Yale. Yikes.

Plus, cheating is "Big Business." Plus, The Alligator gets Course Hero on the record.

Issue 106

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81 Students in a Single Yale Course Cited for Cheating

Not even two weeks ago, Issue 104 had two stories on academic integrity at Yale University.

You may want to review them because this week the student newspaper carried news about 81 students in a single Introduction to Biological Anthropology class who were referred to the school’s academic integrity committee for misconduct. There were 136 students in the class. That’s 60%.

The details are pretty stunning.

The alleged cheating took place on the final exam, which was online, unproctored and open book and open note. Many professors and other educators mistakenly think cheating can be mitigated by giving open book, open note tests. And although the students were told - twice - that they were not allowed to cut-and-paste from books or Internet sources, many apparently did.

In any case, there are a few details about this Yale story that are jaw-dropping.

One is that, according the news coverage, this particular class:

was structured around nine short, open-note quizzes administered during class but completed via [the online learning system].

Yale has a class where the assessment system is nine, open-note quizzes and an online, open-note, unproctored final exam. Yale.

Another thing I can’t get my head around is that, according to the reporting, it was only after the professor noticed some similar answers from students that she ran the student responses through the plagiarism detection software Turnitin. After.

In other words, those open-note quizzes administered through the learning management system did not even use a plagiarism checker. At Yale. Whatever is one level up from astounded, that’s where I am.

And still - still! - in a course with just nine, short open-note quizzes with no plagiarism prevention tools and an online, open-note final, 60% of students have been nabbed for cheating. At Yale.

Those who follow academic integrity understand that cheating was probably so common in this course precisely because it was so easy, so passive and permissive. People cheat when they think no one cares and when they think no one is watching.

The other bullet point from this Yale debacle is that, if you look for cheating, you’re likely to find it. The only reason educators can honestly say that cheating doesn’t exist is because they don’t want to find it.

Issue 104 from two weeks ago quotes the Chair of Yale’s English Department saying she’s encountered exactly no cheating whatsoever. I said at the time that Yale was dramatically undercounting and under-addressing the proliferation of misconduct. That was obvious.

And here we are - this single incident in this single Yale class, these 81 cases are more than the total number of cases “reported” misconduct at the entire school in all of 2020.

Cheating is Big Business

The outlet Inside Sources, which ran an absurd piece on academic integrity a few weeks ago (see Issue 104), ran another piece recently - this one by an executive at Meazure Learning/ProctorU, a major provider of remote exam proctoring.

The title is:

Cheating in College Is Big Business and a Big Problem

It is.

The premise is straight-forward:

Around the world, companies are making billions of dollars selling test answers, trading tests, hawking pre-written essays or writing entirely new work for students. There are even people who can, for a fee, take entire classes or take a student’s tests.

True.

Here’s another snippet from the piece:

Some cheating companies have millions of subscribers. Some of them are publicly traded entities posing as student support services. They spend millions on ads and on social media, messaging students directly saying “you deserve to have fun” or “being a student is so stressful” or “your teacher is terrible.” All this is to make cheating logical, normal and easy. Oh, and to make money.

Also true.

It’s a strong piece and worth a read.

IHE, Community College Dean on Cheating Policy(ies)

Matt Reed is the VP for Academic Affairs at Brookdale Community College (NJ) and the writer/owner of a space at Inside Higher Ed (IHE) - Confessions of a Community College Dean. It’s consistently good.

A week or two ago, Reed wrote about his school’s efforts to visit and adjust their academic integrity policies, and a related discussion among faculty.

Reed writes:

Another [faculty member] suggested that the enforcement metaphor already gives the game away; if we just trusted students, cheating wouldn’t be an issue. I agree at some level that if we have to resort to sanctions, something has already gone awry. But my own reading of human psychology isn’t quite sunny enough to assume that if we got rid of all rules, we’d get rid of all bad behavior. At a basic level, I just don’t buy it.

Good for Reed. He should not buy it. No one should.

The idea that trusting students is a cure for cheating is like suggesting that people drive dangerously because there are traffic police - if we just trusted people to drive better, everything would be fine. We don’t need to lock the doors at banks. If we just trusted people, no one would steal.

Some members of academia do think this way and it stuns me every time I see it.

Reed continues that there’s a difference between “sloppy citation” and buying a paper from an essay mill and that enforcement regimes should recognize it. I agree. Frankly, if the student is making an honest effort, I never consider “sloppy citation” to be cheating.

This paragraph is also noteworthy:

I suspect most agree that prevention is vastly preferable to punishment. I was heartened to see some of the methods that people use to prevent cheating. The most effective and attractive ways involve building assignments that are both intrinsically engaging and customized. If students are intrinsically motivated, the rest pretty much takes care of itself; at worst, you might get some mistakes of enthusiasm. To the extent that it’s possible to craft assignments that way, of course, I’m all for it. But the idea that you can engage all of the people, all of the time, in every class, just isn’t plausible. There are too many variables. Some safeguards are necessary.

Yes - 100%.

In a class of five students, where teacher and student work together closely, academic work and evaluations can be customized, rich, nuanced and engaging. Misconduct would be implausible. And we all want that.

But just like dreaming that simply trusting students is any answer at all, the idea that better assignments will eliminate cheating is pure fantasy - especially at any kind of scale. It - as Reed says - “just isn’t plausible.”

The piece is good and worth reviewing. Reed addresses remote exam proctoring fairly and accurately and touches on the reporting of incidents of misconduct. “It’s clear that many are not,” he says.

Anyway, it’s good.

University of Florida Covers Course Hero Lawsuit

The Alligator, the student paper at the University of Florida, ran a story recently about the professor in California who sued his students who used Course Hero to cheat. The suit was aimed at revealing their identity because Course Hero refused to assist in the investigation into misconduct (see Issue 102).

Personally, though it’s a smidge misleading, I love the headline:

Coursehero could earn students a lawsuit

It opens with this:

Popular websites and study tools like Chegg and Course Hero have been a saving grace for many students’ grades.

The story correctly and seamlessly connects using cheating sites such as Chegg and Course Hero and the “normal repercussions for cheating and honor code violations.”

That’s probably because, and I cannot stress this enough, students know full well what these sites are and what they do. They are in on the joke that these are education companies. Literally everyone - except a few professors here and there - knows this.

I should not be so quick to assume, perhaps. Those who stand with Course Hero may in fact know what they do - they just may not care.

Either way, the Alligator story is significant because it’s the first time I’ve seen Course Hero specifically on the record saying they won’t identify students who use their site - even if it’s to investigate cheating or copyright violations:

Users’ identities are protected under their privacy policies, Jamie Soper, Course Hero spokesperson, wrote in an email. Course Hero must receive a subpoena before releasing any information, like the names of users posting the infringing content, to the copyright holder. 

So there you go. Course Hero says, ‘if you think students are improperly sharing your intellectual property and/or paying us to cheat and you want our help - buzz off. Sue us.’

Nice.