Special Edition: Get Your Popcorn.
A special podcast edition.
Issue SE1
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Get Your Popcorn. I’d Like to Report a Murder.
Get your popcorn, unseal your bourbon - whatever you need to settle in for this ride.
I’d like to report a murder.
Warnings first. It’s long and doesn’t end with hugs and smiles.
But it starts with Matt Crump, a professor at City University of New York in Brooklyn. He has a website with a blog. It has what looks to be a pretty good page on academic integrity research. Really, it looks good. On it, he alludes to a story he wrote about students cheating in his course(s):
The story picked up more attention than I anticipated. I shared the story as part of a course assessment writing exercise, which has now been completed, and the original post is no longer available.
But it is.
If you know how to work the interwebs, you can find it. Here it is.
There’s a murder because at first his very long article kills me. And then it kills me.
By long I mean his story is a breezy 38-pages, single spaced, covering more than 10,600 words.
I will do my best with some key portions here. But seriously, settle in.
The Eruption Begins.
The set-up is that the professor was teaching an online class and during his first lecture he noticed a student shared a group chat, on WhatsApp. He joined and was able to watch as his students cheated, in real time, repeatedly and nearly universally.
That’s the headline. The real story is in the details and the resolution.
Here’s the first detail - the course was initially centered on a series of what he called “low stakes” weekly quizzes:
in this course I ran short multiple choice quizzes each week. Students could take the quiz as many times as they wanted during the week. The quiz questions changed each time (pulled randomly from a pool), and students always got their most recent quiz grade. The quizzes were low stakes. I also told students that taking the quizzes would help them study for the midterms, which would contain questions from the quizzes.
The result? In his words:
[a] volcano of cheating erupting since the first quiz.
Though the professor seemed to be, no one should have been surprised.
Low stakes assessments are no solution to cheating. We are constantly told that low stakes exams are part of the answer to reduce cheating but they aren’t. Even putting this example aside, there’s good evidence that lowering the stakes of an assessment actually encourages cheating.
Likewise, randomized questions is no solution to cheating either. Test banks are easy to cheat. If a question is in a test bank, it’s very probably compromised.
Anyway, a volcano.
And:
by the way, I should say that the quizzes were entirely open book and open note. All of the course material was online and freely available to the students.
We’ve also heard going “open book and open note” reduces cheating. It doesn’t.
A volcano.
He says:
There were 100+ students in the class, and a strong majority of them were in the chat. It was obvious that lots of cheating was going on
After just two weeks:
I had about 70 violations
With the midterm test questions recycled from the quizzes, during which there was serious cheating, it’s no surprise that by the time the midterm came around:
Many students got 100% on the first midterm.
Worse, he says he:
let my students take the first midterm anytime they wanted within a week long period
Honestly, open book, recycled questions from a test bank and from quizzes and a week to take the unproctored online test? It’s shocking that anyone could be shocked there was widespread and consistent cheating.
Lesson Learned, But …
Burned by all the cheating he saw with his own eyes, the good professor says he:
rewrote all of the quiz questions and kept them out of the online pool. I also stopped giving quizzes and changed to written weekly assignments
That’s great. But let’s, for a moment, consider this new workload. All new questions plus grading written work every week. Plus, he says he:
read through the thousands of texts to figure out what exactly went down, and tallied up for each student whether an academic integrity violation occurred for each quiz, assignment or midterm.
Plus, he says his school requires individual misconduct forms be filed against each student. He also says his school suggests an hour-long conversation with each student accused of misconduct. He had 70 cases. After two weeks.
I sympathize. The burden schools put on professors to deal with misconduct is a problem and a major disincentive.
Anyway, back to the cheating prevention.
In addition to rewriting his quizzes and switching to written material, our professor made his second midterm a set time instead of keeping it open all week. He also made it impossible to back up on questions during the test - one and done. Good stuff. Those are solid tactics from lessons learned.
An important minor digression. Our professor thinks that these changes in his exam policies will thwart cheating sites. To his credit, he lists examples:
the cornucopia of websites offering opportunities for students to violate academic integrity principles wouldn’t be much help. For example, https://www.chegg.com, https://www.coursehero.com, and https://www.quizlet.com
He got the big three - Chegg, Course Hero and Quizlet. Unfortunately, he’s just wrong about his new solutions stopping them. Chegg and Course Hero would be easy to use to cheat on his newly designed and unproctored exam.
