Cheating is an unethical behavior where one student solves a problem and everyone else copies the answer, while another fails to deliver material assigned to them. Collaboration on homework, take-home projects, and in labs is an extremely gray area for many students, as what is acceptable collaboration in one class is often labeled cheating in another. Collaboration can include jointly calculating homework problems, working in a group on a lab assignment, having another help one rewrite a paper, or checking.
Collaboration can also be considered “cheating” when it is necessary and benefits the student’s learning and finished product. However, the line between collaboration and cheating is fuzzy, and students may engage in activities they don’t consider to be serious cheating, like collaborating on homework assignments or asking for exam results.
In the changing learning environments necessitated by COVID-19, a study investigated how 12 college students at a highly selective Research 1 institution reported engaging in activities they don’t consider to be serious cheating. It is important to differentiate between in-class collaboration and individual work, and encourage students to collaborate or seek help when needed. Fewer than one in four students believed collaborating on an assignment was cheating, even when the instructor had specifically disallowed it.
Improper collaboration involves sharing with or receiving information from another person regarding an academic assignment or examination. Some argue that computer science students who collaborate on homework shouldn’t be accused of cheating because they will work in teams when they are in the lab. Collaboration works for students, while copying works against them, making them less prepared, not learning, and violating the rules of ethical collaboration.
📹 How do students respond when they are caught cheating?
When I’m meeting with students who have been accused of academic dishonesty, probably what is most frustrating to me is when …
Should I give my friend homework answers?
Sharing assessments is an academic offense, as students are expected to complete them using their own thoughts, ideas, and analysis. Sharing your work with others can lead to inadvertent use, potentially causing trouble. If a classmate or friend asks to review your assignment, inform them of the academic offence. If struggling to complete the assignment, campus resources such as emailing your instructor, visiting their office hours, contacting the TA, visiting the Writing and Communication Centre, asking a Librarian for research assistance, using the Assignment Planner, using SSO resources on time management, or booking an appointment with a peer success coach are recommended.
What percent of students cheat on assignments?
The survey results indicate that between 65 and 75 percent of undergraduate students admit to engaging in academic dishonesty at least once, with 19 to 20 percent admitting to doing so on at least five occasions. Additionally, 62 percent of respondents admitted to engaging in academic dishonesty at least once with respect to written assignments. It should be noted, however, that the data set does not include first-year students, students attending schools with an honor code, or students attending two-year schools.
Is cheating in homework haram?
Cheating is a dishonest and disrespectful behavior that is detrimental to truthfulness, honesty, and honesty. It is akin to lying and treachery, and it is essential for individuals to avoid it. A Muslim should understand the nature of cheating in exams and follow the example of hard-working individuals to avoid it. The teacher’s decision to allow a female student to complete exam answers at home is a betrayal of trust and unfairness to others. This allowed cheating to become easier, leading to high grades that she did not deserve. Shaykh Ibn Baaz was asked about the teacher’s awareness of cheating in school tests.
What qualifies as cheating?
Cheating is the act of being unfaithful to a spouse or other committed partner, often involving secrecy and betrayal. It can take various forms, including emotional, sexual, or cyber cheating. Emotional cheating involves emotional investment in someone else outside the relationship, while sexual cheating involves having sex or engaging in sexual activities with someone outside the relationship. Cyber infidelity involves flirtatious online interactions with someone else outside the relationship. Dr. Tara, a Los Angeles-based sexologist, identifies six signs that indicate your partner might be engaged in unfaithful behavior.
What are the 3 forms of cheating?
Infidelity can be categorized into physical, emotional, cyber, object, and financial infidelity. It can have negative effects on a relationship, and can be prevented through various methods such as therapy and marriage counseling. Dr. Tristan specializes in intimacy issues, infertility grief, and non-monogamy, while Kristen Fuller, MD, a physician with experience in adult, adolescent, and OB/GYN medicine, focuses on mood disorders, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and reducing stigma associated with mental health. Additional resources and infographics can be found to further understand and address infidelity.
Should I let my classmate copy my homework?
It is imperative to refrain from allowing the replication of one’s academic work, as this practice is detrimental to the academic community and may potentially lead to legal and ethical issues if the original work is copied verbatim.
Is it OK to look up answers for homework?
A new study suggests that guessing is a better strategy for learning than searching online for answers. According to psychologist Arnold Glass, who works at Rutgers University, guessing is the better strategy. Glass discovered this by analyzing homework and test grades from college students who took his courses from 2008 to 2017. Glass gave students a series of quiz-style online homework assignments, where they answered similar questions in class a week later and again on the exam.
This practice, known as the testing effect, helps students learn by testing themselves repeatedly. Co-author Mengxue Kang, a PhD student at Rutgers, believes that students in Glass’s classes should have performed better on each set of questions in the homework series, and best of all on the exam. This suggests that guessing is a more effective strategy for learning than searching for answers online.
Is it cheating to work on homework together?
The Math Department expects that 50% of students will approach homework with assistance from their parents, seeking extra help from the teacher, or working together. However, in practice, many students, especially those with a scientist dad or engineer mom, may not have the opportunity to brush up on their algebra. Some students stay after school for teacher assistance, while others work together. Some students spend the lunch hour before math class copying someone else’s answer, which is considered cheating.
This raises questions about the clarity of these concepts to the many students who engage in this activity. If math is beyond their abilities, they may need someone else to guide them through the steps to solve the problem. Collaboration is acceptable on challenge problems, but what is wrong with it on everyday homework or tests?
Can excessive homework lead to cheating?
A significant proportion of students (over half) report that homework is their primary source of stress, which can have a detrimental impact on their physical and mental health. The excessive assignment of homework can result in academic dishonesty, including cheating and plagiarism. Conversely, homework can also facilitate the reinforcement of classroom learning by enabling students to engage in revision and the application of the knowledge they have acquired. It is of the utmost importance for students to retain only 50 percent of the information provided in class.
Is sharing homework answers cheating?
To avoid cheating in academic settings, it is essential to encourage peer learning and teach effective strategies such as working in pairs, sharing comments, and brainstorming solutions. However, sharing completed work is not acceptable and should be documented and sent to the course instructor. Sharing unauthorized information and using unauthorized information are both offenses. It is crucial to avoid cheating by ensuring that your friend has not yet written the quiz and that you never have, never will, or will cheat. Students should also remember that the person next to them probably knows less than you do. This will help maintain academic integrity and prevent cheating in dental schools.
What is considered cheating on an assignment?
Cheating is the unauthorized use of information, materials, devices, sources, or practices in academic activities. It includes copying during exams, allowing another student to copy from one’s work, and engaging in prohibited behavior in course syllabuses or class discussions. The NIU Student Code of Conduct defines cheating as using sources beyond authorized by instructors, acquiring tests or academic material without permission, and engaging in behavior prohibited by faculty members. Ensuring academic integrity and respect for others is crucial in preventing cheating and promoting ethical behavior in academic settings.
📹 We need to talk about cheating in universities…
Cheating in university is a big money business and connects to a lot of larger issues in education. As a professor, I unpack what …
This article is going viral again months later, so editing in a few follow ups! Thanks everyone for sharing in the comments:) 1) A common comment is that rote memorization isn’t a meaningful thing to be testing in the first place, and that allowing a formula sheet in tests is a good idea. I agree! I actually do this in most of my classes (thumbnail is mainly just the visual of cheating I could think of). I try to write tests that get at students ability to reason with the material, not memorize it. I generally think this is a bit of a moot point in that most people who have done the practice problems and are able to reason in calculus will be 90% of the way to memorizing the basic formulas anyways. I don’t really see different grades regardless of whether I do or do not allow a formula sheet, but nevertheless think allowing it lowers anxiety and symbolizes the emphasis on reasoning and conceptual understanding over memorization. 2) The other big theme in the comments is broadly speaking “dissatisfaction with the teaching and learning in universities”. Whether this is that universities are way to expensive, too credentialized, don’t teach relevant comment, have poor professors etc, there is a lot of various ways one can quite reasonably be frustrated by the quality and purpose of the education. I also agree! I mention this late in the article, but these kinds of dissatisfactions have been shown in studies to highly associated to increased cheating, and it makes sense. I share a lot of those frustrations with our academic system.
