How to Catch Students Cheating

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The student had perfect scores on the first two tests in Michele Kerr’s math class, offered virtually this summer because of the coronavirus. But, in just a few minutes of one-on-one conversation during her online office hours, Kerr noticed he struggled to grasp the material.

Kerr quickly figured out what was going on. “You cheated” on those tests, she told the student. He admitted she was right.

Kerr, who teaches math and engineering in California’s Fremont Unified School District, is always on the lookout for academic dishonesty. But she and her colleagues across the country are on heightened alert now that the coronavirus has forced thousands of schools to offer more virtual learning experiences than ever before.

“I expect cheating to go up in this new environment and I expect that it will have negative effects long term on how much students learn in their classes,” said Arnold Glass, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University who has done research on the impact cheating has on learning.

Already, some teachers have reported that grades were higher this spring, when many schools went online only, and wondered if cheating could be at least partly the reason.

Here are 4 tips for discouraging and preventing student cheating:

Tip #1: Emphasize Critical Thinking and Inquiry

A big part of the solution, educators and experts say: Give assessments and assignments that require students to analyze information, craft creative presentations, or explain their thinking.

“If you are developing critical thinking and inquiry-based activities that frankly require kids to think and apply their learning, you’re not going to have cheating, because you can’t cheat on that, you really can’t,” said Michelle Pearson, who teaches social studies at Century Middle School in the Adams 12 school district in Thornton, Colo.

On the other hand, answers that can be easily found on a cellphone, for assignments like “multiple choice and fill in the blank stuff, [that’s] not necessarily higher-level thinking that should be in a final assessment,” she said.

It’s possible to offer creative, cheating-proof lessons even in a remote learning environment, Pearson said. For instance, last spring, when her district shifted to all-virtual schooling, she asked students to research one of nearly 300 historical sites and create a presentation explaining its significance to westward expansion.

Tip #2: Create a Classroom Culture That Discourages Cheating

Some educators are trying to create a classroom culture that discourages cheating and dishonesty, even if it’s in an online environment.

Teachers at Oriole Park Elementary School in Chicago have been trying to help students understand that assignments and tests are about figuring how best to help them learn. That means starting the school year talking “less about grades, and more about: we want to know how you can get the most out of your education here,” said Emily Hogan, who teaches 1st grade.

Hogan’s colleagues have also brainstormed creating an “honor code” for their classes that focuses on academic honesty.

“We are talking about character and what character is comprised of and how they can be a good person when nobody is watching,” she said. Such conversations are necessary because it would be impossible to cut off all avenues to cheating. “There’s no way we can micro-manage them,” Hogan said.

That approach can work for older students, too.

Kristin Record, who teaches physics at Bunnell High School in Stratford, Conn., plans to address the cheating issue more directly than in the past.

“My plan is to be a little more overt” than usual, she said, given how easy it is to cheat in a virtual environment. She’ll tell students, “Let’s be real with each other now, obviously you can take a picture of your work and text it to your friend. What do you gain by doing this? What do you lose by doing this? What’s your motivation for doing it?”

Students in Record’s class can receive college credit for their work, either through Advanced Placement or a dual enrollment agreement with the University of Connecticut. She’ll remind them that the consequences for cheating in high school—say, getting a zero on an assignment—pale in comparison to the consequences of cheating in college, where students can be suspended or expelled from school.

Tip #3: Use Peer Feedback, Daily Assignments

Allowing students to assess each other’s work is another good way to cut down on cheating, said Pearson, the Colorado teacher. That’s something that’s a hallmark of her classroom, both in person and now online.

“I work diligently to really create a community network of peer feedback, where kids are giving direct feedback to each other, they are critically thinking about what their partners are writing,” she said. “When you have peers evaluate peers, it reduces [cheating] tremendously because they are held accountable to their buddies.”

Kerr also recommends getting a good sense of what students know by asking them to turn in their classwork daily. That wasn’t as necessary when her district went all-remote in the spring. “I knew my kids and could tell who was cheating,” she said. But it will help when she has a new crop of students.

Tip #4: Have Students Turn on Their Computer Cameras

Technology tools can also help cut down on the temptation to cheat.

For instance, Kerr requires her students to turn their computer cameras on during tests and quizzes. And she disables the “chat” function in Zoom so that the class can only communicate with her, not each other.

Jacob Ryckman, who teaches English and English as a Second Language in the Plano Independent School District in northwest Texas, says some of his colleagues use software, available on Google’s Chromebook, that allows teachers to get a glimpse of their students’ computer monitors.

Google classroom lets teachers create a quiz or assignment that must be completed in a certain time frame. And it permits teachers to change settings so that students can’t open any other windows, making it tougher for kids to pull off a quick search.

But, of course, students could still look things up on their phones or other devices.

“Especially when kids are working remotely, there’s no 100 percent fail-safe [strategy],” Ryckman said.

