Cheating.
We can design online courses in ways that will reduce cheating.
Look, cheating happens. People cheat on their taxes, on their partners, on their courses — both online and in class. It’s regrettable, but it’s to be expected because it's a fact of life. So do we need to spend so much time discussing it? Because we are discussing it a lot. With the Great Pedagogical Pivot of 2020, the news media couldn’t help but report on it in stories such as this one and also this one. Part of this media interest was and continues to be fuelled by other media stories on aggressive proctoring measures instituted by universities and professional accreditation bodies.
Photo by Alissa De Leva on Unsplash
For years universities and colleges have been creating offices and programs for what they now call “academic integrity.” That term is a bit clunky, typical of higher education’s penchant for instituting new vocabulary for old ideas. (That being said, it does attempt to accentuate the positive, which is good. Besides, “Office of Cheating” might give students the wrong idea.) But higher education knows that its value proposition depends on being able to guarantee that its students have earned their degrees on their own and on their own merit.
With the massive shift to online teaching, it seems natural that people might wonder about the increased risk of cheating. What lies at the heart of the many media stories, and at the heart of the concern about online cheating, is that most people imagine university courses to be made up of lectures, essays, and exams. That’s likely what they experienced when they went to university, and that’s likely what they hear about from their own children when they come home from university for the holidays. They assume that with essays comes plagiarism, and with exams comes cheating, and they wouldn’t be wrong: those assignments are the sites for some of the most common academic integrity infractions.
With courses online, the anxiety has grown, especially around exams and the limited ability to exercise oversight of test takers. The solution for some programs has been to institute highly invasive digital proctoring systems. That kind of surveillance is accompanied by intricate regulations and rules. Have a look at the list of rules for this algebra midterm at Wilfrid Laurier University — it’s five pages long! Students have every right to complain about these invasions of their privacy and the unwarranted stress that is added to situations that are already stressful enough.
The thing of it is, cheating is nothing more than breaking rules. To reduce cheating, reduce the number of rules.
We can do this by redesigning the high-value assignments of courses to be less rule-laden. The simplest way to do this for exams is to make them open book. That requires different kinds of exams, to be sure, but it’s not that difficult to create open book exams or other kinds of assignments where there’s little or no need for surveillance. And this can be done in almost any field, including the STEM disciplines.
Or perhaps you’re worried about students using outside sources to get around having to do the work themselves? This plagues all sorts of disciplines, for example language instructors who see students flocking to Google Translate when homework is due. You can try to forbid the use of such technology — good luck with that — or you can turn the tables and make the technology part of the learning process. And if the concern is about students collaborating with each other, make collaboration a part of the exercise.
Will students be at a disadvantage if they aren’t required to regurgitate memorized material and information on a test? That could be possible in some fields, and tests of memory and recall may be necessary. In those instances, making an effort to shift to oral exams could be worthwhile, or even creating a blended written and oral examination. Whatever route is chosen, there are ways of creating more humane testing conditions that don’t rely on invasive automated data collection and multi-camera video proctoring. All of that extra stress only puts students at a disadvantage, and instructors won’t really gain a full understanding of their students’ knowledge under such conditions.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 43/60.