Of these sites he says:
students can hire people to do their assignments (cough, help them with their homework as a legit tutor). Because my content was new, none of it was available for easy download. I don’t know how many students hired people to do assignments in my course, that’s beyond the call of duty
Right, they can. And he’s right about how terrible they are, posing as legit tutors. And he’s right again that he doesn’t know if his students were using them.
Even so, and even with these new interventions, students still tried to collude and share answers in the chat. Most of the attempted cheaters, the professor said, failed - which means that his cheating interventions probably worked at least partially, at least on this particular form of cheating.
The Developing Bigger Picture.
A few levels up, after he’s seen the quiz cheating and midterm cheating, our professor starts to say things such as:
there was a lot of evidence in the chat that students were blowing off the course and making a mockery of the whole thing
They pretty clearly were. And, he says:
This was the first time when 75% of the class was cheating way beyond the pale for half a semester
Ah - and this is important - it’s not. It’s not the first time there was cheating, it’s the first time he logged into the group chat and saw it.
Just like there’s no chance the cheating was isolated to his class. He says, in part:
It was pretty clear that many of my students were cheating in their other classes.
In other words, the professor did not stumble upon an anomaly, he found the rule. He just didn’t expect it or did not want to process what it meant, so he treated it as an exception, as “the first time.”
Still, throughout all this, Professor Crump remains very empathetic. He tries to understand and does not want to fail his cheaters:
It’s just, I’m not the police. Education isn’t a form of punishment. I’m trying to get students to engage in my course. Failing them all isn’t a solution.
In another section he says:
My full time job is not to detect and report cheating, and it took me several weeks to accomplish the [the finding, the notations and forms]. In the meantime, I also had to teach my course. It was extremely demoralizing to teach to a class that was blatantly cheating the entire time. Relatedly, try lecturing online by yourself to a bunch of blank screens while subscribed to a WhatsApp chat where a vocal minority are telling everyone how they really feel. I had perma-eyebrow raise, and oh my poor feelings.
I do feel for him. I’ve interviewed many professors who’ve spoken about the betrayal, the violation of trust that cheating brings on. I feel for the position he’s in when he sees what’s really going on - how he does not want to be the police. He calls it “demoralizing” and I see that.
But back to the story. And believe me, I am saving you reading time.
Hammer Time, Lyin’ Time.
After changing his course assessments and filling out papers for every misconduct case, the professor is about to tell his students he knows they’d been cheating. From his experience, after the hammer falls, the lies start to rain. In his words:
all the lying. When you catch cheating, there is so much lying.
And:
That’s when the lying starts. I don’t have enough fingers to count how many times students sat in front of me and lied to my face, just lies, lies, lies, all the way out of my office.
He finally levels the accusations and the proof of cheating. Students panic; lying happens.
But before he even gets to the accusations and the torrent of lying, armed with this incriminating “volcano” of cheating - 75% of the class- what does our professor do?
In his words:
I was getting set to announce to the class that most of them were about to fail, when I had a light bulb moment. I needed to write an alternative syllabus for the cheaters.
Not what I was expecting.
After all the work finding and cataloguing the cheating. The paperwork. The new questions, the new grading, the betrayal - after all that, our heroic professor decides to create a brand-new course in the middle of his course. For the cheaters. A road to redemption.
How’s your popcorn?
A New Start?
Thinking a new syllabus for cheaters is his path forward - at least his third instructional pivot to address cheating - the professor says:
Even the student who sent 15 emails of lies got a second chance.
Really good guy, this Professor Crump. You have to cheer for him at this point.
Sorry, another quick detour. Get more popcorn. Or refill your glass. It’s about to get good.
At some point, our professor also drops this about his class, the low-stakes, open-note, weekly quiz class:
I had given two extra credit writing assignments and of course my students plagiarized on them like rabbits.
Ah, OK.
The students used Quizlet to source answers to the extra credit. Then they created a Google Doc with the extra credit answers and - wait for it - shared it in the group chat the professor was in. You can’t make it up.
Back on track.
This below is a long quoted section. But I really want anyone still following along to appreciate the work our noble professor went to - work he didn’t need to do, above and beyond all the other stuff. He says of his new post-cheating, second-chance syllabus:
I created a whole bunch of new assignments. I tried to come up with fun and interesting assignments. I had a several pedagogical goals and I wrote assignments around those goals. If I wanted to students to engage in some particular aspect of my course, then I wrote a writing assignment about how to do that. Students love examples, so for each assignment I also wrote example answers to show students the kind of thing I was looking for.
