The Score

On this episode of The Score, we look at cheating from a different angle than we have before. Our guest is Pete Van Dyke, the Certification Security Program Manager at Amazon Web Services, the office responsible for minimizing cheating among people taking professional certification exams.

Kathryn Baron (01:57): Would you describe what you and your office do?

Pete Van Dyke (02:00): We divide our time among three different activities. One is looking at people that steal our exam content and post that online or charge money for that online. Those are known as brain dump websites. You'll probably hear me talk about that a couple more times today. The second thing that we do is we look at what are known as proxy testers. So, individuals or organizations that take exams for candidates charge them a fee for that, and then through remote control of the computer screens take an exam for them. And then the third thing that our team works on are individuals who misbehave during their exams. So, whether that's accessing a cell phone or hidden notes or having a third-party present, people that misbehave on exams…

Kathryn Baron (07:16): If I'm taking one of these exams, what can I expect before I'm cleared to actually begin the test?

Pete Van Dyke (07:22): Well, we present our exams in two different formats. One is at an in-person test center. So, we have literally thousands of in-person test centers all across the globe. If you were to take an in-person exam, you would schedule that. You would go in and there's a live proctor who would observe you as you take your exam but once COVID hit, the second modality for us, which is online proctored exams became very popular. And an online proctor exam, you don't have to go to a test center. You can take that right in the confines of your own home, and you don't have to interact with people live. What happens for online proctoring is that there is an online proctor located somewhere else in the world who is observing up to 16 or 18 people taking in an exam at one time, and they make sure that they're not misbehaving.

So, if you were to take an online proctored exam, there's an entire formal check-in process. So, we verify that the government issue ID is the same person as the person taking the test. You don't want someone who looks like me taking the test under the name of someone who looks like you, Kathryn. There's a very detailed room scan by video to make sure that there aren't any learning materials, that there aren't any secondary computers or electronic devices, any note-taking materials, pens, paper et cetera in the area.
And then there's also a systems check. So, the test delivery provider looks at that and sees what kind of programs are running in the background to make sure that there's nothing that would allow a candidate to record the testing experience and then steal content from the actual exam.

Kathryn Baron (09:07): So, what have people done to try to trick the security measures? Are there any anecdotes that stand out for you?

Pete Van Dyke (09:15): It's really limited only by creativity. So, for online proctored exams, because you don't have a human being in the same room, people attempt to cheat that system in lots of different ways. They may try to record the session, either audio record or video record. They may surreptitiously have notes and access notes during the exam. It's not unusual for someone to try and have a third person, a third-party individual in the room with them to help with the exam and indicate which questions have which answers. And we've seen evidence in the past of people using things like recording devices built into eyeglass frames or even using earbud type communicators so that someone can communicate with them what the correct answer is for items.

Perhaps one of the more interesting things that we've had when someone takes an exam with a proxy tester, the proxy tester loads software on their machine that allows them to remote control, take control of the desktop as they're using it. So, during that hour or hour-and-a-half that they're taking the exam, the candidate pretends to be taking the exam while someone thousands of miles away is actually taking the exam for them.

One of the funnier instances that we've had of exam misbehavior, we had a candidate that actually fell asleep during his exam. His head was leaned over, and he was snoring very loudly for about a 10-to-15-minute period. Yet, his exam continued to move forward because the exam proxy tester didn't realize that the candidate was sleeping, and he was just moving forward as had been planned.

Kathryn Baron (10:59): What are some of the less obvious red flags that the proctor will look for?

Pete Van Dyke (11:20): So, when you take this exam, you can see the webcam capture as it's running to make sure that your face is completely visible, and your shoulders are visible. But if you were to place that just slightly outside, if you continuously look, say down into the right or down into the left, that would be an indicator that there might be something there that that candidate is using to cheat on the exam. Leaning partially off-screen would be the same type of violation or exiting the exam completely.
We don't allow for breaks on our exam, even bathroom breaks. So obviously getting up and leaving for a minute or two and then coming back is a sign that there's at least the very strong possibility that the candidate was accessing information that they weren't allowed to have during the exam.

Kathryn Baron (13:53): Have security measures increased in recent years due to an increase in the products that enable cheating and the increase in online exams due to COVID?

Pete Van Dyke (14:53): As the pandemic continued, about a year-and-a-half, two years into it, we saw about 85% to 90% of our exams being taken via online proctoring and only 10% being taken in test centers. So that created a whole new environment for us. Obviously, if you don't have someone standing in front of you, it's easier to misbehave, it's easier to try and hide things, and it's easier to have another person in the room that's hidden from camera view. So, we had to adapt to all of that. And the proxy testers are very, very sophisticated.

Kathryn Baron (15:40): Well, how organized are they, the proxy and all the other companies? Is it difficult to find them and maybe put them out of business or anything like that?

Pete Van Dyke (15:50): Well, the challenge for us, we're a US-based company and a lot of the brain dump websites and a lot of the proxy testing organizations operate in countries outside of the United States. So, it then becomes very lengthy, very expensive and very difficult to pursue any type of legal action against these individuals in countries that may not even support that type of a lawsuit. So, it's very challenging.

The proxy tester networks themselves work a lot like a multi-level marketing campaign. They advertise all over the web. So, if you're on Facebook and a Facebook group about certification exams, it's not unusual to see multiple posts a day with people offering to take exams for you. We've seen this on LinkedIn. We've seen it all over the place, even on Etsy, believe it or not, and eBay.

You have one level of their organization that is recruiting potential customers. You have another level that works with them and negotiates pricing and details, and then you have a very sophisticated technical side of their organization that actually makes the proxy test happen by taking over candidates' computer screen and taking an exam for them. Industry-wide, we estimate that this is a multi-$100 million-a-year business. It's not unusual for a proxy tester to charge as much as $1,200 above and beyond the cost of an exam for someone to have an exam taken for them.

Kathryn Baron (17:19): You were talking about stealing the test questions earlier, and how do people do that? Is it that the people who are the proxies, they can take a screenshot of things because they're not quite on the exam legitimately? Or how would that work?

Pete Van Dyke (17:36): Historically, prior to COVID and prior to the explosion of online proctored exams, there were really two ways that brain dump websites harvested exam content. One was to literally snag candidates that just finished taking an exam and say, "What do you remember from the exam? What are the questions that you remembered?" Another way was to work with a test center that was in cahoots with the proxy testing. So, the test center would allow someone to take photographs or to record a session where they took an exam and then sell that content to a brain dump website that would then publish it or sell it to others for a fee.

Kathryn Baron (19:07): What are some of the potential consequences to us, to the people who use different services in terms of our safety or the legitimacy of something that a person who cheated on an exam to get a job is responsible for?

Pete Van Dyke (19:32): Let's imagine you come to me. I'm a proxy tester, and you want me to pass a Google certification exam for you. I charge you $500 plus the $300 it costs to take the test. I make arrangements and the first step of that is you have to give me control of your computer. I load software that surreptitiously allows me to control your machine during the exam. Through that process, I can load anything I want. It's possible to load malware or spyware, all sorts of tracking information. So, within the industry, we've seen evidence of this happening, of people that thought they were just going to find a way around taking a certification exam that ended up having banking information and personal information like social security numbers and all of that stripped from their machines, et cetera.

And then if that were to happen to you, who do you report that to and who do you complain about? "Oh, well, yes. I was cheating on this exam, and I worked with this person who was from some country thousands of miles away, and I gave him complete access to my machine so that he could pass an exam for me. But in the process, he also stole some of my banking information." I don't see that part of the process happening very frequently.

Kathryn Baron (20:50): What would be the potential impact in terms of maybe public safety, that type of thing?

Pete Van Dyke (20:56): In the IT field, it's not quite the risk, but we also see these types of behaviors and people finding ways around taking the exam for things like nursing and doctor certification. So, if you were to imagine someone going through a two year or a four-year nursing program, they get to the point where they're going to take a certification exam that certifies them as a nurse, and rather than demonstrating fairly that they have the knowledge and expertise necessary to be certified, they pay somebody else to take their exam. It's pretty frightening to imagine that, because now that person can go ahead and get hired and the area that they were weakest on, maybe the ones that someone's life depends on down the line.

Kathryn Baron (21:44): What about in the sector that you test for?

Pete Van Dyke (21:47): There are many areas of the world, many regions of the globe where a certification itself is enough to get a job, and if someone is able to land a job because of a false certification, whatever it is that they work on could be affected.

Kathryn Baron (23:59): What is it that keeps you in this job that you find most interesting about it?

Pete Van Dyke (24:13): It takes about nine to 12 months to fully develop a brand-new certification exam. Hundreds of people are involved. There are subject matter experts at all different levels that are responsible for determining what that certification exam should look like, what kind of questions should be contained that evaluate each and every one of those questions to make sure that they're fair, that they're valid, and they're legally defensible.

So, tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of hours are put into these exams, and then we discovered that people are stealing this content sometimes just a few weeks after it's been published.