The real enemies here are the grading system and the cost of college tuition. Students aren’t afraid of failing per se — student are afraid of the consequences of failing. Students don’t want a permanent negative mark on their record; students don’t want to delay graduation if it means paying an extra semester of tuition down the line. It seems universities facilitate an incentive structure that leads to cheating. This doesn’t justify the cheating any more than poor material conditions justify committing a crime, but it does explain why cheating occurs. Let’s try and reform education so that the only real motivation a student has while taking a course is indeed learning the material.
To professors everywhere: PLEASE stop doing closed-book exams. In actual engineering nobody cares if you remember all formulas or integration methods, you can always look them up. I still remember spending weeks practicing integration techniques that were then never used in practice. Mostly because practical diff. equations are either trivial or can’t be solved anyway.
My prof allowed us to bring in the cheat sheet for computer architecture subject, 2 side of A4. And I think it’s hella good way to “force” students learn everything because they need to know what’s important and what’s not. Fyi it’s around 2000 pages of presentation, and you’re only allowed to have 2 side of A4. Beside writing things again is also a method of studying, you basically have to reconstruct everything you learnt (this is also basic knowledge for reading researching paper I believe)
I love how my university deals with this. Firstly all exams must be submitted by professors every semester so they are practically always new. Secondly all previous exams are available on the university web page and actually encourages students to use them to study. Thirdly and most impressive is that most exams allow you to take your notes into the exam. And correspondingly it has problems that require connecting 3 or more topics in order to solve them, information is almost always dependent and conceptual understanding almost defines your grade. If you have fundamental physical understanding of the topics the exams are surprisingly easy, and when not by the end of the exam it forced you to think creatively to reach a solution. They are very long exams as well and most of the time have very very lenient time limits (say 5-6 hours for finals). Some might argue that is a bad think but on the contrary many students realise how important it is to take notes and have them correctly organised. The extension of the courses makes it very hard to locate what’s useful if you didn’t make your notes yourself or at least studied them well and catalogued them. One of my professors told me that in practice you won’t have single day time limits to make all the calculations, you usually carry them out in matters of weeks. So putting time pressure on top of the underlying difficulty hinders the actual learning of topics. I know this will receive some criticism, so for those interested my university is top 100 in the QSRankings (if that is of any value, it is considered after all the best uni in my country) and I have enjoyed so much more my education because of this philosophy of teaching.
After my final exam, I discovered a calculator left by a student. This was in the mid 70’s when even the simplest calculator cost $400. Taped to the back of it was a cheat sheet. Imagine the dilemma of this student: claim the calculator and admit cheating, or forget the calculator and lose $400. It turned out it was his brother’s, and he had to take option.
I graduated 10+ years ago. 99% of my classmates cheated. I am the one who didnt cheat. I earned 80% in my final, everyone got almost 99%. I have a C, everyone has a mixture of B and A. So i just joined them cheating. Too late. Shitty grades, bad start in career (amid of the financial tsunami) and a dumbass second low hon. It was really stupid not to cheat when no one cared. I am a math grad and my math foundation is solid. Honestly, it is uselss and I have to eventually translate to become a programmer lol. Seriously, what is the point testing my memorization skills over various numerical methods?? Or ways to solve a ODE?? Useless degree and education.
What I’ve noticed here (UC Berkeley computer science) is that the common refrain of “If you just cheat and don’t learn the material, you won’t do well later!” just doesn’t really hold up. Students will study the material, learn it, and then cheat anyway because the classes are just that competitive and difficult. Granted, that’s not the worst thing in the world – the primary objective of learning is still fulfilled – but it screws over students like me who don’t cheat because the classes are curved.
The only problem with this is professors need to actually be 100% certain when they accuse of cheating. I had a professor, who thankfully reasoned with us later, but he wanted to give myself and a friend an F on a coding homework assignment for “cheating”. We were honest that we discussed the assignment together (which was allowed by policy), and we both talked about a global variable being a potentially good idea (typically global variables are frowned upon). We both had a global variable, which is why he thought we cheated on each other. However, preparing to defend ourselves against the university, we sat down together and went through our code to find that almost none of the rest of it was all that similar. Luckily he agreed with us and reinstated our homework grades.
In my physics exam we are allowed to write a DinA4 paper with “cheats” or notes. It is generous and helps not to feel pressured to remember everything. Good notes aren’t enough to complete the exam. The tasks are technical. Some stories came about of people using the old 3d glasses to write in red and blue to have double the information on the paper. Another story was someone writing on a extremely large piece of paper till the loophole was fixed and the size limited to DinA4.
I’ve cheated in the sense that I have looked up solutions as a reference to homework problems that I either got stuck on or that I felt were a waste of time. In both of these scenarios, my “cheating” was genuinely the most effective (and time efficient) way for me to learn while still getting a good grade. I’m a “learn by example” kind of person so if I got stuck on a problem type that the professor/book didn’t explain well, I used the solution to generalize a way to approach those kinds of problems, and used that to drill for exams. And if I came across a problem that I knew wouldn’t be useful for me to do, I didn’t have to waste too much time on it. Since homework is for a student’s own benefit, I don’t really find this kind of cheating to be particularly problematic. I was practicing in the way that was most effective for me, without wasting time. That being said, I have seen a lot of students starting out like this who then fall down the “cheat code” analogy rabbithole where they start looking up solutions more and more, so it definitely takes discipline not to over-use.
All my best stories came after I switched from teaching university level to teaching high school. They were really… really bad at cheating. Story time. It’s 2020. Covid strikes, we go online. I give an online test. I have students handwrite their answers and take photos/etc. to get it to me (this was right when it happened, so we hadn’t adopted to remote learning yet and didn’t think we would be gone for long). I give a trigonometry problem. “There’s a ladder leaning on the wall, needs to be at an angle, how far should the ladder be placed from the wall?” You know the one. I’m grading a test and I see that one student answered “about left from the wall.” No idea what that means. Continue grading. Another one: “the ladder should be placed about left from the wall.” It keeps happening. Test after test. “About left.” What the hell is going on? I notice every “about left” paper also has a very peculiar error on a different problem. I sift through the papers and look for any other test that made the same strange error on the other problem. I find exactly one. I flip to their page with the ladder problem. Their answer: “The ladder should be placed about 16ft from the wall.” All those students copied her test and misread her handwriting. They all saw “about left” where she wrote “about 16ft.” They didn’t even question the fact that what they had copied not only failed to give a solution to the problem, but also wasn’t even a viable English sentence.
In Germany, in pure Mathematics, you are usually allowed to bring a handwritten piece of paper into the exam and i think that ist awesome. I am the oppinion that the Goal of a lecture is Not to know some formulas by heart but to understand the matter and to be able to proof things. Therefore i have never seen anyone cheating in an exam at the University.
Do professors realize how much of a problem it is to not just fail a class, but to drop below a certain GPA? I wasn’t able to get my bachelor’s degree because I got one too many C’s, lost my scholarship, couldn’t apply for other, less selective scholarships because I was already in college and most require you to be an incoming freshmen. Couldn’t pay for school, had to stop. I am lucky enough to be going back now but that is only with the support of my partner. It is 100% understandable that students feel pressure to cut corners when the margin for error is small or nonexistent.
To me, it’s really simple, if the education system were any good people wouldn’t cheat. I became fluent in Japanese because I had a private teacher that really made me fall in love with the language, not only did I not cheat but I went out to point out my mistakes and areas I could improve when the teacher missed it, even if it meant a lower grade. I cheated my way through school and uni cause I just needed certification to work and the actual content is dogshit. If you don’t want people to cheat don’t overload them with bullshit.
