A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology devised a clever way to detect student cheating on homework in his introductory physics course—and found about 50 percent more cheating than students reported in anonymous surveys. And he discovered that frequent cheaters ended up bombing their exams.
The professor, David E. Pritchard, led a research team that analyzed student performance in an online homework system called MasteringPhysics.com during four different semesters. The researchers were able to measure the time spent on each question and look for suspicious work patterns. If a student took less than a minute each answering several complex questions and got them all right, for instance, the system flagged that as likely cheating. “Since one minute is insufficient time to read the problem and enter the several answers typically required, we infer that the quick-solver group is copying the answer from somewhere,” said the researchers in a paper due out today in the free online journal Physical Review Special Topics–Physics Education Research.
Based on later surveys of the same students, researchers found that the culprits typically copied answers from friends, by logging onto a friend’s account on the system to copy work or by getting answers via e-mail or instant message.
The goal of the research was to see how homework copiers did on later exams, where presumably fewer were able to cheat, and to try to understand when and why students cheat on their homework.
Not surprisingly, the cheaters performed far worse than other students come test time. But the degree of impact surprised Mr. Pritchard—students who frequently copied their homework scored two letter grades lower on comparable material on the exam. More students cheated later in the semester than in the beginning, and many students surveyed said that time pressures led them to copy a friend’s work.
“If you look at the self-reported data, over half the kids think receiving unfair help is either not a big deal or trivial,” Mr. Pritchard said in an interview. Among other reasons students gave for cheating: “I knew this pretty well from my high-school physics course so it was only review,” and “not motivated to learn physics because I don’t enjoy it and it’s not needed for my major.”
Mr. Pritchard said that many professors turn a blind eye when students cheat on homework. “A lot of people are willing to forgive copying because they think those students are weaker— that they work as hard but just aren’t as able to get them,” he said. But he said their research showed that cheaters were most often those who waited until the last minute to start the work and that they copy answers before even trying the problems.
The professor said he did find a way to greatly reduce cheating on homework in his class. He switched to a “studio” model of teaching, in which students sit in small groups working through tutorials on computers while professors and teaching assistants roam the room answering questions, rather than a traditional lecture. With lectures, he detected cheating on about 11 percent of homework problems, but now he detects copying on only about 3 percent of them.
It might help that he shares findings from his study to his students, showing them that cheaters are much more likely to get C’s and D’s on exams than those who work out homework problems on their own.
28 Responses to Cheaters Never Win, at Least in Physics, a Professor Finds
wchesney - March 18, 2010 at 8:45 am
What we already know to be true…
physicsprof - March 18, 2010 at 9:05 am
“Physics education” never stops surprising me…
iris411 - March 18, 2010 at 9:07 am
Well, cheating is called “proudly cutting corners” in graduate school. With undergrads taking 15-18 credits per sememster and grads taking 3 graduate level courses (plus teaching and research), it’s impossible to be honest on everything.
mjw13 - March 18, 2010 at 9:22 am
iris411: Cutting corners and cheating are not synonymous. One can cut corners by not completing or doing a perfunctory job on an assignment and willinginly (or relunctantly) accepting the consequences. Cheating involes not being willing to accept the consequences and copying from others, be it physics homework, or ecams, or plagarising in a paper, or fudging results of an experiment.
seraphpendragon - March 18, 2010 at 9:24 am
What wchesney said. I could have told the professor this and saved a lot of time and effort. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are cheating though…if it’s like MathXL, you often have multiple choice questions. Guessing can make you super-fast too. Tests will prove that you really have no clue what you’re doing.
mmccllln - March 18, 2010 at 9:36 am
I’m with mjw13 on this one. There is a huge difference between cutting corners and cheating.
tridaddy - March 18, 2010 at 9:39 am
iris411: “it’s impossible to be honest on everything.” WOW, so does that mean we don’t seek honesty in everything or you just don’t care? How can you have a meaningful conversation or relationship with someone if you’re never sure he/she is speaking the truth, or at least doing his/her best to speak the truth and be truthful? I’ll give anyone the benefit of doubt initially, but lie to me or be untruthful and the relationship is severely affected, if not, destroyed.
dank48 - March 18, 2010 at 9:56 am
I’m with Tridaddy on this one. People who say it’s impossible to be honest haven’t really tried it. It’s not easy, of course. But “impossible” doesn’t mean “requires more exertion than I feel like putting out.”
