At the beginning of most class sessions, as students are coming into the room and getting prepared for that day’s work, we make small talk. One particular day we discussed college football. I asked the semi-random question of the students who were present at the time: “if a player on Team A fouls a player on Team B (pulls a face mask, throws a punch) behind the referee’s back, should Team A be penalized?”
The answer was a resounding, “no!” Because, the students stated, that behavior is just a part of the game. They recognized the behavior as being against the rules of the sport, and they realized that Player A shouldn’t have committed the foul, but since the referee didn’t see it, it didn’t matter. It’s almost as if the foul never happened. Getting away with those punches is an unwritten parts of the game, they reasoned. But that was football, a game. What about academics? For these students on this particular day, cheating in school and cheating on the gridiron were about the same: neither really mattered unless you were caught.
Students today live in a world of brazen and well-paid cheaters. Why shouldn’t they think it’s OK to cheat? Students cheat for a variety of reasons, and some are easy to understand. They cheat because they are fearful, they have not managed their time well, and they often believe that the act of cheating really doesn’t matter (or that no one will ever know) in the artificial world of academia. Increasingly, students believe that “everyone does it” and if they don’t cheat they’ll be behind (for college admissions or in the search for jobs) those who do. Cheating, many believe, levels the playing field. In the race to get ahead (to mix metaphors), cheating becomes an unwritten rule of the game.
David Callahan, in his 2004 book The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, blames academic cheating (and certainly other types of cheating as well) on the “exceptionalism of America” and that “the American Dream ethos that dominates U.S. culture–an ethos at once intensely optimistic and brutally unforgiving” pushes us (students) to cheat, in order to get ahead (125). We often think we are exceptional, that rules do not apply to us. Students think this about themselves, too.
Dozens–if not hundreds–of websites exist to provide students ways to cheat. One video explains, in significant detail, ways to cheat on an exam. To be fair, though, the video has the disclaimer: “for educational purposes only.” Indeed, there is even actually a Facebook group that describes “cheating strategies.”
In 2008, Donald McCabe, a professor of management at Rutgers University found in a study on cheating behaviors that “a whopping 95 percent of high school students say they’ve cheated during the course of their education, ranging from letting somebody copy their homework to test-cheating.” The number is as high as 75 percent for college students. If these statistics are true–and there is no reason to doubt them–then we have cheaters in our college classrooms.
As with other ProfHacker articles, we don’t offer a definitive solution about this growing problem. We present a situation and then we ask you: What do we do about students who cheat? What do we do about the culture of cheating?
Please leave suggestions / opinions / thoughts in comments below.
[Image by Flickr user Mr. Stein; licensed under creative commons]
15 Comments
I have the good fortune to teach in an academic discipline (music history) in which cheating is comparatively irrelevant to issues of student assessment. On the studio-performance side of things, it’s not possible for a student to “cheat” his/her way into having the musical/instrumental/vocal skills required to pass a weekly music lesson. On the academic/history/music-theory side, it is still comparatively impossible for a student to “fake” or cheat his/her way into a passing grade. Here are some ways we cope:
1) we use multiple iterations of assessment: 3 exams, 5 quizzes, 6-10 online assignments, a writing project in 6 assessed stages, plus in-class attendance and participation. We do this with sections of 80-100 students and 2 TA’s in addition to the instructor of record. It is not much possible for a student to “cheat” his/her way through so many separate assessments.
2) we of course take all the appropriate stages to “control text security” in the classroom and in online testing.
3) we require students themselves to “maintain their own test security”–telling students during a quiz or test that if they observe someone else cheating, they are enjoined to report that behavior in order to protect their own academic ethics.
4) we talk about ethics and right-conduct. In fact, I use the analogy of music lessons and ensemble rehearsals, saying “well, you couldn’t cheat your way through a rehearsal, could you? If you did, you’d get cut and somebody else would take your place.” We also articulate, early and often, that “cheating” is a fast track to failure in acquiring the skills for success in the professional world of music.
5) we frame ethics versus cheating as an issue of peer respect and peer pressure, saying that “somebody who is cheating, or talking, or texting, or otherwise misbehaving during a class or lecture is taking something from you; don’t let them do it!” We find that, often, students who either passively accept cheating, or even engage in it themselves, would actually prefer not to, if they feel empowered by their teachers and by their learning situations to resist unethical behavior.
6) finally, we model these behaviors. Young people, as the above article makes clear, are not given clear messages about the social, community, and personal damage wrought by unethical behavior. But we operate from a presumption that, at some level, even students who have been given bad or no messages about ethical behavior actually will respond favorably and constructively to more positive role modeling.
CJS– Thanks for the extended comment. Seriously. I appreciate all the work you and your colleagues put into the ethics of what you do. I wonder if your discipline has something to do with the likelihood that your students will follow your example? Please know that I don’t mean that any snarky way. Students who are musicians typically WANT to take music courses and they see those courses beneficial to their future careers. (OK, I’m not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, so I might have completely misunderstood students in this field.) As someone who teaches writing– typically a required course– students cheat because they don’t care about what we do in that course . . . I have found, like you, that multiple assessment is key to keeping some of the cheating under control.