I have ADHD and I used to get bad grades on math exams in middle school. One day during an 8th grade algebra exam, our teacher had to leave the class in order to take care of an urgent matter. Before he left, he asked the students if he could trust us not to cheat while he isn’t there to watch us, and the students promised that they won’t betray his trust. He said very clearly that he trusted us and went out of the classroom. As soon as he got far enough away – everyone got up from their seats and started comparing and yelling their answers. I was the only one who remained seated and solved the exam alone, while trying as much as I could to use my fingers to block my ears. As soon as the students guarding the window saw the teacher on his way back, they sounded the alarm and everyone got back to their seats. When he walked in it seemed like nothing had happened. I was the only student on that exam who got 40/100, while all the other students got 100 or 98-ish, which was highly unusual so the teacher must have known what went on while he wasn’t there. When I got to university I was crushed by the feeling that the impossibly demanding academic environment pushes almost all students to cheat on homework assignments at one point or another, regardless of their ethical standpoint or their feelings towards the matter. The worst part is that because students keep passing the exams with high scores, it doesn’t seem like the lecturers have an incentive to change anything in the working environment, which perpetuates the cheating attitude.
As a student, here is my perspective. In the classroom I am expected to learn multiple different ideas and formulas, quickly memorize them, then take a test and hope I understood everything and remembered it all. In the real world, I’m just expected to do my job. I don’t have to remember every formula, I don’t have to do everything on a sheet of paper. In the real people use charts, books, and the internet to fulfill their job. Heck even my doctor looks up new medicines. Even teachers or professors have to look up answers to questions every now and again. So in my eyes, if a student uses textbooks or notes to help then ace the test, let them do it. The saying “you won’t have a calculator on you all the time” is quite frankly a lie. An estimated 83.72% of people have a smartphone, and I guarantee most if not all of those phones have a calculator. It’s not your all of your fault, it’s mostly the grading systems fault, but how you choose to handle the situation is on you!
I’m not proud of it, but I did cheat on some homework (never a test) in the final two years of my undergrad. A big part of the problem (as a math/comp sci double major) was the tremendous amount of work that was expected of me. I was doing homework like a full time job and I know that’s part of the deal, but never having a moment to myself, a moment to breathe, just became crushing. Like, it got to the point where, if I struggled with a problem, I couldn’t justify spending 3 hours on this one problem, banging my head against it when there was a mountain of other work I had to do. I wasn’t getting enough sleep, I never got to see friends, I never got to enjoy myself. It was untenable. This problem is only made worse by the fact that I, and a lot of students, also had to work while going to school to survive. I don’t know what the solution to this is, other than to get kids free/cheap school so they don’t need a job while going to school. The workloads in some classes does need to be addressed though. I’m fine with the 3 hours outside class for every hour in class “rule,” but I feel like I was doing more like 6 or 7 just to keep my head above water. It was too much.
As a student myself, one super helpful way of stopping people from cheating is just constructing the assignments differently. For example, if there’s an online test, where half the questions are just “What does this vocabulary word mean”, and it isn’t open book, you have to realize that there isn’t really anything you can do to stop people from cheating on those questions by cracking open their textbooks. Instead, if you make it an open-note, open-book test, but assign problems more based on application of the concepts, you end up with a test that isn’t any harder or easier, (because they have access to their books for help to offset the increased difficulty of those questions), but is more valuable in testing their actual understanding of the concepts, (because it’s application instead of rote memorization), and also discourages cheating. (because the easiest way of cheating by far is looking up the answer in the book)
A few years ago I took a technical maths course. During the final our instructor said that if we were unsure about a formula, just let him know and he’d write it on the board for us. He was a retired engineer, and didn’t care if we memorized the formula, only that we knew how to apply it. Because that’s how it works in the real world
I’m going to toss in my two cents involving my experience with physics. I took an AP physics class in highschool and while it was interesting and intuitive at first, it was also really fast paced and when I was absent, i felt miles behind. By the time Christmas brake came around, i had resigned and decided to just absorb the knowledge to have a leg up come college. I got a 2 out of 5 on the exam and decided to keep my notes because even in highschool, i was a diligent note taker. Come sophomore year, I’m retaking physics and it just so happens that on Mondays, I’m on campus all day. So i spend at least 6 hours each Monday reading the chapters, doing the homework, looking through book examples,and perusal articles. I show up to every class. I participate. I go to office hours when I need help i take even better notes this time around. On the test, even though they are online and i can easily look up answers in realtime, i don’t because I’m confident that i will pass because of the work i am putting in. Half of my peers don’t have a clue what is going on. The end of semester comes by finally and i finish my final exam proud. At how much I’ve grown compared to my highschool self. But then the grades are submitted and I get a C- (73.4%) which is passing but i needed a C (75%) to go into my statics course. I was demoralized. Now i was going to have to take the stats course a year later because I was being honest. Those other peers however? Well one I personally knew from highschool, who didn’t do the reading, didn’t go to class, didn’t take notes, didn’t watch articles, didn’t go to office hours, asked others for the homework, and just generally could t be bothered, passed and moved on.
not to justify cheating, but most of the cheating around me happens from peer pressure, so many people around them are cheating and getting better grades than the people who genuinly work and spend time learning subjects and its really demoralizing, it makes it feel like working hard has less value than cheating. A student can study, get a high B on an exam and have a really good understanding of the subject or they can cheat and get an A on the exam while having little understanding. Unfortunatly many admissions which are greatly based on numbers influences students to go for that second option.
I’m currently on a gap year, but at the university I’m attending next year, all exams are take home and open note. I asked a math professor about this during admitted students weekend, and what he said was that the exams are all hard proofs, so the open book just gives you the resources you need to start them. I think this is a good system, because it takes the premium off memorization and forces students to develop an intuition about what to do with given mathematical facts.
Something that I saw while I was TAing in grad school: The university had a fairly generous scholarship program for the undergrads where students could get a respectable scholarship based on their entry level grads, and it renewed annually as long as they maintained their GPA… but if their GPA dropped below a certain threshold (pretty high, I think it was an A- average or something), then they lost the scholarship going forward. So we observed a lot of cases where a student who was “on the bubble” of losing their scholarship had a really strong motivation to cheat, even students who were generally excelling but just couldn’t afford to take a B in physics 101 because it might mean a loss of thousands of dollars going forward. Really unfortunately designed system.
As someone that cheated every single general class by letting my ex do them. I work 90+ hour weeks plus Japanese lessons and volunteer to teach responsible gun usage. there was no conceivable time for me to do everything. But doing my IT classes which is actually the important part of my degree. Why do I need humanities classes? Or history? Has nothing to do with running a raid 5 redundant server.
One thing that you didn’t address is familial and societal pressure. Some students who may have been historically the smartest in their classes in high school suddenly find themselves under real academic pressure to perform for the first time in their lives. They can’t bear to fail a class, as it affects their reputation among friends and family. The incentive to cheat and get that letter grade suddenly becomes the utmost importance if they can make it through that semester. It doesn’t matter how it affects their learning in the future. I say this as someone who also faced immense pressure and dropped out as a result of sacrificing mental health in order to keep up. I saw classmates cheat, get away with it, and proceeded to go through and get their degrees. Obviously, the landscape has changed with online learning, which has made it easier and more prevalent.
the “credentialization” of university really hit home with me. i used to really care about learning but I’m in my final year and I’ve come to the point where the only point of this is to finish and get the diploma. i put minimal effort into work (just enough to pass) so that i can move kn a do something else. I’ve struggled throughout university and I’ve been running on fumes since about my 2nd year. and honestly seeing people so eager to cheat (especially lately) is just even more discouraging.
As a 51 year-old who cheated one time in college I’ve changed my thinking on this. Our current society in COMPLETELY corrupt, to the bone. You should make it a GOAL to cheat and get good at it. It will prepare you for the reality of life you’re coming into. Of course, there are exceptions, you don’t want to be a doctor or engineer who cheated because that will come back to bite you in the litigious ass when your incompetence shows through. Be a good person and don’t steal others’ work but the system is your enemy and if you can find a way to f it in the a then do it.
