Nearly 81% of College Science Students Say Cheating More Common Online

Plus, Meazure Learning executives write about misconduct. Plus, two notes on Chegg.

Issue 85

To subscribe to “The Cheat Sheet:”

To share “The Cheat Sheet:”

Research: Nearly 81% Say Cheating is More Common in Online Classes

Research published late last year showed that a heavy majority of college students in United States in science fields (80.9%) say cheating is more common in online classes and programs. The survey research also found that the opportunity to cheat - lack of assessment proctoring specifically - was the number one reason.

The paper is from eight authors from Rutgers University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and other institutions.

As academic integrity research, it is awful. I’ve done a full research brief on the paper and am considering ways to share it. This probably is not the place, mostly for space considerations. Nonetheless, a few of the paper’s results are worthy of adding to the conversation.

It’s important to note that this survey asked students what they thought their peers were doing - why and how they were cheating. It did not ask the students about their own behaviors, just their perceptions of others.

From the paper:

Almost 81% of students indicated that they believed cheating occurred more frequently online than in-person

This is not a new finding. When asked, students and teachers have consistently said cheating is easier, more common in online settings. The evidence on this is overwhelming at this point (see Issue 73).

It’s also noteworthy that, according to this paper, students say the opportunity to cheat is the primary reason that students do it. The authors call it, “The overall ease of cheating” online. From the paper:

The majority of students’ open-ended responses (87.3%) included themes that were mapped to planned behavior theory. Planned behavior theory includes both opportunity to cheat and intent to cheat, and students were more than five times as likely to discuss the opportunity their peers had to cheat than intention.

Let me highlight - planned behavior and opportunity.

Though the authors never consider this, this response is highly likely to stem from students’ views of others - that others are doing bad things on purpose. When asked about personal decision making, results more frequently align with rationalization or what the authors call neutralization. I.e., it’s not my fault, my teacher is bad, the pandemic is the problem, stress, etc.

On that note, this paper also says quite clearly that online instruction and assessment are driving the perception of cheating and not the disruption of the pandemic. From the paper:

[results] strongly suggests that most students believed cheating was occurring more online because of the new modality of online learning, rather than the emergency-induced disruption to education

And:

[results] suggesting it was a novel modality of assessment rather than a pandemic that shaped student perceptions.

Finally - and, again, there’s so much more to be said about this “research” - it’s worth a note that the students said that lack of proctoring of exams and assessments is the biggest factor in the opportunity to cheat - which they also identified as the biggest factor in their peers’ conduct. From the paper:

Lack of a proctor, followed closely by access to the internet, was the most common explanation for an opportunity to cheat.

Meazure Learning Executives on Professional Exams and Using Technology to Catch Cheaters

Two executives at Meazure Learning, which owns remote exam proctoring company ProctorU, have written recent articles about academic misconduct.

Jarrod Morgan, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, wrote in Fast Company about how cheating is invading the world of professional, credential testing. Specifically mentioning the risks to the public and businesses that hire credentialed experts. He wrote:

Based on what we’re seeing in our industry, dishonesty in these exams is increasingly becoming more common. It also appears to be gaining in acceptance. Spend a little time on Reddit or YouTube and you’ll find people bragging about how they beat the system. This arrogance makes credential fraud not only an existing public danger but also one that’s gathering momentum as cheaters teach other people how to cheat, all the while normalizing the behavior.

Ashely Norris, the Chief Academic and Compliance Officer, wrote a piece for eLearning Industry on why technology alone can’t stop academic misconduct. She wrote:

even though technology is getting more complex and seemingly better at cheating, it’s ultimately a human interaction. People make a conscious decision to try to cheat and then it’s up to people to catch them. Tech is assistive. Software may alert us to something we didn’t catch at first, but trained test experts know how to interpret what the software is reporting.

Two Notes on Chegg

Notorious cheating provider and public company Chegg announced this week that it has a new service or product offering called “Learn with Chegg.”

Reading between the lines of the press announcement, the service will use AI and the company’s trove of data it’s collected from students over the years to cue up and suggest existing learning resources. Many companies already do this.

Chegg mentions in their release that their inventory “includes 70 million worked examples with expert-created step-by-step solutions.” Those are, of course, the test and exam and homework questions and answers that students previously paid for. Though in Chegg speak, they’re not purchased test answers, they are “worked examples.”

Seventy million.

It also means that if you’re an instructor, and a student has used Chegg’s “we will give you the answer in 30 minutes” service, your intellectual labor will continue to help Chegg and its investors make money. Congratulations.

The Chegg announcement also mentions the company’s “artificial intelligence-enabled writing support” service. Yikes.

Also, over at Motley Fool, the investing advice site, an author has weighed in on Chegg and Nerdy, another publicly traded “tutoring” company. The article aims to parse out which company is the better investment. The writer says Nerdy is. But what stands out is that, at long last, an investor at least tosses in a line or two about cheating, saying:

Chegg Study -- its biggest paid service -- has been repeatedly accused of helping students cheat by outsourcing their homework problems to online tutors in India.

Tags - #VC #onlineassessment #rationalization #professionaltesting #proctoring