This episode of The Score features Dr. Roy Swift, the Executive Director of Workcred, an affiliate of the American National Standards Institute. He also served as executive director of the National Board for Certification in Occupational Therapy. This appointment followed a 28-year career in the U.S. Army Medical Department, where in his last position, he was chief of the Army Medical Specialist Corps in the Army Surgeon General’s Office with policy responsibility for Army occupational therapists, physical therapists, dieticians, and physician assistants throughout the world.

Kathryn Baron (7:22): I'm wondering then if that disconnect is perhaps part of what leads to academic integrity problems in college and the frustration that you mentioned students often have?

Dr. Roy Swift (07:34): I do think K-12 is the foundational component to success in post-secondary education, in academia and Higher Ed. I believe it is crucial to individuals being able to make the right choices. There are several issues in regards to the system and preparing success in the post-secondary system. One is helping people understand how to learn to be able to identify resources, to build self-confidence in people. There is our need to move to more of a competency-based approach in Higher Ed, that's transparent and can signal to the work world or the government or whoever that what the person not only knows, but what the person can do. The current transcript is not helpful in this regard. And the reluctance of faculty to move to competency outcomes versus general course descriptions is problematic. I feel the issue is that the competency approach does put more pressure on the faculty to produce what they say they are producing because it is more transparent, and the assessment tools have to be more precise. The other disconnect is the lack of employability skills. The college is not teaching the behaviors that are expected in the workplace. Something as simple as coming to class on time, participating in class and being an active learner and working in teams often are forgotten.

Kathryn Baron (10:36): You mentioned a paper in an earlier conversation we had that you co-led on the integration of credentials, and I'm wondering if you can just tell us what were the primary takeaways from that and were you at all surprised by anything that you found when you were doing that work?

Dr. Roy Swift (10:54): Yes. Recently, I participated with the Higher Learning Commission, which is one of the national accreditors of universities and colleges. And because they are very interested in looking at the whole issue of credentials and how credentials may be integrated into a higher education system, industry credentials in this regard. The title of the paper was Institutional Accreditation at the Crossroads Drivers for Change, and it had four main themes. One was at the landscape and pressures on Higher Ed, employers and accrediting bodies are going to be increasingly to produce a product that is able to function at higher levels probably because of all the technology that is going on today will have to produce a very different kind of individual. Most people think technology will run people out of jobs, but it really looks like that what is going to happen is that it's going to force and put pressure on producing people with higher level of knowledge in the ideas of robotics and artificial intelligence.

Dr. Roy Swift (13:36): ….there are over 8,000 industry certifications right now. And every week they develop more and more industry certifications, and it is one in which they can be complimentary.

But unless we understand, like I said at the beginning, the credentialing system and how they may interface and complement one another, we are going to develop competing systems. Which may not be the best way of thinking about these various because each credential tends to have a lot of strengths. And so, we should use the strengths of each credential to be able to see how they can be integrated. Our particular group, Workcred, is looking about the embedding of certifications into degree pathways. We think the two can complement one another because certification is about competency assessment.

Dr. Roy Swift (17:14): So, people who are trying to design Higher Education need to take a more systems thinking about what is the work world telling them? What is the government telling them? What do students desire? What's the environment that we should be doing? And so, we take it from the, let's just say the national system to the state systems, to the academic systems, to the subsystems of provost, deans, faculty, students, and understanding how those layers exist. Unfortunately, too often the K-12 system, which we talked about as being the foundation, is not producing individuals that have the psychological ego strength to face many of the issues that students are facing. And that threat, I think, does cause students to do things that may be unethical, such as cheating.

Dr. Roy Swift (26:12): Well, I think the first step is building more precise learning outcomes, competencies, whatever word that people feel comfortable in using, because I think that many times, I hear students talk about the unknown, oh, I don't know what he's going to ask. I don't know what the expectations are. Competency gives more structure to the student as to what the expectations are in this regard. Competency-based assessment is really a more straightforward method of evaluating whether a skill has been achieved. And the students feel more secure when they know what it is that is expected of them, expected in the course, and expected on the assessment.

Kathryn Baron (30:50): ….what are your thoughts on what can be done in the training and workforce development industry to minimize cheating or even to, I don't know, curb the impetus to cheat itself?

Dr. Roy Swift (31:04): Well, I do think it's important to go back to transparency, relevance, and competency. I would say those are three main elements that has to be looked at. I would go back to my thoughts about competency-based education. When it's about competency, and you can repeat the assessment until you've achieved the level of competency. There's less reason to cheat. Let's say, okay, I failed. I'll go back and relearn. That's a skill that's taught in the military. I used to teach at the Academy of Health Sciences. It's called something different now in the army. But one of the things that always happens in the military is that teach, test, reteach, retest. And generally, students are given several times to be able to achieve it because the military believes it's about competency.

It might take them two or three times that one person can do it on the first time, but it doesn't mean that the person who took three times isn't just as good with that competency. So, I think we have to take that sort of an attitude in Higher Ed, instead of this, wow, we're going to fail you, and that's it. There's no other chance in this ring. And it sets up a more feeling of freedom to fail. And don't we tell people we learn by our failures?

On this episode of The Score, we look at cheating from a different angle than we have before. Our guest is Dave Tomar. From 2001 to 2010, Dave worked as the ultimate ghostwriter. He was a contract cheater. He wrote thousands of college essays, reports, and even master's degree thesis. After a decade of putting words into other people's work, Dave Tomar put the cheating life behind him. He's since written two books about his experiences.

Dave Tomar (05:26): Well, I saw quickly that this type of service was popular with my classmates. But I had no idea how large the demand was, and when you start working for these companies, suddenly it's not simply that you're getting paid to write, it's that you have more writing work than you can handle, which was a unique and exciting position for me to be in, honestly.

Dave Tomar (07:58): Yeah, it was a bit of a barter system as well on the college campuses. But no, the real difference was that while I was charging between $10 and $20 a page, both independently and while working for online companies, the online companies were charging twice that. I would get half of it, but that was the model for profitability. As an independent contractor, I would get half, they would get half, so I was essentially learning that I could have been charging twice as much on campus. However, it was worth splitting the proceeds because the work was so plentiful.
Kathryn Baron (09:19): About what did you earn a year?
Dave Tomar (09:21): I probably started when I went full-time earning just a little over $30,000, which so you know, was a raise from my legitimate job. By the end, bear in mind, inflation now applies, but this was 2010, I think I earned about $66,000 in my peak year.

Kathryn Baron (10:00): Do you have any sense of how many independent contractors like yourself there are working for these companies?

Dave Tomar (10:07): Certainly thousands. Every company that I've worked for has a different size pool. Some of them, you could tell was a couple of dozen, but others were sort of these broad online syndicates where when you get a sense of the surface level of this industry, there are big faces looking out to customers, but there maybe 20 of them affiliated with the same writing pool. The back door that I worked in for one company was a name that you would never see in public, but they pulled in assignments from a couple of dozen different outlets that are pretty well-known, and so that was a pool of hundreds. Now, when you get to the real essay mills, which are some of the lower-grade ones that might be operating overseas with even fewer rules, they could be working with stables of thousands.

Dave Tomar (11:11): The smaller companies would actually reach out to you with individual assignments. They'd say, "You interested in this one? You interested in this one?", which is a bit of a clunky model, but I certainly have worked that way. The best companies that I have worked for use an automated system. You go onto a page like cheat.com and you order your assignment, and it automatically shows up on a board that I and hundreds of other writers have access to. As soon as it shows up, it tells me when it's due, what it's about, what the college level/graduate level is, and how much I'm going to get paid to do it, and you click the right button, and it goes into your box and you are responsible for it. From there, have it done by the deadline.

Dave Tomar (16:19): Now, this one's really important, and I have to pull attention to the fact that when I read the typos and the grammatical errors in there, I don't do so to mock this student, I do so to point out that this is a master's-level student, and this is how their written communication appears. You can't help but look at that email and say, "This person really lacks the academic qualifications to write the assignment that they're outsourcing." It's an important point that I like to make a lot, which is that this desperation. This is not to dismiss the ethical implications of this conversation, but from a practical standpoint, this guy could not write this assignment, and that's just a fact.

Dave Tomar (18:58): The rule is this, and this is an important thing to note about these paper-writing companies as well, revisions are important, repeat business is important, satisfied customers are important.

Dave Tomar (20:09): I worked with students through a full course, a full semester, three years of a program, you name it. If you're working with a student on a thesis, or a dissertation, I know professors always say, "Well, how is that even possible? We're constantly meeting, and they have to defend this and there's feedback." Well, it's good-paying money because you are basically the student's just a liaison between you and the professor at that point. Professor gives some feedback, the student brings it to you, and I say, "Okay, well, I got to work on my thesis a little." That was how that process worked, so repeat business was important. Writer requests were very common. Not only that, but once you start buying assignments and submitting them in somebody's voice, a savvier student knows not to raise red flags, so sticking with the same writer is usually a good idea.