I’ll just be honest in the age of online classes, I’ve used my notes for all the “closed book” exams. I find it’s stupid that professors are so for closed book exams yet don’t realize that in the real world, you’re always going to have access to information. I’m currently at a 3.7 GPA right now, but I think the fact that I can use a notes for an exam, barely understand the core concepts, and practically ace every test shows how flawed testing is. The best professor I ever had was for Business Law and she did no tests, only written assignments. I honestly learned so much in her class about law, and got an A in her class. Every assignment consisted of mock scenarios where we would thoroughly discuss who would sue who and present arguments/counter-arguments for each case. I could use my notes to complete the assignment (which you certainly should be allowed to, real life isn’t a closed book exam), but it required a deep understanding of the material. It also completely took away the exam anxiety as we were given two days to complete our final assignment. The only way I could’ve cheated in this class was through contract cheating, whereas in all these classes with “closed book exams”, I can just use my notes online during the exam and get free 90%+ grades. That Business Law class was so far, one of the only classes I had to put some serious effort into. I feel like a lot more classes need to be like this. Like imagine if my business law course operated where instead of having me apply my knowledge through real life applications in written response, I was asked in a multiple choice question to name the tort applied to some random case from 1927 they briefly discussed for two paragraphs in the textbook (which pretty much all my classes’ exams have consisted of so far).
My university dealt with cheating during covid in a very smart way. They sacked exams altogether and gave us three assignments per course during the semester. We had a week to complete each assignment, but since they knew we would have access to all our course materials freely, as well as the internet, they made them really hard on purpose. In the end I feel like I ended up learning much more than I would have by doing exams.
For my university there was a huge cheating scandal for my gen chem 2 class and the professor took it upon himself to email the entire class and wished that the cheaters go through hard times and get nowhere in life because those that worked hard for a grade would suffer because of the cheaters. This was a class where A’s were made impossible to get and tests were exceedingly hard, as is a “weed out” class. What a joke
Student perspective: I’m taking a course that will cease to be relevant the moment I pass it, it is too difficult to sleep through and I can’t get my degree without it. There is no incentive for me to learn, but this alone isn’t enough to push somebody like me to bending the rules as far as they go. What pushes me over the edge is $25k USD per semester and debts that I, in all likelihood, will not be able to fully repay until I have GRANDKIDS and the fact that not passing not only leaves me in the same place and out money but also risks my entire degree by dragging down my GPA. You put that kind of pressure on somebody and either they’re rich enough to waste hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of their life or they win by any means necessary (not unlike the rest of the US come to think of it). Education is not, as my (genuinely amazing) professors constantly insist is the case, the opportunity to learn useful things that you will apply in your life. In fact, most of the classes that teach you ACTUALLY USEFUL INFORMATION like how to file your taxes or create a budget or perform emergency first-aid are not required nor are they actively promoted electives. Education is like playing Diablo Immoral, you pay obscene amounts of money for the privilege to grind for four to six years to get a piece of paper that ceases to be relevant after you get your first “real” job. The education system at least in the US is incredibly flawed to the point where it is little more than a paywall formality for most professions.
You are spot on with your observations, Trefor. I agree with your comments about having more frequent, lower-stakes exams and doing all we can to provide a learning environment as opposed to an exam environment. For me this means giving students opportunities to rework formative assessments to understand their mistakes and how to avoid making them again. I also try my best to make sure the summative assessments (i.e., exams) really do give students an opportunity to demonstrate their understanding and mastery of the course objectives. I try to include at least one active learning exercise in my classes each week, so that students can solve problems in real time and get help directly from me rather than a cheat site. We all have the same objective, and I try to sell my students on the proposition that the value of their degree is determined by the skills they develop and can apply in their careers, rather than whatever arbitrary grade they receive on an assignment or course.
I’m a math professor at a community college. My question is: what is the instructor’s incentive to police for cheating? If you don’t like dealing with the students, paperwork, etc. then why do you spend your time policing it? You aren’t paid to catch cheaters. You’re paid to teach. For example, why check their calculators for notes? Like you said, it probably wouldn’t help much anyway, and if it helped a little bit, it would catch up with the student eventually. I don’t like to actively look for and prevent cheaters for all of these reasons and also because it’s demoralizing. When I was a student, my college had something called an “honor system.” Teachers assumed students had integrity. No exams were ever proctored. Professors would pass out the exams and then retire to their offices. A student could even leave the classroom and take the test in the library or wherever they felt comfortable. I like to carry on this tradition. If there are cheaters in my calculus sequence, then these students are the ones that will never really understand calculus anyway. They will almost always fail the course, and if they don’t, they’ll fail something else down the line. If that doesn’t happen, they probably won’t have a prosperous career in a math-related field anyway.
The college admissions scandal taught me that there is no consequences to cheating if you’re a legacy alumni or have money. If i’m competing with people who have deeper pockets than i, and they do shit like this regularly, i’m not obliged to entertain a system that pretends that advantage doesn’t exist to my detriment.
I feel like a lot of motivation to cheat can be chalked up to an already existing motivation of “this sucks I just need to endure” but is also hugely dependant on the learning environment. I’ve had classes where the professor quite literally only spends 4 hours reading the online PowerPoint off of the website all the assignments come from, then assigns 12 homework assignments for the week. At that point the feeling, at least for me, was “if this teacher is going to sit here, read some words for a few hours and collect a paycheck what’s the point in me doing anything but getting everything done and collecting the grade.” teaching, ESPECIALLY over online, needs to be a team effort, classes where the teacher is TRYING to do things is always going to motivate students to give honest work a try
I cheated my entire high school and the reason was simple: the teachers didn’t know how to teach the class and I needed to graduate because that’s what will shape my future in today’s world. It’s not that simple for a student to tell the institution that a teacher doesn’t know how to teach, so we do our best to overcome this obstacle. I don’t regret doing this because I’m at the university today and if it’s necessary here I’ll do it again, we don’t live in the world that many professors lived in that they NEEDED to know everything and if they forgot something they had to looking in huge books, today we have Google in our hands, universities and schools should adapt to the modern world
I think we need to rethink the system of grading. Obviously this is difficult because grades are currently used as a very sloppy (but still somewhat useful) metric to assess learning and competence. But the current system of grading and the pressure that it imposes upon students is the biggest cause of academic dishonesty and cheating in my opinion. People also think of grades as a tool for motivation, but I think grades are just about the worst system for motivating students you could think of. In a hyper-capitalist system, it makes sense why we would assume that people require rewards and punishments to motivate them to do work, but I think humans are far more motivated by narratives (whether interpersonal or intrapersonal). In fact, I would argue that grades actually don’t generate motivation in students through the behaviorist operant conditioning sort of mechanism we might associate with them, but rather through a narrative approach in which students attach narrative meaning and significance to their grades (i.e. they view grades as something that defines an aspect of their identity, and they use grades to identify success and failure in their conceptual “map” of narrative importance). Gamification is something that can be used to increase motivation, so I wouldn’t say the behaviorist conception of rewards and punishments are entirely off base. But I do think grades as they exist now are a terrible and ineffective implementation of gamification. And that, in my opinion, is because they are inherently attached to a person’s identity.
Hi, I’m doing a BS-MS (5 year integrated master’s) in physics. In my institute, students are indirectly encouraged to cheat. Yes, you heard me right. There’s this relative grading policy, which grades you based on others’ performance. And there’re a lot of cheaters in my class who just form a group online and share the answers during the exams. Due to this, students are pushed into cheating because, as a single student, they can’t compete with a group of students. And hence if they don’t join the group, they’ll get a really bad grade. And then there’re people like me who don’t cheat whatever happens. But now I’m paying the price for it. I got really bad grades due to relative grading with cheaters (and that further depressed me making a feedback loop). Now I don’t get internship programs while the cheaters get really good opportunities. Worst part is that the institute and most of the profs, don’t give a damn. I really want to pursue research and now my institute and my classmates have ruined my career or life. Is this what I get for not cheating in my exams?
