University of Virginia Reduces Cheating Penalties

Plus, an important memo from University of California leaders. Plus, a French survey says 71% of students admit to cheating.

Issue 101

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University of Virginia Students Vote to Lower Penalties for Cheating

Yes, lower them.

Inside Higher Ed has the story.

Context is helpful.

Context One - The University of Virginia has what I call an actual honor code. That is one in which the majority - perhaps even total - enforcement and disposition of misconduct violations is done by students. In actual honor settings, professors may not even proctor their own in-person exams. They leave the room. Students are literally on their honor not to cheat and should misconduct happen, students are expected to report it.

This is vastly different than having an “honor code” or “integrity pledge” that students sign once a year.

There’s a lot to like about these actual honor setups. For one, they work. Research has shown that schools with actual honor codes and peer-to-peer enforcements do have reduced cheating rates. They don’t eliminate cheating - nothing does. But, the evidence supports some efficacy of their use. Probably.

On the downside, putting pressure on students to turn in their peers can feel draconian. And, with the explosion of cheating by collusion on social media and messaging services, it takes only two willing and silent participants to render a true honor code moot. Moreover, with cheating services such as Chegg and Course Hero, you don’t even need a conspirator. If you cheat, by yourself, on an unproctored remote exam, a willingness to trade your honor for an easy A is all that’s required.

As such, it’s likely that when these true honor codes were created - in most cases more than a century ago - professors or students could not conceive of being able to get custom essays written in hours or the answers to a chemistry test in minutes - all anonymously. In other words, it’s an open question whether true honor codes such as the one at UVA are suited to the modern age of misconduct.

Context Two - By any reasonable standard, the UVA code was harsh. A single offense meant expulsion.

To me, the certainty and severity of their code carried with it the gravity of the subject. Even though every school on the planet says how seriously they take academic integrity, at the University of Virginia, I believed it.

Context Three - Even at UVA, most reports of academic misconduct came from faculty, not students. And when reports did come from students, those cases were very likely to sidestep serious consequence. Only 12% of incidents reported by students resulted in a sanction.

Then there is the data showing that, when penalties were applied at UVA, they fell disproportionally on racial minorities.

In other words, even though Virginia had a real honor code and steep penalties, it’s not clear how well it was actually working. It’s also not clear that revising its penalties downward was the answer to whatever the question was.

Even so, within those context points, an adjustment to the code - allowing for suspensions and a return to school - makes sense. Virginia had been using a cannon battery to deal with what is increasingly complex, sophisticated and nuanced.

Still, given that we are in the middle of an unprecedented era of cheating, lowering the penalties for cheating is not a good look. Even though having more options is good, something about students deciding to lower the consequences they place on themselves just feels off.

University of California Provides Important Briefing on Cheating

Yesterday, the Office of the President for the University of California system delivered a memo on academic integrity and misconduct.

The Cal System, as you probably know, is both large and influential. It spans ten campuses and has nearly 300,000 enrolled students. People do pay attention to what it does and says.

The memo outlines what several of their schools are doing to address misconduct and has some other important notes. One, is that Cal is apparently not buying the soggy idea that incidents of cheating may or may not be increasing. Their report says they aim to address:

how the pandemic led to increased academic misconduct violations, and ways to reassert this critical university value post-pandemic.

Not whether the pandemic led to increased misconduct, but how. And not that the pandemic led to more reports of misconduct, but that it led to increased violations.

Good. No one is going to address any problem by endlessly debating whether it exists. This one exists.

After reviewing some of the integrity education and intervention efforts that their schools have undertaken, the memo also says:

While these approaches to advancing academic integrity and addressing student misconduct can be useful during normal circumstances and when individual students are cheating occasionally, these approaches were less successful in handling large-scale occurrences of academic dishonestly during an educational and social crisis, specifically the COVID-19 pandemic.

Again - yes. What schools have been doing is not working.

The memo also touches on the spike in cheating cases at University of California, Berkeley, which were up 3x during the pandemic (see Issue 34). And based on the newest numbers, they are actually up 4x - from 300 reports of misconduct in 2018-19 to 1,318 in 2020-21. A “significant portion” of that increase, the Cal folks say, is:

attributed to the use of these commercial sites that facilitated academic misconduct.

You may want to read the whole memo. But if you don’t, there are two other bits you should roll over. One:

Prior strategies to provide multiple, lower-stakes assessments as a way to reduce academic misconduct may have been less effective during the pandemic when frequent testing created work overload or burnout. In addition, there was a greater disconnect or social distance between faculty and students and the use of multiple, unproctored assessments might have created more opportunities for cheating.

It’s baffled me that during this ongoing cheating crisis so many people have offered that more, lower-stakes assessments are a solution when research on the topic is absent. Moreover, what research is available supports the opposite - that lowering the value of assessments makes them more likely to be compromised, not less. If something is of limited value, students reason, there’s little consequence and little risk to cheating it. If it’s not that important to their grade, it’s not that important.

Moreover - and I cannot underline this in a bright enough highlighter - here are leaders of the California system saying that “the use of multiple, unproctored assessments” may have “created more opportunities for cheating.”

Yes. Again, yes.

And finally, the memo goes back to the well on cheating profiteers:

Campuses reported the increase in academic misconduct cases was associated with the influence and impact of commercial sites that facilitated academic misconduct. These services advertised homework help, exam prep, and writing support that could make a student’s life easier

Yes - again - these cheating companies are a real problem. They don’t sell “help,” they sell cheating.

For more on misconduct and the California system, see Issue 58.

Anyway, the memo is important and worth knowing about. Big kudos to the leaders at Cal for writing it and sharing it.

French Survey Says 71% of Students Admit to Cheating

With the usual caveats that surveys of students tend to undercount misconduct, a new survey in France shows that 70.5% of students “have cheated at some stage in their education.”

The survey is by “French academics” Pascal Guibert and Christophe Michaut.

The translated article is a bit dicey to unpack but here are some bits that appear to make sense. The headline finding:

The poll asked 1,815 university students whether they broke the rules at any stage in their education so far.

In total, 70.5% said they had cheated at one point or another.

And:

More than two-thirds of students admit they cheat in exams

And, as we’ve seen in other research:

The researchers found cheating became a habit - those who did it at university had started at early stages in their education.

According to the study, pupils often shared the workload and ideas among each other during the test, or took notes or mobile phones into the exam room.

One respondent told the researchers: "I cheat [at university] because the amount of information we are expected to learn is huge. The benefits outweigh the risks and the chances of being detected are very slim."

Yep. Risks and rewards - rewards are good, risk is low.

Connecticut Police Recruits Fired for Cheating

News from the Nutmeg State is that eight state police recruits have been “fired” for incidents of “alleged cheating and plagiarism.” What they are accused of doing was not specified but there was, it seems, enough evidence to dismiss them.

Col. Stavros Mellekas was quoted in the news coverage,

This was a very unfortunate set of circumstances and allegations such as these are not taken lightly. From start to finish, we demand that our recruits maintain the integrity of the Connecticut State Police

It seems so.