Dave Tomar (21:24): Yeah. Well, it helps for students that go to school like the one that I did because Rutgers University was so large, and in so many contexts, so impersonal that it was maybe nobody's looking. I witnessed it enough with my customers at Rutgers that it was a very, very easy thing to get away with when you're dealing with graders and TAs and the professors teaching the course, but you never have once interacted with this person. That's a very commonplace thing in a larger school. Now, I'm not saying that is the scenario always, but just as an example of how easy that might actually be to get away with.

Kathryn Baron (22:08): Well, this is a huge business, and I have to say, I was flabbergasted at how many of these companies exist. You list in one of the books, I think The Complete Guide to Contract Cheating (https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Contract-Cheating-Higher-Education/dp/B0B45C7LNJ), at the end, you have a list of about 470 cheating companies. You make a note that this is just a partial list. They operate like any other business. I looked up one company on the list at random and it made no attempt to obscure what it's selling.
Kathryn Baron (22:59): Yeah, and I thought, "How do these companies avoid detection when the way they're just so obvious and blatant with their advertising?"

Dave Tomar (23:12): Well, first of all, you can't avoid detection because that's poor marketing. It's really, visibility is actually extremely important.

…Number two, and most importantly, this is the thing I do my best to impress upon educators at every single turn. It is very, very common and understandable to think of this as this sort of black market for papers.

Dave Tomar (24:16): Sure, it's a shady business, but it's not like drug dealing where these people are lurking in the shadows. It is an out-in-the-open business. It operates like an out-in-the-open business.

Dave Tomar (25:20): These are real companies, and they operate real companies and if we think of them as these shady black market/drug-dealing type of companies, then we undermine their danger. I paid taxes when I did this job, they paid taxes. It was very normalized, workaday sort of life with customer service, and everything else. While there are certainly shady companies out there, I think that's probably true of every industry, those are not the ones that are going to survive in the long run. The companies that I worked for 20 years ago are still there and there is a reason.

Kathryn Baron (35:30): Did you ever hear back on what grades you earned?

Dave Tomar (35:35): No, not really. It's funny. I know I read an email where the customer requested that they needed to have a certain grade. However, it was our official policy that we didn't guarantee grades. As a matter of fact, to get back to the legal language, we made it very clear that these were study guides and that they were by no means meant to be submitted in a classroom, and so if you did that, then the consequences were really on you, and if you told me you didn't like the grade you got, then you have violated the conditions of our agreement.

Kathryn Baron (36:13): Oh, gosh. Well, yeah, that's kind of like Chegg saying, "This is just to help you understand how to answer the question."

Dave Tomar (36:19): A hundred percent like. That's exactly what it is.



Dave Tomar (37:40): As we led with, anytime anybody would ask what I did, I'd say, "Well," very frankly, "I help students cheat for a living." And people were just filled with questions about that. It took me a while to connect the dots that "Wow, people don't realize this goes on." It is very much out in the open. I was always very much out in the open. The companies are very readily Googleable. It was news to me to find out that people in education specifically were just not aware.

Dr. Ramaswamy discusses what accrediting organizations look for and where academic integrity comes in.

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On this episode of The Score, we're speaking with Kylie Day and Sarah Thorneycroft, leaders in the field of design and implementation of online examinations. Kylie Day is the manager of exams and e-assessments at University of New England, in Australia, and Sarah Thorneycroft is the director of digital education at UNE. Due to the length of our discussion, these interviews cover two episodes of “The Score” – episodes 9 and 10.

Episode 10

Kylie Day (03:58):
… we do have a central team and that's been a feature at Australian universities for a long time. But what we've seen at other universities in Australia lately is that's being distributed back out to academic areas. And I think I would say that's a loss because I think it requires professional expertise to run what is probably the largest event a university will hold, high stress, high stakes, high numbers of people, really, really quite important.
And to pull that expertise in terms of how do I wrangle 10,000 people without making them cry, to be a little bit cynical, but that's a skill. How do I communicate with people to achieve compliance with lots of different rules? How do I get people to actually do what they need to do so that everything coincides nicely for everyone and everyone has a good experience and how do I manage academic integrity issues well? I think distributing that out to academics who already have plenty to do it might not be their area of expertise, but to outsource that to them as well. I think you lose something there.

Kylie Day (07:43):
COVID helped us because we were at about 25% online exams before COVID, in the before times. And then we had a very rapid shift to 100% of all exams had to be held online with a 24-hour window in the online proctoring. So that really helped tear the bandaid off. And I think it helped people just take that step that they might not have been keen on doing. What we, my team put a lot of effort into was to make it really safe for them and massive amounts of support for students and for staff, so that nothing was too hard and that nothing went badly. And that's why we put effort into being on call till 1:00 AM so that there were no stories from students about how they were just left at midnight with no one to help them. And I think that really helped. And when we did have people who wanted to be a bit innovative, we went out of our way to support that.
And so those then became the stories, the good examples that we could say, Hey, your colleague tried this and here are the metrics where we can see that student success increased. Students are happier. Students have more agency over all the demands on themselves. So they're much more settled and more engaged. And just supporting that in a really safe way with a lot of support. The whole flexibility piece did take a lot of time for people to get their heads around. And I think that exams exist as a cultural archetype, that they're hard, they're tricky, they're secret, they're tough. You have to turn up or else, all this stuff that people have embedded in their brains about exams. Helping people realize that the way exams have been managed in the past is not necessarily the way exams should be managed and really calling into question every assumption that people have consciously or unconsciously about assessment and exams and flexibility and students. So it really has been a long change piece.

Sarah Thorneycroft (10:45):
Access too is key for students that don't have to engage in geographical travel to get to locations. That can sometimes be a real barrier for our demographic. So being able to access online in your own home makes a real difference for a lot of students.

Kylie Day (11:02):
We had a student early on who actually rang crying tears of happiness and no one rings, right, to say what a wonderful exam they've just had, right? It's a occupational hazard in our line of work that you only ever hear from people who have a bad time, but this student rang early on in the project when she really realized that the flexibility that she could have. She rang, crying tears of happiness to thank us to say that she had a spinal injury, which meant she was in chronic pain. Traveling was really hard and would make her really unwell with pain. And that she asked for a comfortable chair, but our idea of comfortable chair was not the same as her idea. And we couldn't provide what she needed in the exam venue. When she realized that she could do, she had three exams in two days and she physically was not going to be able to do that at an exam center, which meant that she wasn't going to finish her degree, which meant that she wasn't going to be able to get that job that she had lined up, this dream job.
Once she realized that she could actually choose the timing of her three exams and sit one on a weekend, sitting in her lounge chair, which was much better for her and lay down if she needed to, she realized that she could access those exams. She could finish her degree. She was going to get that dream job that she'd lined up and that moved her to tears and probably moved us to tears a bit too when she rang to tell us that. So exams are an institutional barrier. Traditional exams are an institutional barrier to accessibility.

Kylie Day (13:13):
Certainly easier to get those metrics in an online assessment mode rather than paper. From my perspective, we do a survey after every exam period to say, how was it? Which bits were good, which bits were bad? Why did you like it? Why didn't you like it? What impact did it have? And we also get various other pieces of feedback. And what we know is that students really appreciate being able to choose a time that suits them. They don't like having to sit in an exam hall with 300 other people, sniffling and tapping and wobbling their desks. They don't like having to travel, but I think Sarah can speak on the kind of metrics that you could get that would influence design.

Sarah Thorneycroft (13:58):
So in terms of designing our approach, getting metrics around when students choose to have their exams is really useful, because you can actually see the uptake of flexibility and understand when you make this available to students, how are they making use of it? And thus, to what extent you want to make sure you're designing your assessments to maximize that capacity. And some of the other metrics, I know that some of the ones that we use a lot are around things like the test taker experience. So this isn't necessarily about the design of assessment. A lot of the most effective actions you can take for assessment design are the things that don't look like assessment design. Metrics around the test taker experience in terms of satisfaction, technical issues, academic integrity issues, the incidents of actual confirmed breaches and that kind of thing.

(section skip)
When you're talking about an academic or you probably use the term professor, who's talking to a student who had a bad experience in the exam, that's really easy to understand as oh actually online exams are bad, but understanding that out of 10,000 exams, 85 to 90% of students are having a really positive experience

Sarah Thorneycroft (18:26):
The intangible costs are an important part of the conversation. In terms of dollars for instance, it's reasonably more expensive than our learning management system, just as an example. But the key thing is because human individualization, human proctoring is a key part of our strategy. It's not a platform cost it's people, it's people cost. So I think it's important to contextualize that way is that it's not a really expensive piece of technology. It's actually a part of a whole ecosystem and it's paying for the human experience.


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On this episode of The Score, we're speaking with Kylie Day and Sarah Thorneycroft, leaders in the field of design and implementation of online examinations. Kylie Day is the manager of exams and e-assessments at University of New England, in Australia, and Sarah Thorneycroft is the director of digital education at UNE. Due to the length of our discussion, these interviews cover two episodes of “The Score” – episodes 9 and 10.

Episode 9

Kylie Day (07:06):
… if we put our effort towards the student's feelings and attitudes and decisions before the exam ever starts. So, in the same way as a community safety program or a community health program, you would do population-wide communications to talk about the risks involved, expected behavior, alternatives to risky behavior. In the same way that the highway patrol police are not expected to catch every single person who might speed, they have a presence and that serves a purpose to make it risky, to dissuade people from speeding.