Vol. 40 , Issue 04 , Page 8

Published in Print: September 9, 2020, as How to Prevent Student Cheating During Remote Learning: 4 Tips

Waiting around for your lover’s cheating heart to tell on them won’t get you anywhere. But with these sneaky tracking apps and GPS tokens, you’ll know exactly whose bed their boots have been under.

Be warned, however, getting caught stalking your partner’s movements can end a relationship just a quickly as being caught in the arms of another. And given that the federal government as well as many states consider installing tracking tools on a device without the owner’s consent or knowledge a crime, doing so could land you in hot water with the law. Very hot water, in fact—you’ll be looking at anywhere from 5 years to a life term depending on your actions. Know what’s kosher where you live before you start playing P.I.

Also, this goes without saying, but you’re being a major creep.

Software Solutions

Modern smartphones make for excellent tracking devices. They’re always with us, always on, and constantly pinging cell towers and GPS satellites to determine their location. The following apps leverage that flow of geodata to provide you with reports as to where the device—and presumably its owner—are in real-time.

Marketed as a means of keeping tabs on your wandering kids or slacker employees, mSpy logs virtually everything that the target device does, from current GPS coordinates to SMS, voice, and Skype transcripts—it even includes a keystroke logger. It can also be used to block incoming calls, access the target’s address book and calendar, monitor its web usage, or remotely lock and wipe the device.

All of these functions are handled via a web-based control panel. The mSpy software can be installed on devices running Android, iOS (you’ll have to jailbreak the phone first though), Blackberry, and Symbian OS platforms. The company also sells preloaded phones including the HTC One, Nexus 5, Samsung Galaxy S4, and iPhone 5S if you prefer to deliver your trojan horse as a gift. Once installed, operates invisibly, giving no indication that the target device has been compromised.

mSpy does charge a monthly subscription fee for its service: $40 a month for the basic plan which logs voice, GPS, email, and SMS data and provides access to the device’s gallery, calendar, and address book. For the full suite of spy tools, you’ll have to fork over $70 a month or $200 annually.

Family Tracker

A less clandestine alternative to mSpy, Family Tracker allows users to ping the target device at regular intervals for its GPS coordinates. You can also “stealth ping” the target device at will to receive real time location updates. However, unlike mSpy, Family Tracker does not delve into the target device’s personal content, nor does it operate invisibly. The app appears on the target device’s home screen and app menu though it does not have to be actively running to transmit data.

This information is then logged for review through both a web portal and the Family Tracker app installed on your phone. It’s compatible with iOS and Android phones and tablets.

Cellular Solutions

If you’d rather not have to nick your partner’s phone to install a local tracking app, the major cellular companies all offer family tracking plans. Again, these are designed for monitoring the whereabouts of young hellions. However, they can just as easily be co-opted to keep tabs on anyone that’s party to the cellular family plan.

Sprint’s Guardian bundle allows the subscriber to find, in real-time, the precise location of any phone on the plan via GPS, either at will or, with the Safety Checks feature, at preselected times and days. This could be used to know when or if your child gets home from school or, alternately, be used to learn where your spouse goes every morning after you leave for work that leaves them smelling of ammonia and polystyrene. You can even text the target phone while you track it, potentially catching your lover in a lie.

AT&T’s Family Map works much the same way. The GPS-based Family Map service displays the location of the target device on an interactive map with the option to call or text the target. You can also set up automatic check-ins so that the target device will text you whenever it arrives at a pre-selected location. And because the service operates through a web app, familymap.att.com, it’s accessible from any mobile device or computer with a web browser. The service costs an additional $10/month on top of your existing family plan and iPhone 5 users will also have to install the AT&T Check-In companion app in order for it to work.

Verizon’s Family Locator can be installed on up to 10 devices per account for $10 a month, though really, you’ll need just one. You’ll first have to activate the service through your My Verizon control panel, then follow a series of SMS instructions to add the Family Locator app on the target’s phone (you may want to borrow the target device to avoid tipping them off) and sync the newly-installed app with Family Locator through the My Verizon control panel. Once the system is set up, you’ll be able to actively monitor the device’s location and receive notifications at scheduled intervals as well as whenever the device departs from or arrives at a specific location.

Hardware Solutions

Mobile snooping apps are effective, but only so long as the device they’re installed to is turned on and in your spouse’s possession. If the phone were left, say, back at their office while your spouse was getting busy in some seedy motel, you’d have no way of knowing that. But with a properly-planted GPS tracking beacon—discretely deposited in a coat pocket or purse, sewn into a jacket’s lining, or hidden in their car—there’s a better chance of the signal being true, even if your spouse isn’t.

Pocket Finder

Weighing just 1.4 ounces, the palm-sized Pocket Finder boasts the “Longest Battery Life for any Personal GPS Tracking Device” on the market. It pings its GPS location every two minutes (adjustable out to once a day) and sends that data either to the company’s monitoring web portal or to the free iOS and Android apps. Every ping logs the beacon’s exact address, its distance from you, speed, direction, and altitude. It also keeps a 60-day record of its travels. The Pocket Finder retails for $100 with a recurring $13 monthly fee for the reporting service.