I’m at a loss for what to do about the culture of cheating, so I don’t know if I can offer any helpful commentary in that regard. Most of what I try to do is to make my assignments and exams cheat-resistant. Here are some actions that I take toward this end. Please note that I’m in philosophy, and so not everything I do will be universally useful.
(1) Give assignments and exams that are not easily cheated upon. - Long term papers and essay questions are especially good for this purpose. It is hard to fake a good answer on an essay question for an exam, and especially an essay question that is both a clever question and is not re-used from a very recently-gone by semester. It is good to have a number of questions on file for this purpose. - Require that part of the student’s grade come from participation, which is more or less not possible to fake. Require them to speak up during class, and give thoughtful comments. Instructors can distinguish between a thoughtful comment that advances the discussion and a frivolous comment that doesn’t. - Require a presentation to be done. Again, much like in-class participation, this will be difficult to fake. - Ask students to write on a fairly well-defined set of topics, and ask unique, clever questions – not general questions that have answers readily available on the web.
(2) Require that assignments and papers be turned and checked against an electronic database, e.g., Turnitin.com or SafeAssign. It is very likely not foolproof, but it automates a great deal of the work of looking for plagiarism. It further allows you to more easily provide students with feedback, which may in turn help them to view their work as something other than a throwaway. And it saves trees!
(3) Have a well-defined grading rubric that makes it clear that the baseline of competent but not exceptional work is not an A. It could be instead a B or a B-. Make it clear that they have to somehow put in extra, authentic effort to make their work stand out in order to get an A. In philosophy, for example, this could be an exceptionally interesting way of analyzing an argument, or bringing up an original criticism of an argument, or making a unique, sharp distinction that does real philosophical work.
(4) Follow a lot of common sense cheat-foiling rules at exam time. Watch for people getting up and leaving the room, don’t let people sit diagonally behind someone else if at all possible, look for people sneaking a peek at their cellphones, don’t allow students to have backpacks, water bottles, food, or other material on or near their desk when taking an exam, keep an eye on people who have their heads down and might be staring at things written on their arms or clothing, etc. Not an exhaustive list, obviously.
(5) Be proactive in researching cheating techniques. Students are inventive at c, but not all that great at secrecy. As the original post indicates, a lot of information on what students do may be gained by simply going out and looking for it.
Justin– I agree: the type of assignment one creates has a lot to do with the type of cheating (or if any cheating) occurs in a classroom. I strive very hard to have different writing assignments each time I teach a course. As CJS noted above, also having multiple assessments helps (drafts, peer reviews, etc.) keeps a student on track with writing — but as you say, it’s not foolproof. I just really hate (seriously hate) having to think like a cheater . . . to stay one step ahead of students who cheat.
I talk about plagiarism and other forms of cheating extensively in the history methods class and senior seminar that I teach. In all courses save the survey of American history, my strategy for limiting plagiarism is to make cheating more costly in terms of time and energy than writing the paper oneself. To do this, I require students to submit numerous bits of information along the path to the paper: a preliminary topic statement, preliminary bibliography, primary source worksheets, working introduction, annotated bibliography, first draft, and so on. My theory is that this teaches them how to build a solid paper, thus making the writing process a bit less daunting AND making it more difficult to cheat. Certainly it would be time-consuming to purchase a paper and deconstruct it to provide info for all of the stages above. But it’s also tough to sneak materials/ideas into the paper that didn’t appear at an earlier stage. (Hmm, you’ve chosen to cite an unusual secondary source here; how/when did you pick it? OR This is an interesting insight, but I’m wondering why you wrote a discussion of X when your paper outline and working introduction suggested that your research would emphasize Y.) It’s not a perfect system, but I adopted it after failing one-third of a methods class for plagiarism of various sorts. I now use Turnitin, even though most of the content similarities that it detects are unobjectionable. I should add that I don’t really grade most of the stages; I check them off as submitted, which takes little time.
I don’t talk to my students about the ethics – that’s pointless. Morality is subjective. Students cheat b/c they can and they perceive benefit if they get away with it.
If you remove the benefit, and you punish it, you will have fewer problems. I make all students read our dishonesty and plagiarism policy, make them sign a form that states they have read and understood the policy.
When I catch someone plagiarizing, I don’t putz around – I give them a zero. My written assignments are not in depth and very short, and use web-based sources. I usually catch people that plagiarize by copy/pasting a well written sentence from their papers in Google. I also make them aware that I’ll use “Turnitin.com”, though I rarely have had to do so. (Turnitin is a pain to use, IMHO).
Cheating on quizzes and exams is more difficult to catch and stop, but I make sure during a test to walk around the room a lot. And I’ll casually mention to the class that they should not let their eyes wander if I see something. When long written answers are essentially duplicates on students sitting next to each other – I give them a written warning. So far, I’ve not had to repeat warnings. However, I have small classes and our student population is rather small (word gets around fast). I’m sure it’s more difficult with 100+ students.