Kylie Day (07:49):
But that's not the only thing that one would do if you wanted to reduce say the road toll or the incidents of people breaking the road rules, you would expect to have a community safety program and narrative happening along with that. And when we catch people who might be cheating it's not a good outcome for them, it's not a good outcome for us as an institution.

Kylie Day (10:05):
… we see flexibility and easy flexibility as a key factor in letting students manage their own pressures in ways that allows them to succeed and not have to cheat to do that.

Sarah Thorneycroft (10:17):
That changes the cost benefit analysis.

Kylie Day (10:20):
So, we work with online exam proctoring service where our exams live in our learning management system, but we have highly skilled and trained supervisors who can... They have a view of the students’ screen. They can use software to lock down that student's computer in ways that we ask them to, and they can also watch the student.

Kylie Day (12:01):
And that's the first thing that our faculty said when we started having conversations about flexibility, flexibility is an F word, if I can be cheeky. Students will cheat, and so that's when we talk about design. The assessment needs to be designed in the mode or in the context of the mode that it's held. It should not be that we are just doing paper exams on a web page, it's a whole second order change.

Kylie Day (12:31):
So, the design features might include using a question bank. So you would have just enough. I get a different question one to you. It's still the same topic, same degree of difficulty. But if I say, "Hey, what did you put on question one?" That kind of collaboration will be disrupted because we get different question ones.

Sarah Thorneycroft (15:12):
This is where it's really useful to help people make comparisons between the paper examination paradigm in which somebody is watching them, and often in more embodied ways of walking up and down and patrolling the physical room that people are located in. But we've also discovered, because online the proctor and student relationship is one to one, whereas in an exam hall it's one to many. Yes, that proctor is watching because that's the cultural condition for examinations that we've agreed on regardless of where they're held.

Sarah Thorneycroft (15:49):
But the proctor can actually also provide support in situ, which can be both technical support or general encouragement. And we've had a lot of comments come through student evaluation that actually talk about how helpful and supportive the proctor was. So that's one of the key reasons that we focus on human invigilation, not AI only invigilation, because of that personalized element and the ability to also provide benefits, not just stress and monitoring.

Kathryn Baron (22:57):
Do you have online practice exams to help students as well? I thought I had read that.

Kylie Day (23:05):
We do, and that's one of our favorite things. We call it a try it out exam. And you have to book it, it's supervised. You have to follow the rules, but it's got questions like, Hey, did you know this is where you can see the countdown clock on your screen?

Kylie Day (23:24):
Or a question that suggests that you change the batteries in your wireless mouse or keyboard before your exam and do all your windows updates. It's instructional around, how do I have a good time in my online exam? It has a thing on draw us a graph, which you can do, showing the correlation between the amount of caffeine that you consume compared to the amount of assignments you have due. So it's intentionally lighthearted, but it allows a student to work out what buttons do I have to push? How does this thing work out? What does it feel like? What does it look like? What do I need to do in my own space to conform to exam conditions? And will my computer actually sustain the technical requirements and the bandwidth that I need?

Kylie Day (30:31):
What rings in my head a lot is the phrase demonstration beats explanation. So just starting with people who wanted to come and play really and making sure that went really well. Those people then become champions. You can publicize details and say, "You know what? We can talk all we like, but we tried it and this is what happened." And having evidence to show people.

Kathryn Baron (32:44):
What are the concrete steps that these other universities can take?

Kylie Day (32:48):
One of the pieces of advice I give to people at other universities is that they should not consider it to be an IT project, nor should it be seen as a admin logistics project. That those pieces are really important, but the structure of the team I think is one of the reasons for our success in doing it.

Sarah Thorneycroft (33:10):
Yeah, I think I tend to frustrate my sector colleagues who hope that there might be a nice recipe of concrete steps and you just follow the steps and then it works, and it's all good. And they come and talk to us and we are like, "Oh actually it's a cultural change piece."

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On this episode of The Score, we're speaking with Jennifer Wright with the University of Central Florida, where she facilitates workshops and seminars on ethical decision making and is Program Manager of Student Conduct and Academic Integrity in the Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities. She has been working on academic integrity issues and initiatives at UCF for nearly 12 years, including the simple but effective “Take the Zero” campaign.

Jennifer Wright (05:50):

I have a workshop also that I do that is called Bs and Cs Get Degrees. And again, it's not easy for students of today to go ahead and get a C, take a zero. It's interesting how they have the ways of looking at that zero on a 10-point quiz and manifesting it to, "I can't be a doctor. I can't become a lawyer. My parents won't be proud of me. I'm going to let my siblings down." Zero out of 10 will move a student to go, "It's all over." I'm trying to get that concept across to them that it is okay.

Jennifer Wright (08:20):

But I can tell you because there is not a week that goes by that I don't meet with a student and I don't have somebody who is literally crying about what has happened, and that release they do a lot with me. Yeah, they do admit to it. They get it. There' s no other way because they were there when it happened. They can't blame it on anybody else.

Jennifer Wright (15:11):

Because professors for a final grade are looking at student behavior over a 14-week period over a semester. We're looking at one act that has occurred on a day. We're determining the egregiousness of that act. And with that, we look at, what was the intent, what was the impact that it had, how many were involved, were other students brought into this, did other students benefit from a student committing academic misconduct.

Jennifer Wright (15:46):

With the Course Hero and with Quizlet, with Chegg and all of that, other students end up participating as well in that. We look at a lot of things with it to determine what the outcome will be in violation. We have six levels of violations, and they range from a warning to probation to deferred suspension, suspension, dismissal, and expulsion.

Kathryn Baron (16:24):

You talked about intent. I kind of think of it as, what, premeditated cheating versus spur of the moment cheating.

Jennifer Wright (16:32):

I look at it and say, "Was there enough of an opportunity or a moment where the student could have stopped what they were doing?" For example, if there was a student who paid another person to do their work for them, there's contacting somebody, getting it set up, changing usernames and IDs, giving them access, having a lot of conversations, that could have stopped at any moment. That person could have said, "Wait a minute here, what am I doing?" And could have stopped.

Jennifer Wright (17:08):

Continued it, that's where it rises a little bit higher. A student who puts a cheat sheet together the night before, puts it in their pocket, walks with it to class, they could have just said, "I'm not going to take it out. Nobody would be the wiser," but then you chose to take it out. We know what was going to happen there. Those kind of run to a higher level. I also engage with forgery as well of whether it's a medical document or forgery of an email to try to get out of taking an exam or getting an extension on an assignment.

Jennifer Wright (17:51):

We've had that before. Forgery, you knew what you were doing. You know it's not your name that you're signing. Those kinds of things rise to a higher level of it.

Jennifer Wright (18:45):

Those of us in academic integrity lands, we really have a very, I do, and I know many of my colleagues do, have a very visceral reaction to Chegg and to other websites who their sole mission is to convince students that their sites are safe, good, and helpful, and nothing could happen. Nothing could happen if you use us. That's not true.

Jennifer Wright (25:07):

I would say I think [students] are impressed [with what we do around academic integrity]. I think they are glad, because I do know and have heard from students that have said... It really, really bothers me when I see a student with a cheat sheet and nothing is done about it, or it really bothers me when somebody in my group will go ahead and text me and say, "I know you already took the exam. What were some of the questions?"

Jennifer Wright (30:34):

I think one of the things that has really helped is we have dedicated somebody, myself, to just academic integrity. We have 20 rules of conduct at UCF. I specialize in one of them. That's all I do is just the one. I don't work with students who are coming in for alcohol or drugs or something else, anything that's going on in the residential halls or anything like that. I don't handle any of those cases.

Jennifer Wright (31:14):

I'm specifically academic integrity, so that helps. I think that has been a great win. I've been able to focus great partner in that, in not having to go, "Oh, today I'm working with somebody who cheated on an exam, and then I'm working with somebody who had marijuana in the residential hall, and then I'm working with somebody with a fake ID," and all of that. It's really been helpful to specialize in it. That's what my role is.

Jennifer Wright (36:03):

Their questions are... And again, I understand, but I also correct, where they'll say, "I don't want to be the one to upend a student's life and career." I always say back to them, "I understand that. You had nothing to do with it. This was the student's choice to do what they did. You could have been standing behind them in their residential hall, over their shoulder and saying, 'Don't do it. Don't do it.' If the student wants to do it bad enough, they're going to do it. You don't have anything to do with this."

Jennifer Wright (36:50):

There are some things we can't unsee. We really can't unsee somebody on a video taking notes out from underneath their shirt and then trying to hide it and use it during a final exam. I can't unsee what I'm looking at.

Kathryn Baron (37:22):

So, you've seen that?

Jennifer Wright (37:23):

Yeah. Oh yeah. Many times. Many times.

Kathryn Baron (37:47):

What's the worst thing you've had, just for fun?