facdevniu - March 18, 2010 at 10:15 am
iris411: “it’s impossible to be honest on everything” is quite a statement and I wonder if you prescribe to your own sentiment? So, how do you deal with those (students especially) who are not honest?
amandafrench - March 18, 2010 at 10:53 am
These findings about lecturing versus “studio” work ought to be reported to the law professors described in the recent Washington Post article about banning laptops from lectures.
bekka_alice - March 18, 2010 at 11:38 am
Difficulty of being honest all the time does not preclude the need for an effort to do so nonetheless. Also, while it’s “assumed knowledge” that cheaters score lower, this research provides a nice example built on real life data showing that the impact is not a half point here or there but a full grade or two lower on exams. The student who isn’t interested because Physics isn’t part of his program requirements may not respond to that knowledge, but students who do need the course are more likely to respond to a simple and clear example than to mawkish admonitions without associated data.
clementj - March 18, 2010 at 12:42 pm
There are online homework systems which make cheating harder by giving each student an individual problem. But, the studio solution is much better.The studio style of teaching has been shown to improve student understanding and their attitudes. There are standard tests now available for pre and post-testing to calculate normalized gain. One of these tests the MPEX measures attitudes, but not just whether they like or dislike things, but rather what they think about particular aspects of learning. My favorite is the attitude towards proofs. Do they a. “make connections between concepts”, or do they b. “tell you it is alright to use the equations”. Standard physics courses generally make students more novice like and more likely to pick b on a Likert scale. But studio courses tend to make students more expert like and to be more towards the a side.Much of this research has been around since the early 90s, so does it take cheating to force professors into a studio style course?One reason for the cheating is that the students who cheat generally have low understanding, and find things so difficult that they try any avenue that works. They do not understand how to understand physics other than by just memorizing, so cheating may be the only thing they think they can do.Of course the same thing is happening with teachers. They don’t know how to raise students to a higher level, so they “cheat”. This may consist of just using drill and practice rather than actually teaching. But some have been known to give students answers on tests, or actually change scantrons. When you don’t know how to do something, and high pressure is on you, you may well “cheat”. This is especially true if you are not getting any support.
johntoradze - March 18, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Iris411 has a point of sorts. It is true that the majority of students are simply overwhelemed in tough majors, and this problem is growing, particularly in sciences. There is simply not enough time for students to learn the material. And since it builds upon the foundations supposedly laid in previous courses, the farther and faster they go, the worse it gets. This is a serious problem today. Even comparing curricula of 30 years ago with those today, what is taught in lower division now encompasses material that was beyond doctoral work then. The way this happens is that we skimp on fundamentals that would allow students to figure out and contextualize the advanced material, and flood them with factoids. The result of this is people like Iris411. Today, doctoral students openly cheat – in the words of Iris411 “proudly cut corners”. In recent years I have known 5th year+ science doctoral students who couldn’t handle an exponential. Most can’t step through something as straightforward as a random walk gene inheritance tree. Most can’t reason their way through anything much. We are turning out a generation of scientists, who are simply not qualified despite the PhD at the end of their names. The result is legions of Iris411′s, and a scientific culture in which corruption is becoming the norm. From department chairs who scratch the back of those who fake data by getting them professorships for it, to simple-minded plagiarism and trading the work of a postdoc of in their lab to another professor in order to get support on a grant. This is very serious, and incredibly dangerous to the academic enterprise.
davi2665 - March 18, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Let us hope that none of these “corner cutters” and cheats choose medicine as a career. We have enough trouble today with uninspired doctors who would rather run a bevy of expensive tests than to do a thorough history and physical examination that usually will reveal the diagnosis. If you add cheating and lack of integrity to the mix, you then can bring the very worst of we commonly see in politics and wall street to a profession where honesty often really is a matter of life and death.
ahrashb - March 18, 2010 at 1:57 pm
Cheating is ultimately a manifestation of the fact that the students do not believe that the problems, whether on homework or exams, provide any formative feedback which can guide them towards better understanding. For too many students, they feel that the classes they have to take and the work involved is akin to filling buckets with sand using a teaspoon. Since the whole enterprise feels pointless, why not just find a way to do it quickly?Clearly, some of the blame resides with the students themselves who should do a better job of identifying their educational goals, the pathways to achieving them, and the reasons why well-informed people feel that certain types of knowledge are crucial components of that process. But much of the blame lies with the professors, who often do not care that students in their classes do not intend to become experts in their particular fields, and with institutions who overly simplify higher education into check-boxes, seat times, and summative assessments that have little to do with learning.Cheating is so obviously against the student’s presumed self-interest, at least when it comes to learning, that we have to acknowledge that maybe it persists because learning isn’t actually the top priority in our classes and institutions, at least much of the time.