G/O Media may get a commission

PocketFinder Outdoor Personal GPS Locator

LandSeaAir GPS Beacons

LandAirSea offers a pair of GPS trackers: one active, one passive. The Silvercloud Active GPS Tracker pings its satellite every 30 seconds, transmitting that data to the LandSeaAir monitoring website with displays the information on Google-powered maps with detailed travel reports. This data can also be exported to other sites—say, a Facebook wall—if you’re of a mind to publicly shame your spouse. It certainly beats renting a billboard. The Silvercloud itself retails for $300 plus $30-$35 monthly for the service.

How Students May Be Cheating Their Way Through College

Concern is growing at the nation’s colleges and universities about a burgeoning online market, where students can buy ghost-written essays. Schools are trying new tools to catch it.

National

Contract Cheating: Colleges Crack Down On Ghostwritten Essays

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

We’ve heard a lot in recent weeks about the cheating that happens to get kids into college, but schools are also focusing on how students may be cheating their way through school. There’s a lot of concern specifically about students who don’t do their work; instead, they buy ghostwritten essays online. Here’s NPR’s Tovia Smith.

TOVIA SMITH, BYLINE: It’s not hard to understand the temptation; the pressure is enormous, the stakes high, and for some students, college-level work is a huge leap.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: I was kind of lost on what to do. And, like, even though I did my best to manage, deadlines come closer and closer, and it’s just the pressure.

SMITH: This student, a college freshman, says one night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: It was like, someone please help me write my essay, and within the first few minutes, it was, like, five, six replies.

SMITH: Send us the assignment; we’ll write it for you, they offered. The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, picked one that cost $10 a page and breathed a sigh of relief. In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students know plagiarism will get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays to a massive database of other writings. But to students like this one, buying an original essay seemed like a good workaround.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: Technically, I don’t think it’s cheating because, like, you’re paying someone to write an essay, which they don’t plagiarize, but they write everything on their own.

SMITH: So they may not be plagiarizing, I say, but aren’t you?

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: That’s just kind of a difficult question to answer. I don’t know how to feel about it. It’s kind of like a gray area.

ASHLEY FINLEY: That – it just breaks my heart to think that this is where we’re at.

SMITH: Ashley Finley with the Association of American Colleges and Universities says campuses are buzzing about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says what used to be a small side hustle has grown through the Internet into a global industry of so-called essay mills.

FINLEY: Definitely. This is really getting more and more serious. I think it’s part of the brave new world, for sure.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Get instant help with your assignment.

SMITH: The essay mills market aggressively online.

(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Don’t lag behind, join the majority.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Don’t worry, be happy.

TRICIA BERTRAM GALLANT: Yeah, they – they’re very crafty.

SMITH: Tricia Bertram Gallant, head of academic integrity at UC San Diego, says companies are brazen offline as well; they leaflet on campuses, post ads in toilet stalls and fly banners over Florida beaches on spring break. They also bait students with emails that look like they’re from official college help centers and Bertram Gallant says they pay social media influencers to promote them.

BERTRAM GALLANT: It’s very much a seduction. So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world.

SMITH: YouTube has cracked down on essay mills, pulling thousands of videos that they say promote dishonest behavior. But new ones constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small print that essays should be used only as a guide, not as a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn’t answer our interview requests, but one called EduBirdie answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers. April Short (ph), a former teacher from Australia, says the idea that students may be turning in her work as theirs doesn’t bother her.

APRIL SHORT: These kids are so time-poor, and I don’t necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career. And I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well.

DAN ARIELY: Yeah, that’s it. I mean, you know, this just shows you the extent of ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do.

SMITH: Duke University psychology professor Dan Ariely says the rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome because more begets more; dishonest behavior, he says, is not just about a few bad apples.

ARIELY: Instead, what we have is a lot, a lot of blemished apples, and we take the cues for our behavior from what we see people around us doing.

SMITH: To curb essay-buying, schools are starting to use new technology, just as they did to fight plagiarism.

BILL LOLLER: So the new product is called Authorship Investigate.

SMITH: Bill Loller with the company Turnitin says the new software inspects document metadata, like when it was created, by whom and how many times it was edited. Then it looks at style. Everyone has a kind of writing fingerprint, Loller says, like whether you double-space after a period or whether you use Oxford commas. By comparing that to a student’s other work, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed or alleviated in minutes.

LOLLER: At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not.

SMITH: Eventually, schools hope students will get the message that buying essays is risky on many levels – some companies’ essays have been horribly written and even plagiarized, and when buyers complained, some companies turned to blackmail, threatening to tell their school they were cheating.

But ultimately, experts say, fear of getting outed by shady businesses or by the latest technology may not deter students. Tricia Bertram Gallant from UC San Diego says the only right way to dissuade them from buying essays is to remind them why it’s wrong.

BERTRAM GALLANT: If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won’t win. Our solution has to be about creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter.

