ELearning/Teaching online/Academic dishonesty

Cheating (using illegitimate means to obtain answers and content, plagiarism, and fabrication) is a fact of life for colleges and universities. The proportion of students who admit to cheating in one form or another hovers near 100%. Many believe it to be a reflection of American society – the "cheating culture" (Callahan, 2004). Others say we need to rethink cheating and what it means (Clinchy, 2003).

We will leave this argument to others and concentrate on strategies to discourage these practices. We need to understand up front that there is no magic bullet, but rather a series of actions and behaviors that cumulatively suppress the motivation and opportunity for cheating.

The how, who and why of cheating

Take a minute to review this big-picture look at cheating.

How to encourage cheating

Many practices we may consider normal actually encourage or make it easier for students to cheat. Do you see yourself in any of these?

• Include only two or three high-stakes exams or assignments to determine course grades.
• Create exams that are really difficult - word gets around.
• Leave students guessing. Use very general learning objectives. Provide incomplete instructions.
• Use the same assignments and exams year after year.
• Use only multiple choice and short answer exam items.
• Allow students as much time as they want to complete exams.
• Create assignments that require only the repetition of knowledge and information.
• Trust your students completely; never check for plagiarism.
• Use publisher test bank questions only.
• Concentrate only on the final products of student work, not the process.
• Never mention cheating to students.
• Focus on competition and grades, rather than support and mastery.

How students cheat online

• Hiring a proxy or tutor to take exams and write papers
• Buying term papers and exam answers
• Paraphrasing material without citation
• Copying verbatim from texts, other students, websites
• Making false excuses to delay assignments
• Making false excuses to retake exams
• Texting or calling friends for answers
• Opening the book, finding the answers
• Searching the web, finding the answers
• Buying the instructor's edition of the textbook
• Playing audio files, set to repeat, stored on music players
• Learning the right buzzwords to use
• Creating cribnotes/cheatsheets for quick reference
• "Fudging" learning disabilities
• Taking the exam together (in the same place)
• Writing papers together, submitting as one's own
• Altering data (e.g., to obtain significant results)
• Fabricating data (making it up)
• Submitting a paper written for one course and again for a different course

Find more at: Cheat-On-a-Test

Who cheats?

1. Who cheats? Students admitting to cheating at least once.

There is little doubt that cheating is widespread and has increased over the years. Researchers have looked at additional characteristics of cheaters, most of which you will likely not find surprising.

• 95% of high school students say they have cheated at least once (Howell, 2010).
• 80% of undergraduate students say they have cheated at least once while in college (Howell, 2010).
• Cheating among undergraduate college students has increased significantly over the years (1963 = 39%; 1993 = 64%; 2008 = 80%) (Howell, 2010).
• 47% of graduate students say they have cheated at least once while in grad school (Howell, 2010).
• Cheating tends to be more prevalent on larger campuses (McCabe et. al., 2001).
• Business majors are more likely to cheat (91% vs. 71% for natural science majors) (McCabe et. al., 2001).
• Fraternity and sorority members are more likely to cheat (66% unaffiliated, 82% affiliated, 90% resident) (McCabe & Bowers, 2009).
• Males admit to cheating more than females (69% vs. 47%), although within similar majors, gender differences are small (Athanasou & Olabisi, 2002; McCabe et. al., 2001).
• Younger students tend to cheat more than older students (McCabe et. al., 2001).
• Students with lower GPAs report more cheating than those with higher GPAs (McCabe et. al., 2001).

Why they cheat

There are a large number of reasons students cite for cheating, but we can reduce the number to two, intentional and unintentional.

Intentional Cheating

A few of the more popular reasons cited in the literature (Callahan, 2004):

• "Success is purely numeric. Students are obsessed with their grades and are driven relentlessly to succeed."
• "More than ever, students (and their parents) seek to emulate those who win the 'top prizes' and the accompanying disproportionate rewards."
• "The world isn't fair and sometimes to get where you want you have to sacrifice some integrity."
• "I figure a percentage of students are cheating …, so I might as well cheat once in a while to help myself."
• Rising income gaps and rising education costs impose serious pressures to succeed.
• High probability of success; low probability of consequences.
• Large class size; over 50 students (Anderman & Won, 2017).
• Time pressures; overwhelming workloads. Homework doesn't seem to be the problem, though. Arum & Roksa (2011) report that college students spend an average of just 12 hours of studying per week, ranging from under ten hours for Business majors to nearly 15 hours for Science and Mathematics majors. This compares to average study times of 24 hours in 1961 and almost 17 hours in 1981 (O'Brien, 2010).
• Students are more likely to cheat in courses they dislike (mostly required math and science courses), especially risk taking personality types (Anderman & Won, 2017).

