Cheating Trends

"Who will not be deceived must have as many eyes as hairs on his head."
-- Proverb

RETURN
edited 9/25/05

Cause for Alarm

Instructors often are reluctant to take many precautions against cheating. They fear this will undermine the comfort and trust they want to foster in their classrooms. So, perhaps after taking the most basic precautions, they cross their fingers and hope for the best.

This is unwise. An abundance of research shows that academic dishonesty is epidemic. Gregory Cizek (1999) author of the comprehensive book Cheating on Tests: How to Do It, Detect It, and Prevent It summarizes the body of research this way.

"Nearly every research report on cheating -- whether the data were obtained by a carefully designed study, a survey of self-reported behavior, an RRT (randomized response technique) approach, or questionnaire regarding perceptions of cheating on the part of another -- has concluded that cheating is rampant."

Evidently such cheating begins early. In 1986 sixth graders attending 45 California elementary schools were asked whether they had ever seen other students cheat on a test. (Brandes, 1986) A surprising 86% said that they had seen cheating; and 30% said they had witnessed cheating "many times." Only 14% said they had "never" observed cheating. The following chart summarizes all 1,037 responses from the survey.

The situation worsens in secondary school. When Brandes surveyed over 2,000 California public high school students, for example, almost 97% said that they had seen others cheating. Here is a summary of the behavior reported in the study.

Trends over time also are discouraging. Schab (1991) surveyed thousands of high school students in 1969, 1979 and 1989, asking them if they agreed or disagreed that three -fourths of the students in their high school were guilty of cheating. The results reveal a depressing trend that is summarized in the following chart.

Year	Percent Agreeing that 3/4 of their classmates cheated
1969	20.3
1979	27.2
1989	29.9

In 1994 Who's Who Among American High School Students conducted a survey that asked thousands of the nation's best high school students if they cheated. Nearly 4 out of 5 of these very successful high school students said that they had. When asked, "How common is cheating at your school?" Ninety percent said that it either was "common" or "nearly universal." The following chart details their responses.

 

How common is cheating in your school?

 

College cheating research results are similarly gloomy. For example, McCabe and Bowers conducted a 30-year longitudinal survey of cheating on tests in college. During the 1962-63 academic year McCabe and Bowers administered surveys to over 5,000 students from 99 US colleges and universities. Then they followed up during the 1991-92 school year by surveying 6,096 students at 31 schools.

To make sure they were matching apples with apples, McCabe and Bowers compared only male juniors and seniors attending small to medium-sized selective residential colleges. The following chart summarizes their disquieting findings. Note the dramatic increases in cheating in just thirty years and that in the more recent sample over half the students surveyed reported copying from another student on a test. (McCabe & Trevino, 1996)

Type of Cheating	1961	1991
Copied from another student during an exam	26%	52%
Helped another student cheat on an exam	23%	37%
Used crib notes to cheat on an exam	16%	27%

In his excellent rundown of the research on college cheating Cizek summarizes the results by saying that dozens of studies made at different times by a wide variety of researchers in dissimilar places all concur that more than half of college students responding admit to having cheated. (Cizek, 1999) Of course, it is reasonable to suppose that many cheated but did not admit it.

Interestingly, college cheating seems to vary by major. When, in 1992, Meade surveyed 6,000 students attending 31 different universities, business students reported cheating more than any other majors. (Whether they are more larcenous or simply more honest in reporting their dishonesty we can only speculate.) The chart below summarizes the reported rates by major. (Meade, J., 1992) Note well that taken collectively the students self-reported cheating rate in this 31 university study is a startling 74%.

High Tech Cheating

Contemporary technology makes cheating a great deal easier. Students use web-based cheat sites to plagiarize with ease. They use powerful calculators and technical trickery to secretly store equations they will need on tests. They ask to be excused to go to the lavatory then use their cell phone to get outside help. They get answers from a test file or someone who took the test earlier in the day, then store them in easily retrievable form in their Personal Digital Assistants (Palm Pilots, Visors, etc.). They also beam answers to one another using their machine's infrared transmission capabilities. One instructor even discovered a student using her numeric pager to have answers phoned in to her while she was taking his test.

In most cases the high tech cheater's confident expectation is that the instructor will be at least one step behind them. They might be right. The young often take to high tech quicker than adults.

Cheat Merchants

In the "good old days" cheating schemes spread by word of mouth. Today there are web sites specifically intended to aid academic swindlers and how-to cheat books are routinely sold over the web. Michael Moorer's Cheating 101: The Benefits and Fundamentals of an Easy A is one of the most successful. The New York Times, (Sunday, April 4, 1998), reports that Moorer, a middle-aged former journalism student, has sold tens of thousands of copies of his handy guide to academic larceny.