SMITH: And she says, only when learning is valued more than grades will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves. Tovia Smith, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROCKET MINER’S “MY FRIEND COMA”)

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2.Always greet students as they come into the classroom. Look at their hands/arms to make sure they didn’t turn them into cheat sheets

3.Arrange the testing environment. If possible, leave a space between students to discourage cheating, and ensure that students store backpacks, books, or binders under their chairs.

4.Do not take your eyes off of students while they are working. Students may look up at the ceiling during tests pretending to work out the answer, but they are really trying to look at a classmate’s paper. Always walk around the room instead of sitting at the front as it makes it much more difficult for students to hide study notes on their laps or behind desks. Students are less likely to cheat with other students when they aware of your presence.

5.Do not allow students to leave the classroom until they finish their test. Students can go look up answers on their electronic devices if they leave the room, or consult with other students. In case of an emergency, ask students to empty their pockets (to make sure they don’t have an electronic device), and deduct points from their test if they have to use the restroom/drink water.

6.If you notice a student continuously coughing, tapping the bench or their foot, or whispering, they are probably cheating. Make sure you go over expectations for these kinds of behaviors before testing, so students know this is considered cheating. If it happens, be consistent with the consequences.

7.Use technology to catch cheating outside of the classroom. Students are more tempted to cheat when they are working on take-home tests or essays. Fortunately for teachers, there are plagiarism detection services, such as turnitin.com, to catch plagiarism.

8.When possible, create your own tests. This makes it more difficult for students to find answer keys online.

9.As a student’s teacher, you can recognize his/her writing style. Trust your instinct when reading student work; if something looks inauthentic, it probably is. If you suspect cheating, type in a couple of sentences from a student’s paper into a search engine to discover if he/she copied it from the Internet.

10.Protect your physical and digital spaces. Do not allow students to be in your classroom when you are not there. Lock filing cabinets and desk drawers to prevent students from looking at tests, and watch for this behavior when you are in the classroom as well. Create and memorize complex passwords for computer and gradebook logins; do not write this information on paper.

11.Compare student answers. If people sitting near each other have exactly the same ‘wrong’ answers, they may be cheating. This, however, is not foolproof, and should be considered only when it occurs in multiple instances and/or along with other suspicious behavior.

12.When assigning take-home tests, create one trick question that does not relate to the material and has no correct answer. When grading the tests, compare answers to discover who cheated.

13.Consider techniques like two versions of a test administered in adjacent rows.

14.As an alternative, you can throw cheating students off by issuing a “test number” to students, so as to suggest different test versions, but retain the same test copy. It’s best to limit this tactic, however, as students will eventually catch on.

15.Make sure every student has their own school supplies to limit interaction during the test.

16.If you hear a student asking another student before the test: “Did you study for the test?” If they said yes, that may give the student an opportunity to cheat off that person. If they are sitting next to each other but the student who asked the question is in close enough range to see the paper, watch that student particularly during the test session.

17.Check with your school before applying penalties for cheating. Doing so without following established procedures can put you at risk for legal action.

For the past few years, online learning has displaced our usual way of study. More and more of us are opting to do online education due to various reasons, from cheaper school fees to convenience. There’s also a wider variety of online courses, and professors can easily monitor students’ progress and assignments remotely.

While many management systems support online learning, one of the most popular is Canvas. Not only does it allow professors to post grades, information, and assignments, but it also allows them to hold exams. If you’ve got an upcoming exam that you haven’t quite had the time to prepare for, you may be wondering if it’s possible to cheat.

Below, we’ll give some suggestions on how to go about cheating on your Canvas quiz. We’ll also provide some insight into what professors are using to see if you’re cheating, and how to go around it.

Can You Cheat on Online Exams?

The simple answer to this is yes. However, before we talk about how to cheat on online exams, it’s essential to know how professors track cheating in the first place. For a Canvas exam or quiz, professors have access to something called a quiz log. This is sort of like a Canvas test cheating functionality.

From this Canvas quiz log, cheating is something that can be identified. Professors can find out whether you left the exam and opened another tab to google the answers. If they want to, professors can check the log if they think you’re cheating, and it may affect your overall grade.

Another system that your professor may use is online exam proctoring. This method is effective in Canvas cheating detection as it uses additional tools such as webcams to monitor the student. While this method does raise some privacy concerns, it’s one of the best Canvas anti-cheat methods. Why? Simply because the system will not only monitor your surrounding area, it’ll also make sure that you’re not googling anything.

A final method used to monitor if students are on Canvas cheating is through a custom browser. These browsers will prevent you from opening other tabs, so you can’t look up answers. One of the popular browsers is the Respondus LockDown Browser, which’s a great Canvas quiz anti-cheating mechanism. With this browser, you can’t google answers or access notes or other programs on your laptop.

Hence, as you can see, cheating on the Canvas quiz is no easy matter.

How to Cheat on a Canvas Exam?

With so many restrictions in place, you might be wondering if it’s even possible to cheat on a Canvas exam. The answer to that is yes; you can still find ways to make your Canvas quiz cheating dreams come true.