16: 34 totally agree with you on that point. In my 3th year, we had class on PLC. The professor seems strict at first but everybody in the class agree that he is one of the nicest professor in the university. He had many small test for us in which he don’t even want to cheat because we like him so much, if we had a hard time with a question, we just choose to ignore it because there are many chance you can improve your grades in class. However, the final was hellish. The question wasn’t even hard or tricky but he made us upload our computer screen as a article file every 30 min. I know he want to prevent student looking up stuff online or discuss about the test but it made the test a lot more stressful than it need to be. No one failed the test of course because he was good in his teaching but there was a lot of lost potential in that test, we could have improve on a lot of things if we didn’t need to constantly check the clock. Thank you for addressing this point
It’s very interesting to know a professor’s perspective. Most of my classmates have cheat almost in every test, I’ve never acused them or argue with them for doing it, it’s their life and decisions, but it’s so disappointing when a professor say that they have spotted cheaters and they aren’t even close and accuse the ones that actually tried their best, but the worst part is that it becomes personal and they get upset with them. And they are just making cheating more atractive, I mean, they are rewarding cheaters and punish good/honest tries.
Im not proud of it but I’ve definitely cheated on exams and quizzes in various online classes. I don’t cheat because the material is hard but because I’m too lazy to spend the willpower to memorize the information. I don’t think there’s valid logic for memorizing so many minute details if I already understood the concepts. On top of this, some classes are mandatory for my biochem degree that I just don’t care to study for. However, I still need to do well in these classes to preserve my gpa for med school. It was always just about saving more time by studying the day before the test, understanding the concepts, and using notes during the test to supplement the concepts. With the amount of time I saved from not studying for long periods of time, I was able to accomplish more such as completing additional research, additional clinical volunteering, etc. For reference, I scored in the 98th percentile on the medical college admissions test in the US so I know for a fact that I’m more than capable of doing well in school. I guess this was just something I needed to get off of my chest.
my uni implemented a system where all students need to turn on their article while doing the exam to prevent cheating. my exam generally is practical questions that test the ability of a students to implement calculus formula in real life examples. Bringing a “formula note” for you to cheat wont help at all.
As a student, I feel this so hard in my soul. I’m a Japanese major, but thanks to the pandemic and my own living situation, I don’t get nearly as much practice as I’d like, and that’s without factoring in my neurodivergence. There were so many times in my early semesters where gen eds confused me to no end, and I had to use equation solvers online; not to cheat, but to get into the right mindset and figure out how the answer was solved in the first place. Worked wonderfully for Calculus I and Physics… nooooot so much for Calculus II.
I think one of the biggest grey areas is looking up help for questions and finding the question on like math stackexchange. The imposter syndrome hits hard. I do agree with all of this. I think one of the best ways to figure out cheating is to just have an interview-style component to the final exam where the professor/TA just asks question to the student directly and sorta just sees them reason it. if they learned the material, they would be able to at least communicate with the vocabulary. Love your articles 🙂
In Romania there is a HUGE cheating problem. Literally everyone I know (including teachers) have told me they cheated at least a few times. The problem here is the way that courses are structured, with even subjective answers (like commenting literature, or LITERALLY GIVING YOUR OPINION ON SOMETHING) having very specific things that you need to say (even if you disagree with the opinion that the text presents you, you still have to agree with it and justify it in your essay). This mentality leads to so many people cheating, because if you find a different way to get to the same solution, you usually get punished for you creativity with lower grades, so it’s easier to just cheat, instead of memorizing everything perfectly. It’s weird hearing the perspective of someone from another country, since here it’s been so normalize, some teacher encourage cheating, knowing that there is just so much that you need to learn, in so little time, that it is simply impossible to keep track of, lets say, geography, when you don’t even go to the geography exam at the end of the year, cause you chose chemistry or physics.
When I took calculus two the professor let us bring in a “cheat sheet.” The second exam was about integration techniques and was 40 questions long and we had a time of 75 mins. Needless to say that “cheat sheet” did not help at all. Moral of the story. Cheating isn’t a band-aid for poor preparation.
Years ago, one of my students was caught cheating on a math test. He had some notes written on slips of paper he snuck into the testing lab. He was caught, given a failing grade, and kicked out of class. He came to talk to me afterwards and said he had trouble remembering all the formulas. I reviewed it with him and he realized it was easier than he thought. He promised me that he would study over the summer and return to my class the next semester. I never saw him again. He was killed by a stray bullet in a park he was in with his friends. If he had not been kicked out of class, he would have never been in that park. He would have been taking precalculus over the summer instead. Since then, the policy on cheating was changed. Students were still given a failing grade, but allowed to complete their units and move on to their credit math course. Cheating hurts people in more way than one.
I have a bit of a problem with the concept of cheating when there are notes involved. When are you, seriously, in the real world, working without notes? Don’t you check sometimes in your previous notes, or in other people’s work on your day to day job? It is not allowed to have your notes for tests and exams, and there are reasons for it… But are those reasons valid, and were they ever valid? Taking into account how the world works currently, test and exams are worth way too much for what they mean about the individual. Imagine programming for years, and failing math’s class because you forgot about the necessary notation to be “correct” maths, despite the result being correct, using the correct algorithm, and you end up not having enough grades for what you’d want. Despite the fact that you were already a programmer going into the course, probably better than most, and failing because it is not “pretty math” or some calculation mistake is pretty ridiculous. And also, this is all academic. How does it reflect teamwork? How does it reflect real world application of said individuals skill? Exams and tests don’t work, and while they reflect knowledge, the most successful students are also the ones that gobble up information, and then forget most of it after 2 weeks. It doesn’t work. No, I cannot provide any alternative that is easily superior, but cheating with notes and little remarks for the student to remember is not really cheating; it’s coherent with the real world.
This topic was covered on another YouTube website. The main focus for his though of the rise of cheating was correlated to the jump in cost of college. Students out there are paying $25,000 a year for a college education. The cheating comes in when you can qualify for a scholarship that is based on GPA. If say someone can cheat there way into say a 3.50 GPA and get a $5,000 scholarship then they will try what ever they can to get that GPA to save that money.
Our professor of physical chem always said “if you cheat and I dont really notice it, its okay. The world we live in is far from ideal and even further from fair. Those of you who like my subject will sure come to love it during my lectures. And those who dont, i will not interfere with your goals in life”. Althought i always went for organic, that man was fascinating.
As a former university student what I struggled the most was with the necessity to memorize some formulas that I no longer remember but that with a quick search I can get up to speed and recall how to use them. It really made it feel like I wasn’t really learning but more like memorizing. Then some subjects did just let us bring our notes to the exams (or a limited amount of notes), and the exams did feel a lot harder but at the same time they felt way more fair and I felt like I learned much more in those subjects. Despite everything in university I didn’t get to the point of cheating, but I do remember cheating in chemestry in high school because I just didn’t feel like memorizing the valence electron values of the elements. Anyway, great content.
I think a lot of professors come at cheating from the wrong angle. Everyone tries to discourage their students from cheating, of course, but whenever someone gets caught it seems like a “Gotcha” moment. I would much rather teach students why cheating is ineffective in the long run and give them the tools they need to learn instead of forcing them to fall back on cheating as a way to try and avoid failing a class. In my mind, there are no “bad” students who cheat because they hate school, there are just people who haven’t been put in an environment that allows them to learn and grow legitimately.