Jennifer Wright (37:50):

… We've had one case of a student who had another student go in and pretend to be them and take an exam for them. The other one would be the student who paid another individual to complete their coursework for them. You'll sit there and go just, "When I think I have seen it all, something else will come up." And I'll go, "This is a new one. Okay, let's see how this plays out."

Jennifer Wright (38:46):

Students will say, and I understand, they'll say, "Trust me, Ms. Wright. I'm never going to do this again." I am never really concerned about them actually doing the exact same act again. What I say to them is, "Good. I'm glad to hear that. But what I want to address with you is there was a moment in time where something got the better of you, and it just happened to manifest itself into looking up an answer on the internet to finish a quiz. There's going to be other times where something is going to get the better of you, whether that's in your career, in relationships, whatever it happens to be. But how are you going to handle the integrity piece?" I kind of take the academic part out, and then I focus on the integrity piece. "How will you react if a supervisor comes to you and you were just hired right out of graduating from UCF and they say to you, 'We got a big report coming up. I know you're responsible for these numbers here in our report. Make them dance for me. Make it happen. We have to look really good to our stakeholders. Whatever you got to do. Don't worry about it. I got your back. I'll take care of you, but please make those numbers look good for our meeting.'" Well, that's not right. How are you going to handle that? That's where I hope in just starting some awareness on these topics that students will not only take it when they're doing their academic work, but also take it for life. That's for sure.

Jennifer Wright (44:56):

I would say my greatest piece of advice [for schools] is if you can designate a person, a team, a department that just focuses on academic integrity, I think that is one of the best things you can do, because then you're having people specialize in what is happening. You're having people day in, and day out be around students that this has happened to and hear from faculty of what their frustrations are in this area.

In this special episode for the 2022 World Education Summit’s Podcast Corner, host Kathryn Baron discusses the overall theme of The Score with different clips from the podcast’s first 6 episodes. She notes that all the guests have agreed that cheating is a significant problem with serious repercussions for society but disagree on what constitutes cheating and what to do about it.

https://podcastthescore.com

On this episode of The Score, we're speaking with Melissa Ezarik, a contributing editor at Inside Higher Ed, where she manages survey based content for the Student Voice News Hub. She recently wrote a series of articles based on responses to a survey focused on student behaviors and perspectives related to academic integrity. Melissa has been covering higher education since 2005.

Melissa Ezarik (02:17):

Only 10% [of students] say Googling on homework is unacceptable. One student wrote in that small assignments actually should not be of concern to faculty in terms of cheating. Thought that was interesting.

Melissa Ezarik (02:36):

Another surprise to me was getting perspective about low numbers of reports for cheating. Professors are definitely under reporting cheating for a variety of reasons. That includes that they don't trust the systems in place to manage accusations, or maybe they worry the institution may be too hard on a student, or they may just think that reporting will reflect badly on them as an educator.

Melissa Ezarik (11:30):

I think we saw some write-in comments to that effect, that it's not fair that the professor might handle it one way for one student, a different way for another student. If you don't have strong policies in place, just how much a professor has a connection to a particular student, some sort of rapport built already may make a determination whether he or she reports or what the consequence would be, if you did cheat.

Kathryn Baron (12:23):

I think that one big question though is, why do students cheat? I don't think that your survey asked that directly, but it did ask why student in general might cheat, and I'm wondering if you can talk about that. What are the factors that they say today lead them to cheat, even if they don't see themselves as a cheater?

Melissa Ezarik (12:47):

Sure. The top response that we found is something that was a contributor to academic cheating, according to students, was pressure to do well, and that's from family or academic requirements. The second biggest reason was lack of preparation for exams and who's that on? That's on the student for that one. And the third was heavier unrealistic course loads, and the fourth was actually the opportunity to cheat. So, "It was there, so I took it."

Melissa Ezarik (13:18):

One expert that I spoke to framed it as, everyone has their price. It's stress or family pressure, time constraints. Everyone's got some sort of breaking point, and most students are able to reach that breaking point over the course of a particular semester, is his thought.

Melissa Ezarik (14:16):

We didn't ask this directly, but experts noted that there's a shift from most students going to college to develop the meaningful philosophy of life, and now it's most students going to college to get a job. So you've got that extrinsically motivated focus that sets the scene for more cheating.

Kathryn Baron (14:32):

That's true. One person I spoke with said college is now transactional, in part because it's so expensive. "Well, I'm giving you $60,000, and I expect a degree." That's the way it goes. And they do want the job. They want a better job. They want a better chance of getting into grad school, that type of thing.

Melissa Ezarik (17:14):

I've got another quote from a student that relates to stress that I thought was interesting. The student says, "Stop assigning work as if students are only taking that one class and dedicate their entire life to school. Many students are taking multiple classes on top of having a job, extracurriculars, events, networking, possible illnesses, families and loved ones to take care of. People sometimes have to make compromise and sacrifice a grade in one class to do better in another because there's only so much time in a day. If people didn't feel like they have to compromise, perhaps they wouldn't feel so compelled to cheat or to use shortcuts."

Melissa Ezarik (19:48):

Well, we asked students first of all how they feel about how cheating accusations are handled on their campus, and the majority at least somewhat agree, actually. I think it's 8 in 10 that almost someone would agree that it is handled fairly. So, I think that says a lot about them wanting to be aware of what systems are in place for when the accusation is made, so they would find that helpful to know.

Melissa Ezarik (21:34):

UC San Diego, actually, if anyone gets accused, they complete academic integrity seminar that's on making better ethical decisions. And they actually get assigned a coach of some sort to work through with them what went wrong. How could we prevent this from happening again? And then if no more violations come up, even if they've been suspended for it, the suspension gets canceled. So, there's the idea that you can prove that you do want to be a member of this community, you want to uphold academic integrity, even if you've made a mistake.

Melissa Ezarik (24:46):

I think what I heard from my interviews the most is that reports increase a lot once awareness goes up, and in some cases that's encouraging faculty to actually make a report. But that doesn't mean that the outcome is that a student is getting a consequence in any way.

Kathryn Baron (25:56):

You were talking about honor codes, and from what I've read and heard from folks that again, just like with what is cheating and how to address it; there's really not a consistent definition of what is a good honor code. And some schools say we have an honor code, but other schools would say, "No, that's really not, and it's not going to be effective at all." Have you heard anything to that effect?

Melissa Ezarik (26:28):

Unfortunately, I don't think there's any template out there, and that's probably just because there's some disagreement on what to include in it, perhaps. You have individual teachers having students sign honor codes that are on the syllabus. Some teachers that maybe are more focused on this concept in general and making sure that students truly get what the expectations are of them.

Kathryn Baron (27:19):

Right. You were talking about students saying how easy it is. One student I read, and maybe this was from one of the student comments that you received, "If they didn't want us to cheat, they shouldn't make it so easy." So, I thought that was an interesting way to look at it.

Melissa Ezarik (27:41):

I feel like in general, we see a lot of responses that relate to, "Well, if you weren't doing this in this way, I wouldn't be doing this in this way."

Kathryn Baron (27:50):

So, they're not really taking responsibility. They're saying it's the school's fault. I don't know. I mean, that's what it sounds like in a way. "Make it hard for me, and then I won't do it."

Kathryn Baron (28:05):

When you were talking about authentic assessment, I think one thing that came to mind which I believe you also wrote about was; if you're a professor who's been using the same exam for 10 years, you are asking for it, I think, because students talk to each other. That's just the way it is.

Melissa Ezarik (28:23):

Yes, absolutely. One of my experts said that you actually could still do a multiple choice test. That's better designed to be more authentic. It's just changing it up and making students think a little bit differently about the way that they may come across their response.

Melissa Ezarik (29:06):

Yes. It's absolutely a multifaceted problem. Like any behavior, if there's multiple reasons for it, solving is going to be complicated. And the reasons for cheating are very individualized, even though we see some trends pointing towards some reasons more than others.

Melissa Ezarik (29:21):

I have one other quote from a student I think may be helpful to share, and this relates to professors handling things themselves and what kind of situation that creates. This is a pretty scary quote to read, and it's just disheartening. That student says, "Professors are not reporting it, but are instead handling it themselves, and this leads to unfair situations where students are punished and get no chance to petition against the allegations. The current way my campus is handling this almost caused me to take my life last fall." And this is a person who's a senior now. So, they pointed out that they know what college is like. "It's unacceptable to punish student for trying to pass classes by working together or using resources outside of class to help with homework. If students need outside material and are spending the time looking for it, maybe it's a shortcoming of the professor that's causing it."

Kathryn Baron (31:07):

Hey, I'm going to put you on the spot for a last question. Do you feel hopeful that colleges and universities are beginning to take this seriously, and really putting more effort and even money into looking at how they can deter students from cheating in the first place and how they can help them with schooling, with their education so that they don't feel a need to cheat?

Melissa Ezarik (31:39):

Certainly, it's getting more attention ever since the pandemic started. Everyone is assuming that cheating as easier online, even though it's possible in either environment. I was disheartened to learn that so few schools have students as part of the process if someone is accused. To me, that just seems like a no-brainer that of course them understanding their peers and being part of that decision making body makes so much sense.

