Student Cheating in the Digital Age
Online education has been getting a lot of eye-catching press lately – an artificial intelligence class offered by Stanford University last year drew 58,000 registrants, quadruple the school’s total enrollment – but not all the coverage has been flattering. A June 3 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education was headlined "Online Classes See Cheating Go High-Tech."
Granted, there have always been cheaters.
"Having started college in 1958 and having fooled around in colleges ever since, the whole issue of academic dishonesty is not new," said Dan Ferritor, vice president for academic affairs for the University of Arkansas System. "It is an issue that every instructor faces in every class, whatever kind of class it is."
Still, the UA System is taking the idea of online cheating seriously.
"I think online you have to be particularly aware of it," Ferritor said. "Some of our instructors make sure of this by having students come take their test at either a public library or a central location in the community, somewhere their identity can be verified. Some of the other instructors do what we’ve done in higher education a long time, and that’s providing tests that are open-book opportunities; you ask very difficult questions and allow students to have access to their resources.
"I don’t want to downgrade the problem of academic honesty," he said. "What I want to say is online [education] produces new challenges and the faculty are up to the challenges."
Online classes might be particularly attractive to the technologically savvy, and cheaters also tend to be early adopters. That was the subject of the article in The Chronicle and a particular sore spot with John Fontaine, senior director for the corporate strategy group of Blackboard Inc., a provider of online tools to colleges and universities. The University of Arkansas at Little Rock uses the Blackboard system, for example.
"People will figure out ways of cheating, as The Chronicle story shows," said Fontaine. "There are ways you can defy online cheating in a class."
To make it harder for online students to sit beside each other and simply collaborate on test answers, the instructor can create a "question bank" with far more questions than are needed for a single exam. When the students log on to take the test, each is assigned questions at random so nobody has the same test. Or the same questions may be presented in a different order.
Another option Fontaine suggested is the "lock-down browser," which prevents students from opening another window – for Google or Wikipedia, say – while taking a test. And Word documents and PDFs can be encoded to show which computer was used to create the document.
A bigger issue, though, is identifying students who are buying term papers and essays online or hiring someone to write the papers for them. Fontaine said Blackboard is working on technology that compares submitted writing to a large database of online papers and previously submitted work.
"When a student submits a paper to Blackboard, we then go out, take the paper apart, and check it against various databases to see if it’s been plagiarized or not," he said. "We can tell you whether your sources were cited correctly – and the first thing people use it for is to catch things that were incorrectly cited – but then there’s a minority of students going out and trying to copy papers right from the Internet."
The Blackboard system will generate an "originality report" and identify areas where a student has likely not done her own work, Fontaine said. That alone makes it a good deterrent to plagiarism, he said, but there’s another advantage.
"One of the challenges teachers have is, when do you confront the student?" he said. "If the computer is catching you, then the computer is reporting the problem; it’s not that I am accusing you directly. It often makes that an easier conversation.
"In some ways, we’re trying to enable that kind of general catching, because you’re aware you’re being watched," Fontaine said. "That can kind of keep cheating down a little bit."
(Traditional Colleges Embrace Online Classrooms)
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