Great article Trefor, you’ve broken it down very nicely. Since you didn’t ask for it, here’s my 2c about “why students cheat” and “what to do about it.” I’ll apologize in advance because it’s somewhat of a discursion from this topic, although I think it’s fundamentally related. If we’re interested in the most immediate cause of pressure and stress that induces students to cheat, then I claim that cause is grades. Grades are, I believe, at the core of most of the issues you mention in your segment about why. Beyond cheating, I think grades cause a lot of the other friction for students and instructors that I’ve experienced (more on this below). This might sound obvious or simplistic, but I think we can learn something if we think about the role of grades in more detail. How can we reduce the pressure caused by grades? A common piece of wisdom for instructors these days is to make assessements low stakes. Specifications based grading, for instance, seems to be primarily built around reducing this pressure (and I’ve heard it can be quite successful, although I’ve not done it myself). But then, we are scientists, so we should think more analytically and question the basic assumptions. What are grades? Fundamentally, they’re a metric that instructors use as a proxy to measure how proficient students are at the given tasks. This introduces a number of complications. a) how lossy is this metric? does it accurately reflect level of mastery for all students? By the way, what is the type of mastery we seek from our calc I students?
I do not condone cheating. However, this may be a hypocritical lecture. In my experience profs talk the big talk but ignore when they do something wrong and ignore when the institution does something wrong. I’ll have more respect when I see the complaining going both ways. Those essay websites don’t work. You have tools to catch those.
This is such a beautiful article. I never cheated but it have resulted in me being in college for 6 years. I know some people who have ended up being successful in the field and are passionate but at one point of their academics have cheated/plagiarised because they were sick. But I was very emotional in this article because it made me feel so strongly about how much hard time my professors are feeling and as much as I want to perform as expected or as much support they give to me, I just don’t deliver.
I took Calc1-3 + Linear Algebra and Differential Equations. I spent A LOT of time on the homework using online Differential and the Integral calculators to slog through quickly what I like to call “Charts Scraping”. I have both a preclusion to writing errors due to adhd and a tendency to go the wrong direction early on when there is nothing but knowledge and experience of the paths available to tell me otherwise. I got an A in ALL of those classes including the tests. The difference is that when I used those calculators I used them ALL THE WAY. Every time I did not understand how to get the answer I studied the detailed answer given by the calculator. I graphed it using desmos. I grabbed youtube articles. The books we had were terrible website bullcrap. Pauls Online Math Notes was a Godsend. So was this website. None of that would have mattered if I had not recognized that I NEEDED to study. I used extra tools to power up my study capabilities and reduce the time I spent doing work that did not AID my learning. If you do that it works GREAT. If you use the calculator as a crutch to avoid learning the concepts, you’re just crippling yourself and wasting your own time.
Gonna tell my case, I’m and undergrad of Mathematics. Some preofessors left us exams for sending back in one or two days (of course harder that regular 2 hour exams) and really hard to find online solved (maybe some hints in any pages). That would be great because I felt this a some oportunity for make “research on interesting and challenging problems” and not just train my memory for spit off a lot of answers that i probably forget the next day. I must admit the regular method for exams seems to go pretty well: it is the filter for which a lot of remarkable professionals had to pass, but I think is time of think about if time pressure and the lack to acesses to the bibliography is really the best way to test knowledge and skills of people.
As a nineties highschooler prone to algebraic mishaps and with poor arithmetic I would’ve sold my soul to have access to a CAS in order to let my higher order reasoning shine. Instead I was relegated to a life and a career that made me fundamentally miserable. Once upon a time astronomers needed to have keen eyesight to qualify for the job, now we have have noted astronomers and radio astronomers who are blind. Why are we who love mathematics tied to the rote manipulations that are so banal even a computer can handle them? Is it cheating to delegate to a machine what machines are designed to do? Humans use tools, let us use those tools.
All the reasons I found why people cheat at universities (I’m from Russia): – I don’t know how it’s now, but 10-15 years ago at certain specialities you H A D to have a higher education diploma even if it isn’t really required to learn the stuff you need, or otherwise your CV will be thrown in the trash. Good example – programming. You can just get a few courses, watch some youtube articles and you’re pretty much fit for a junior position. And many students understand this very well. Thus they cheat through the uni programs while learning only the things they actually need (or “think” they need). – Many universities in our country have some really strange and/or unpopular subjects like philosophy (which is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea) and some other crap local professors probably made up, so of course many cheat through them. If you are majoring in philosophy – of course the philosophy is important, but if you’re getting for example an IT degree – it’s likely not useful for many people. If the professor is very vigilant in cheating – students either bribe him (he probably has to accept the money because otherwise his salary is likely tiny, even in a prestigious place), or bribe the management above the professor to pass through him. – If the kid has rich parents, he has the incentive to just bribe the professors/management staff to pass the exam or even just get the diploma without learning anything. Of course “just getting” the diploma is very expensive, but “buying through” certain courses may be more affordable.
I just graduated with my B.A. Computer Science from a state school, and I am damn proud to say I had bent the rules here and there to get through when I needed to. I had most of college for covid, and being computer savvy, it’s not hard to cheat—most professors are either completely oblivious to it, or they turn a blind eye. Either way, I landed a real decent job as a software engineer straight out of college. I just see this as my big middle finger to everyone who argues against cheating. I study real hard at what I need to know, bs the rest, and move on. I know with certainty I am a better programmer than many of my colleagues—but my grades will never show it. This college system that have me a piece of paper at the end means nothing. I can’t stand the college system and professors’ bs that they put students through, and I couldn’t be happier to be done. I sincerely hope the best for all the students who don’t have the privilege of going through college during the pandemic like I did, because I took advantage of my professors not knowing how to use Zoom and other tools to get the grades I needed to make it out of this awful college system on top. God speed, future college students.
You want students to not cheat? I had a wonderful online Chemistry class during the summer back in 2020. Every exam had: 1. Four hours of time 2. Open textbook, notes, Google 3. Every exam has a study guide that’s not “too broad” because only things that will be on the exam is on it 4. Two wonderful professors who go through the material before and after the test who were available 24/7 on Microsoft Teams Despite having all of these “leeways” the exams were not a walk in a park. Four hours is not enough time to look up everything you need to know if you don’t already understand the material. Not having to worry about running out of time and taking my time doing the calculations were really a life-saver though. I always hate math classes due to the “speedrun” aspect of it. I’m always meticulous with my calculations, and I take a lot of time on my assignments just to be correct (it’s not because I don’t understand the material). This is one of the main reasons why I got a B in Calc and A in Chemistry despite imo, I understood Calc better
One time I had a student turn in code that looked suspiciously like someone else’s code, but it looked like they had gone through a lot of work to refactor it. When confronted about it, the student explained that they had looked over someone else’s code and “copied the algorithm, not the code.” The thing is, the algorithm was the whole assignment.
A course I have this semester (first sem, ECE, India) has that kind of one way mode for some tests where you cannot go back once you move forward in the test. While I think it lowers the possibility to cheat, it significantly increases anxiety and pressure like you said in the article. I ended up scoring less than what I could have if I were allowed to go back to some questions.
“Cheating in Universities is a problem”, a problem that remains there with different students in course of time which shows that most of the blame is on the universities and professors and not on the students. though unfortunately, experience has shown me that a small portion of people is going to cheat anyway, but when the whole class starts cheating it’s almost always the teacher’s fault, and since they are the ones controlling the class and somewhat in power, they are not the ones who are going to be punished and the students are always to blame. Honestly, I think cheating is good for people because that’s one of the skills they are going to use in real life anyway (not in a way like a fraud but in a more constructive way) and it also helps students learn faster and better. it should also be noted that the present grading systems and the way people see these grades are one of the major factors in cheating too.
As someone who recently went back to University to study mathematics after 15 years of working in IT, 8 of those being as software developer (self taught). My experience with academia is that we focus way too much on the final exam instead of learning the material leading up to said exam, this of course differs from professor to professor and it’s ultimately up to the student to learn the material but I often feel that the exam is way more demanding than anything leading up to the exam and I rather have the assignments be more difficult so if a student does well on everything leading up to the exam then the exam should really be quite easy. Something I’ve personally struggled with is memorizing formulas, I’m in my first year of studying pure mathematics but I also have to take a few applied math classes which just expects you to memorize a bunch of formulas.. which I pretty much refuse to do, unless it happens naturally from me having to use something over and over. I simply cannot memorize it unless I can prove it myself, some I can.. some I don’t have the time to. I don’t think you should you be forced to memorize something that you are not also expected to be able to derive yourself, memorizing something for an exam that you will just forget later seems pointless to me. I also had to take a programming course (in C) which is why I brought up my background.. I didn’t study at all for that exam and yes I did well on it but my takeaway from the exam is that it focused way too much on just memorization of certain things that I can say for a fact most working programmers will not make conscious effort memorizing.
