I'm about to teach my first class, so what follows is speculation. I hope at least a small part of it survives contact with actual students. (And this is not the first time I've expressed this thought.)
Ultimately cheating is undetectable. In the online environment that's clear. As a thought experiment, the student could give his/her username and password to a hired ringer, and I as the instructor would have no way to tell. But doing something as extreme as that is costly. And unlikely. More likely is that the student will rely on friends and family, and maybe try to plagiarize. Since I teach math, plagiarism may not be a big concern. Relying on the work of others is.
I suspect that the major method for detecting cheating is to note inconsistencies in the students abilities. Particularly, if discussion, especially real time chat, is significantly poorer than turned in assignments that suggests there may be a problem. Another indicator may be widely varying assignment quality, perhaps because the help was used on one but not the other. A third indicator is the kind of errors made may be different. Now none of these is proof of cheating, but should it be suspected, there are procedures to follow to investigate, but I don't see how that could be definitively resolved. Plagiarism may be found and sometimes pretty well proved, but proving that you had someone sitting with you and helping seems very hard to do.
There's another problem in detecting cheating as well. The line is not particularly sharp between a student seeking help to learn the material and a student overdoing that and thereby beginning to get into the area of claiming the work of another. There are some grey areas here.
And cheating a big issue because:
- the student isn't learning the course material
- the student is misrepresenting himself or herself
- the grade is no longer a true assessment, damaging my institution's credibility and good name
I teach math so the Turnit service isn't going to work. In essence if I notice that the structure of thier response is identical in sparse wording it is a flag for comparing the homeworks. One clear evidence of cheating is when their work involves a maturity beyond the course level in the response. I can't prevent cheating just like I can't prevent birds from flying - what I can do is catch the bird (cheater) in the act.
Thanks for your comments. Do you think cheating is more prevelant in online learning than residential?
Cheating is more prevalent in residential. I recall reading an article where statistics showed that 60% of entering freshmen consider cheating as collaborating and not wrong. What amazed me was that if in strait for succeeding 60% considered it stupid not to cheat. The future doesn't look good for society with people thinking like this.
Wow, those numbers are a little frightening. This is the first that I have heard of it. Do you recall where you read this John?
I read this some years ago in an article that was part of the online training that I was taking. Sorry but I don't remember the article source.
For papers there are many software methods to determine if someone is plaigarizing. However, this is very time consuming if you input every student's info. Therefore, I concentrate on ones that appear out of order. For example if a student has discussions usiong slang and has poor grammar and all of a sudden has a perfect paper. This gives me a warning light that maybe I should check it out.
It is still interesting information. Thanks
This is a question asked in on-ground classes too. We don't "see" students submit their work there either. As such, when I taught on-ground, I always took a writing sample at the beginning of the class to compare with future assignment submissions. For online detection, my school subscribes to software that shows how much of the work is original and what is not. That works well. I've also learned that comparing assignments to email correspondence from the student is much like taking the writing sample. It's amazing how much I can learn about students from their emails. At my school, we use discussion boards and I can glean information there too when looking at their formal submissions versus their responses to others.
You provided some great tips on identifying cheating in the classroom. I especially like the idea of getting a writing sample to compare at the beginning of class. Thanks for sharing!
It's important to keep students engaged and to pay close attention to students' submissions on all accounts. If there are major differences in quality between papers versus discussion board posts and group project submissions, that's a good indicator that the student isn't doing all of his or her own work. Turnitin is a good tool, but it isn't enough to detect situations in which a student is having another person doing at least some of their work. It's extraordinarily difficult to detect occasions in which someone has another complete the entire course for him or her. Protecting against that is something that should probably take place at the university level, using appropriate security and authentication procedures and tools.
Jessica-
I think you're absolutely right. You can discern a student's tone and style from even the briefest contributions. It is also apparent from the types and frequencies of grammatical and spelling errors.
Best,
Monique Ferraro
I agree, Shenetha. One of the problems I've encountered is with the process for reporting cheating. Some universities make it so difficult and time consuming to report suspected transgressions, that it really dissuades instructors from looking very closely at suspected student academic honesty cases.
Best,
Monique Ferraro
David-
I think we're getting there, but bandwidth and technology isn't quite there yet. Online graduate programs seems to be moving more quickly in that direction. I can't wait to see it implemented more consistently and for the technology to be more prevalent.
Best,
Monique Ferraro
You bring up some great points Monique. Certainly knowing the writing styles of your students can be a great way to begin to detect cheating.
I don't think we can, in an online environment, know for sure who is in fact even taking the course. Is it Joe, which is suppose to be the student, or is it Joe's brother. My thoughts on cheating are-it can be challenging to stop. In the end all will come out in the wash as we say. The person will not know the topic and has lost the opportunity. It's easier to catch in the face-to-face class-but it still goes on there as well.
Unfortunately, cheating is everywhere, not just in the online classroom. Thanks for your posting Lisa.
There are tools and techniques to help identify plagiarism but I don't know how you would be able to determine if the student assigned to the class was the person who completed the assignment.
That is a tricky issue. But, we have the same issue when it comes to the residential classroom and papers/assignments that are not completed in class. Bottom line is if you have a student that wants to cheat, they will find a away. What they don't realize is the only person they are hurting is themselves.
I actually have personal experience with the cheating issue. I had 2 students submit the exact same responses to 2 hypothetical questions. The responses were identical (word for word), but one was submitted as a Word attachment and one was submitted in the body of an email. I initially didn't catch on, but once I started reading the second paper (they were each about 1 page long), I started to recognize the language. I then compared them and discovered they were identical. I reported them and they received a zero on teh assignment. A report was placed in their permanent file and if caught again, they will be kicked out of the school.
As a side note, I was also told you can check the "properties" on a Word document and see if the document originated from a different student's computer. Another instructor was able to catch 2 students cheating when the properties of the document were from another student's computer.