I gave assignments to read papers, and generate graphs, and examine theoretical issues, and to relate phenomena in my class to real life, and on and on. I made a choose-your-own-adventure assignment where students could do anything they wanted to engage in the literature. All they had to do was tell me what they did and then provide an explanation of why they should get course credit for doing what they did.
My idea was to create as many new assignments as necessary for any student with sanctions to bounce back and get a decent grade.
Hero.
Doing anything you want to engage the literature doesn’t sound rigorous to me, but I can’t imagine all the work he was doing. He even let students do both syllabi. He announced he’d take whichever grade was higher. Hard to say he didn’t try. Credit due, for sure.
There was one hitch. Those who cheated had to complete an academic integrity assignment to access the new path. Here was the entire assignment:
In at least 150 words, demonstrate your understanding of what it means to behave according to a high standard of personal and academic integrity as a student. Use full sentences.
Pledge that you will behave according to a high standard of personal and academic integrity for the remainder of this course.
We’ve seen how these pledges don’t work (see Issue 108). But another A for outstanding effort.
Anyway, if you need to fill your popcorn or get more ice, now is a good time.
Because - and you saw this coming - the very first integrity essay the good professor received - yup, it was plagiarized.
But wait. When the professor wrote to the student with a link to the website they’d copied, the student said the professor was wrong. The student pointed out that they’d actually copied from an entirely different website.
Really:
I messaged the student that they had plagiarized the assignment from a website. I sent the link. They immediately wrote back and said I had the wrong link and that they copied it from a different website.
Then there’s this:
At my most mystified, I proceeded to release a class announcement warning students not to plagiarize the academic integrity assignment.
Check, meet mate.
Murder One. Or the First Three Anyway.
That’s the first murder.
Knowing what I know about academic integrity, it kills me that anyone is surprised that students would see low-stakes, open note, online, unproctored, asynchronous, test bank questions and disrespect the class. Of course they’re going to cheat because it’s obvious no one is watching and pretty clear that no one cares.
And it also kills me that “people” keep advising teachers to lower the stakes of their assessments and to go open book and randomize their questions when none of this works to stop cheating. None of this. Here’s a guy who did all of it and - a volcano. Seriously, it’s time to stop saying it.
It kills me again - I think this three times now - that our professor thinks what he saw in his group chat was unprecedented. Or new. I get why he had to, or wanted to, see it that way. But the truth is that not only is the WhatsApp deal incredibly common, it also probably represented only some of those cheating in his class. There are many, many other ways to cheat that don’t involve discussing your misconduct with classmates in a semi-public forum. The “volcano” he saw was just one of what was likely an entire range of them.
Professor Crumb himself says at one point:
students are using a variety of methods to communicate with each other about a course, especially while taking online classes.
Ah, yea. Again, if a student used Chegg during the midterm or texted answers to another student one-on-one, the professor would never know.
I don’t want to disrespect the professor here. No human could have done more to help their students pass a class or been more forgiving. After cheating, cheating repeatedly, lying and plagiarizing, he still reports that:
most of them got decent grades and engaged substantially with the course material.
Though he also says:
Some did some more plagiarism and failed.
I bet. Given a second, third, fourth opportunity to come back from cheating, some won’t. Honestly, by the time we reached the point where the cheating students were plagiarizing the academic integrity assignment, I was done. Ring the bell. Stop the fight. I am dead.
But Wait, There’s More.
Hang on. It’s not over.
After the ordeal of at least 75% his class cheating, yet most still getting “decent grades,” the good professor was slated to teach another online class the next semester. This one was to be asynchronous - an online class with no set meeting times. It’s the format that’s probably the easiest to cheat because literally no one is watching - ever.
And wouldn’t you know it, early on in the course, a student shared a WhatsApp chat. The professor joined again.
But this is no sequel.
This time, our hero professor used all or most of his alternate syllabus from the previous semester - the one he designed for the “cheaters.” His word. The one without the weekly open note unsupervised test bank quizzes that were replaced by:
All they had to do was tell me what they did and then provide an explanation of why they should get course credit for doing what they did.
So what did Professor Crumb find when he spied on the group chat again? He saw:
A bunch of students being their best selves. Truly. They weren’t cheating. They were talking about stuff. Helping each other out in good ways. Connecting with each other. This happened every morning. I’d see a big number of texts, and I would think it would be this time. But it wasn’t.
Our protagonist says:
Overall, I had a great bunch of students, really truly fantastic. I gave so many A+s because of all of the A+ cool stuff they did this semester. Using their own words.
Admit it - you didn’t see that coming.
On “Not Cheating”.