Depending on which restrictions your school has in place, it’s possible to get around them. If your school doesn’t allow you to google your answers, you can consider creating a word document ahead of time. In this document, you can have all of your notes and tips, and you can refer to it during the exam.

If there’s a custom browser in place, you can choose to take the exam with a classmate – after all, two heads are better than one, right? You can both study for the exam and exchange notes while helping each other tackle the exam questions.

Finally, if there’s online exam proctoring, consider writing out your notes on a piece of paper and placing it near your laptop. It doesn’t have to be anything massive; just a short cheat sheet would do. With these cheat sheets, you’ll have all the important points to help you nail the exam.

Can Canvas Detect Cheating?

The system itself can’t explicitly detect cheating, but there is one feature that can help professors. The Canvas quiz log feature allows professors to see when students answer each question and stop viewing the test. It also shows when a new tab is opened or if a student is inactive in Canvas for more than 30 seconds.

Below are some of the most popular questions received when it comes to Canvas cheating. We’ve taken the liberty of answering them and hope that the answers are helpful.

Can Canvas Tell If You Cheat?

Canvas can’t explicitly tell if you cheat; however, there is a Canvas quiz log cheating functionality. This quiz log feature can give professors an idea of whether you were cheating as it tells them if you’ve opened a new tab.

Can Online Classes Tell If You Cheat?

Online classes themselves can’t tell if you cheat. If you and your classmates are all scoring a perfect score on a quiz, however; your professor may suspect that you’re cheating. If that’s the case, they may check the quiz log functionality and dig a little deeper to determine if that’s happening.

Can Canvas Tell If You Copy and Paste?

Canvas itself can’t tell if you copy and paste. There are a few things to note, though; your professor may check if you’re plagiarizing if you copy and paste. While that’s not something Canvas can detect, your professor can easily run an online program that’ll check that. If he or she finds out that you’re plagiarizing, you’ll fail your exam automatically.

Does Canvas Know When You Copy and Paste?

Canvas doesn’t know when you copy and paste. As mentioned above, however, your professor can use other software to tell if you copy and paste, so it’s not encouraged to do so. If you’re caught plagiarizing, you won’t get any marks on the exam at all.

The only activity professors have access to on Canvas is monitoring quiz log activity. From there, they can see if you’ve opened another tab or if you’ve been inactive on Canvas for a while. Either than that, Canvas does not record any other activity when you’re taking your exam or quiz.

Cheating is a common situation in our schools today. For a teacher, it can be a challenging situation to handle in the classroom. However, if you keep a calm frame of mind, you can appropriately handle the situation and even help the student move forward in a positive way.

Cheating is a Reality in Teaching

Those of us who have spent any number of years in the classroom know that cheating, in general, is a common issue. According to ETS, 70-98% of college students report that they cheated in high school. Cheating on written assignments is a bit easier for educators to deal with because it is far easier to prove. However, dealing with students who cheat on exams can be more challenging.

Document the Event

When you see a student cheating during an exam, it stirs a lot of emotions inside you. While your impulse as a teacher may be to stage a teacher rant in the middle of the exam, you have to keep a cool head and proceed calmly.

Start by documenting what you see happening during the exam. As much as it may pain you, you want to sit and observe the behaviors for as long as possible. Take a deep breath, and sit back and take detailed notes on what you see. For example, if the student keeps looking over at their neighbor’s paper, keep notes of who was sitting around the student, the times you saw them cheating, etc. Having this information will be very helpful later. If the student appears to be using notes, or some other aid on the exam that was not approved, at some point you will need to step in and confiscate the notes and the test as quietly as possible.

When students cheat on computer exams, it gets a bit more challenging to try and document the act of cheating. Again, you want to observe the act of cheating and take notes on the times, how the student was cheating online, etc. If possible, go to the history on the computer and save it. You can sometimes do this under the guise of ‘I think there is something wrong with your computer …’ The history will show any websites the student might have been visiting during the exam.

Have a Conversation

Your next step is to set aside time, preferably as soon as possible, to discuss the situation with the student. Ideally, you will want a third party to sit in on the meeting if possible. This person is essentially there to witness what was said should you need it later. It can be a fellow teacher or an administrator.

It is not a good idea to accuse a student of cheating right off the bat in the conversation. Keep in mind that, due to a difference in perception, they may not realize what they were doing was wrong. Students who cheat often have already justified their decision to cheat.

Start by simply telling them you have some concerns about their test. Begin by asking them a sampling of questions from the test and document the answers they give you. Most of the time when students cheat, they will give different answers than they chose on their original test. If their answers are significantly different than that is a good place to start the conversation.

As hard it may be, once you get the conversation started you have to sit back and let the student tell their story. Sometimes they will come clean and confess to cheating and give their reasons. Other times, they may deny everything. It just depends on the student and their situation. During the conversation, you want to pay attention to the non-verbal signs of lying, such as lack of eye contact, eye motion that doesn’t match facial expressions, and excessive touching of the face, eyes, or nose. Non-verbal behaviors are good signals of whether or not a student is lying.