If you state you have a zero tolerance policy, and you back it up – students will respect it more and be less likely to cheat. If you hem and haw, you won’t get anywhere.
Something that hasn’t been mention here– and something I only have anecdotal information about– is the professor’s reputation when she/he turns students in for cheating. On one hand, the department / university is appeased, as none of us want cheaters receiving degrees from our institutions. On the other hand, however (and this is the anecdotal story I have), professors can be blackballed by students and those courses don’t fill. An acquaintance told me this story a few days ago: s/he teaches a grad course in a science-type discipline. One semester s/he caught several cheaters using eBay-type services (“bid on this job I have” and the job was completing a difficult assignment). The professor caught the cheaters, turned them in, and they were dropped from the grad program. According to this professor, no other grad student will take courses from her/him. The junior faculty member feels that s/he was the one to suffer by outing the cheaters.
Of course this person did the right thing. I don’t think anyone on ProfHacker would argue with that. I just wanted to raise the issue that there are, well, other issues at stake.
This is why, as an administrator, I try to get adjunct faculty to pull me into the plagiarism loop ASAP. If they suspect something, I want to know. They handle it on their end, but they also tell students to see me if they have questions or want to challenge the decision. I’m the one with tenure, and I’m the one directing the program, so I need to be the authority (as much as I hate it).
In that other case, Billie, I wonder if the department chair or grad director should have had a stronger role in what happened.
Nels, I don’t know about others’ involvement in this person’s situation. S/he didn’t say. I think it would be tragic if administration wasn’t involved, but as GC noted below, there are cases where admin leaves the professor out to dry in these type situations.
I think reputation does play a role, but in my case I have a monopoly on the face-to-face courses in my discipline at my location. And students also know my courses are challenging. Yet, I consistently have the highest enrollments in my 100 level courses. I imagine for grad level or upper level undergrad, those courses are not mandatory – that also plays a role. If a large % of graduate students at a program are plagiarizing, it sounds like that program needs some serious cleansing. Then again, perhaps the culture of plagiarism is more prevalent in some places.
The point about the role of administration is also important. If admin backs up professors, that’s a key factor. Our admin has been pretty good about that. However, I remember when I was a graduate TA at a state school, profs would not pursue students for cheating or plagiarism, because admin would not back them up for fear of a law suit. So, as you might expect, profs were pretty much left hanging in the wind and only talk a good game.
GC, thanks for this. I’ve heard too many times about the “lawsuit” threat. I suppose it’s not only a threat . . . some students would actually follow through. It’s unfortunate on some many levels (and “unfortunate” isn’t a strong enough word), that we/professors/administrators must fear potential retribution for doing what’s right. (And it still saddens me greatly that students and others don’t think there’s anything wrong with cheating and then threatening lawsuits if confronted.)
I’m not certain if students would actually sue, though some high profile litigations at that institution probably affected admin policies. Their attitude became “we don’t want any attention drawn to us, so just drop it”. In one case, the university’s attorney called one of my fellow TAs (according to him) and told him point blank the university would fire him if he said anything to any media outlet about one of his students. The student was the victim of a high profile, off-campus murder, and the TA had no knowledge of anything involved with the case, no reason to speak with the media.
It’s funny how admin would come down hard on a TA (who is dependent upon the University) and not a potential plagiarist.
I just had to deal with my first case of plagiarism this week (a pretty bad one). The matter is settled; I met with my Dean in his office and then followed up later and we determined a course of action that led to the student being removed from the class and given an F for the semester. One thing I did also do was talk to all three of my classes about plagiarism more generally. I told them all about the process I went through, from finding the stolen content to reporting it to my department to meeting with the student and then my Dean.
A lot of my students were very intrigued by this process and I believe I scared the hell out of some of them when I noted the student was being given an F for the term. In the long run, I hope that helps them and establishes me as a professor who does not tolerate plagiarism.
Recently, I’ve seen more and more evidence that “beating the system” is seen as a necessary and admirable skill, both in the student community and the world at large. I think that this plays a large part of the culture of cheating, and this is why making ethics part of the discussion as cjs does above is important.
You can discuss the ethics all you want, but it doesn’t really solve your problem at the proximate level (e.g. ‘what to do about it’). If you make it clear that you will punish cheaters, whatever their ethical perspective, then they have less positive incentive to cheat.
Look at it from this perspective. Most children don’t understand right from wrong, and it is up to parents to explain the rules, and enforce them. And many children will violate those rules, irregardless, until at some point they ‘get it’. Until they ‘get it’, punishment is the only thing that may keep them in line.
Now, I would hope that adult students have advanced ethical sense than children. But when they lack ethical sense, the only thing keeping them in line is the long arm of the professor’s law, unfortunately. No law, no enforcement —> no order.
I’m bothered by the lack of ethics as well. But there’s not much I can do about it when overly permissive parents, school teachers, and the ’system’ crank out poorly educated (ethically as well) products.
Ask yourself this. What is it that keeps most people on the straight and narrow in society? Certainly the rewards of living clean help, but the fear of punishment and shame are strong motivators.
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