Melissa Ezarik (32:05):

I think it's one of those issues in higher ed that everyone has to play a role in thinking about and talking about, and it's truly a campus-wide issue. It's not just an issue for professors or for deans to be thinking about. The student experience is so challenging these days, and this piece of it can be given more thought for sure.

On this episode of The Score, we're speaking with Dr. Amy Smith, a longtime leader in online learning, and the Chief Learning Officer at StraighterLine, which provides low cost online college courses. Also with us is Dr. David Emerson, an Associate Professor of Accounting in the Franklin P. Perdue School of Business at Salisbury University in Maryland. Dr. Emerson and his colleagues conducted groundbreaking research on the different motivations for cheating in school.

Dr. Amy Smith (03:01):

[another] thing I think universities really owe students are accountability systems that are clear, that are well defined, and that are consistent. We often see in the research, and the literature shows us that a lot of times, a faculty member, for all the right reasons, will help a student out or try to manage or monitor cheating, and not really report it for a variety of reasons, and I'm sure we'll get into that much throughout this podcast, but that also goes around the actual accountability system the university sets up. So, universities, different colleges, different majors, different fields report incidents differently, and then that makes inconsistencies in the accountability. So, if I'm a student and I don't know how I'm going to be held accountable, like what's going to happen to me, I don't make a fully informed choice when I do make choices of how to navigate my education.

Dr. Amy Smith (16:05):

So, let's talk a little bit about deterrents, let me expand on that. So, take these 45,000 students. We have three things at StraighterLine that we set up to monitor or to prevent cheating, like you just have to try to prevent it. I'm going to go back to Dr. Emerson's opportunity, you just don't make it opportunistic. It isn't available. One way we do that is everything you turn in at StraighterLine, you have to turn in through turnitin.com. So, we have a mechanism to check, "Hey, is Amy's paper really Amy's, or did Amy borrow Catherine's paper, because it was a little bit better, and she submitted Catherine's sections as her own?" We definitely do that.

Dr. Amy Smith (16:43):

The second thing we also do is all final exams are live proctored. I mean, your browser will shut down if there is any hint of suspicious behavior in any way, while somebody's watching you take your exam. So, that's the second part. And the third thing that we do at StraighterLine is there's actually a team in the academics side of the house that watches postings, watches online constantly. This is their job, right? This is what they do, is make sure that Amy didn't decide to post a quiz somewhere online, and then everybody's got the answers to a StraighterLine course. So, we have preventative measures, which are, we feel, deterrents, but humans are humans, and that's actually what Dr. Emerson's talking about, that decision making that really happens. I'll pause with that. Dr. Emerson, thoughts about what I just said?

Dr. David Emerson (17:34):

I agree completely. I mean, it sounds like you're doing everything right within the online arena, right? Is denying them that opportunity, and like I said, we did find that these online real time lockdown browsers, and continuous monitoring, and proctoring of live exams, it is going to be effective, absolutely. I mean, the cheating behaviors I was referring to were unmonitored, unproctored, and the experiment that we did, when we implemented an online proctoring service, the incidence of cheating went down 87%. It went from about half, down to about 5%.

Dr. David Emerson (18:27):

So, it didn't eliminate it, but it greatly reduced it, because the problem is when you're using an online assessment integrity tool, it only works on a machine on which you're taking the assessment. There's no preclusion that prevents them from looking up the answer on a different device. Now, you state that you're not finding StraighterLine materials on other websites. Have you gone to Chegg to look to see whether or not the answers are there?

Dr. David Emerson (20:40):

The students don't like [exam monitoring] because it starts with a presumption, like Amy was saying, that everybody's cheating. Well, they are, to a large extent. If you're taking a class, especially if it's a class you don't care about very much, and your professor gives you a quiz directly out of the publisher's textbook, out of their test bank, and you go online and take it. If you're able to just copy that answer or question out, go over to your browser, go to chegg.com, and instantaneously the correct answer is there. And many times, from my publisher, I found the exact question with a test bank identifier attached to it, and with the correct answer immediately displayed.

Dr. David Emerson (26:34):

What we believe is that each of the phases of the ethical decision-making framework, which is the Fraud Diamond, opportunity, motivation, and rationalization, can be targeted to help minimize the cheating behaviors by emphasizing those aspects of the decision-making process to minimize ultimate cheating.

Dr. David Emerson (29:00):

one of the ways to decrease their motivations to cheat is to counter the incentives that are provided, through disincentives, right? The cheating decision is made under the presumption that it's a rational calculus of, "What do I get as a result of this activity?", versus "What are the costs, if I'm caught?" So, one of the ways you can disincentivize this activity is to make sure that there is a heavy cost for every incidence of academic misconduct, regardless of the level of severity.

Dr. David Emerson (29:58):

So, if they know what is expected of them, it goes to Amy's point that they have to be acutely aware of, these are the rules, and if you break those rules, you are going to be harshly and swiftly punished, to the point that it is a disincentive that you do not want to pay.

Dr. David Emerson (30:47):

Now, I do not want to do this. It is a royal pain to go through the process to charge someone with academic misconduct, but it is the only thing, now, based on lots of research, that a harsh, severe, and certain negative outcome works, but you have to be consistent in applying it across all students, regardless of level, and regardless of the level of severity.

Kathryn Baron (33:40):

And does that seem to reduce cheating in your classes, when the other students see what the repercussions are?

Dr. David Emerson (33:49):

Well, that's hard to say. One would hope, right? Because I mean, one of the ways that academic honor codes work is through peer pressure. If you can inculcate a culture where cheating is not acceptable, then presumably, peers will disincentivize them from engaging in that activity. But people are always going to be motivated, they want that diploma, they want the rewards that go with an education, but they don't want to work for it. They will do whatever they need to do, and this is especially true more on the psychopathic end of the spectrum, where they're there maybe because their parents want them to be there, they don't have that intrinsic motivation.

On this episode of The Score, we're speaking with Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher, professor of education and the Hagen Chair in Women's Leadership in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, where she also served as dean for 20 years. And Dr. Mark Biggin, a staff scientist in molecular biology at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He also teaches at UC Berkeley.

Kathryn Baron (02:30):

Dr. Biggin, … what happened that revealed this dark side [of cheating] to you?

Dr. Mark Biggin (02:41):

Oh, oh, direct experience from a class I was teaching. During the lockdown, suddenly we were giving exams that were unproctored online as opposed to proctored in person. I assumed that if we just told the students to follow the honor code, they would do that. I didn't imagine many students would cheat, but the readers, for the first time I was doing this, pointed out they found two students who obviously had copied their answers. They were very similar.

Dr. Mark Biggin (03:08):

From there, being me, somewhat an analysis person, I started doing a statistical analysis and I found that some of the students had very usually similar question scores. They got the same scores for many questions, and so the greater scores. When we looked at the written answers of those students, we found that many of those had cheated and the students that we challenged, most of them confessed.
Dr. Mark Biggin (03:30):

Through some iterative process, we kept finding more and more students who cheated. We eventually found that in that particular class, it was the worst case we had actually. 19% of the students in the end, we found had cheated. I was floored. I kept saying, "Oh, I found say five or six groups, 15/17 students." Said, "Oh, well that must be most of them." Then one of the students who cheated said, "Oh, no, no, no, I bet there's more than that."

Dr. Mark Biggin (03:58):

That student was right, and just kept going. That was my entrée.

Dr. Mark Biggin (04:29):

Well, it's important to say these were online exams which were unproctored. They were actually open books, so students were allowed to look at lecture notes, but that wasn't sufficient for some of the students. What they do is they first go through and answer all the questions they can answer and then they collude by just literally sending an email with ... or in some way, a text, whatever, literally the entire exam that they've written. They copy those answers from their colleagues that they didn't know the answer to.

Dr. Mark Biggin (05:24):

It's just wholesale copying. When you look at some of the copied answers, so a chemical structure, they copy it minutely. It's not that they ... They're really just blindly copying. This is not an intellectual collaboration. This is blind copying.

Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (10:40):

In the last couple of years, we've had over a thousand cases that have been referred to SJACS, [ the student run process for academic integrity cases at USC] not exclusively for cheating, but between the fall of 2019 and the fall of 2020, there was 115% increase in cheating, reported cheating by faculty. Most of it was what we call contract cheating. It was collusion, looking up answers during a test.

Again, a lot of unproctored tests. It was, like many universities, we rapidly went into online education through Zoom, and we saw this increase of reported cheating.

Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (12:10):

We know the saying, there's an app for that. Well, when it comes to cheating, there are hundreds of apps for that. That is because contract cheating, which really is outsourcing answers or essays for an exchange of money, is very lucrative. In the last 10 years alone, there have been a sizable investment by venture capitalists in apps that clearly are cheating apps. I mean, they say they're for homework help, but they're inexpensive.

Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (12:49):

They're like signing up for Netflix so it's possible for almost any student to use these apps. Now, be clear, we've had cheating like this. We've actually had what you call contract cheating, but it was usually something that students who had the resources, either the money or the ability to find people have used. But with these apps ... And as an aside, I'm not naming any of them. I don't think that's the important part on this.

Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (13:22):

It's just that it is very lucrative for these for-profit ed-tech companies. They advertise on social media so that students are inundated, whether on Facebook or Twitter they get advertising for this. It's in a kind of advertising that appeals to students about how overworked they are, how awful COVID is, let us help you.

Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (13:53):

We can not only help you with your answers to your math problems and your ... in the STEM fields, but also, we can write that essay for you with little as a couple of days' notice. In exchange of money, we can have someone write that five-page paper for you, all the way up to we can have them write your research paper. Again, it's the number of commercial cheating apps out there and their ability to advertise in places that they'll find students.

Dr. Mark Biggin (17:49):

We get a median of 4% of students cheating across all the exams we've looked at, but it varies greatly by class. Some classes seem to have a more persistent problem, probably because they're considered by the students to be high value because they're important. One that I teach is required for medical school and that's one we've had the biggest problem with. That speaks to ... I think is telling you to some extent why students are doing this.

Dr. Mark Biggin (18:52):

I think academics are to some extent a little naive at ignoring that [economic] incentive. It's an enormous effect. As to the harm done, we've already discussed I think the ... If students know that other students are cheating, although only a minority cheat, the rest of the student body are aware this is happening, particularly during the pandemic. But if you have a lot of online courses or those courses where people can cheat and do cheat, the other students know.

Dr. Mark Biggin (19:19):

If the administration, the faculty aren't making what are perceived to be sufficiently effective attempts to mitigate and stop that cheating, it creates a pall over the environment. Sort of the sense of trust and comfort with the system is corroded somewhat.

Dr. Mark Biggin (20:30):

Well, because most classes the students are judged relatively to the other students, for every student who goes up a grade, an honor student who didn't cheat goes down a grade. 10% of students cheating, that's 20% of the grades are inaccurate. 10% got a grade too high and 10% a grade too low.

Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (21:47):

Yes. I agree very much with Dr. Biggin, that we have to do something as the administrators and as faculty. We cannot let students prosper from cheating. In the long run, if we erode the belief in the academic integrity of a college, a school, a department, we all suffer.

Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (22:19):

That is probably the most insidious part of cheating in general, but these contract cheating, these companies, these websites, these applications that are flagrantly selling cheating kinds of services. It is up to us. I think we, both administrators working with faculty and working with students, because the other students ... I mean, it's right. Other students don't want the cheating to go on.
They know it not only harms them on a grade, but in the end, it can harm the value of the degree that they get.

Dr. Mark Biggin (25:06):

Well, the physicists are always telling us if you haven't measured it, you haven't understood it. The first thing you have to do is measure the amount of cheating, the different forms of cheating that are occurring and know when and where it's occurring.

Dr. Mark Biggin (26:55):

We've been able to reduce cheating by about twofold, by informing students in advance of the method, and actually showing them the website and the website has a specific page addressed to the students explaining that our goal is not to catch them, but to dissuade them and to tell the honor students, "We're doing this. Don't feel threatened. We're doing this to make sure you get the grade you deserve."

Dr. Mark Biggin (27:20):

I assumed cheating would plummet. It dropped about twofold. I still had 7% in my class this last summer collude, even with all that information and telling ... The website explained to them, "You'll be caught if you cheat." And they cheated. In fact, one of those students had been caught in the term before in the class, was failed, took the class again, cheated again, and was caught again.

Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (32:08):

I really want to pick up on this notion of measuring it. I found out about the 115% increase in SJACS at USC through a student publication. We do not publish what's going on at USC in our handling of student disciplinary actions, nor do most universities. In fact, I went through several student newspapers to find that there's been this increase since the pandemic forced most classes to be online.

Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (32:44):

Well, if you don't know what's going on, you're both unaware, but also there's not much we can do about it until we recognize it is an issue. Measuring it, that is seeing again reported issues. A lot of cheating does not get reported because faculty members say, "I'm the bad person if this happens. Students will give me bad reviews on my end of the semester." It destroys the teacher-student relationship.

On this episode of The Score, we're speaking with Dr. Alexander Matros, a professor in the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina, and Eren Bilen, Assistant Professor of Data Analytics at Dickinson College. Both are chess players and in their September 2020 study, online cheating, amid COVID-19, they examined the connection between cheating and online chess and the extent of online cheating in universities. The report describes how the International Chess Federation and the Internet Chess Club deal with cheating and suggests what universities can learn from that. Welcome to The Score.

Eren Bilen (05:08):

Yeah, the 2020 AP exams were the first time that these AP exams were given online because of, this was basically because of COVID. And so, what happened was this, so if you look at Google searches, and this is public information, you can just access this information, easily. What you see is this, so the 2020 AP exam for the math subject was given on May 12. This was in the afternoon Eastern time. So, we had 2:00 PM on May 12. And so, if you look at some of the keywords related to math concepts, such as derivative, integral, critical points, inflection point, things like that, you'll see a spike, exactly 2:00 PM, and then following 3:00 PM, and so on, the spike basically disappears.

Eren Bilen (06:03):

And so, the next day, on May 13, it was the English literature subject. If you do a similar study, so you check, this time instead of checking math related keywords, you check literature related keywords. So, you can do imagery, literary techniques, diction, things like that. You get the spike, exactly at 2:00 PM on May 13. This is again the time of the test.

Eren Bilen (06:29):

And then last, you can even check physics, for example, this was the next day on May 14, but this time not 2:00 PM, it was 4:00 PM in the afternoon. And you get this spike on physics related keywords at exactly 4:00 PM on May 14. So, it looks like students basically do some Google searching in order to find the answers, was this helpful? Yes, no, we're not sure, but at least students tried.

Kathryn Baron (06:57):

At least they tried to cheat. So, was this an unproctored online exam?

Eren Bilen (07:06):

That is correct. It was unproctored.
Eren Bilen (10:21):

Sure. Yeah. So, in the data, so we were quote on quote, "lucky," in the sense that we had one special tool that enabled us to basically pinpoint what's going on, what's going on? The issue was this, so we looked at the time the students took to answer their questions. So we gave them basically a test with 20 questions. And these questions were not multiple choice. So, the students had to basically enter numbers using their keyboards. And what we saw was that some of the students had very strange timings.

Eren Bilen (11:02):

So, for example, on a question that you will expect a student to take on average, let's say five minutes, the student gave an answer in seven seconds. You can say, "Okay, this is one occasion. The student just input a random number or something." That was not the case. That was the correct answer. So, for example, the correct answer was let's say 347. So, a student was able to pick that number 347 in less than 10 seconds. And this kept going and going. So next question. Similar. Third question, again, somethings similar. So, it kept on going for 20 questions.

Eren Bilen (11:40):

So, the overall time the student took to complete the exam was about 10 minutes.

Kathryn Baron (12:30):

But Eren, in seven seconds, how did they cheat, could they actually look something up online that quickly?

Eren Bilen (12:36):

So, you cannot do this in seven seconds. So, what we believe that students had was that they had the answers from other students who volunteered to take the test before they did, and they gave them the correct answers. And then you basically had a list in front of you with question names and then the correct answers. They basically looked at this test, the answer sheet, and it probably took them on average, 10 seconds to be able to figure out that was the question that they were seeing on the screen. And basically, they inputted the correct number using their keyboards. So, looks like this on average takes 10 seconds.

Kathryn Baron (15:51):

You earlier and mentioned fairness. And it does seem that this issue raises some huge ethical issues around fairness, because a student who works very hard to get good grades could very likely do worse in a class because that student didn't cheat. And even though teachers and professors know from say homework assignments and classroom participation, which students are studying, what can they do when the test results don't reflect that because of cheating?

Dr. Alexander Matros (16:21):

Yeah. I think in a sense, you ask very, very important questions. So, in a sense, during this pandemic during the whole year, so we had some expectations, we had some, you can call this social norm, so what we expect. So, let's say people would come to a class and they would take a test and then you can rent them based on these results. And everything is from this point of view, more or less fair.

Dr. Alexander Matros (16:45):

Now, if you take a test at home, especially if it's not proctored, so nobody knows who took this test. And then the situation now is such that we have another social norm when if you have these expectations if you have these beliefs that everybody else is teaching. So, this immediately puts you in situation when just, you might be the best student, but you feel that you have no chances to compete with this, as a students, unless you cheat as well.

Dr. Alexander Matros (17:15):

And we just move from what is called, maybe [inaudible 00:17:18] When you have these expectations, these are self-fulfilling expectations. And now if everybody cheats, everybody expects that. And then they play according to this morals.

Dr. Alexander Matros (20:06):

So, if you put a little bit of effort trying to check them, so maybe they would just abstain from this kind of behavior. And then this even simple monitoring can remove a lot, a lot of cheating. So, it would definitely not remove all cheating, but it would remove simple ones. So, for students like you describe, so who would actually prepare their rooms, you cannot eliminate that, but they put so much effort. So, if they would study instead, they would do so much better.

