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Cheating on Campus Is Worse Than Ever
Fifty years ago, I was sitting in a high school classroom taking an exam. The sun was shining through the windows behind me, and I wasn’t particularly anxious about this test. I looked up from my test paper and something caught my eye, off to my left and slightly behind me. Two of my friends, two lovely teenage girls who always received excellent grades, were consulting each other.
They were cheating on the test. And I was dismayed.
I quickly turned my head back to my test paper and tried to unsee what I had seen.
And did nothing else except finish my own exam.
I’m embarrassed to tell this story today, because I consider myself a person of integrity. I could give plenty of excuses for not telling our teacher, but it’s clear that I colluded with their behavior.
And I was wrong.
* * * *
This memory came back to me as I ruminated about recent reports about cheating. Yes, I’m aware that there have always been students who cheated. But the opportunities to cheat and the tools available to aid them have grown; the societal norms and values about cheating have decayed and been severely compromised. And it suggests an even more dismal future for our values and culture in the U.S.
So, how and why do people cheat?
Some of the usual cheating methods continue. Students have others write their papers. Others use crib notes or silently commiserate with others. But the violations are bolder than I could have believed, especially following the restrictions of Covid-19.
One of the strategies is to work around the rules for midterm online exams:
No one checked IDs to make sure the students enrolled in the class were the same students taking the final. Cheaters in the class paid fellow classmates—the ones who stayed in the proctored exam room—up to $100 to send them the codes so they could log in from outside the room, where they were free to look up information on their phones or brainstorm answers together. In case the Olds got smart and thought to track students’ IP addresses—that is, where they actually were—students reserved study rooms in the same building as the exam room, Huntsman Hall, making it appear as though they were physically there. (It’s unclear whether any proctors thought to check.)
The average on the midterm was around 80 percent. In past years, it was closer to 60 or 70 percent. ‘It’s not that the teachers got miraculously better at teaching the content or that the kids are smarter,’ the University of Pennsylvania sophomore told me.
There are technical tools available as well:
Remote testing combined with an array of tech tools—exam helpers like Chegg, Course Hero, Quizlet, and Coursera; messaging apps like GroupMe and WhatsApp; Dropbox folders containing course material from years past; and most recently, ChatGPT, the AI that can write essays—have permanently transformed the student experience.
For one online exam, students were to allow no more than an hour. Since the exam wasn’t proctored, students violated the time limit, used technical sources to answer questions, and commiserated with each other to answer questions.
You might ask about the role of instructors to stop these behaviors. Many are intimidated by the demands and expectations of their students:
‘Nontenured faculty have no real choice but to compromise their professional standards and the quality of the students’ own education to take a customer’s-always-right approach,’ Gabriel Rossman at UCLA told me.
That’s because lower-level courses, where cheating is more rampant, tend to be taught by nontenured faculty with little job security—the kind of people who fear getting negative student evaluations. ‘Students can be tyrants,’ the CUNY English professor said. ‘It’s like Yelp. The only four people who are going to review the restaurant are the people who are mad.’
* * * *
What is the source of this rampant cheating? It often starts in high school:
It stands to reason that if high school students are allowed to cheat, then these same habits will be repeated in college. A survey of 9,000 high school students shows that 70% have cheated at least once in the past year. Moreover, 50% have cheated more than twice.
Once they enter college, the outcomes are even more bleak:
In March 2020, [International Center for Academic Integrity] ICAI researchers tested an updated version of the McCabe survey with 840 students across multiple college campuses. This work showed the following kinds of key cheating behaviors:
- Cheated in any way on an exam.
- Getting someone else to do your academic work (e.g., essay, exam, assignment) and submitting it as your own.
- Using unauthorized electronic resources (e.g., articles, Wikipedia, YouTube) for a paper, project, homework or other assignments.
- Working together on an assignment with other students when the instructor asked for individual work.
- Paraphrasing or copying a few sentences or more from any source without citing it in a paper or assignment you submitted.
The rationalizations for cheating are legion, but many people do it to get a competitive edge for job procurement.
