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[Colloquy Moderator]

As cellphones and PDA's gain popularity as teaching tools and cultural accessories, a growing number of professors worry that students may be using the devices to cheat on examinations. The professors cite incidents like a well-publicized episode at the University of Maryland at College Park, where 12 students used Internet-connected cellphones to look up the answers to an accounting test they were taking. Colleges have taken a number of steps to curb high-tech cheating, such as proctoring exams, creating multiple versions of tests, and stiffening academic codes of conduct. Which measures actually work? Should cheating be considered a technological issue or a cultural one? Read more ...

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[DL from CT]

I am a new full-time faculty member at a small private college. I wonder if we cannot just maintian a no-tech rule in the classroom. I know that in very large venues, it is impossible to see what everyone is doing, but in small classes (10-12), I would think it is easier to "keep an eye on things" during exams.

[University of Maryland, Baltim]

We have a general policy that all cell phones and pagers must be turend off and out of sight during class and exams. If students must receive calls during class they must go outside to recieve it. This for emergency use only. We do procter exams and do not allow any technological device to be used duirng the exams. If students are permitted to use calculators they are furnished by the School for this purpose. This policy has worked well. We are not aware of any cheating before but wanted to be proactive to prevent it from occuring. I am not aware of any incidence where cheating has occured with the use of electronic devices.

[R.N. Houze, Professor/Purdue U]

One effective way to prevent use of cell phones, PDAs, programmable calculators to cheat on exams is to exclude their use.

I administer closed-book, closed-notes, no calculator exams that try to test the students' understanding of materials and their abilities to apply the information - not to test their abilities to remember or look up facts.

[John Garner Ivy Tech]

There is a problem with the "read more..." hyperlink. It does not go to the right story.

Instead it goes to...

" Silent Treatment
A copyright battle kills an anthology of essays about the composer Rebecca Clarke"

It needs to be corrected so that the article on high tech cheating can be read before the discussion of it is started.

(ed. note: this has been corrected.)

However, I shall start it anyway.

Perhaps this mistake with the hyperlink is illustrative of the difficulty that faculty would have catching high tech cheaters. Many faculty are not as well-versed in the high tech world as are their students. Unless, of course, the faculty's specialty area is high tech.

Apart from having the classroom lined with continuous sheet copper that is grounded, and the room having no windows, there is not much of a way of blocking radio signals into a classroom.

Of course, the most unlikely action is to frisk the bodies and to search the personal effects of all students going into a classroom for a test and then not allowing them to leave the room until the test is over.
 
Cheating has been going on for a long time via low-tech methods. The problem is that rote-memorization is not a good way to learn and multiple choice has its limits as a testing method. The testing method has a lot to do with the capability of the student to circumvent it, high tech or otherwise.

[Rod]

Fight fire with fire. Use technology to scramble the signals produced by those devices. They all operate in a certain frequency range and I see no reason why institutions of higher learning could not pony up yet more facilities money to install small electronic scrambler devices in all classrooms that emit white noise in selected freq rangesm, thereby blanketing the area and making PDAs and cell phones useless!

It always worked for Commander Uhura on Star Trek!

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[Glyn Rimmington, Wichita State]

This is a case of our continuing to use outmoded approaches to learning and assessment.  It is time to wake up and rethink how we design both learning activities and assessment methods.  In a world that is demanding better communication, collaboration, team-work and Internet abilities and skills, what looks like 'cheating' in the old paradigm is actually highly desirable behavior.  

We simply need to change the way we do assessment so we can simultaneously measure both team and individual performance in an environment that allows ready access to information using wireless Internet devices.  After all, we did this to deal with calculators by rethinking how we tested math students.  We have designed tests that can be open book.  This is merely an extension of such redesign.

Let's stop complaining and get on with doing some collaborating ourselves, with our colleagues in the education college, to come up with new designs for learning and assessment that deal with these changes to technology and the new demands of our increasingly globalized society.

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[Assistant Professor]

The fundamental questions of this debate are off-target, unless we can argue that cheating is a "cultural" issue of higher education, and of education in general.

