his colleagues released a ground-breaking research report on academic misconduct (see Issue 64).

In addition to being a great listen, the podcast has “show notes” of selected quotes from the episode. Here are just two - one each from Smith and Emerson.

Smith,

[another] thing I think universities really owe students are accountability systems that are clear, that are well defined, and that are consistent. We often see in the research, and the literature shows us that a lot of times, a faculty member, for all the right reasons, will help a student out or try to manage or monitor cheating, and not really report it for a variety of reasons … but that also goes around the actual accountability system the university sets up. So, universities, different colleges, different majors, different fields report incidents differently, and then that makes inconsistencies in the accountability.

Emerson,

The students don’t like [exam monitoring] because it starts with a presumption … that everybody’s cheating. Well, they are, to a large extent.

If you’re taking a class, especially if it’s a class you don’t care about very much, and your professor gives you a quiz directly out of the publisher’s textbook, out of their test bank, and you go online and take it. If you’re able to just copy that answer or question out, go over to your browser, go to chegg.com, and instantaneously the correct answer is there.

I find these first-person interviews with experts to be illuminating and valuable. This episode, like others, is worth a listen.

Connecticut Police Recruits Under Investigation for Exam Cheating

Local TV in Connecticut has the story of a state police inquiry into exam cheating by eight police recruits.

The report says:

After allegedly receiving a link to a test ahead of time, the recruits are accused of starting the exam earlier than others in the class.

In April of 2021, a former Connecticut Police Chief asked a judge not to send him to prison for cheating on a chief’s exam then lying about it (see Issue 17).