Unintentional Cheating

While it can be said that many or most students who plagiarize do so intentionally, the case can be made that some students do not understand what plagiarism really is. This may be especially true for freshman level students and others new to college.

How to discourage cheating

As mentioned earlier, there is no one tactic that will eliminate cheating. Indeed, it may be impossible to totally eliminate it. Rather, there are a number of tactics that when used in combination, will significantly reduce the motivation and opportunity for students to cheat.

General strategies

This set of strategies focuses on creating an atmosphere that encourages academic honesty and discourages cheating. It is best approached from a department perspective; ideally the University as a whole. Individual instructors, however, can and do impact their domains.

• As part of your course introduction, inform students of what you consider cheating and the consequences for infraction.
  • Assign a video discussing the forms of cheating that may arise in your course. You can create your own, use a video from Films on Demand or one you like from the Internet. Keywords: cheating, plagiarizing.
  • Assign students to a plagiarism tutorial and/or a "cheating quiz". View an example at the University of Texas
  • Create a reading assignment followed by a discussion centered on cheating and its consequences.
  • Ask students to read and sign an Honor Code. Surveys conducted in 1990, 1995, and 1999, involving over 12,000 students on 48 different campuses, demonstrate the impact of honor codes and student involvement in the control of academic dishonesty. Serious exam cheating on campuses with honor codes is typically 1/3 to 1/2 lower than the level on campuses that do not have honor codes. The level of serious cheating on written assignments is 1/4 to 1/3 lower (McCabe et. al., 2001).
• Use fewer exams and more assignments and graded discussions.
• Use strategies to create a supportive learning community. Students, especially the low-achieving, who respect their instructors and feel a sense of belonging, are less likely to cheat (Anderman, 2007).
• Balance focus on mastery and performance. "Students with mastery orientation seek to improve their competence. Those with performance orientations seek to prove their competence" (Schraw, 1998). Eighty percent of students should master 80% of the material.

Assignments

• Assign different versions of the same assignment using Group Manager in the learning management system (LMS).
• Use a plagiarism detection service and create assignments using the service. TurnItIn and SafeAssign for Blackboard are two that contract with institutions. There are also services for individual subscribers, plus free tools for academics available for download. Sourceforge is a very reliable source.
• Segment important assignments into milestones (e.g., proposal, outline, initial draft, revisions, and final submission).
• Create group assignments that include grading both individual contribution and a group product.

Tests, exams, and quizzes

• Use formative assessments (e.g., ungraded self-tests, low-stakes quizzes) to help students self-monitor their learning and prepare for exams.
• Before exams
  • Provide study guides
  • Offer help sessions
• Create new makeup exams rather than use the original version.
• Require proctored exams. ProctorU is the most prevalent service for institutions. You can also create a policy in which students locate their own proctors, who sign an agreement to provide the exam, proctor the student, and return the completed exam.
• Make exams not too hard and not too easy. Advertising how difficult your tests are is an invitation to cheat.
• Create open-book exams.
• Use more constructed response questions (e.g., essay, short-answer, fill-in-the-blank) and fewer multiple-choice questions.
• Use more authentic assessments (assignments in which students perform real-world tasks). See the Authentic Assessment Toolbox or refer to the Assessments article.

Specific measures within the LMS

• Randomize the order of assessment questions and the order of question answers (multiple-choice only).
• Create a large pool of questions (question sets) and create assessments that randomly select the number of questions you indicate.
• Allow only one question to be viewed at a time.
• Do not allow revisiting exam questions.
• Include a strict cutoff time (disallow answer submission if time has expired).
• Increase the ratio of questions to minutes (e.g., more questions in the same amount of time).
• Require a password that you provide via LMS messages or mail.

Conclusion

Efforts to eliminate cheating purely through technological means are bound to fail. There will always be hackers who view such measures as challenges, and when they find the "hole" they can share it. Your best strategy is to emphasize honesty and honor while taking common sense technical measures for those who are most inclined to cheat.

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