There are solutions to these issues; you may have identified them yourself: stop online testing; require essay exams in proctored settings; take advantage of technology that aids in detecting cheating. There is no way to stop completely the determination for students to cheat, but we should try to slow down this pervasive deception.
Why, you ask? Unfortunately, many losses are generated by students cheating. First, their performance on the job may be sub-standard. These are the people who will become doctors, nurses, laboratory technicians, engineers of all kinds, airline pilots, and teachers. Many of them will believe that they can cut corners and no one will notice.
Are these the people you want to put in charge of your lives?
These are also people who don’t value integrity, so they are likely compromised in pursuing relationships, not only friendship and marriages, but work relationships, too.
These people can wreak so much damage to our society, but I am struggling to figure out how we can turn things around:
Amy Kind, the Claremont McKenna philosophy professor, is pessimistic. ‘We’re headed for one of these dystopian societies in science fiction where we just outsource all of our writing and projects and thinking to computers, and they do it for us.’ Soon, she added, ‘we’ll be at the mercy of our future computer overlords.’
Do you see a better way forward?
Published in Education
I hate to say this but it is a spiritual problem. The reason not to cheat is because it damages your soul and spirit. It is the same reason that one needs to work. Being Given something or achieving it by deception doesn’t come with the reward of actual accomplishment. In the end you know you don’t deserve the grade and it will eat away at you.
The College of Engineering once had a large proportion of tests that were either open book/open note, or take home.
If the test was open book, the book wouldn’t help you.
If the test was take home, neither would your friends.
When I was in college, getting caught cheating meant expulsion. Do they not do that anymore?
When my kids’ school was in lockdown, one teacher thought my son was cheating on a test because he did not have his camera on (anti-social little kid). I told her, just grade it and you will see he didn’t cheat. Sure enough he failed, which proved he wasn’t a cheater, just a really bad Spanish student with a stubborn attitude. We had him drop that class and take photography instead. He aced photography.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s somewhat understandable because of the cost of a college education. The price confuses people. It feels to students, and often to their parents as well, that they are buying something, not earning something.
Why do you hate to say that, Raxxalan? It is a spiritual problem! And since it is, I’m skeptical whether in the future it will eat away at those who commit it. I’d assume that many of them will rationalize their decisions.
Completely agree.
When the perceived value of the credential is greater than the perceived value of the knowledge, the temptation to cheat increases. And our society focuses more and more on the credential.
But it’s only when you don’t value your integrity, your soul, that lets you succumb to the temptation.
I doubt it. Except for the military academies. I’d love to see if anyone has seen this consequence. Thanks for bringing it up, Vance.
It was 1984 and the professor started the class with a discussion of cheating. He said he had to decide “where to draw the line” and gave two examples.
First: A student asks a classmate “how did you do that part?”, and the answer is “I used pointers.” No problem with that.
Second: He said, “I see two programs that differ only the variable names. That’s cheating and won’t be tolerated. What I want is a discussion of where between those actions I should draw the line.”
No one said anything, so he said, “Then, I’ll decide on my own.”
Critically important. How do we perceive ourselves? Do people also care about respecting themselves, or is that too old fashioned?
Nowadays if a college expels someone for cheating they might find themselves in the headlines.
One rationale/rationalization is that the skills one needs to be successful in the professional world are more akin to the skills one develops by cheating than the skills one develops by completing academic work honestly.
Seriously, think about it. How many jobs out there pay people to read big hardcover books and then fill out multiple-choice questionnaires about the content and/or write essays about the content using a pen and paper under a 2-hour deadline? Test-taking is a pretty useless skill for most people, unless they plan on entering a licensed profession that uses exams to demonstrate competence.
Otherwise, the professional world is about teamwork, networking, persuasion, identifying the best person for a job and incentivizing them to do it for you, getting the information one needs on a just-in-time basis to complete the task at hand by the most efficient means possible, etc. That’s also how academic cheating works.