timewaster123 - March 18, 2010 at 2:18 pm
I think if we see this as a moral issue it has a neat solution – cheaters cheat and then bomb the exams. Which to me is great. You don’t even have to sort out the lazy guessers from the cheaters, because both groups get what they deserve. Though, if they cheat on the final, you have a different problem.
tee_bee - March 18, 2010 at 4:47 pm
I don’t think iris411 has much of a point. I think that iris411 is invoking the time-honored excuse “everyone does it, so why punish me?” College is hard. Work is sometimes not fun. Tough. It’s no mystery why the cheaters failed so poorly–they “did” the homework, but cutting and pasting doesn’t equal mastery. If it did, I would have earned As in mathematics, instead of the Cs I routinely earned and deserved. The solution is to understand that students will use tools to cut corners. So the homework is just to help students develop mastery–if they do, they do well on exams, and all’s great. If they don’t, they fail, too bad.
fixsen - March 18, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Students majoring in any subject should have some basic understanding of science, beyond what is taught in high school. I am an English major (and now teach English), but I found considerable pleasure in my science and math courses – which were designed for the liberal arts major. I learned some basic principles, did some experiments, worked some formulas, made some observations, learned to identify some specimens, etc. — all of which helped me understand the physical world better. You simply cannot be an educated adult without learning some science. But more colleges should design science courses for non-majors.
biologistnc - March 18, 2010 at 6:17 pm
I loudly and unapologetically disagree with iris411. If you’re cheating in graduate school, why don’t you just go get a job and skip it? I am weeks away from finishing my Ph.D. and can proudly say that for good or ill, I’ve never cut corners, never made a closed-book exam into an open-book exam, didn’t ask former members of my lab what I would get asked on my qualifying exams, etc… I could care less what ‘everybody’ does…not my problem. My problem is to be able to account for my research, my behavior and my decisions. Cheating is a reflection of one’s respect for their chosen field. All I can say is, I hope people who cheat get caught and get run out of their field forever. This is why the public is skeptical of the motives of the scientific community.
mottgreene - March 18, 2010 at 7:14 pm
It’s good to have this empirical result in the can, as cheaters, learning of this study, may now avoid detection by playing a video game or whistling dixie for 2 or three minutes before filling in the answer given by their friend to them for each of the problems.
marka - March 19, 2010 at 12:35 pm
‘Let us hope that none of these “corner cutters” and cheats choose medicine as a career.’ Hmm … Unfortunately, I think this is actually much more common than one would like. I was impressed that the physics ‘cheating’ rate was ‘only’ 11% — @ MIT!! When I was an undergraduate in the 70s, pre-med was very competitive, and my smart, ambitious dormmates would spend a lot of time ‘fudging’ their lab results to be close to what was ‘expected.’ I was appalled at the time, but my spouse is now an MD, and she wasn’t surprized at all – grades before all to get to med school for many. And some of her ‘colleagues’ in med school similarly ‘fudged’ their way thru. One way to look at that might be they are doing the work to determine what is ‘expected,’ and hence are gaining & reinforcing knowledge. Another is that they are putting theory before facts ['truth'], and are simply concerned about looking good, not actually doing good. This latter might explain the significant resistance in medicine to evidence-based comparative effectiveness. In case any weren’t aware, the challenge in getting evidence bases is the refusal of many docs to undertake rigorous research protocols — they don’t really believe in ‘science,’ and prefer the anecdotal.
ohreally - March 19, 2010 at 1:14 pm
It seems that some poster always says something like this: “What we already know to be true…” and often they imply that the study is “soft” or the researcher soft headed. But such comments beg the question of what the word “know” means in this construction. Presumably a “scientist” would be concerned with the nature of the evidence used to support a claim. “Believing” this state of affairs to be true because it is commonly believed, or having “observed” such dynamics anecdotally do amount to a kind of “knowing”. But this is a rather paultry kind of knowing. What these comments reveal is not the “obviousness” of the findings as these posters seem to think, but rather a very limited understanding of empiricism. I think it is an outgrowth of contemporary science education where one can get an advanced degree (e.g. a “Doctor of Philsophy”) by merely being a technician. Few, if any, science programs seriously consider issues of the philosophy and sociology (i.e. the practice) of science as a balance to idealized descriptions of “the” scientific method. The result is scientists not understanding the significance of their own–and others–epistemological commitments, methodologies, and truth claims. Einstein, Bohr they were true scientists, doctors of philosophy; they studied and understood the philosophical issues underpinning their work and their work was the better for it.
