New Survey: 77% of Professors Say Cheating is More Likely Online
Plus, the Baseball Hall of Fame and cheating. Plus, the digital SAT.
Issue 89
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New Wiley Survey on Academic Integrity
Wiley, the education publisher and major provider of online college program management, published a new survey of faculty and students on academic integrity this week.
There’s a ton to unpack so I’m doing it in two sections - one on the survey itself, a breakdown of what it shows, and one on Wiley screwing it up.
The Results
The headline is probably that 77% of the professors Wiley surveyed said they felt students were more likely to cheat in online courses compared to in-person courses.
When asked “which course delivery formats” concerned professors the most, a majority (52%) said online courses. A third said in-person.
A strong majority of students (59%) said cheating was “easier or significantly easier” online. And more than two-thirds (67%) of graduating seniors said it was “easier or significantly easier” to cheat in online classes.
A majority of students (51%) said the pandemic made it easier or significantly easer to cheat. Just 14% said it was harder or significantly harder.
Twenty-eight percent of students said they themselves were significantly more likely or more likely to cheat during pandemic learning.
Nearly three-quarters (73%) of students said they were less likely to cheat if they think they are likely to get caught and 69% said they were less likely to cheat if “proctoring software is used.” For comparison, outlining the consequences of misconduct in the course syllabus would influence 51% of students not to cheat, the same impact (51%) as signing an honor code.
The survey was conducted in September 2021 at American and Canadian institutions and included 2,868 instructors and 682 students.
We see, once again, a link between online course delivery and cheating. Both teachers (77%) and students (59%) say so. This mirrors many surveys and research papers over the past year or two that show this correlation strongly (see Issue 73).
Also noteworthy, I think, is that students say that cheating consequences are more impactful than honor codes or syllabus instruction on academic integrity. That’s not surprising. Research has shown similar findings (see Issue 64). But I don’t know that we’ve seen it presented quite that way.
Finally, that 28% of students said they were more likely to cheat - that’s quite concerning. Whatever the baseline was, that more than a quarter of all students are now saying they are more likely to do it ought to raise the volume on alarm bells.
Wiley Gets Their Own Survey Wrong
Wiley, the education publisher and major provider of online college program management, published a new survey of faculty and students on academic integrity this week.
There’s a ton to unpack so I’m doing it in two sections - one on the survey itself, a breakdown of what it shows and one on Wiley’s blatant attempt to misrepresent it.
Misrepresentation
The Wiley survey itself is pretty good. What they try to say about it is not.
Wiley, it seems, is bent on framing the survey as good news, that concerns about cheating have dramatically abated. The headline of the press release announcing the survey results is:
Concern about Academic Integrity in Online Courses Decreased Among College Instructors After Experience with Remote Instruction
The release says:
concerns about academic integrity in online courses have eased significantly among college instructors since 2020
Wiley cites their similar 2020 survey on academic misconduct which found that a jaw-dropping 93% of instructors felt cheating was easier in online classes. That number is now 77%. Yes, that’s a big drop - 93% was probably crazy. Fair. But Wiley’s press release never cites the 77%. That three in four teachers say cheating is more common online is absent from their release. They mention the decline without including that it declined to more than three-quarters.
Further, Wiley says:
While instructors still express some concern about academic integrity in online courses, the findings suggest that those fears were not realized in actual experience.
Ah, excuse me, but the findings in no way suggest that. In fact, the survey asked professors “what percentage of students they caught cheating over the last year.” And, the survey found:
Over 60% of respondents nabbed between 1-20 percent of their class engaged in academic dishonesty.
More than 60% of teachers said they caught as much as 20% of their students cheating this year, about which Wiley says “those fears were not realized in actual experience.”
And there’s this:
While the majority of student respondents believe it is easier to cheat online than in person, that does not mean they actually are cheating.
Wiley’s messaging is clear. Concerns are down. Fears not realized. Not actually cheating.
It seems obvious why Wiley wants to downplay cheating in online and hybrid course formats. They sell them to colleges.
Basic Errors
Then there are the stunning - yet very convenient - errors Wiley made in their own report.
Consider this screengrab:
If you can’t read that - I admit, the quality isn’t great - the header says:
Has the Pandemic Made it Easier to Cheat?
The text below it says:
Student respondents were nearly evenly split on this question with 51 percent saying the pandemic has made it easier and 49 percent saying it’s harder.
Problem is that only 14% said cheating was harder during the pandemic - not 49%. To get to 49% and call it “nearly evenly split,” the 35% who said it was “the same” were counted as “harder.”
That’s clearly, obviously, embarrassingly wrong.
So is this:
If you can’t read what’s in those circles, the one on the left says:
Wiley asked instructors what percentage of students they caught cheating over the last year. Over 60 percent of respondents nabbed between 1-20 percent of their class engaged in academic dishonesty.
In the right circle is:
The percentage of instructors who caught zero percent was a surprising 83 percent across the three modalities.
First - both cannot be true. You cannot have 60% saying they caught some and 83% saying they caught no one.
What Wiley did here is simply add the percentages of “caught zero” in the different types of classes - 31, 25 and 27 - and get 83. Only you can’t do that. That’s like eighth grade math. You average percentages, not add them up.
I’ll use that bogus Wiley math to demonstrate. According to Wiley, at least 217% of teachers caught cheaters last year.
I will also quickly point out - because Wiley doesn’t - that the rates of caught cheating were slightly higher in online and hybrid programs than in in-person ones.
But that’s not the point. Maybe those are just dumb errors. From a company that calls itself an education research and publishing company, that’s just awful.
But in the context of Wiley trying to downplay cheating, and given their business model, it is very convenient to have mistakes that say students were “nearly evenly split” on whether cheating was easier during the pandemic and that “83%” of teachers “caught zero percent” of their classes cheating. They actually wrote both things. Both are obviously false.
An aside - am I the only person who reads these things? I mean didn’t someone at Wiley read their own report?
SAT Goes Digital, Cites Cheating
Big news this week that the SAT is going digital, shorter and adaptive.
Most of the coverage had a mention such as this:
[the new SAT will have] more concise content that is expected to better prevent cheating
For what is essentially a throw away line, I find it fascinating.
It more or less concedes that the in-person proctoring the SAT used in the past was susceptible to cheating and that a digital alternative - assumingly proctored - will be less so.
Though that may be counterintuitive, the idea is not without reason.
Cheating the in-person SAT was a major factor in the Varsity Blues cases and there’s been good evidence for some time that in-person proctoring may present opportunities for unfair outcomes that remote proctoring doesn’t - intimidation, bribery, test theft as examples.
The Baseball Hall of Fame and Cheating
It’s not a typical coverage area for “The Cheat Sheet” but you may want to check out this article on the Baseball Hall of Fame and cheating over at Sports Illustrated.
It’s really good. And it touches substantially on academic misconduct.
Here are two paragraphs:
The year 2001 saw Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs, Roger Clemens go 20–3 and win the Cy Young Award, Enron CEO Kenneth Lay insist “there are no accounting issues” at the company, and Howard Gardner, a Harvard ethics professor, identify the decline of professional and academic integrity in his book Good Work.
Upon interviewing hundreds of students, Gardner and three researchers discovered a troubling trend. The students wanted to do good work and be successful, but they feared being disadvantaged because their peers were cutting corners. And so, as Gardner said, the prevailing attitude was, “We’ll be damned if we’ll lose out to them … Let us cut corners now and one day, when we have achieved fame and fortune, we’ll be good workers and set a good example.”