Here, you may think, given the results, that the change in course design altered the cheating behavior - that switching from quizzes and midterms to fun and engaging assignments was the secret sauce of academic integrity. The professor never really says that, though the format of his presentation conveys it. And he absolutely says:
They weren’t cheating.
The problem is, it’s not that they weren’t cheating - it’s that they weren’t cheating in the WhatsApp chat. Big difference.
It’s probably true that the difference in assignment structure made sharing answers in a chatroom less productive. As a result, it’s likely that other cheating tools and tactics were used, such as Chegg for example.
It’s also nearly certain that, based on the lessons from the previous semester, the students knew the WhatsApp chat was compromised. They knew students had been caught cheating. The professor says students in the second semester chat were discussing the previous semester’s cheating, even directly theorizing that the chat was compromised:
They knew that students had cheated, that I found out about it, and it was bad. They suggested not cheating in the chat. Many “I wouldn’t do that if I were you” texts were sent. This put a stop to explicit use of the chat for cheating. I didn’t see any for the whole course.
Exactly. It didn’t stop the cheating; it stopped the use of the chat for cheating. And not that it didn’t happen, he didn’t see any. Remember, he gave “so many A+s.”
In this case, our professor accessed a group chat, saw cheating, presumed it was a one-off, made changes and it went it way. Pretty easy to feel as though you fixed it. Especially if that’s how you want to feel about it.
The lesson here is that cheating is like squeezing your fist around Jello - it’s going to squish out somewhere. If you’re not seeing it where you’re looking, it does not mean it went away. The other lesson is that if you’re not looking for it all, you won’t find it. That too does not mean it’s not there.
The Final Murder.
At the top of this journey I said the story killed me and then it killed me. The incredulous discovery of very predictable cheating, the lying, all the extra hero work - how the story disproves so many pearls of conventional wisdom - it all killed me.
But the final murder, the dagger deep in my psyche is where, after living this saga personally, our professor ends up. Seeing all of it real time, being “extremely demoralized” by the cheating, our hero essentially gives up.
He says he joined two group chats but that:
this is something I will not do again.
He says rather directly that he knows he could make his course more difficult to cheat, but he just doesn’t want to because he’s over it. No, really:
TBH, I’m so over trying to deter my students from cheating. There are so many ways I could lock down my courses. Not interested. If real life was about being monitored by proctoring software that spies on you at home and forces you to test under duress, it would be a sad real life.
He’s “not interested” in deterring cheating.
I guess we have to overlook that spying on students is essentially what he did by lurking the student group chat for two semesters. But it’s that, at the end of it all, seeing what actually happens when no one is watching, our professor just doesn’t care.
I am dead.
Or instead of not caring, maybe he’s made a value decision. Perhaps he’s decided that not testing “under duress,” or avoiding his own discomfort in seeing his students “make a mockery” of him and his course, or maybe his desire to not be a cheating cop - whatever that value is - it’s more important than academic integrity. Whatever it is, it’s an affirmative decision to allow cheating rather than - I am not sure exactly what.
In other words, here’s an educator who knows his students cheated, knows they are cheating, and simply prefers to look away. All while, telling himself and his students that he was tough:
I wrote about academic integrity violations at length in the syllabus, I did what I could to inform them about the sanctions. I was clear about the course having a zero tolerance policy: Immediate failure in the course.
I guess that’s helpful in case a student happens to walk into his office and confess.
Although, as we’ve seen already, he will do very heavy lifting to not fail anyone. He said so repeatedly and proved it. Again, at least 75% of his students cheated but “most of them got decent grades.” That’s not a zero tolerance policy, that’s a fourth and fifth chance policy. I mean, that’s fine I guess, but don’t say you have a “zero tolerance policy: Immediate failure”.
Still dead.
On final analysis, I suppose it’s one thing to be naïve about cheating, to blindly assume that you’re the only teacher with entirely honest students. I’ve heard more than one professor say that their students don’t cheat.
I suppose it’s a thing to not look for cheating out of fear for what you’d find or because you know you’re too busy to deal with all the very real and demanding consequences that come with it. It is a bad system.
It’s another thing entirely to open the door, find a harsh truth and simply close it again, to be disinterested in addressing what you know is a problem with serious consequences - to maybe convince yourself you’ve fixed it.
I just don’t know what to think, feel or say about that.
Sorry to end on a down note. I hope the story was worth the ride. And, to be fair, I did put “murder” in the title. And I did warn you.
All I can add is that, if we’re ever going to make progress on stopping cheating and defending academic integrity and rigor, we’ve got work to do. So much work.