"We Often Haven’t Known How Much Cheating is Occurring"
Plus, observing a problem in Charlotte. Plus, EY gets more time to understand their $100 million exam cheating problems.
Issue 202
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Opinion: ChatGPT Exposes Long Largess on Cheating
Inside Higher Ed ran an opinion piece from Frank Vahid last week. Vahid is professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, Riverside.
It’s a good piece and, for my money, pretty accurate.
Vahid writes:
for some 20 years now, we really haven’t known who is doing homework, and most of us haven’t sufficiently revamped our classes to deal with that.
The rise of the internet in the 1990s and 2000s led to dozens of online homework solution sites that appear at the top of web search results and have become legitimized in students’ eyes. Google’s phone app has “Solve homework” as the third search option just after “Shop” and “Translate,” and university bookstores upsell students on those sites with offers like, “Get homework done fast!”
True.
He did not, but I will, name a few - Chegg, Course Hero and Bartleby, which is owned by Barnes & Noble, which runs hundreds of campus bookstores. Those are just a few of the thousands of sites that provide the same services, all universally accessible, all virtually anonymous.
I’ll also add - and Vahid does include - that it’s not just homework that’s being cheated for money. It’s easy to find people to take tests for you or even complete entire online classes and programs. All you have to do is pay them.
He says the Internet also:
gave students anonymous classmate access on apps like Discord or GroupMe, where solution trading occurs at a pace akin to the New York Stock Exchange trading floor.
Yup. All true.
Then there’s this:
Many professors may not be aware of how much cheating is actually happening in their classes. In an analysis I’ve done at professors’ requests, we found one large California university’s introductory computer science class had a 60 percent rate of blatant copying on at-home programming assignments. At another college, we found that every student in a 30-student computer science class was clearly copying their programs—every single one. It’s not just one subject and not just homework: a student in a biology class told me that nobody was learning because the professor reuses their quizzes and the solutions are all online. High cheating rates today are common across all disciplines.
Tell me about it.
He says students cheat because they feel they have to, because “professors don’t do much to prevent it.” He quotes a “common rationalization” among students:
“If professors get to be lazy, so do we.”
The article touches on why AI text-generation is such a problem, especially in computer classes. After which, Vahid writes clearly:
The first step is to realize that we have a problem, and it’s not a new one. ChatGPT just magnifies it.
We do have a problem.
He also offers solutions including proctored assessments, requiring students to show their work and, crucially:
More aggressively seeking and punishing cheating, ideally to prevent it—nobody speeds right past a cop.
He’s right about all three.
And this part, I absolutely love:
Through research that we’ve conducted at the University of California, Riverside, we’ve found a few low-effort prevention methods can yield some success. We regularly show our cheat-detection tools to the class
I love it because it’s true - simply telling a class that you’re aware that cheating exists, and sharing that you’re looking for it, will deter a sizable portion of misconduct attempts. When the risk goes up, the attempts go down. It is among the easiest prevention tools in the universe. When coupled with a review of integrity policies, our author found they:
have reduced cheating rates from 30 percent to 10 percent in our large computer science classes.
He adds further that other solutions should include:
spending some reasonable percentage of teaching time seeking out and addressing cheating cases, which many professors today simply don’t do.
Looking ahead, we need to develop new approaches that automatically detect whether a particular student actually did the work themselves, such as comparing their homework with their proctored exams or identifying each student’s distinct patterns. How can we do that? By basically using AI to fight AI, or at least to better manage it.
He’s right about that too - and it’s already happening. AI detection tools are now nearly universally available to schools and educators, and many are already in learning management systems.
It’s a great piece and well worth reading and sharing.
Quick kudos to Inside Higher Ed for running the article. With their horrible record on academic integrity, it’s nice to see them acknowledge that cheating happens and that it’s a problem.
Charlotte’s Web of Cheating Content
The Charlotte Observer is a real newspaper.
And it has a real problem.
A “reporter” named Robert James - who almost certainty does not exist - has been “writing” articles on their website for some time. James has articles hawking nutrition supplements, hearing aids and essay writing services. Sometimes he posts several similar articles in the same day, within minutes of one another, all with the same links to “high quality hearing aids” or “essay writing alternatives,” and all with suspiciously proficient SEO headlines.
I contacted editors at the Observer and they said they’re looking into it - the blatant selling of cheating services on their digital property, under their masthead. When I inquired, the bio for Mr. James said he was:
a full-time freelance writer and editor specializing in the health niche and its ever-expanding sub-niches. As a food and nutrition scientist, he knows where to find the resources necessary to verify health claims.
Which, I noted, makes him an expert on essay writing services.
Originally, I thought the Observer’s website had been hacked, hijacked by cheating sellers to place ads within credible sites and juice their SEO. That happens (see Issue 9).
But now the James bio also includes:
McClatchy’s newsrooms were not involved in the creation of this content. We may earn a commission if you make a purchase through one of our links.
That’s not better. And it means that the Observer and McClatchy may be earning commissions when students use essay mills to defraud schools. Pretty amazing, if you ask me.
But it’s a bigger problem than that because having links to cheating sites on the Observer website does not just boost search rankings. Observer links are blindly syndicated by other news outlets. Here’s one of James’s cheating articles reprinted by the MSN news outlet. The MSN version very credibly says the article is:
Story by Robert James, The Charlotte Observer
Even though James does not work there. Or perhaps even exist.
The biggest problem though is that it’s further evidence that cheating providers are playing a different game than professors or universities. Cheating links are in credible news outlets, repeated and syndicated. Cheating sellers are apparently paying front-line news organizations - while schools rely on honor codes and quibble over whether to use plagiarism or authenticity tools.
If the Observer responds or makes further changes, I will provide an update.
EY Gets More Time to Fix Exam Cheating
In Issue 131, back last June, we shared the large, $100 million fine slapped on accounting and auditing firm EY for allowing employees to cheat on certification exams. The firm knew its auditors were cheating on CPA exams, including exams on ethics.
No, really.
As part of the settlement and fine, EY agreed to an outside audit of the issue - an audit of the auditors. That review was due in March and it’s not finished. EY asked for an extension to get their homework done, an extension they received.
If you can get past the obnoxious ads, go over and read that article. It’s incredible.