Most cases of cheating are a direct result of poorly-designed exams, inane writing assignments, and just flat-out bad teaching. It may puff up some professors' egos to take up arms against an alleged epidemic of academic dishonesty, but such professors are inadvertently acknowledging their own failure as teachers.

In my experience, if the teaching is good and the assessment mechanisms are well thought-out and relevant to student learning, the vast majority of students will not cheat.

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[Patrick Jung, Prof, MSOE]

According the article that leads this colloquy, a group of professors did the following:

1. They posted and ANSWER KEY on their web site for an upcoming exam.

2. They put INCORRECT ANSWERS ON THE ANSWER KEY.

I was FLOORED when I read this.  The article went to discuss how students use cell phones to cheat.  And NOONE asked why an ANSWER KEY would be posted on the web?  

Sure, cheating is appalling, but when PROFESSORS bait the hook as blatantly as this, it is even more appalling.  I cannot believe a group of university professors were so STUPID as do something as grossly DISHONEST as this.

I think I have adequately expressed my sense of incredulity.  I mean, what a group of IDIOTS.

I am an historian, not a scientist, but I would assume if you want to set up an experiment to see how much students are cheating, you would establish a normal classroom environment and a normal testing routine.  You would not try to "prime the pump" but instead see how cheating plays out in a normal, everyday classroom environment.

That, of course, would be a lot more work for a group of professors.  They would have to have a large number of proctors who would actually (gasp!) examine suspicious behavior during a test as soon as they see it.  They would also have to confront guilty students on the spot and tell them to their face they are "cheaters."  It is so much more comfortable for cowardly academics to tell students via e-mail and other such anonymous means of communication that they have cheated.

Yes, cheating and plagiarism are a problem.  But as this article readily proves, many academics have a yellow streak a mile wide and are too afraid to tell a student to his or her face "You cheated, therefore you have failed."

This little experiment by a group of professors merely seems to confirm my view of the situation.

[J Turner]

Wichita writes that we need to collaborate and to make free use of all sources of information.  We can solve the problem by redefining "cheating" so that, by definition,  it no longer occurs.
Assistant Professor writes that, for several reasons, it is our fault that our students cheat.  Reads like "The devil made me do it"

 There are problems with these views:

Re: Wichita
Not all tasks are collaborative--examples:
 (1) Showing that one understands how to apply the quadratic formula by solving given particular quadratic equation. (Some students, despite their claims, cannot  prove that they  "understand" the formula". )
(2) Showing that one understands Kant's Categorical Imperative  by explaining its implications regarding the moral status of assisted suicide.    


Re: Assistant Professor
To claim that most cases of cheating are the direct results of our incompetence (poorly designed exams, bad teaching) or unreasonableness (inane assignments) requires (accessible and cited) statistical evidence.   We are all aware that there are numerous reasons that students cheat. Not all of them the professor's fault: examples
(1) poor grades in most or all classes,
(2) desire to improve GPA's to get into post-graduate professional schools,
(3)perception that the course is irrelevant to the student's career goals,  
(4) simple ignorance of rules of academic integrity.


According to my cheap Webster's,  cheating involves  fraud or deceit.    This is not enough to determine whether any given action is or is not cheating.  Rather, whatever devices--technological, textual, or human--that the student is to be allowed to use depends upon three  inter dependent, and, ideally, harmonious factors.

(1) The goals and objectives of the class and the exam.

(2) The professor's statements about the : (e.g., no electronic devises of any kind, no looking on other students exam papers.)
 
(3) Whatever the local academic culture has deemed to acceptable and unacceptable behavior in while completing academic assignments. (e.g., students should not share information (talk) during an exam, nor should any student interfere with others sitting for the exam.)

So, it  is not fraud or deceit to use textbooks and notes on an exam that is open-book and open-notes.  


When I was a student, certain students made illicit use of written notes, textbooks,  and/or would signal each other in the classroom in order to obtain hints or anwers to exam questions.  Now, students use modern technology.  So what?  The result is the same.   It remains up to the individual professor to determine the rules  of academic  integrity that are consistent with the goals of her classes, the mission of the institution. and the culture of the academic community.