There are actually relatively few professions that require the employees to fill their heads with myriad memorized facts. Doctors, engineers, maybe lawyers (but that’s required less and less nowadays), etc.
Now, this doesn’t really apply to practical training. If I’m hiring a computer programmer then I want to know that they have lots of practice doing actual programming and didn’t just pay some guy off to do their homework for them. However, as long as they are able to do the job then I don’t give a flying fig if they cheated on their philosophy-101 exam to get their mandatory freshman arts credit.
I’m reminded of the scene from Halt And Catch Fire where the programmers are all given free copies of a hot computer game to play, and the ones who cheated to finish the game are the ones who got to keep their jobs because the company needed problem-solvers rather than guys who were good at playing computer games.
If they don’t need what they are being taught, they shouldn’t bother going to college; they should pursue a different kind of education, as you say. Even my husband said he got his B.S. because he needed the piece of paper.
In my case, I learned critical thinking from my history classes. Time and money well-spent.
Our entire attitude toward education needs a huge makeover. We need to provide more people with practical education that will help them in their jobs.
And I also think if they think that cheating is no big deal, then I’d hate to have that person working on my bank account.
I feel like we on the right use the spiritual problem card perhaps too often. It will eat away at them in ways they don’t even really understand. It will feed self doubts. It will also mean they won’t have the actually tools and knowledge to succeed. Eventually you get into a situation where there is no way to cheat. That can be shattering to someone who hasn’t had to learn things the hard way. I agree they will rationalize their decisions, but in the darkness of night there isn’t a way to run away from or rationalize things.
Yabbut, in many cases the really useful stuff people learn at college, like the critical thinking skills for example, isn’t necessarily the stuff that gets tested.
I’ve never seen any research on what kinds of assignments and/or exams get cheated on the most. Are there some kinds of assignments where kids cheat less than others, because those assignments are considered more useful? Do some subjects see more cheating than others? Is there a difference between mandatory courses and electives?
There are some assignments I had to complete where, in hindsight, I kinda wish I’d cheated to get a better grade, because they were really little more than busywork and/or an exercise in flattering the professor by parroting the professor’s opinions back at ’em. I certainly didn’t learn anything by completing those assignments badly but honestly, other than the feeling of alienation from getting a poor grade for doing something pointless badly.
I wager that students cheat the most when they believe the course is a load of hipposcat, and I wager that in many (most?) cases the students believe the course is a load of hipposcat because the course is, in fact, a load of hipposcat.
Strangely, most of the courses I took that I remember thinking were a load of hipposcat were mandatory. Coincidence?
Would I be a very less valuable member of society if I’d cheated in my utterly mind-numbing Frankfurt School philosophy course, or would it have pushed my GPA up just enough that I could have become an even more valuable member of society by getting into a grad program that I actually cared about?
Much of the hand-wringing about cheating assumes that the students are cheating in every class, on every exam, and with every assignment. I’m highly skeptical that’s actually the case.
You would be a less valuable member of society if you thought that cheating was just fine. Just because you took the easy way out and because you were deceptive.
Good point–I don’t know if students cheat in every class. I frankly don’t think it matters. Cheating is cheating.
Gosh, you musta had to dig your way out of a lot of hipposcat! ;-)
But the fact is that the damage to a spiritual society permeates everything. Maybe it demands that kind of recognition.
You do make a good point about too many courses being required to graduate that are irrelevant to a persons degree. It increase the cost of tuition and is done to subsidize departments and extract more cash from students. I think stopping that would help.
There can be a lot of value in open-book tests because they force you to use the resources at hand to solve the exam problems. If you haven’t read the chapter and prepared, you will be much less efficient at using the book to solve the problems.
I had a zoology prof who let us bring one page of notes, a cheat sheet, to the exam. You could write anything on it front and back. You could write as small as you liked. You could even photocopy someone else’s notes and bring it to class. Preparing the page was good test prep because you had to go through the book and class notes and decide what was important enough to put on the page and then summarize it. There were fraternities and sororities that gave out zoology 101 cheat sheets to their members for each exam, but it did them little good because they didn’t know the material on the sheets. The real value was in the hard work of preparing the cheat sheet.