Talk to the Parents

Your next steps often depend on your school’s policy. In some cases, schools have clear cut guidelines in regards to cheating as part of their honor codes. Consequences could be a zero on a test, suspension, or other disciplinary action. In other schools, they may leave it to the discretion of the teacher as to what consequences a student receives for cheating. So before you call the parents, have a conversation with your administrator so you know what will happen next.

Finally, you want to call the parents as soon as possible. Be prepared, because it is quite possible the parents will be difficult to deal with. While occasionally you find parents who will accept your story at face value, more often they will get defensive and perhaps even accuse you of lying about their child – especially if the child denied they did anything wrong. If the latter happens, you want to setup a meeting with the parents and include your administrator in the conversation. All of your documentation will be important to show the parents exactly what happened.

Students are Someone’s Child

Keep in mind, the student is still a child, and the consequence needs to take that into consideration. You always want to document the cheating as part of the child’s discipline record, in case it happens again. However, it doesn’t mean you can’t hand out humane consequences. For example, the student may be required to complete an alternate exam to show they learned the material. You may even require them to complete additional remedial work before you allow them to retake the test. Remember, a lot of the time a child cheated on a test because they felt hopeless and didn’t think they could talk to anyone. Whatever the consequence may be, try to move forward with better communication between you, the student, and the parents.

Despite your efforts to promote integrity and prevent cheating, you will likely still have to respond to the occasional integrity violations. Although you do not have to speak with students before reporting them to the AI Office, if you feel like you want or need to, here are some recommended guidelines for doing so.

Don’t hesitate

Prepare for the conversation

If you choose to meet with the student, it may be helpful to think of three C’s in addressing academic misconduct with a suspected offender: clarity, compassion, and candor:

• Be clear about the behavior you find questionable.
• Be compassionate to the student who may experience significant distress but also great learning from this incident.
• Be candid about your interpretations of the behavior and your feelings about the incident.

What to say

If you’re unsure about how to have a clear, compassionate, and candid conversation with a student:

1. Begin your intervention with a statement. Example:
   1. “I have some concerns about your recent [paper or exam], and would like to engage in a dialogue with you about it. When can you come in to see me?”
2. Start the conversation by asking the student a question. This way, the student can tell his or her story rather than hearing your interpretation first. Examples:
   1. “Why don’t we start by you telling me how you’re feeling about the class/ this assignment?”
   2. “What was your process for studying/ completing the assignment?”
   3. “Are you satisfied with your learning/ progress in the course?”
3. After listening to the student’s story, express your concerns about the assignment or work in question. Example:
   1. “I’m concerned because the information I have suggests that you may have _________________. Is that an accurate assessment? Why not?”
4. Tell the student what you’re planning to do next. This could include:
   1. Considering his or her answers and thinking further about your next step
   2. Reporting the incident to the Academic Integrity Office

Remain Steadfast

Student reactions may vary. Your student may cry, get angry, accuse or offend you, calmly admit to the misconduct, or deny the misconduct outright. In any event, proceed using your best judgment, knowing that it is your professional and ethical obligation to follow Senate Policy which states that you must report all suspected academic integrity violations to the Academic Integrity Office.

To identify likely cheaters, the researchers compared the predicted number and the observed number of matching answers for all possible pairs of students.

An introductory natural science course at a top American university offered in the spring of 2012 had three midterm exams and one final. Two hundred fourteen students took both the third midterm and the final. After the third midterm, two students reported that other students cheated, and the professor in charge of the course asked Steven D. Levitt and Ming-Jen Lin to develop a method to uncover the cheaters. In Catching Cheating Students (NBER Working Paper No. 21628), Levitt and Lin describe how the “simple algorithm” they developed enabled them to identify roughly 10 percent of students who were very likely to have cheated on the third midterm.

Nearly every classroom seat was occupied when students took the midterm exam. Students chose their own seats; there was one test monitor, and seating positions were recorded. Students also chose their own seating positions when they arrived to take the final exam. Again their choices were recorded. But before the final exam was handed out, students were moved to randomly assigned seats. The exams were multiple choice tests. There were two versions of the final with the same questions in different order.

The researchers hypothesized that the simplest way to cheat is to copy from the student sitting next to you. They compared the number of matching pairs of incorrect answers in all of the theoretically possible 22,791 pairs of students who took the third exam with the number of matching pairs of incorrect answers in pairs of students who actually sat next to one another. Because the typical student answered most of the questions correctly, the mean number of shared incorrect answers across all theoretical pairs of students was 2.34. Cheating was a likely explanation when student pairs actually sitting next to one another averaged an additional 1.1 shared incorrect answers, more than would be expected by chance alone.

To identify pairs of potential cheaters, the researchers compared the predicted and observed matching answers for all possible pairs of students, using the percentage correct on each of the midterms and the final to model a student’s predicted answer to a particular question. Then they calculated the predicted number of matching answers for each pair and compared it to the actual number of matching answers observed for each pair. The difference between observed and predicted matching answers was computed both for matching correct and matching incorrect answers. Matching incorrect answers were a stronger indicator of potential cheating. Student pairs with more than six residual matching incorrect answers showed up as clear outliers in a scatter plot.

