Covid Cheat
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Forbes interviewed 52 students who use Chegg Study. Aside from the half dozen students Chegg provided for Forbes to talk to, all but 4 admitted they use the site to cheat. They include undergrads and grad students at 19 colleges, including large and small state schools and prestigious private universities like Columbia, Brown, Duke and NYU Abu Dhabi.
Students have always cheated. In the 12th century, Chinese test takers sewed matchbox-size copies of Confucian texts into their clothes so they could cheat on civil service exams. Henry Ford II dropped out of Yale in 1940 after he was exposed paying someone to write his senior thesis.
Mariam Aly, an assistant professor at Columbia University, has tried everything to keep her students from cheating. In her cognitive neuroscience class, she gives her students a week to complete an open-book exam. And, as part of that exam, the nearly 180 students in the class have to sign an honor code.
But they're still cheating. And dealing with student misconduct, she says, is the worst part of her job. "It's just awkward and painful for everybody involved," Aly says. "And it's really hard to blame them for it. You do feel disappointed and frustrated."
But while students may have had new and different opportunities for cutting corners in the online learning environment, it's unclear how much cheating actually increased. Some educators note that there are other factors at play, such as an increased ability to identify misconduct.
"There was probably increased cheating because there were more temptations and opportunities and stress and pressure. And, faculty were probably detecting it more," says Tricia Bertram Gallant, who researches academic integrity at the University of California, San Diego. "It's easier to catch in the virtual world, in many ways, than it is in the in-person world."
When colleges shut down or restricted in-person access, students were taking exams in their bedrooms, with unfettered access to cellphones and other technology. This, educators say, spurred cheating to take on new and different forms.
One student at Middle Tennessee State University used his smart speaker to find answers during an exam, according to Michael Baily, the school's director of academic integrity. California State University, Los Angeles, had a large-scale cheating scandal early on in the pandemic, after one student alleged that her peers were sharing exam answers through a GroupMe chat.
Stearns, who logged onto classes from her family's home last year, faced the pressures of online classes herself, but she sits on her school's academic honor council. For other students, she says, cheating can feel like the only option.
"We're going through such an unprecedented time that (cheating is) bound to happen," Stearns says. "They prefer to take the shortcut and risk getting caught, than have an email conversation with their professor because they're too ashamed to be like, 'I need assistance.' "
Many factors are at play in the rise in reports of cheating and misconduct, and, in interviews with NPR, experts across the higher education spectrum say they aren't at all certain whether, or how much, cheating actually increased.
"Just because there's an increase in reports of academic misconduct doesn't mean that there's more cheating occurring," says James Orr, a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity. "In the online environment, I think that faculty across the country are more vigilant in looking for academic misconduct."
And at least one school, the University of Texas at Austin, found that reports of academic misconduct cases actually declined during the pandemic. Katie McGee, the executive director for student conduct and academic integrity there, explains that before the pandemic, UT-Austin had toughened its ability, through software, to detect cheating.
With online learning, educators are using third-party tools, which can make cheating easier to detect. Middle Tennessee State, for example, rolled out an online proctoring tool, Examity, at the start of the pandemic. The tool records testing sessions on students' webcams and uses software to flag possible cheating. The university has seen reports of cheating jump by more than 79% from fall of 2019 to spring of 2021.
"I don't believe that more students started cheating during the pandemic," said Baily. "What I believe is that we then put in place these proctoring systems that enabled us to find these students who were cheating."
Ken Leopold, a chemistry professor at the University of Minnesota, says he and other faculty must balance privacy concerns with the need to guard against cheating. He says he has avoided using Proctorio in his classes, saying the software "didn't sit right" with him. But then came the pandemic.
Professors at Missouri State, Marshall and Kansas State universities are examining the issue of cheating, specifically, whether the conditions of the pandemic caused an uptick in academic dishonesty.
Sottile and his colleagues collected data through a survey like the one used in the original study. They added additional questions to gauge if students were more likely to cheat since the pandemic began.
This paper reports on the growth of how a single market leading file sharing website has been used for contract cheating purposes. The period of growth coincides with the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated necessary increase in online teaching and assessment within education.
This paper considers how contract cheating takes place on the market leading file sharing site Chegg (2020). It makes reference to the volume of requests made and answers supplied pre and post Covid-19. The pandemic has seen the movement of teaching and assessment online, often made with little time for the revised method of provision to have been planned in advance or for academic integrity safeguards to be put into place. Where students have previously been taught face-to-face, activities such as in-person lectures, tutorials, assessments and exams have been replaced by virtual alternatives. The unsupervised nature of assessment, including exams, may mean that students have had increased temptation to cheat or may have felt that the support they would usually have available was not there.
The paper first discusses the relevant literature surrounding academic integrity, contract cheating and online exams in more detail. Online teaching and assessment are not in themselves new, even though changes to assessment due to Covid-19 may have made this more prominent. The Chegg file sharing site is further discussed, with reference to how this can be used for contract cheating purposes. The paper provides a quantitative analysis of how Chegg is used for contract cheating within a selection of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects, offering an analysis over a two-year period with reference to pre and post Covid-19 provision. The paper concludes by recommending that the sector works to address contract cheating through file sharing sites particularly as this relates to Covid-19.
Many forms of assessment are susceptible to contract cheating. The literature in this field has revealed that an aggressive industry exists, aiming to implore students to cheat (Ellis et al. 2018; Lancaster 2020a). Contract cheating solutions can be purchased cheaply by students, often from writers operating in economic surroundings where incomes are typically low (Lancaster 2020b). Contract cheating solutions can also be provided quickly (Wallace and Newton 2014). This includes providing them within the limited time available for a standard online examination.
Examinations themselves have also been found to be susceptible to contract cheating. Lancaster and Clarke (2017) identified a wide range of sites that could be used to provide students with unauthorised exam assistance, including tutorial sites. Where exams are online, remote proctoring services that use cameras to check the activities of students have been suggested as possible solutions. However, experts have warned about the dangers of such an approach. Eaton and Turner (2020) conducted a rapid review into literature on academic integrity relating to Covid-19. They identified that students felt they were suffering from stress and anxiety, particularly when remote proctoring solutions were used to preserve academic integrity. However, when students are not monitored during examinations, they may be able to turn to file sharing websites to request contract cheating solutions. Although further research in this field is necessary, this does illustrate the trade-off between the need to protect the value of academic awards, but to still ensure that students feel supported and do not need to use suspect providers of services from outside their own academic institution.
Research has shown that cheating is more likely to occur during online exams than on-site exams. From a survey of accounting students, King et al. (2009) found that students believed that cheating in online exams was easier than cheating in exams held in person. They also noted that students said they would be less likely to cheat if instructors specifically told them that this was not allowed.
The solutions to exam integrity breaches through file sharing websites need to be considered. Cluskey Jr et al. (2011) suggested changing the questions for online exams every time they run. This would prevent standard answers being already available on file sharing websites, but that, in itself, would not seem to be a solution to contract cheating.
Clark et al. (2020) have recommended specific solutions to online exam integrity in light of Covid-19. They found that contract cheating was occurring in online chemistry exams and suggest watermarking exam materials to make them more difficult to share with contract cheating providers. They also recommend the use of unique data sets for individual students to work on. This means that if questions are placed on a visible file sharing site, the student with that data set allocated to them can be traced. Even where this is not a viable solution, it can be possible to detect contract cheating, including answers obtained from file sharing sites. Rogerson (2017) provided indicators for assessors to look out for, including citation and referencing irregularities, as well as the use of inconsistent language. 59ce067264
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