Massachusetts Investigates Police Cadets for Cheating Exams
Plus, a UNC Professor says he hopes no one cheated in his class of 333 freshmen. Plus, high school students in Ottawa using GPT to C-H-E-A-T.
Issue 220
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More Police Cheating More Exams
State authorities in Massachusetts are reportedly investigating exam cheating by police cadets in two cities - Holyoke and Boylston.
Details of the alleged misconduct were not released though the announcement did say that cadets were disciplined and/or dismissed. An official statement said:
several officers in the Holyoke and Boylston academies compromised the integrity of testing procedures and materials in violation of our agency’s honor code and academy policies.
The reporting also says:
The agency has implemented new measures in response to the cheating, including a new course quiz and test questions, increased proctor-to-student ratios in testing rooms, and enhanced test-taking software “with additional security measures”
N.C. Professor: Did Some Students Cheat? I Hope Not
Jeff Greene is a professor at The University North Carolina, Chapel Hill who authored an opinion submission for a local paper.
It’s a bit surprising and doubly disappointing.
Early on, he writes:
But rather than spending a lot of time trying design courses and exams where students cannot cheat using ChatGPT, I am spending my time developing courses where they do not want to.
I’m sure he is.
He continues:
When educators invest genuine care into their teaching and their students, when they help students see the relevance of what they are teaching, and when they work to be inclusive, even tools as tempting as ChatGPT become less likely to be used.
And, I am sure that’s true too. Just as I am sure that 60% cheating is less than 75%.
I am less sure that’s success.
He goes on to describe a course he taught this spring and all the work he and his colleagues put into it. There were, he says, 333 first-year students in that class. And, continuing, he wrote:
When people understand what they need to do to be successful, and have the tools and support to do so, there is much less need to yield to the temptations of ChatGPT.
That assumes people use ChatGPT out of need, but sure. There’s nothing wrong with any of that. But if building a course students don’t want to cheat is your anti-cheating approach, it will be the difference between widescale cheating and massive cheating.
Professor Green continues:
Despite all our efforts, did some students cheat? I hope not, but it’d be naïve to assume no one did.
So, two things. One, he has no idea if people cheated in his class. That tells me he did not check. And if that’s the case then - spoiler alert - they cheated. A ton.
Two, naïve is exactly the word I’d use. To think that it’s possible to make students not want to cheat while not checking for cheating - that is naïve. A word well chosen.
And of course he says, “I take academic integrity seriously.” And that he’d:
refer any student I suspected of cheating to our Honor System for proper investigation.
Unfortunately, this tells me once again that the good professor has no idea who cheated in his class. Or how many. Or how. He ends with:
But I am not worrying about students cheating with tools like ChatGPT. Instead, I am focusing on making classes where students do not want or need to cheat, at all.
I know this will come across as dismissive and condescending. And I’m sorry. But 333 first-year students in a course with, it appears, few security or integrity safeguards - good luck with that.
I wonder whether administrators or Deans at UNC are comfortable with “genuine care” as the lead form of academic integrity in a class with 333 students. And whether ‘I hope no one cheated’ is good enough.
Canadian High School: Students are Using ChatGPT to Cheat
According to the CBC, a high school in Ottawa, Canada is:
sounding a note of concern about student cheating — including the suspected use of artificial intelligence to answer test questions
You think?
The news coverage includes:
Teachers have reported students cheating, according to the memo, and have also outlined suspected cheating methods.
Examples include looking at pictures of notes on Apple Watches, talking to each other via AirPods to share answers during tests, and using ChatGPT, the emerging artificial intelligence tool, to help answer questions when using assigned laptops.
Uh huh. Go on.
A spokesperson for the supervisory school board told the paper:
We trust the overwhelming majority of students will not engage in this type of behaviour
An awful lot of trust and hope being deployed of late.
And, right on cue, an expert quoted by the newspaper offered this advice:
What we really need to be focusing on is thinking about how to change the incentives in schooling so that the incentive isn't to cheat but to learn
Wow.
Got any more trust and hope? We’re going to need it.