[staffman]

Glyn's argument would hold water if every student cheated. This is not the case, so why blame the system for the actions of a few who deviate. Her solution is analogous to blaming the highways and traffic control devices, and not  the intoxicated driver with regard to  DWI (DUI) accidents.  

When are we going to start making individuals responsible for their actions and stop blaming the system or the process!

[C.M. Biddulph]

Perhaps because I've come to my career in education later in life, I am not terribly concerned about students using technology during exams.  In fact, most of my exams are open book, open notes, open computer.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but in my field (computer skills/IT/MIS) I have found it relatively easy to write exams that test whether students understand and can apply key concepts.  If the student cannot, then having the text book or a web site available is of limited value.

By key concepts, I mean those that I'd like the student to still remember in a couple of years.  Not that they could necessarily put the concept to practical use before consulting a book or a web site--but they'd remember that they need to consider (for example) balancing costs and risks when devising their network security policies.  Then, they could research the current "best practices" and put them to use.

I do warn my students in advance that I am VERY good at detecting answers that are too similar to have been written independently, and will not hesitate to give any and all cheaters a zero on the exam.  

Hope this helps someone!

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[B Capehart, SDSMT]

From Rod:  “It always worked for Commander Uhura on Star Trek!”

Uh… I don’t think that she’s a good example for this discussion.   Didn’t that one movie have her and her friends flipping through dusty old phrasebooks because she didn’t *really* know Klingon (and for some reason couldn’t use the technobabblethingiemawhatzis where everyone in the universe speaks English)?  She's more of a pop culture cautionary tale than a role model.

But Houze has it down just right.  You can’t really show that you understand concepts with a calculator.  I teach a gut quantitative course where, in the Lab section, my charges require computer, math and physics problem solving skills and the rest of the 9 yards.  Since I hover and glower over them in Lab, they pretty much have to sink or swim.  But on exam day, they know that they can have any kind of calculator they want – it just won’t do them any good since they’ll be asked to explain what “that equation” means *physically*, or how (or if) they would use it to solve a given problem.  And those sissy-pants graphical calculators haven’t been able to do that for ‘em – yet.  Sure, it takes work to make unique, challenging puzzlers for the students but, it's worth it beyond just stomping out academic dishonesty.

For basic skills classes, like Math-based courses, it’s perfectly reasonable for students to be asked to go Low-to-No Tech, and cell phones and PDA rally oughtn't be in found in a testing scenario, period, unless the technology is required for the exam itself.  The phones are rude to the others students, and the PDAs are effectively notebooks.  Sorry but to me it's just common sense.

[Asst prof too]

I have to disagree with this and wonder if the writer is actually a student and not an instructor.  Cheating is a cultural problem brought on by the "dumbing down" of society generally and education in particular.  I am sick and tired of students coming into my classrooms who can't think critically or read and interpret on their own.  We're not making them _work_, we're allowing them to pass  courses just as they graduated from high school.  I refuse to give someone a good grade just because she's a nice person or he's an athlete and needs the grade to stay on a team.  It's pathetic that they graduate high school not knowing how to look up words in a dictionary or to come to class and pay attention.  I'm teaching a class right now in which one of my students thinks if he's funny I'll let him do well.  He's about to find out the truth on Thursday.  Students cheat because it's easier than learning.  Education is no longer respected in our society and the idea of actually wanting to learn something has been erradicated; we've replaced instilling a love of education in our students with trying to make them like us and be our friend. I have a colleague who carries around a huge bag of candy all semester to every class--his students love him.  Another colleague has pizza parties and tells his students jokes half the time while showing them movies the other half.   Both of these men have won teaching awards because they've been nominated by the students who love them.  During my years at this school, I haven't seen a single person who makes students work hard win a teaching award.

[N. H. Jolemore, Tidewater CC]

The idealist in me says, "What ever happened to honor codes?"

The realist says, "If students are getting technologically smarter at cheating, then faculty need to update their tech skills to catch cheating students." Plus I agree with Assisstant Professor, who says bad teaching and assessment methods can lead to increased cheating.

The cynic says, "What ever happened to honor codes?"