Some pairs of students who sat next to one another were more than 60 times more likely to be in the upper one tenth of one percent of the distribution of the number of residual matching incorrect answers than randomly constructed pairs. About nine percent of the pairs, consisting of 18 students, showed up in the extreme tail. By chance, less than one pair of students sitting together should have shown up there.

When seating was randomized for the final, the distribution of the percentage of residual matching incorrect answers was indistinguishable from one that would have been produced by chance. The distribution of residual matching correct answers still had more pairs of students with relatively high numbers of matches than one would expect. After examining the possibility that students studying together might be more likely to produce matching correct answers, the authors concluded that even with randomized seating four students probably cheated on the final.

By: Dennis Pierce

Cath Ellis, Associate Dean Education in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales in Australia, describes the conflict between students looking to cut corners on their education and instructors trying to preserve academic integrity as an “arms race.” And there is a new front in this battle.

“Students figure out a new way to cheat. We figure out a new way to catch them. So they figure out a new way to cheat,” Ellis says. The latest method that educators need to be aware of is a phenomenon known as “contract cheating.”

In the early days of the Internet, a wave of term paper sites emerged that sold prewritten papers to students. Plagiarism detection services such as Turnitin, which allows educators to compare students’ written work with a massive database of content published online, proved to be an effective deterrent—and this has forced a change of business model.

Now, many websites advertise that they will custom-write original papers for students on nearly any topic, for a fee. Although this is still plagiarism, in that students are passing off someone else’s words and ideas as their own, it’s much harder to detect than copy-and-paste plagiarism.

It’s also a huge business. A 2014 study estimated that revenues from contract cheating in the United States may exceed $100 million.

While educators might not be able to prevent contract cheating entirely, “we cannot ignore it and hope it will go away,” Ellis says. “That is not going to happen, and we need to decide to take action.”

Deterrence strategies

Deterring contract cheating starts by establishing a culture of integrity in the classroom. “We need to equip students with the skills and the acumen to be able to resist the temptation to do this,” Ellis says.

Simply telling students not to cheat is not an effective deterrent. Educators must help students understand why cheating is wrong by explaining the consequences of their actions.

Ellis frames this conversation in terms of risk, both to students themselves and to the public at large.

“Every student we graduate is going to put the public at risk if they haven’t properly demonstrated their learning to us,” she notes. “It’s easy to think about nursing graduates and engineering graduates. But what about financial advisors? Primary school teachers? Everybody we graduate needs to be properly qualified, so that we’re not putting the public at risk.”

The risk to students themselves begins with the chance of getting caught. “The penalties for this are, or ought to be, serious,” Ellis says. But students who pay others to do their work for them also put themselves at risk for betrayal.

“A lot of educational institutions have reported writers ringing them up and saying, ‘I did this work for the student. They haven’t paid their bill,’” she explains.

Students who do this also risk blackmail, possibly for the rest of their lives. Ellis says “these companies make lots of reassuring promises of quality and integrity to their customers, but many of them are little more than scams.” There is also the risk to the student’s reputation. But the biggest risk to students, Ellis says, is that they are not learning from the assignment. “This is why students are attending the educational institution,” she observes. “And it’s the most important thing they should be getting from it.”

Along these lines, educators should make sure they are giving assignments that have real value, and they should communicate this value to students. Students should understand why it’s important for them to complete each assignment and what skills they will learn from it.

How a writing assignment is designed can also deter contract cheating. Andrew Quagliata teaches a first-year business writing course at Cornell University. He says his best strategy for preventing plagiarism is asking students to write multiple drafts and bring these to class for peer review.

“The more work a student completes in advance of the final deadline,” he says, “the more time they have to ask questions—and the less likely they are to plagiarize.” What’s more, students are less likely to pay someone to write multiple drafts of an assignment for them.

While assessment design plays a role in taking action against contract cheating, Ellis offers an important reminder: “Even though requiring drafts may make contract cheating more unlikely, it doesn’t prevent it altogether. I’ve seen students order multiple drafts of one assignment and turn those in as their own work.

Detection methods

Establishing a culture of integrity, communicating the risks of cheating to students, and designing more thoughtful writing assignments are important. But Ellis says it’s equally important for educators to be able to recognize contract cheating when it happens.

“Detection, to my mind, is a really important part of deterrence,” she says. “If we’re not picking it up, it doesn’t stand as a deterrent to students.”

The International Center for Academic Integrity has put out a guide to preventing contract cheating. One of the techniques it describes for identifying whether contract cheating has occurred is examining the metadata embedded in an electronic file.

“If it’s a Microsoft Word file, download it, right-click on the icon, and click ‘Properties’ from the drop-down menu,” the document states. “At the top of the new window, click the ‘Details’ tab. From here, you can see a variety of information, such as authors, the number of revisions, when the file was created and last saved, (and) total editing time. However, remember that any potentially incriminating pieces of information can be circumstantial at best. A student may have genuinely written their paper on a borrowed laptop, re-saved the file elsewhere, or simply deleted the metadata.”