I think probably does on one level. I also think it causes people to roll their eyes and tune out valid and good arguments. I think some of the best thinkers on the right today are able to describe the spiritual problem in such a way that they convey it without explicitly stating it as such, Alas I have no such talent.
Par for the course on a university campus in the late 1990s.
Corruption is a horrible problem. Cheating is one form of corruption but it illustrates the problem with all forms of corruption: once it reaches a certain level, more join in to avoid being “suckers”. And once this starts we lose the “trust” society that is essential to broad economic success and security. There is a reason so-called “third world” countries are poor — many have low trust societies that require central management to ensure any economic progress at all, progress that levels out and stagnates.
A number of people said that if they didn’t cheat, they’d lose out on better grades. And I agree that the loss of trust is a key issue. When (or if?) cheating becomes commonplace, doesn’t it erode the trust in our relationships: family, friends, business?
The cynic in me says that since we live in a world where no answer can ever be identified as “wrong,” even in a subject such as math, I just can’t see the point in cheating at all!
On a slightly more serious note, and incorporating most of the comments above as to reasons, I think, for very smart students, that “risk-taking” is also sometimes a reason to cheat. They just want to see if they can get away with it.
OMG, I never even considered that motivation, She! As you probably know, that’s not an aspect of my temperament at all. I always assumed I’d get caught, so I didn’t even try. But of course, my higher self [ahem] kept me in line, too.
I didn’t realize you met Jerry in high school! (LOL. Kidding.)
I keep trying to write a comeback, and could only think of an emoji that sticks out its tongue. But I couldn’t find one. Darn.
I think there are at least a couple factors at work.
One is connected to some thoughts I’ve had for a few decades: that some cultures have a sort of “trickster tradition” whereby the trickster is honored and praised for putting one over on someone. It is considered acceptable to trick someone who is not part of your culture.
The European culture from which America was birthed does not have that. But I feel as if it’s crept in over the last few decades.
The second thing that’s come to mind is the push toward group projects and collaborative learning. This allows the laziest members of the group to receive the same grades as the ones who actually know the material.
And then add the increase of online schooling where instructors simply cannot tell if students are cheating or not. And the U.S. just went through at least a year of that and it hasn’t gone away completely.
So we’ve created the conditions that allow for more cheating. And then you have the wokester profs who insist that doing the work properly is “whiteness” or some dumb thing.
Here you go. Just save the jpeg, upload it to your Ricochet media library and it will be there whenever you need it:
It’s a deadly combination, and I see little to no chance of its changing. Thanks, Drew.
Now, here’s a really silly way this first occurred to me. Video games.
Specifically video games with several puzzles to work out. (Think: working your way through a Zelda game, for example.)
Now, you can try to use all the clues available and put your mind to work and actually solve the puzzle. (Yay!) Or you can go online and get all the answers to help you solve the puzzle without actually having to use your brain.
I remember being quite proud of solving “Myst” without any hints at all. (Though if I recall, I did get one.) And as I’ve been playing through “Breath of the Wild” (don’t judge) I’ve been trying to avoid looking up anything at all. Because yeah, you can get entire walkthroughs of the game online.
But what’s the point of even playing the game if you can find all the answers? Apparently, my kids still get enjoyment, even though they look up everything. Because sure, you still have to actually do the actions required, even if you do look up how to do them. (i.e., the walkthrough might tell you how to solve a Shrine puzzle, but you still need to actually do it.)
But doesn’t that minimize the pleasure you get from figuring out things for yourself? It would for me.
So I wonder if for a younger generation, life isn’t about learning, but about knowing how to apply life’s “cheat codes”?
We have somehow eliminated or greatly minimized the buzz one can get from learning something. From learning a new skill or being conversant in a particular subject matter. There’s no longer pride in that accomplishment. Why bother when machines can do all that for you?
So yes, . . . cheating at video games got me thinking about how that idea expanded into the culture whereby “cheating” becomes an acceptable way to accomplish something.