[COSEAfaculty] What does "cheating" mean?

[Grady P Blount]

Good morning:

Below is an article from The Chronicle that has me wondering about the
answer to a simple question: "What does the term cheating mean in an
information-rich society?

Clearly we are in a world where the ability to mine data and find
content is considered a plus. But we in academia seem to still be stuck
(some of us anyway) in a world where memorizing the information is still
considered a prime criterion of success. Do we punish students who
demonstrate the very skills that will make them successful in the 21st
century? 

Regurgitate material in exchange for a good grade is not going to cut it
in an on-line world. 

Hopefully we all agree that comprehension and critical thought is the
goal. It seems that a return to the Socratic method might be in order
here.

Clearly, the information-rich and collaboration-rich world we are living
in is simply too tempting of a cheating target for "traditional"
teaching and assessment methods.

That's my two cents...feel free to "Reply All".

-Grady

===============================================
Grady Price Blount, Ph.D., Professor of Physics and Dean,
College of Science, Engineering & Agriculture (CoSEA)
Texas A&M University-Commerce
Commerce, Texas 75429-3011
Telephones:  903-886-5781 (office)      325-716-0450 (cell)     
===============================================
Talent hits a target no one else can hit.
Genius hits a target no one else can see.
                                    -Schopenhauer



Online Classes See Cheating Go High-Tech
William Lounsbury for The Chronicle

"It's important that the research community improve perhaps as quickly
as the cheating community is improving," says Neal Kingston, of the U.
of Kansas, who organized a Conference on Statistical Detection of
Potential Test Fraud.


By Jeffrey R. Young

Easy A's may be even easier to score these days, with the growing
popularity of online courses. Tech-savvy students are finding ways to
cheat that let them ace online courses with minimal effort, in ways that
are difficult to detect.
 
Take Bob Smith, a student at a public university in the United States.
This past semester, he spent just 25 to 30 minutes each week on an
online science course, the time it took him to take the weekly test. He
never read the online materials for the course and never cracked open a
textbook. He learned almost nothing. He got an A.
 
His secret was to cheat, and he's proud of the method he came up
with-though he asked that his real name and college not be used, because
he doesn't want to get caught. It involved four friends and a shared
Google Doc, an online word-processing file that all five of them could
read and add to at the same time during the test.
 
More on his method in a minute. You've probably already heard of plenty
of clever ways students cheat, and this might simply add one more to the
list. But the issue of online cheating may rise in prominence, as more
and more institutions embrace online courses, and as reformers try new
systems of educational badges, certifying skills and abilities learned
online. The promise of such systems is that education can be delivered
cheaply and conveniently online. Yet as access improves, so will the
number of people gaming the system, unless courses are designed
carefully.
 
This prediction has not escaped many of those leading new online
efforts, or researchers who specialize in testing. As students find new
ways to cheat, course designers are anticipating them and devising new
ways to catch folks like Mr. Smith.
 
In the case of that student, the professor in the course had tried to
prevent cheating by using a testing system that pulled questions at
random from a bank of possibilities. The online tests could be taken
anywhere and were open-book, but students had only a short window each
week in which to take them, which was not long enough for most people to
look up the answers on the fly. As the students proceeded, they were
told whether each answer was right or wrong.
 
Mr. Smith figured out that the actual number of possible questions in
the test bank was pretty small. If he and his friends got together to
take the test jointly, they could paste the questions they saw into the
shared Google Doc, along with the right or wrong answers. The schemers
would go through the test quickly, one at a time, logging their work as
they went. The first student often did poorly, since he had never seen
the material before, though he would search an online version of the
textbook on Google Books for relevant keywords to make informed guesses.
The next student did significantly better, thanks to the cheat sheet,
and subsequent test-takers upped their scores even further. They took
turns going first. Students in the course were allowed to take each test
twice, with the two results averaged into a final score.
 
"So the grades are bouncing back and forth, but we're all guaranteed an
A in the end," Mr. Smith told me. "We're playing the system, and we're
playing the system pretty well."
 
He is a first-generation college student who says he works hard, and
honestly, in the rest of his courses, which are held in-person rather
than online. But he is juggling a job and classes, and he wanted to find
a way to add an easy A to his transcript each semester.
 
Although the syllabus clearly forbids academic dishonesty, Mr. Smith
argues that the university has put so little into the security of the
course that it can't be very serious about whether the online students
are learning anything. Hundreds of students took the course with him,
and he never communicated with the professor directly. It all felt
sterile, impersonal, he told me. "If they didn't think students would do
this, then they didn't think it through."
 
