There sure have been a lot of excellent, Comment of the Day-quality responses to EA posts lately: color me awe-struck and grateful. Parts 1 and 2 about the philosophy prof’s sting designed to catch cheaters on his ethics exam produced several, but this one, by teacher Michael R was detailed and epic in scope, examining the academic cheating problem and providing a primer on the phenomenon. Here it is:

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You do need to realize that professors have a very high bar to accuse, let alone punish, a student for cheating. I catch and turn in students for cheating every semester, but only the most blatant examples. There is a lot of cheating I know I wouldn’t be allowed to punish.

Remember, the administration doesn’t want the faculty to find cheating. Cheating makes the school look bad in the press, it deters students (who like cheating) from coming to the school, and significant punishments for cheating can entice students to leave your school for more ‘cheater friendly’ schools. In addition, cheating is so rampant, and has been for so long, that many of the faculty cheated THEIR way through school (sometimes it shows). Some fields have become so numb to what I consider cheating that they encourage it.

So, what do you need to prove cheating to your upper administrators?

(1) It has to be the same wrong answers. Writing the same, correct answer, even if using the exact same words and figures, is not sufficient. You can’t convince any administrator that it is unlikely that 2 people who sat next to each other would come up with the exact same words and figures (in the same place on the page) to explain what determines the efficiency of an engine.

(2) All the wrong answers on the document have to be the same on both papers. If one person has a different wrong answer, even though the previous 8 wrong answers were identical (even the same wording), you are going to have a hard time. The students will claim “Well, we studied together, so we were thinking the same way”.

(3) You have to prove that they knew they weren’t allowed to cheat on the exam or assignment. Many students will say “I didn’t know we couldn’t work together on the exam”. Your exam better say in bold print, “This is an individual assignment. You may use X sources, but Y sources are forbidden.” and talk about it in class, and have it in the syllabus, and have them do a quiz where they state that they understand it. I have had cheating cases rejected despite all of the above because an administrator said “I don’t think they understood they couldn’t copy off each other during the exam”.

(4) A paper needs to be significantly the same. This is the digital age. Many of the students are smart enough to take their friend’s report and just reword some sentences. You aren’t allowed to stop this. Gone are the days when I had students turn in someone else’s report with the name covered in white-out and the new name written over it in pen. My students have told me their friends are using ChatGPT to write their papers, then rewording each sentence so that the grammar and punctuation is their own (atrocious). That is the main way to determine a ChatGPT paper from a student written one, the punctuation and grammar are correct.

The last couple of years, I have had trouble with people cheating by looking up answers on the internet for take-home assignments.. How do I know they copied them off the internet? Because they are wrong! The internet likes to post answers that are just wrong or at least oversimplified for science topics. Light is usually described as Maxwell described in in the mid-1800’s, not using Einstein’s description from 1905. Let this be a warning to all who wish to use AI to solve problems, the AI’s source material is wrong or way out of date for most science or engineering topics. It is difficult to get an administrator to back you up, however, if ‘the internet’ agrees with the student.

A friend of mine recounted a specific example. He was listening to his child’s science class online, when he heard the teacher say that there was no difference between microwaves and radiowaves, they are the exact same thing. My colleague objected that this is very wrong. His wife confronted him, and said the teacher was right because the book and ‘the intenet’ said they were the same. She said if the teacher, the book, and ‘the intenet’ agreed, he must be wrong. He has a degree in physics, but that doesn’t matter because the ‘EXPERTS’ and ‘AUTHORITIES’ disagreed. His statement was dismissed as ‘misinformation’.

Many years ago, I had a student whose reports just copied entire paragraphs from textbooks without quotes or citations. When I discovered it, I collected several to make sure the honor court would take it seriously. When I pressed the cheating case, his father intervened. His father was on the NSF ethics board and he threatened to personally investigate every NSF grant at the university for ethics violations if we didn’t drop the case against his son. The university, of course, caved. (sarcasm alert) Gee, I’m shocked by all the unethical behavior by the CDC, the FDA, OSHA, etc during COVID. People asked me why I didn’t trust the ‘scientists’ at those agencies. You now know 1 reason out of many.

