"Rampant Online Cheating"

Plus, more on the new Australia research. Plus, cheating as teachable moment.

Issue 67

Educator in LA Times: Cheating Online is Rampant

This past weekend, the LA Times ran an op-ed from educator Karen Symms Gallagher on what’s really happening with online learning and cheating.

It’s true, accurate and chilling.

And it would be important on merit alone but for the fact that Gallagher is more than an educator who’s seeing the cheating crisis. Gallagher is former Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education, one of the top programs in the country, and is currently a professor of education and the Veronica and David Hagen chair in women’s leadership at USC.

Gallagher’s piece is a must read and gets enormous credit for calling out some of the companies that profit from cheating - Chegg, Course Hero, Grade Bees and EduBirdie. She writes:

what surprised me most as an educator playing this cat-and-mouse game for decades is that cheating is now scaled and outsourced internationally and powered by venture capitalists, Wall Street investors and billion-dollar companies.

Indeed.

Gallagher continues:

As an unintended consequence of technology allowing remote learning and exams, students are finding more and more online venues allowing them to earn grades and diplomas by cheating.

No doubt about it.

What I particularly like about her piece is that Gallagher offers ideas for addressing the ongoing, profit-driven situation. She suggests pressuring online credit and payment companies to stop fueling cheating services and notes that schools and teachers could join the current copyright legal challenge to Chegg (see Issue 57).

We all benefit when cheating is acknowledged and discussed and the LA Times/Gallagher piece is a significant contribution.

More from the Hill, Mason and Dunn Research

In the last Issue of “The Cheat Sheet” - Issue 66 - I shared some key findings from the research from Hill and Mason of Charles Darwin University (AUS) and Dunn from University of New England (AUS). They find, in major summary, that colleges and individual educators are overmatched in addressing the growing threat of contract cheating providers.

Because their report is so good, and so long, I’m sharing more of it here. The researchers wrote:

some individual institutions are ill-equipped to design, deliver and monitor assessments to deter and avoid academic integrity breaches in the face of the sophisticated and easily accessible businesses ready to take advantage of such a disruption.

Rightly, the research trio also calls out a significant problem within institutional responses to addressing academic misconduct - that, even when spotted, the process is stacked with disincentive. They write:

One of the biggest problems is not detection, though, it is the difficulty of proving a breach, the administrative burden of investigations, and a lack of confidence that appeals will be denied, all leading to a reluctance to report in the first place. One could imagine this is exacerbated by large class sizes (getting to know your students being one of the best ways to detect breaches) and a casualisation of the workforce.

All very, very true. At some point, schools will need to decide how serious they really are about academic integrity and, if they are, they will have to address the policies, practices and procedures that push faculty not to bother addressing misconduct.

Wisconsin Students Hurt Their Own Case Against Remote Exam Proctors

Issue 65 of “The Cheat Sheet” noted that, despite student displeasure, the University of Wisconsin-Madison renewed its contract with remote exam proctoring company Honorlock.

Reasonably, the student newspaper at UW-M ran a story about the renewal. By the standards of logic or journalism, it’s not good and undermines their arguments. I don’t want to over-analyze, but here are two examples.

Mason Lahm, a student, tells the paper that Honorlock isn’t meeting its purpose because people still cheat, saying,

I’ve heard all kinds of different ways people work around Honorlock

To support this argument, the paper cites increased reports of cheating nationally as well as at UW-M.

Of course, that students are trying to cheat is the reason the school needs exam proctoring. That cheating went up during remote exams is the reason the school needs exam proctoring. Research has shown that having a proctor and detection regime reduces cheating.

Further, arguing that proctoring does not work because people still cheat is akin to arguing that we should remove our door locks because robbery still happens.

The UW-M article also says:

UW students of color taking tests with Honorlock have been incorrectly flagged as cheating because the software could not recognize their darker skin tones, according to Inside Higher Ed.

The problem is - and let me be clear - that is just not true.

I left the link in the quote so you can, if you’d like, check the source. That IHE article says no such thing. It says three students said they had their exams delayed because the proctor system could not read their IDs - not that they were “incorrectly flagged as cheating.” It’s also unclear whether this delay had anything do with skin tone.

The article has other errors too.

I get that students don’t like having people watch them take tests. I get it’s an extra hoop. I get that some students would prefer that cheating was easier. But this kind of illogical, misleading stuff is unhelpful to everyone.

Dealing with Cheating as Teaching Moment

Continuing their very solid coverage of cheating and academic misconduct, Times Higher Ed ran a piece on a “new approach to academic misconduct” that supposedly cuts school workload and “leaves a better taste in the mouth” of those involved.

The backstory is that administrators at the University of New South Wales, Sydney found that 100 academic assignments had been summited from the same internet address. The story quotes Kane Murdoch, head of the university’s Student Conduct and Integrity Unit, saying,

This is what cheating on a systemic, industrial scale looks like

And, the article says, facing that many potential cases, instead of initiating investigations and triggering hearings and potential consequences, the school decided to initiate:

a semi-formal alternative to traditional investigations. The unit contacted all the students in the course, explaining that the university had strong evidence of contract cheating and encouraging them to come clean if they had participated.

It continues:

Under the programme, students suspected of cheating are invited to confidential meetings. Those who acknowledge misconduct typically fail the units but escape suspension or expulsion. Those who refuse to meet or refute the allegations risk formal investigations that could attract more severe penalties.

The idea was to teach the ethics of misconduct. And the result was that the time to conclude an individual case went down and, Murdoch says, students were happier, feeling “superior connections” to the university.

It’s easy to see why a policy such as this is better for the school - less time, less litigation, faster resolution, fewer staff hours. It’s also easy to see why students prefer it - less severe consequences.

It’s also exactly the kind of program the United States Military Academy at West Point scrapped this year after a cheating scandal there. Moreover, based on recent research into why students cheat in the first place, such a policy will likely encourage cheating by lowering the perceived penalties. It may be easier; I’m skeptical it’s better.

Correction - In the last “The Cheat Sheet,” I misspelled Kathryn Baron, the education writer and host of “The Score” - the new podcast on cheating. My mistake and I apologize.

In the next “The Cheat Sheet” - As their stock tanks, a stock trader defends cheating company Chegg - kind of. Plus, the college President who plagiarized his speeches will, in fact, keep his job. Don’t miss it. Subscribe and share below.