So long as the cost of American universities remains unconscionably high I have no problem with my students using any means necessary to perform well in my classes. I could not be bothered to question their methods so long as there isn’t a serious explicit offense such as plagiarism. These kids are bending over backwards to work part or full time while juggling college classes. I’d rather not scold them to be academically honest while the academic system is so obviously failing them. If you claw your way to an A in my class then congratulations, you’ve earned it! I’m sorry you had to spend $1800 for an introductory sociology course though.
Very good article. I see all sides of the issue at hand. One thing i think may have been missed is the idea associated with the “we can use calculators in the real world” argument. “I really dont need to memorize this because i wont need it memorized in a real job.” This is why i like open-book open-note exams because the students who truely know how to do the work, will rarely actually use the open-notes&book, but simply use it rarely as a reference. Not to completely learn how to do something during the exam.
I entered my Junior year of Uni when the in person learning resumed. Most of my classes consisted of group projects since I am a Comp Sci student. The amount of people that I got in my group that didn’t know basic programming material was insane. You could tell who cheated or barely made it by during the online learning period because they could barely recall any of last semesters material.
I’m engineering I looked up tons of homework problems. I tried to pay attention to the solutions instead of just copying down but sometimes I got lazy and would just write things down to get it done. Never felt bad about homework’s but I would never cheat on exams. But you’re right homework cheating is common, and often just means more time spent studying for the test
I agree with the final “My Thoughts” section. As a computing science instructor, the best part of a course is the exchange with the students, during both lectures and lab/seminars. Discussing and brainstorming a solution to a programming problem, or discovering the interesting aspects of a programming language (or comparing different languages). I like to think students continue that mindset when working on homework or assignments, and try to prepare the assignment requirements to facilitate that–yes, I know, many students just want to get the assignment done, without realising the learning goal vs. the “get it done” goal. Personally, I don’t like to give exams because I remember how stressful and challenging those were. But it is part of assessment, and the opportunity for the students to discover & show if they have grasped the important ideas (contrary to many opinions, tests are not just indented to be “fact regurgitation exercises”).
What a fascinating article! I received my engineering degree in 1988, so the mathematical learning environment was quite a bit different then! The way I see it, there is no way you are going to complete an engineering degree if you cannot master the underlying mathematics. I still remember the gigantic rooms that held my lecture sections of calculus I and II, and physics, and many of the other basic courses. Usually these rooms held 100-300 students. I have to say, I had a bit of a tough time in that environment, what we called at my university the “weeder” courses (to weed people out). I passed with sightly above average grades but I did not enjoy the experience, nor did I think that I learned everything to the level I usually expect of myself. Once I got to the more advanced material, which were in classes of 30 students or so, where I had easy direct contact with my professors, all of a sudden my grades improved dramatically! Interesting, no? As far as cheating, I agree that, eventually, the poor performers that are cheating will eventually show themselves the door, because they never build the foundations that are required for the more advanced material. Of course, the resources that are available to the cheater, as you discuss, are much more advanced now! Wow! As far as performance pressure goes, undergraduate programs have nothing on the study of law! We had one exam per class per semester. Talk about high stakes!
Fantastic article! I was taking a statics class online and its one of those class that lots of students fail and always has a low average. I did well in the class and the proff made the tests open book so it wasn’t too stressful but the time crunch made it a challenge. However, there was minimal invigilation and students could have easily collaborated online during tests. I didn’t know anyone in the class and I thought it was very generous of the proff to allow us to have notes in the test so I didn’t see any point on cheating. The final for the class was very challenging and I didn’t so well. When I got my final course mark I had not a great mark but it was right around where the average of the class should be. But that wasn’t the case, the class average was outrageously high and my mark was bottom of the class. I think that with some online classes there is so much cheating that the scores don’t actually have any relation to how much the student actually know. Moreover, it makes the people who actually follow academic integrity look worse. I may not have gotten a great mark but I know that I retained 70 percent of the information whereas someone who cheats and gets a 90 percent might not know 30 percent of the classes content. I don’t feel safe knowing that there are students who may not know a damn thing about mathematics and they will be out there putting up buildings.
I recently finished an engineering degree, and I remember I would try to find supplemental information on the topics I was studying only to find a preponderance of the results were to these sorts of companies! It was incredibly frustrating and I think further supports (albeit anecdotally) how prevalent this practice must be.
Pretty sure some unis/colleges in my country offer free mentoring/tutoring. It helps ofc but does not solve issues with the education system, as many are commenting about. But I also know that in some countries, higher education is completely free, which makes sense -> train and teach whoever wants to learn, and the return will be that the whole population will be collectively more upskilled! It would help not only people’s minds, but businesses and the economy too! I think a huge factor for the failure of the education system (and hence the many stressed people who cheat) lies in how students primarily chase *external* motivators – the focus is in the wrong places: on grades, pleasing other people and their expectations). We are studying because we’re scared, and many have been since childhood. More and more people are wondering “what is the purpose of studying?” and “why should I even study?”. No longer are we marvelling at the beauty that comes with curiosity and satisfying that curiosity with growth in knowledge. I’m glad to see more and more people having a unified agreement on this.
Great article Trefor. As a maths teacher from the UK I set regular homework assignments which contribute nothing to final grade or even performance grades – we have regular tests for those. I do try to reinforce that I don’t mind if they mess a few up – make those mistakes and move forwards – rather than copying off their clever friend in the lesson before – presumably to avoid having to explain that they haven’t done it. You’re right though, appealing to their better nature is definitely the positive way to proceed. They’re good kids anyway but just typical teenagers – they’ll put it off to the last minute and copy. I learnt many years ago that its difficult to challenge this kind of cheating with any accusations as students will often say they were working together etc etc. So its a subtle swerve of the hard work required to get through the exam. Shame because as you point out, they don’t get any benefits, only inevitable disappointment when the final exam comes.
As a Computer Science student myself from Germany, I find your article very informative! From my experience, the best way to prevent cheating is to allow the students to take a sheet of paper filled with handwritten notes (front and back side). A few weeks ago I was very, very stressed out because I kind of mis-organizing myself on which exams I’d choose to write during the exam period. Basically I had a few exams from the previous semester that I had failed unfortunately, but suddenly I was like “screw it” and decided to take ALL of my exams during that phase: those I failed from the previous semester, plus the ones from the current one. I thought I was gonna lose it! There was always something happening in my life that would prevent me from learning from exams, and was like “there’s no way I’m going to pass any of them now…”. Learning for the Operating Systems exam was pretty tough, meaning that I couldn’t simultaneously learn for another exam as well until I was done with Operating Systems. Friday came, I finished the exam (turns out I passed 😀 ), and immediately on that day I started to learn for the next exam, which was Math, because I had to write it the next Monday – so I basically had 2 and a half days left to learn everything. I thought it would be impossible, but then I remembered that we’re allowed to bring with us 2 DIN-A4 pages (front ant back) filled with whatever we’d want as notes. And because of that I didn’t even have to consider cheating. Why would I do that?