Comparing a paper to a student’s previous writing also can be effective. At the start of each semester, Quagliata has his students respond to a writing prompt in class, so he has a sample of their work that he knows is their own. “This helps me get a baseline understanding of their ability,” he explains. He compares this sample to other written work that his students turn in, to see if there are any differences in style, voice, or writing ability.

Spotting these kinds of discrepancies isn’t always easy. To help educators identify potential instances of contract cheating, Turnitin has developed new software that uses machine learning algorithms and forensic linguistic analysis to determine if a student’s work is really their own.

If the software notes any major differences between a student’s prior work and his or her current paper, the instructor can investigate further as appropriate. The program, called Authorship Investigation, will be available later this year.

“Ultimately, the conversation we need to be having with our students is that this matters,” Ellis concludes. “Contract cheating is not a victimless crime. Not all students are doing it. It’s not harmless. And it’s not okay.”

Dennis Pierce is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience writing about education and technology.

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If you intend to cheat in your online program, WHO are you actually cheating? YOURSELF!

Hopefully, at this stage of your educational journey, you’ve matured and learned that cheating only hurts oneself; however, if you are still tempted… think again. Deception remains a problem for both the traditional brick-and-mortar school, as well as, the online distance learning format. Online universities and massive open online courses (MOOCs) use a variety of tools to deter students from cheating.

How are tests administered for online classes?

The most effective way to catch a cheater includes proctored exams. In this format, students must travel to a specific location for their tests. Proctored exams will require photo identification, such as your driver’s license. Also, virtual proctoring applications are also available, where a student “shows up” via webcam and footage is reviewed as needed.

Can I get away with cheating? I mean, how will they know?!

The short answer: NO! Keystroke verification software is another form of monitoring each student. The software analyzes how quickly a student can type, along with, their keystroke rhythm. Through this method, professors can tell whether or not the same student is typing during a test. In some cases, online universities may use biometric technology, a form of high-tech scan to identify the correct student is taking the right test. This could include retina scanning, palm vein scans, in addition to, finger and facial recognition.

When completing assignments or when testing, there’s no need to copy word for word someone else’s work. After all, it is illegal. Plagiarism software is readily available that detects “same word phrases.” Using this technology will help you express your original thoughts, as well as, help professors identify cheaters.

Rest assured, experienced test givers know all the tricks, such as wandering eyes or a fake Internet disconnection, in hopes of looking up a correct answer. And, of course, there is good old-fashioned common sense. If a student frequently exemplifies an average C grade, professors are suspicious if they suddenly ace a test. An investigation can be expected!

Don’t you want to learn all you can? And, retain it?

And, most importantly, bring it forward with you in your future endeavors? It sounds cliché, but the lesson here is never to cheat because you will get caught and you’re only cheating yourself!

We created a wonderful INFOGRAPHIC called How Students Cheat Online JUST for this question!

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About 10 percent of students in an introductory class at a top university cheated on their midterm exams. (Shutterstock)

When a college professor suspected some of his students were cheating on a midterm, he did what anyone would do: He called economists and cheating experts to come up with an algorithm to catch them.

The economists, Steven Levitt and Ming-Jen Lin, found that 10 percent of the class had probably cheated on the final exam. In a recent paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, they argue that students have many incentives to cheat, and that colleges need to do something about it.

But there’s probably a reason they don’t. Although the college tried to investigate the cheaters with a judiciary hearing, it ended up canceling it under pressure from the accused students’ parents.

When the professor — who teaches an “introductory natural sciences course” at an unnamed “top university” — suspected cheating, he warned his class that he was going to call in an expert if the guilty parties didn’t confess.

Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and one of the authors of Freakonomics, had previously researched teachers who cheat by changing their students’ answers on high-stakes standardized tests. Levitt and Lin, a professor of economics at National Taiwan University, studied pairs of students who sat next to each other during exams.

Of 242 students, they found those who sat together were more likely to answer the same questions incorrectly — twice as often as would be expected by chance. Using their algorithm, they determined 10 percent of students cheated on the midterm, blatantly enough that statistics could catch them.

They forwarded the name of 12 students they suspected were cheating in pairs to the dean, and four confessed. (It’s not clear if some of the students might have been copying off their neighbors without both students in a pair knowing about it.) All 12 were disqualified for scholarships because the university held their grades, and none of them complained.

Protests from parents mean the university never pursued disciplinary action — “a powerful explanation as to why so little effort is invested in detecting cheaters,” the authors wrote. That’s despite the fact that cheating scandals pop up with disturbing regularity, including at Harvard, where nearly half of students in one class were suspected of cheating.

And students persisted in cheating even after being warned that their professor was onto them: “‘[They are] extremely good at catching cheating, if you have read Freakonomics,'” the professor wrote in an email to the class about his decision to bring in the economists, according to a footnote in the paper. It went on to note dryly, “Apparently, none of the cheaters had read Freakonomics.”

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