There also are hundreds of plagiarist "paper mills" on the World Wide Web each offering thousands of different papers on hundreds of topics. Swindlers search files of previously written papers for one that suits their need, download the paper, add their name and print it out. Some of these papers are free, Making them easier to trace. Others can only be accessed for a fee, making tracing extremely difficult. For still more money, plagiarists can hire papers custom written for them by expert s who boast of Ph.D.s.

A Tension

Despite the abundance of research evidence confirming that cheating is rife, many instructors are still reluctant to acknowledge the full extent of the problem. Perhaps this is because of the tension between the teaching many of us aspire to and the suspicions one has to entertain in order to effectively deal with cheating.

Most educators want to foster comfort and trust in their classroom; and they want to eliminate obstacles that interfere with the joy of learning. They worry that taking precautions against cheating, might confound these goals. Some reluctantly resolve this tension by trusting their students and hoping that they will repay that trust with honesty. Too often that doesn't work..

Positive Preventative Strategies

We see, then, that many students will cheat given half a chance. For those on the cusp, however, how we teach and assess can be decisive. That's where positive prevention pays off.

Teaching as Coaching

One preventive strategy involves putting greater emphasis on what we'll call the coaching dimension of teaching -- a paradigm shift that's a lot more radical than it sounds.

Teaching as coaching requires the development of deep understanding of core concepts at the expense of "coverage." It makes little sense to move ahead when learners haven't mastered the fundamentals. Yet, given the pressure of an ever-expanding knowledge base, teacher after teacher does just that. "I covered it," they'll say, with dubious conviction. But what does "covering," mean? From the point of view of student understanding, it often means nothing at all. But pushing for coverage at the expense of understanding does mean that the probability of cheating is increased.

Teaching as coaching also requires greater attention to student needs and concerns. Figuring out where students are "coming from" helps the teacher tap their intrinsic motivation; and it cuts down on cheating too. Students whose needs and concerns are ignored are far more likely to cheat. If nothing else, it's a way of "getting back."

Variety in Assessment

Using different types of assessment can also reduce the temptation to cheat. For one thing, students who do poorly on one type of test question might be able to do better on others. And one cheating method won't work for all types of testing.

Variety in assessment is limited chiefly by the teacher's imagination. We know of a creative teacher, for example, who asks "make it true" questions. Here students have to change one or more words in order to make a false statement true. This teacher also asks "it ain't necessarily so" questions. In this case students have to briefly explain why a teacher-crafted statement isn't necessarily true. Another inventive teacher gives a final test that requires students to create their own concept "map" of the course's core ideas. Students are told what they will have to do and typically spend weeks reviewing and preparing.

There are many other ways to generate variety in assessment. The point is that it makes cheating less necessary because it better accommodates different learning styles and types of intelligence. It also makes cheating more difficult.

Another test-related preventive strategy is to include test items that chiefly require effort, rather than deep understanding. In addition to conceptual questions, for example, a geography test might include the identification of place locations (nations, rivers, mountain ranges, etc.). Students having a tough time mastering concepts, like the causes of precipitation, might still salvage a passing grade if they memorize these locations.

Effort items provide a safety valve for highly motivated students with limited ability or meager background. Some purists might not like this sort of thing. But remember that when kids must chose between failure and cheating, they often chose cheating. Besides, the test can always be designed to require whatever level of deep understanding the instructor desires.

A number of books offer practical suggestions for developing variety in assessment. We particularly like Bellanca, J., Chapman, C., and Swartz, E., (1994) Multiple Assessments for Multiple Intelligences. This book's suggestions are practical and easily used.

More Authentic Assessment

More authentic assessment also minimizes cheating. An assessment is authentic if it evaluates performance in as close to a real world context as possible. Granted, this is easier to do in the practical or performing arts than it is in traditional academic subjects. But academic tests can be more authentic too. In fact, they can be remarkably genuine once motivated educators see the need for them. Marzano, et al. (1993) Assessing Student Outcomes offers particularly useful suggestions regarding how to do this.

Criterion Referenced Testing

Another way to discourage cheating is to measure how well students meet specific learning goals (criterion referenced testing), rather than how one student's performance compares to another's (norm referenced testing). Norm referenced testing sets up an each against all competition where students are forced to play a zero sum game. Some inevitably lose when others win. This fosters cheating. But with criterion referenced testing, everyone can get a good grade if everyone meets the goals. In other words, no one need lose.

Summing Up

No positive preventative strategy guarantees student honesty. But positive measures can and do minimize temptation. And unlike other cheating counter measures, positive strategies actually improve one's teaching.

Now let's learn more about how students cheat and some practical countermeasures.

 

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