Cheating in Online High School Programs

Is it happening? How often? How are they doing it? More importantly...How do I get them to stop!?! I figured the best way to get the answers to these questions were to ask. I set up a quick SurveyMonkey survey and got 102 responses from teachers in online high school programs nationwide.

Is it happening? How often? How are they doing it? More importantly…How do I get them to stop!?!
I figured the best way to get the answers to these questions was to ask! I set up a quick SurveyMonkey survey and got 102 responses from teachers in online high school programs nationwide and got some answers.

65.6% of the teachers were “concerned’ or ‘very concerned’ about cheating
66.7% have caught at least one student cheating this year
53.7% of incidents involved failure to cite a source
80% of the source of cheating came from websites
37.3% involved copying course material
62.7% of teachers became suspicious of work that seemed ‘too good’ which led to the discovery of the cheating
One student even cheated by plagiarizing the bible

So – it’s not all good news here by any means. It’s not surprising since Rutgers prof Don McCabe indicates that a 1993 study of his found 82% of college students self-reporting that they had committed “serious cheating”.

So what’s a school to do?

In a world where every piece of information that exists is – quite literally – at your fingertips, you have to assess completely differently.

Create every assessment as an open-book assignment.
Require a presentation stage to every high-point written assignment.
Focus on group project-based assignments.
Be sure your kids actually understand what cheating looks like.
If you must use multiple-choice, for God’s sake use deep test banks with question (and answer) randomization.
If your LMS comes with some sort of web-browser locking function that turns on while in a test – stopping copy/paste and new window browsing…turn it on. I know it’s easy to get around – but at least you’ll look like you’re trying to stop the cheating.
In an online NACOL presentation today, Allison Powell shared that accreditation boards are now looking at academic integrity very carefully. In fact, they seem to be giving preferential nods to the practice of having in-person proctored end-of-course tests….so much for distance education.

Of course, you can always go the route of SoftwareSecure and deploy a fleet of tiny biometric sentient beings into your students homes to check their fingerprint and take 360-degree video of the area around the computer during the test.

Ah – can’t wait to see the lawsuits to stem from that little invasion of privacy.

Date: March 12, 2008

Categories: Teacher Resources

Tags: Cheating, LMS, NACOL, Survey

Comments RSS TrackBack 5 comments

Jason

in March 12th, 2008 @ 17:09

I guess I don’t understand on why making assignments group or open book is the answer to this question. If we can’t expect them to KNOW anything, what is the point? Only through a functional understanding of basic knowledge can we expect students to engage in higher level thinking…
Admin

in March 12th, 2008 @ 17:17

Good point – how do you assess basic knowledge in a manner that ensures that student’s really know it and have not just ‘looked it up’? I often wonder how much information falls into this category, actually. Clearly basic math functions and number skills jumps to mind for me. In those cases I don’t think that open book s the answer here. It really is in these higher-level thinking skill areas that the open book method works best.
Glenn

in March 12th, 2008 @ 18:25

@jason – “If we can’t expect them to KNOW anything, what is the point?” we do expect them to know something. We just have to get our students to prove it in a way that can’t be done through cheating. To make this happen you have to get students doing something real. Something tangible. Something that someone from outside of the classroom can come in, take a look at, and say “okay, I see the value in that”. The only way that students will be able to complete something like that is if they have the knowledge you’re talking about. No one’s talking about scrapping the lowest levels of Bloom’s. The problem for education is that the vast majority of the time that’s where learning stops.

@admin (hi, Rob – Who cares if they “looked it up”? It’s what we do as adults all the time. If somethings is important to that student either a) they’ll commit it to memory or b) they’ll keep looking it up each time they need the information. Even for math, because if all they’re doing in their math class is being asked to solve artificial problems at the end of the chapter and not being asked to solve any real problems that help themselves or other people then what’s the point? Again, it gets back to where most education stops and it’s at those lower levels of Bloom’s. I’m not advocating to not teach those levels, but I am screaming that we cannot, must not, under any circumstances stop there.

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Rebekah

in March 24th, 2008 @ 17:51

Two points, which I hope will add to the conversation:

1) When we talk about online cheating, we should in the same breath talk about cheating in f2f high schools. Cameras on cell phones and text messaging are huge problems in brick and mortar schools!

2) I taught online for six years and it was pretty easy to see when students were cheating. I knew my students’ writing style and skill level rather instead of their faces. Also, with the help of date and time stamps, I was able to put together in no time flat what my students probably thought were some pretty “sophisticated” cheating schemes. Let a brick-and-mortar teacher try that! Technological advancements like biometric authentication are helping us raise the bar for students — no anti-cheating device or program will ever be 100% effective for online or brick and mortar students, but we can at least deter them by doing due diligence.

And I just can’t resist the pedagogical discussion… One theory of learning says that to develop complex cognitive skills (like driving a car, fixing a machine, learning a language, or going grocery shopping on a budget), you need to master two kinds of skills: recurrent skills should be automated — that’s where the drill and kill to provide instant access to knowledge like the multiplication table comes in. The second type of skill is the heuristic or decision making skill. That’s where knowing where to find information efficiently and apply that information appropriately comes in. So, Glen and Jason, you both have a point.
Admin

in March 25th, 2008 @ 19:33

Rebekah, your point about F2F cheating is well and true. In fact, one of the ‘gold standard’ methods many online programs use is to require in-person final exams. The thought being that you might get away with cheating all semester, but if you can’t prove it at the end of the semester, we’ll know something stinks in Denmark – or Detroit – or wherever the proctoring is taking place. Your comment points out that even this is not an adequate “solution” and we will, in fact, never ‘beat’ the kids 100% on this. Build a better mouse trap and they’ll just mashup a better mouse.

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Cheating in Online High School Programs

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Jason

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