U.S. Air Force Academy Expels 22, Sanctions 210 for Cheating

Plus, the NYT asks for cheating info and blows it. Plus, cheating on the Bar Exam.

Issue 110

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22 Air Force Academy Cadets Dismissed, More than 200 on Probation for Cheating

In 2020, the United States Air Force Academy busted 249 cadets for academic misconduct in what it called a “massive cheating scandal” (see Issue 4).

The Air Force cheating more or less corresponded with similar cheating incidents at the United States Military Academy at West Point (see Issue 20) and the United States Naval Academy, where 18 students were expelled (see Issue 49).

Now, the Air Force has announced it’s kicked 22 students out and put another 210 on probation, which involves sanctions. From the coverage:

The sudden switch to distance learning invited one of the most widespread spates of academic misconduct in the academy’s history. Away from campus, students sought help on unauthorized websites, plagiarized papers and collaborated on tests.

The reporting says that 231 of the 245 accused students admitted their misconduct and that the incidents represent 6% of the Academy’s enrollment. The story also says there were a total of 311 honor code violations in 2020-2021, which means the 249 in this bunch were not all of them.

This incident, the news coverage says:

became a wake-up call that the academy’s honor code needed a fresh look for the first time in several years.

I think so.

Moreover, if hundreds of students have been caught cheating at the nation’s most prestigious military academies - where honor codes are thought to have special significance - what’s actually happening elsewhere?

And does this spate of cheating at the military academies add more weight to the idea that honor codes simply don’t work to stop academic misconduct?

In that context, it’s noteworthy that the Air Force Academy says that since this incident, since they expelled 22 and put 210 on probation, honor code violations have dropped dramatically - from the mentioned 311 cases to just 44 this year.

Cheating on Bar Exams - Plural

Two stories hit at about the same time in recent days. Both incidents - one in Canada and one in Singapore - involve prospective lawyers cheating on their Bar Exams.

In Singapore, the state’s Attorney General intervened to delay six candidates from being sworn in as lawyers, citing cheating by collusion on a messaging service and plagiarizing papers. According to the coverage, the judge who withheld the admissions said,

When so many applicants cheated in a professional qualifying examination in so many papers, including one for ‘Ethics and professional responsibility’, then something is wrong somewhere.

And

Dishonesty and lack of probity are not the only vices in question in this matter. When a person resorts to cheating in an examination, it also reveals a lack of diligence, and a propensity to take shortcuts — neither of which are sound professional qualities.

The judge also questioned whether a “culture of cheating” existed at earlier stages of the applicants’ educational journey.

Good question.

Meanwhile, in Canada, the Law Society of Ontario has informed examinees that they are under investigation for exam misconduct. This follows an announcement that the exams that were to be online in March and April have been moved to in-person formats in July (see Issue 100).

The authorities in Canada said some examinees accessed exam materials before the exam and that:

the evidence points to the involvement of “third parties.”

NYT Makes Odd Call for Cheating Information, Gets it Wrong, Way Wrong.

A few days ago, The New York Times put out a very strange call for students who’d been accused of misconduct through use of a proctoring provider.

The problem is that what they say is wrong, which does not speak well of what may be to come.

For example, the headline in the little blurb is:

Did Student-Monitoring Software Accuse You of Cheating on a Test?

If you know anything about this, you know that “student-monitoring software” does not accuse anyone of anything. Accusations of misconduct are made - always - by faculty or school staff. What proctoring services do is weed through the test sessions to find the parts that merit review by teachers. It’s such an obvious, basic error in misunderstanding of what proctoring is and does that it’s impossible to excuse.

The writer - Kashmir Hill - is a technology and privacy writer, not an education writer. So, maybe it’s expected that she’s uniformed or misinformed. Or has a biased view. She describes proctoring as “a strange and potentially distressing new normal” even though it’s been used by millions of students over more than a decade.

Further, Hill lists some proctoring software companies - ProctorU, Honorlock and Proctorio - even though ProctorU got out of the software-only business nearly a year ago (see Issue 28).

Still further, the blurb says:

Sometimes the software gets it wrong. Some students who say they were mistakenly deemed cheaters have banded together and fought back.

I left the link in so you can see that the author is referring to the bungled incident at Dartmouth Medical School (see Issue 33).

The obvious problem is that “the software” didn’t get it wrong at Dartmouth Medical - Dartmouth did not use proctoring at all. Instead, Dartmouth Medical relied on data from the school’s learning management system to make their allegations, which they should never have done. Proctoring and learning management systems are two entirely different systems that do entirely different things.

In fact, had Dartmouth Medical used a proctoring service, they would not have been in the mess of making accusations then having to publicly drop them.

Even so, the NYT citing an example of (perhaps) “mistakenly” making cheating accusations to fault proctoring software, when the example never used proctoring software - that’s pretty special.

I used “perhaps” above because, as The New York Times itself reported when Dartmouth Medical School dropped the misconduct cases, they did not find that the students had not cheated. They were clear that the data they were using - again, not proctoring data - was not reliable enough to prove the cases. It’s clear even now that some misconduct happened.

Jump over and scan Issue 33 where I quote The Times, which literally reported:

some students may have cheated

That’s hardly “the software” getting it wrong. That’s The New York Times getting it wrong.

If that’s the baseline, I cannot wait to read the story.

ASU and Honor Lock

You may remember that much-ado-about-not-much story from a few weeks ago regarding exam security company Honor Lock and their use of fake or decoy websites (see Issue 96).

Back in January, the student paper at Arizona State University had a detailed look at the practice. It was their reporting that spun up the minor dust up. It’s a pretty good, well reported piece.

For example, I like this really rational approach from an ASU student who said,

If somebody really wants, they'll get your bike … But if you've got a decent lock, it's going to deter a good amount of people from trying it.

Exactly. That’s great.

Less great is this quote in the story from David Boyles, an instructor at ASU, who said,

If your test is easily cheated by someone searching Google, you made a bad test … You're doing a very surface-level assessment that requires very little of you as an instructor.

Blaming teachers for the conduct of their students never gets old.

According to the reporting, Boyles also added:

A more productive way of assessing students’ understanding would be to create assignments impossible to plagiarize or cheat on, projects that go beyond sheer recall

That’s naïve. There is no form of assessment that is “impossible to plagiarize or cheat on.” None.