Misconduct Cases Triple at NC State
Plus, IHE nods at Chegg. Again. Plus, a Cal State student opines on remote proctoring.
Issue 95
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Misconduct Cases “Surge” at North Carolina State
According to reporting by the student newspaper at North Carolina State University, academic misconduct cases at the school have tripled since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is news but not unusual. Most schools that have shared their data have reported similar dramatic increases.
From the article:
The Office of Student Conduct has seen academic misconduct cases triple since the pandemic began. Thomas Hardiman, the director of the Office of Student Conduct, cited the shift to asynchronous education as the primary explanation for this increase.
According to Hardiman, before the pandemic, there were approximately 275 cases of academic misconduct per academic year, which includes the fall, spring and two summer terms. In the 2020-21 academic year, the Office of Student Conduct handled over 700 cases of academic misconduct. With the return to in-person education in fall 2021, cases of academic misconduct seem to be gradually decreasing, although they remain higher than the pre-pandemic average, Hardiman said.
The most common form of cheating during the “surge” is cheating - using unauthorized resources. Again, no surprise. In fact, we knew most of this before (see Issue 8).
Continuing:
Hardiman attributes the growth in [cheating] cases to virtual learning, which provides a greater opportunity for students to access unauthorized resources.
“When you were sitting in a class and the faculty member is there and students are there, it’s really obvious if you pull out your cell phone and you start to Google an answer,” Hardiman said. “That is an academic faux pas. People would call you out in a second. But when you’re in your bedroom alone doing that, it’s only your own integrity that’s going to stop you.”
Yup. Unmonitored digital learning or assessment is the tinder box of cheating - rewards are ripe, consequences nil.
The article mentions that “online resources such as Chegg” will cooperate with misconduct inquires. And that, in 2020, more than 200 students in a single class were accused of using Chegg to cheat.
Good for NC State for sharing their numbers and discussing the challenges so openly.
European Academic Integrity Conference Calls for Papers
The European Conference on Academic Integrity and Plagiarism has issued a call for papers for its upcoming May conference. The in-person and virtual conference will be the 4th to 6th of May 2022 in Porto, Portugal.
For details or info: conference@academicintegrity.eu
Chegg Executive Answers Three Questions at Inside Higher Ed. Again.
Nina Huntemann is Chegg’s “Chief Academic Officer,” which is like being “Chief Nutrition Officer” as Krispy Kreme.
But that’s not my point.
Over at Inside Higher Ed (IHE), Huntemann answered three questions with Joshua Kim of Dartmouth University who has a column or contributor space at the publication. The piece made me chuckle because not ten months ago Kim did the “three questions” bit with Candace Sue, Chegg’s “Head of Academic Relations.”
The IHE interview list must be pretty short.
Anyway, the interviewer - Kim - is the same bloke who spoke at a conference last year that was sponsored by Chegg (see Issue 24 or this piece in Forbes). So, it’s little surprise that Kim, who has published interviews with two Chegg executives this year and spoke at their conference, didn’t exactly challenge Huntemann.
Mysteriously, the words “cheating” and “academic integrity” never came up in Kim’s Q&A.
What did come up is that Chegg is a “controversial brand” as well as the company’s “critics.” About which Huntemann says:
It seems the current discourse is driven by an impulse to maintain the status quo at a time when it is so clear that students are demanding change. Ten years ago, MOOC platforms were seen as threatening to faculty. Ten years before that, students were told not to cite Wikipedia. Those innovations evolved through productive engagement. I don’t know what we will be debating in 10 more years. But right now, I welcome earnest discussion about how teaching and learning is changing and what students need to be successful in an increasingly complex, digital world. I would hope that members of the higher ed community would be open to working with us to support today’s students and their changing needs.
I suppose it is true that people who care about integrity do represent the status quo, even if students are “demanding change.”
And what can I say about Chegg comparing itself to Wikipedia and MOOCs? They chose their peers pretty well.
In any case, Chegg drew more puffy, non-challenging digital ink at IHE - which, considering IHE’s history of partnering with cheating companies and dismissing cheating, (see Issue 78 or Issue 53 or Issue 49), is not surprising.
Ertz Foundation: Chegg is “best company ever.”
I know Chegg and other cheating providers spend a ton of time and money trying to buy legitimacy. And I also know that not everyone in the world can know how Chegg really makes money.
Even so, this kind of thing from the director of the otherwise credible, highly visible Ertz Foundation is depressing:
Cal State Student: Proctorio Should be Removed
A Cal State University, Fullerton student wrote an op-ed for the school paper recently in which she wrote:
CSUF should discontinue Proctorio from the virtual learning environment. Instead, professors could arrange take-home essays or comprehensive open book exams.
Proctorio is a remote exam proctoring company.
To summarize, the op-ed writer wants Proctorio removed from virtual assessment at her school because she says it causes, or amplifies, test anxiety. And setting aside that her solution - take-home essays and open book exams - are the easiest to cheat, the author deserves credit for citing a research report on academic integrity and actually, it seems, reading it.
In her piece she cites and quotes from this 2019 research from Daniel Woldeab of Metropolitan State University (MN) and Thomas Brothen of the University of Minnesota.
To her credit, the Cal State student notes that the Woldeab/Brothen study of proctoring and test anxiety covered 631 students, 44 of whom took a final exam with remote proctoring provider ProctorU.
Yes, just 44. The experimental group was 44 students.
The study confirms that students with high test anxiety don’t score as well as students who don’t exhibit those traits - a correlation the study authors concede is constant and well documented. But they also say anxiety may be exacerbated by remote, online proctors.
There are a few big problems with the study though. One is the 44. The other is that the group the study zeroes in on - those who used remote proctors and who had high test anxiety - is a small subset of a self-selected small set. The study doesn’t name how many students were in that sub-group, but if it’s even 20% with consistent high test anxiety, we’re talking about like 9 students. Nine.
The other thing the study makes clear is that there was no difference in the test scores of those who used ProctorU’s online proctors and those who took their remote exams in a test center. The study says:
final exam performance between the two groups differed by only one point out of a possible 200 (155 vs 156) and was also obviously non-significant
And
final exam performance between the two groups did not differ
Then there’s also this issue - that the biggest change in taking a test remotely with an online proctor and taking the same test in a campus test center probably isn’t the proctor, it’s probably the test environment. That’s something that Woldeab/Brothen did not appear to consider. Maybe for students with high test anxiety, taking a test alone in a dorm room or in a loud family room on a shared server might be more stressful than where the proctor is.
The point is, the study that tried to prove a link between anxiety and remote proctoring is not great. The Cal State piece is. It’s well written and cites correctly. You should check it out.