johntoradze - March 19, 2010 at 1:41 pm
ohreally – good point, although having been through grad school in the last 10 years I think it is very hard to get through and keep one’s eye on the philosophy. On a related topic, we often forget that Einstein was a guy like many who lament here. He couldn’t get a job teaching, so he worked for the patent office. It was while he was there that he did his most interesting and revolutionary work.
laughin_otter - March 19, 2010 at 7:27 pm
Cheating is cheating is cheating, and the individual who justifies it possesses a mindset that colors the rest of his or her life activities as well. We might generously say that student cheating reflects poor preparation, a fear of not doing well, poor personal habits, early deprivation, undue pressure to perform, in short, a host of psychosocial problems that have built up over time to a level of desperation where the end justifies the means. But what kind of professional will this student become? Will this student actually know the difference between dishonesty and honest conduct in his or her professional life? Or will it become the inside joke around the water cooler? By letting students talk their way around cheating and plagiarism and by not throwing the book at them every time they do it, are we not just perpetuating a breed of schemers, liars, and scoundrels whose aim is to run the country according to their own half-baked morality code, a kind of fond shared memory from their college days, sort of like fraternity drinking binges?My vote is for college administrators and faculty to stand up on their hind legs and start issuing demerits–that’s it, demerits that remain on the record–for every instance of cheating, maybe with a first warning just to be nice. Name names. It’s the only way to stop this plague, but I’m willing to bet it will stop!
raymond_j_ritchie - March 19, 2010 at 10:17 pm
Time and opportunity. Do not unintentionally teach students to cheat. Give reasonable workloads and get them to do things while you are watching. Get them used to that.After getting sick and tired of reading essays that students had downloaded in biochemistry I have found an interesting phenomenon. I give the students the essay questions in the last lecture and they do the exam in a classroom with me watching. The good students write good work, the bad ones write 5 lines of confused twaddle. As a bonus you do not get the “I studied for the wrong things” story any more. Same thing goes for calculation exercises and quizzes. Give them the question in the previous lecture but with numbers changed in the final test version. If they do not understand how to do the calculation they get it wrong and they interpret the result wrongly. Primitive old graph paper and a plot up, fit curve & interpret type question is still as deadly as ever.
willismg - March 19, 2010 at 10:49 pm
I’m wondering where the rationalization arose that students need to cheat because they are pushed so much harder now than back in the good old days. I seem to remember grad school being hard. It was supposed to be hard. I didn’t cheat, and I’m not aware of any of the people I was there with cheating either. We worked our butts off in nuclear engineering so that we had something meaningful inside that we could use as intellectual collateral to obtain a paying position doing what we loved. As far as I’m concerned, cheating should be a capital crime in a university. I only got that piece of paper as an indicator that I was on a higher intellectual level than those who couldn’t get one honestly. That is to say, cheating is nothing less than intellectual counterfeiting. If nobody says anything about it, all of our degrees become not worth the paper they’re printed on.
arrive2__net - March 21, 2010 at 1:46 am
I think the research showed that cheating on homework is really cheating yourself, since the cheaters didn’t seem to have learned enough … they actually avoided learning … by cheating. In the experiment, when the opportunities to cheat went away, so did the cheating. I think the improvement in learning that occurred by adopting the “studio” model could be a case of “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”. Study and homework time may compete favorably with partying, sports, etc. if you can’t get out of the study and homework, by cheating. Cheating is also bad because where there is competition for grades, and cheating is a factor, the honest students may get worse grades than they deserve. Students have a duty to avoid cheating, but professors also have a duty to catch and discourage it. Here is the link to the abstract for this research http://prst-per.aps.org/abstract/PRSTPER/v6/i1/e010104 .Bernard SchusterArrive2.net
11232247 - March 22, 2010 at 10:52 am
26.willismg wrote: “As far as I’m concerned, cheating should be a capital crime in a university.”I say give everyone an “A” and thereby put an end to this perpetual cat & mouse game between teachers and pseudo scholars. If students wish to pay tuition money for a simple letter placed on a piece of paper, give it to them, wish them well, and be done with it. They deserve everthing that awaits them later in life.It is not the grade, but what a person actually learns that counts the most. Mercifully, the “real world” routinely reveals frauds for what they really are.