Now you see the barriers to is punishing cheating. It is difficult to make the administrators see cheating when their job requires them NOT to see cheating. It also makes you no friends. So, why would you worry about cheating?

(1) We have a competence problem in this country.
https://time.com/5753435/amazon-atlas-air-cargo-crash/
Additional information indicated that coworkers rated him the worst pilot they had ever seen and, tellingly, stated that he didn’t seem to understand that he was a bad pilot. Note that American grounded 150 flights because of lack of pilots today. Those same bad pilots will be crashing your passenger flight soon.

(2) You don’t need to catch all the cheaters. Punishing the most blatant cheaters gets most of the students to start doing their own work. For most students, this is the first time they have ever heard of someone being punished for cheating.

(3) Almost all the students cheat when they first enter college. Almost all of them cheat. You have to hold at least the worst offenders responsible for the rest to understand that this is wrong. They have had 13 years of school where the teachers said cheating was bad, but the cheaters were never punished and made good grades. You have to address cheating or they will never learn anything. This is OK in fields where no knowledge is required, but in many fields, you do have to know something or bad things will happen, just look at Palestine, OH.

So, what can you do about it?

(1) Make sure you take away everything but their writing utensils and a non-programmable, non-graphing calculator.

(2) Spread them out.

(3) Give multiple test forms. Don’t make it obvious that there are multiple test forms. Moving the decimal place in the problem between the forms is a good way to do this. You can’t be accused of making one test form harder than the other if the difference in problem #5 is 5.22 on one form and 52.2 on the other. Give the multiple forms different ways each time. Don’t use the same pattern of handing them out or the students will ‘stage’ themselves in class to cheat off people with the same test form.

(4) Put a similar test on the web for practice. This is mainly to help them study, but it also helps find the cheaters/lazy people. Many students will just write down the answers from the practice test on the in-class test despite the fact that the questions are different. Public school trained them to do this by routinely giving them the test and answers beforehand to ‘study’.

A good lesson, don’t cheat in a physics class at UVA.

That linked article was not the case I was looking for. About this time, a UVA physics professor was attending his mandatory ‘beginning of the school meetings’ when the honor court people made a presentation about how they want ALL incidents of cheating reported. A physics professor said “No, you don’t.” The honor court people insisted that they did. The professor asked if they would back him 100% if he reported obvious cases of cheating and they stated that they would in front of the entire faculty (note: Don’t challenge a physics professor this way).

At many large schools, the students insist on knowing what the answers to the exam are immediately after the exam. As a result, many faculty post the answers to the exam somewhere WHILE THE EXAM IS TAKING PLACE. This professor knew that students were having their friends text them the answers during the exam. So, this professor posted a fake answer key AFTER THE EXAM BEGAN. It was multiple choice, so the cheating students received a 0%. Running all the 0% scantrons against the fake key confirmed they used the fake key (the chance of ‘accidentally doing this on a 25 question test is 1 in 1,100,000,000,000,000). Just over half of his class cheated. The only penalty for cheating at UVA is permanent expulsion. The honor court people cried foul, of course, They couldn’t just throw out over 100 people for cheating in one class! Remember their promise to back the professor? Yeah, they lied.

So, now you understand the difficulties a professor has maintaining academic integrity in the classroom. In many fields, this seems to be completely gone. I didn’t even touch on the multiculturalism, DIE, racism charges that traditional academic standards are ‘whiteness’. It is really difficult to get any of the younger faculty to take cheating seriously.

My take: Fake keys should be widely promoted and distributed to get people to start doing their own work and stop trying to find the easy way out. The students should be encouraged to use the study aids their faculty provide and not try to find such cheating aids on the internet. As for the entrapment and honey pot, arguments, they are garbage. If you weren’t looking for ways to cheat, you never would have found the fake key. If you were just ‘using it to study’, you would have noticed that the answers made no sense. This case had a built-in failsafe for an ‘honest’ student who was given this by a friend to ‘study’.

If I was in charge of state-mandated end-of-year testing, I would have my staff offer to sell copies of the tests to schools and then send them different tests than they were actually going to get. I found out that the state tests are being leaked to some schools, who then copy them and provide them to the students to study (because my child brought them home). The fact that such schools still only have 25% of the students pass the tests is disturbing at many levels.