You make some good points, and you are clearly empathic towards students. I had no idea cheating was such a big issue today. Perhaps show your students this article or tell them that they are very likely to get caught and the penalties are high. They are obviously not aware of it and think that they are much too clever and will get away with it. In desperation, people can make poor decisions. If people were not desperate, then there would be no bank robberies 🙂 In high school when it was about remembering stuff, then cheat sheets made sense, but at the university level, we could bring whatever books or notes we wanted (except laptops, math professors, and communication devices). So, there was no such thing as a cheat sheet, but the questions were difficult like: “Prove that theory X, from the book that was left as an exercise for the reader, because even the author couldn’t be bothered” 😊, but I guess that is difficult to do with multiple-choice, as you use in the US. As Engineering students, we considered math a tool, and proving theories was not something we got a kick out of. It would be like asking a carpenter to prove that the hammer works instead of showing how to use it 😊
I’m studying Physics, and many exams let you bring your notes. To me, this seems like the easiest and best solution. You can’t get an advantage by sneaking anything in, because everyone can bring their notes in. Also, you are training to be able to solve problems with the ability to consult material, just as you would in real life.
Interesting article, personally the best classes I’ve ever had and the ones that were the least motivating to cheaters were the ones where the professor did such an excellent job of relaying complex and difficult concepts in an intuitive format before introducing the formal theory. That way, when you received the exam you knew the concepts so well that cheating would be unnecessary wasted effort. The worst offenders for classes most prone to cheating are simple math classes (like calculus) where the information involves route step-by-step work with professors that read off the textbook and offer a lot of opportunities to cheat (i.e. the course and exam are online). A lot of the comments do an amazing job of pointing out how universities as an institution that pipeline people into work inherently incentivize cheating because in a world where a bachelor’s degree is the bare minimum to find any work, college is just an obstacle to get from point A to point B. To expand on those comments in tandem with my previous point: if you’re a professor you’ve likely dedicated decades of your life out of passion for a particular field and will probably assume your students share that perspective. The problem is that it’s not necessarily true, and since a lot of professor in certain colleges are hired primarily for their research they don’t put in that extra step to engage and motivate their students to be interested in the material. This is obviously a more complex issue (such as the need to cover a lot of material in a short amount of time not allowing for topics to be explored in breadth), but this is just one perspective on the issue.
So I will say that as a disabled student and activist- I have seen cheating in my spaces largely occur because of lack of accessibility. It isn’t occurring because of laziness but because professors are refusing to provide or allow access to needed accommodations for most disabled students. Things like extra time, note takers, screen readers, etc are frequently denied- I myself while I haven’t cheated have had to cause myself intense physical pain and basically freeze the muscles in my arm just to finish an exam on time because of professors denying me my time extensions or ability to take exams with a laptop. Academic ableism needs to be considered with these things.
The problem is the “industrialization” of universities coupled with how necessary they’ve become. Let’s be honest, universities are no longer “temples of learning”, they’re a challenge students must endure to get their credentials and enter the workforce. So on the one hand, students have a very strong incentive to get done with it as soon as possible, since most jobs require such specialized knowledge nowadays that spending 4 years to learn X, Y, Z and F will take longer than it will take an employer to teach a “straight from highschool” guy Z, S and T, which are what will be needed for the job. And of course, let’s not forget that student might be more likely to cheat in a class he/she deems irrelevant. On the other hand, because of how many students a professor has to deal with, personalized grading becomes impossible, with assignments and tests being the only options. IMO, universities need to be broken up into A) more specialized institutions that focus on preparing someone for a job (so for example someone who wants to become a server engineer will only have to study what’s relevant instead of also having to learn cryptology, database management, CPU architecture etc) and B) universities that are actually there to educate the next generation of scientists.
I wanted to share a quote (paraphrasing) with everyone by Karl Jobst: “Students don’t cheat to get a good grade. They cheat to get a good grade faster.” Basically, a student that cheats often knows they have the capability to do well, they just don’t want to put in the time to get there. Someone being skilled doesn’t mean they’re less likely to cheat. Someone being unskilled doesn’t mean they’re more likely to cheat. (The original quote was actually in reference to speedrunning cheater: “Players don’t cheat to get a fast time. They cheat to get a time, faster.”)
One of the best professors I’ve had the privilege to take a class with not only allowed, but also encouraged us to take his exams again if we weren’t satisfied with the grade we got. The only requisite was to study again, go to his office and say something like “I’ve learned from my mistakes, I’m ready now”, and he’d give you the exam right then and there or whenever it suited you. Also the exams were worth less than all the homework assignments combined, prioritising hard work over that “all or nothing” vibe that most exams give. One of the phrases I’ll always remember from him was something he said on the first day of the semester: “I want what’s best for you, so I’ll give you as many opportunities as I can to succeed, all I am asking in return is your attention and respect”. And my respect he got, that man was something else, he was so efficient someone offered him to be the director of a big hospital and he accepted, but quit after a year because he said it wasn’t as fulfilling for him as teaching students, regardless of the salary.
I was the most famous cheater in my high school. We had green wooden desk and we didn’t switch rooms. That gave me time to write stuff on my desk on other classes before the test. I went to school of electric engineering and we had a class called in our language (Bosnian) “Tehnicko Crtanje” Or Technical Drawing and we would draw some 2D objects, shapes .. I would fill of my space with drawing on other classes before test and when the teacher started handing us the tests I would try to cover up the whole desk. I would basically lean forward and stretch my arms and try to cover it up! I did that in all tests during 4 years of high school and pretty much 85% tests. I was a cheating wizard and people from other classes started going to my class to see the masterpiece on my desk and they could not believe that I was not getting caught (probably teacher sucked) and they also were amazed that I could fit and draw so precisely. I got caught only 1 time in math class but it wasn’t my foult and my classmate betrayed me and told the teacher. The worst thing was that it was Friday first shift and last class before weekend and the irony was while writing math formulas on the desk, I basically remembered them!!! So yeah I got 1 or F for THE LAST CLASS OF THE DAY AND WEEK… The cheating wizard failed 🙁 . Like for pray, that taunts me still to this day guy’s help…
And you think none of the blame lies with the university? Teachers who are completely uninspiring yet continue to teach. Classes that are truly meaningless in the real world. Too heavy a course load to graduate in four years, or even five (see the previous comment). Students who honestly belong in vocational tech but believe they need to be in college. And colleges that happily admit those kids because it pays the bills. For a personal story, I was recently in a machine learning class where the teacher taught via Power Point slides. He just zipped through the slides so to get through the entire pack in an hour, fifteen. The slides were so theoretically, mathematically dense that after a few a good chunk of the class just zoned out. So then you fall behind and later cheat on the homework, quiz. BTW, Power Point should be banned from teaching. It is just lazy teaching. But that seems to be what everyone does these days. Why? Cheating is as much about the failures of university as it is about those who need to do it. You don’t see that? Anyway, how we educate needs a complete rework and it might not include attending college. Would you be OK with that?
Literally everyone is faking most of what they do for work and for school. Honestly, if a student gets away with cheating for a grade that doesn’t actually translate to successful career, stable life or anything they’re promised for the 100k of debt; then good. They’ve figured out a way to get ahead in a system that is from the core, not set up to help anyone in the struggle.
The view that me and my classmates have on cheating is very different than other universities. Cheating is nothing other than a tool; we all study engineering and our methods range from YouTube to asking an online website where they show you the solved solution so we know the process of how to do what we need to do. We always use calculators to speed up basic algebra on exams but that’s because at our level we need to put most of our time doing the more complex operations instead of getting bogged down by partial fraction decomposition or something else. It’s to show we know how to USE the basics in order to work with the complicated problems instead of having to prove it every single time we have an exam. Imagine having to prove that you know all of the small things when you now need to set up, compute and use the results of a triple integrated system as just a small part of one larger problem
I really like what many of my professor’s have done since the pandemic. Many of them have decided to make the exams open book, notes, textbook since they found that (at least in computer science) that there is very little difference between the two types of test grade wise. Since everything that most people would try to bring with them is permitted, cheating less likely to occur. There are still people that will cheat but at that point you aren’t cheating anymore, you are setting yourself up for failure in the future from not understanding the fundamentals. Then some of my professors will actually just leave it to our morals since ultimately they already got paid and it helps their ratings and salaries.