A professor familiar with the course, who also asked not to be named,
said that it is not unique in this regard, and that other students
probably cheat in online introductory courses as well. To them, the
courses are just hoops to jump through to get a credential, and the
students are happy to pay the tuition, learn little, and add an A.
 
"This is the gamification of education, and students are winning," the
professor told me.
 
Of course, plenty of students cheat in introductory courses taught the
old-fashioned way as well. John Sener, a consultant who has long worked
in online learning, says the incident involving Mr. Smith sounds similar
to students' sharing of old tests or bringing in cheat sheets. "There is
no shortage of weak assessments," he says.
 
He cautions against dismissing online courses based on inevitable
examples of poor class design: "If there are weaknesses in the system,
students will find them and try to game it."
 
In some cases, the answer is simply designing tests that aren't
multiple-choice. But even when professors assign papers, students can
use the Internet to order custom-written assignments. Take the example
of the Shadow Scholar, who described in a Chronicle article how he made
more than $60,000 a year writing term papers for students around the
country.
 
Part of the answer may be fighting technology with more technology,
designing new ways to catch cheaters.
 
Countering the Cheaters
 
When John Fontaine first heard about the Shadow Scholar, who was helping
students cheat on assignments, he grew angry. Mr. Fontaine works for
Blackboard, and his job is to think up new services and products for the
education-software company. His official title is senior director of
technology evangelism.
 
"I was offended," he says. "I thought, I'm going to get that guy." So he
started a research project to do just that.
 
Blackboard's learning-management software features a service that checks
papers for signs of plagiarism, and thousands of professors around the
country use it to scan papers when they are turned in.
 
Mr. Fontaine began to wonder whether authors write in unique ways that
amount to a kind of fingerprint. If so, he might be able to spot which
papers were written by the Shadow Scholar or other writers-for-hire,
even if they didn't plagiarize other work directly.
 
"People tend to use the same words over and over again, and people have
the same vocabulary," he says. "I've been working on classifiers that
take documents and score them and build what I call a document
fingerprint." The system could establish a document fingerprint for each
student when they turn in their first assignments, and notice if future
papers differ in style in suspicious ways.
 
Mr. Fontaine's work is simply research at this point, he emphasizes, and
he has not used any actual student papers submitted to the company's
system. He would have to get permission from professors and students
before doing that kind of live test.
 
In fact, he's not sure whether the idea will ever work well enough to
add it as a Blackboard feature.
 
Mr. Fontaine is not the only one doing such research. Scholars at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they are looking for new ways
to verify the identity of students online as well.
 
Anant Agarwal is head of MIT's Open Learning Enterprise, which
coordinates the university's MITx project to offer free courses online
and give students a chance to earn certificates. It's a leading force in
the movement to offer free courses online.
 
One challenge leaders face is verifying that online students are who
they say they are.
 
A method under consideration at MIT would analyze each user's typing
style to help verify identity, Mr. Agarwal told me in a recent
interview. Such electronic fingerprinting could be combined with
face-recognition software to ensure accuracy, he says. Since most
laptops now have Webcams built in, future online students might have to
smile for the camera to sign on.
 
Some colleges already require identity-verification techniques that seem
out of a movie. They're using products such as the Securexam Remote
Proctor, which scans fingerprints and captures a 360-degree view around
students, and Kryterion's Webassessor, which lets human proctors watch
students remotely on Web cameras and listen to their keystrokes.
 
Research Challenge
 
Researchers who study testing are also working on the problem of
cheating. Last month more than 100 such researchers met at the
University of Kansas at the Conference on Statistical Detection of
Potential Test Fraud.
 
One message from the event's organizers was that groups that offer
standardized tests, companies developing anticheating software, and
researchers need to join forces and share their work. "Historically this
kind of research has been a bit of a black box," says Neal Kingston, an
associate professor of education at the university and director of its
Center for Educational Testing Evaluation. "It's important that the
research community improve perhaps as quickly as the cheating community
is improving."
 
There seems to be growing interest in such sharing, says James Wollack,
an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison. "If you go on the Web and look, it's pretty clear
that the people trying to game the system are learning from each other,"
he says. "Unless the testing industry also pools its resources, we're
always going to be playing this game of catch-up."
 
A revolution in education thanks to online courses could be in store, as
Thomas L. Friedman recently predicted. But significant challenges
remain, not least among them preventing Mr. Smith from fraudulently
claiming an education that he didn't get.
 
College 2.0 covers how new technologies are changing colleges. Please
send ideas to jeff.young at chronicle.com or @jryoung on Twitter.