Dr. Alexander Matros (22:38):

But online, you have some clues, it's never direct evidence. It's only like indirect evidence. So, you can say, "okay, so the student took a test and finished this test in 5 minutes or 20 questions. It was multiple choice. And their answer is perfect." But then is it possible? Yes, it's possible. Because again, you can also win a lottery, so you just put the number and then you just like and you won. So, a student had a good day, so answer everything correctly. So, and then it's possible. So, you cannot say this was impossible. So, student guess correctly, so perfect.

Kathryn Baron (24:39):

But do your colleagues feel that there is a lot of cheating going on in their classes or do they feel that their students, I'm just wondering is there a consensus that, "Yeah it's going on," or are they sort of in the dark about it?

Dr. Alexander Matros (24:54):

No, I think this is clearly a consensus that was cheating and what people will do. So they would try to find like some ways how deal with that.

Dr. Alexander Matros (26:14):

In my first 10 years, I had zero cases. And during pandemic yeah, I did report several cases.

Eren Bilen (32:33):

Yeah. We have to move from a bad equilibrium room to a better one absolutely. I absolutely agree. In order to do that, we need to use some sort of proctoring. So, it could be in person proctoring, it could be live proctoring, but with the use of proctoring, we can basically move from those bad equilibria to the better ones. Because in a bad equilibrium basically, you give an option to student to cheat, but if you're using proctoring, then hopefully 99% of the time, student won't be able to cheat. So that's the key takeaway that I want to point out.

On this episode of The Score, we're speaking with Dr. Tricia Bertram Gallant about what schools, colleges, and universities are doing and can do to reduce cheating. It may not be what you think. Dr. Bertram Gallant is director of academic integrity at UC San Diego, and board emeritus of the International Center for Academic Integrity. She's co-editor of the upcoming Jossey-Bass book, Cheating Academic Integrity, Lessons from 30 Years of Research, which is due out in March 2022.

Kathryn Baron (02:13):

I'd like to start with asking you, how has the scope and type of cheating changed with remote learning due to COVID-19?

Tricia Bertram Gallant (02:22):

Difficult question to answer, because COVID-19's still ongoing, and some schools are still in emergency remote teaching. Although a lot of us have come back, or we're trying to do hybrid. We don't have a lot of data from that period of time. But anecdotally it seems that the contract cheating did increase during this time. In contract cheating, is the word, the phrase we use to define when students outsource their academic work to others. And so, there are websites that exist where students can post their exam question, or their assignment question, or their paper assignment, and somebody else will do the work for them. So that definitely increased during the pandemic, both because there were more opportunities to do so in terms of all of my assessments were now remote, but also, I think because of the stress and pressure the pandemic led students to take more risks and do more things that they wouldn't have done in "normal times."

Tricia Bertram Gallant (03:34):

We do know that from the research that establishing connection and community in the online environment is more challenging than in the in-person environment. And so when people feel disconnected from others, when they feel more anonymous, or their actions don't matter, or don't impact others, that can lead to all sorts of behaviors including cheating.

Tricia Bertram Gallant (10:53):

Well, our academic integrity office is quite unique in America. There's a few universities in America that have either an honor system that's student run, or an academic integrity office that tends to be staff run. And it's odd that it's unique, that you would think academic integrity is so critical to the essential teaching and learning mission that every university would have an office that focus on educating about academic integrity. And it's common maybe in some other countries like Australia, but not here. And so my office, our mission is to promote and support a culture of integrity in order to reinforce quality teaching and learning.
Tricia Bertram Gallant (21:14):
Cheating knows no geographic boundaries. So it actually is pretty similar worldwide. You might get a study here or there that shows higher or lower rates in one country over another, but generally speaking, the rates are pretty consistent, and I'm talking self-reported rates of cheating. So these are students telling us how much they're cheating. So some social desirability bias in there, which means that the numbers are probably higher than what they're telling us. And it's as low as 10% of students admitting that they cheat at least once a year, to as many as in the 40%, or even some studies have shown in the 70 and 80% range are admitting to it. So there doesn't seem to be a difference by country. And I would say that if you talk to anybody like me in different countries, they would say our students are stressed, our students are pressured, because it's a global education system at this point.

Tricia Bertram Gallant (22:55):

But as an organizational leadership theorist, we know that resources can be found for what we find to be important. And people judge what is important in a particular culture based on what the leaders are attending to, what they're spending money on, what they're saying. In the recent years we've seen this country in particular, the United States, trying to tackle racism, for example, in ways that haven't been tackled in the past. And in particular, in higher education institutions, a lot of higher education institutions have done things like created if not an office for diversity equity, inclusion, at least a person who can keep the university focused on the goal.

There's requirements in curriculum, there's requirements in tenure and promotion for faculty that they attend to diversity, equity and inclusion. And that's because the universities decided this is very, very important. And so universities can decide the same thing about academic integrity, that this is a critical piece of our teaching and learning mission. We must spend money on it. We must have symbols that we care about academic integrity. We're known, myself and some others are known for saying that if we don't do this, if we don't attend to academic integrity in a very proactive, intentional way, we have the risk of all of us turning into essentially diploma mills, where we are not truly, honestly and fairly assessing and certifying knowledge and abilities because cheating is potentially out of control. That sounds very hyperbolic and very alarmist, and I'm not talking tomorrow, or next week, or next month, but there's signs that cheating is becoming institutionalized in the periphery of higher education by all these companies that exist to facilitate cheating, if we don't act in a way that counters those highly effective actors, then it can't be good.

Kathryn Baron (25:45):

What can we do, and what can the International Center for Academic Integrity do when there are these, as you mentioned, contract cheating agencies that are actually traded on the stock exchange? They're just as embedded in the fabric of our economy right now.

Tricia Bertram Gallant (26:01):

Anytime that there's big actors like that on one side, you need big actors on the other side. And the International Center for Academic Integrity, although is approaching 30 years old in 2022, is small and not well supported frankly. Every college university should be a member of ICAI to support its mission of cultivating academic integrity cultures around the world. Without that support, we just don't have the resources to counter those other organizations directly. And so we're left with working of trying to help universities and colleges and faculty, in particular, rethink, one, we have to counter their narrative as much as we can. So is there ways that we can, again, it's insidious because students get text messages, they get emails, they get Discord server and WeChat message messages from these companies. How do we counter that? How do we say no, don't do it?

Tricia Bertram Gallant (27:02):

It was easy if there was a flyer on campus, back in the day, again, if there was a flyer on campus saying, hey, post your questions, give your question to us and we'll answer it. I could slap a sticker on there saying, don't be a cheater. I could do direct messaging. It's a lot more diff now. So we do need support. We need a national and international backing behind this, like for example, in Australia where the quality assurance agency, TEQSA, pushed and they now have a law against contract cheating. And, in fact, just one shutting down a company from advertising cheating services in Australia. So that's the route that we have to take in addition to thinking about how can we teach differently? How can we assess differently? Given that it is the 21st century and the internet and all exists, and all of these other technological advances are going to keep coming. We have to keep evolving as an educational institution and as a curricula, to teach and assess differently than we did 30 years ago.

Kathryn Baron (28:11):

Is integrity in some way a part of accreditation for colleges and universities?

Tricia Bertram Gallant (28:16):

Not in the United States. So it is in Australia. We do not have quality assurance in the United States, and we do not have a national approach, it's regional. And there are not pressures from the accrediting agencies for institutions to attend to academic integrity.

Kathryn Baron (32:46):

We've discussed this on a couple of other episodes in terms of the scope of cheating today. But what I'm wondering is, how new is cheating? Is this something that has evolved as higher education has become the North Star for getting jobs and getting ahead in life?

Tricia Bertram Gallant (34:06):

So cheating has always existed. Contract cheating has always existed. This is not new that people are getting other people to do their stuff for them, it's just the internet and the business, the industry around it is new. It used to have to know somebody, it used to be more of a dark alley where you'd arrange to meet someone, and now you just get advertisements to do it. So it's easier. Think about how hard it was for you to plagiarize back in the day. We would've literally had to read the book and type it, right now you can just copy and paste, but we don't have any proof that students, individual people are cheating more or less than before.

Kathryn Baron (35:14):

One final question then, you've discussed quite a few, not necessarily controversial, but definitely unique ways of looking at how to address cheating instead of just being punitive about it. And I'm wondering what can be done from a policy regulatory perspective to help facilitate that? You mentioned somethings happening in Australia right now. Is there something that, say in the United States we could start to do?

Tricia Bertram Gallant (35:44):

Yeah. So 17 states do have education codes that prohibit essentially contract cheating. Those codes have to be enforced by somebody, usually an attorney general for the state, those 17 states could just actually start applying the laws as they are written. But really, I think we need a quality assurance and, or accreditation agencies to say, academic integrity is critical. You must be attending to it to be an accredited institution. And what does that attending to it look like? That has got to be done.

There should be a federal law. Look at the way the FBI went after the college admission scandal, they used mail fraud to go after people who were essentially contract cheating. Those people were contract cheating for their kids to say, give fake personal statements, or fake dossiers, or whatever. And they used federal law to crack down on that. That's not happening. They're allowing the contract cheating industry to grow up around us. And as you said, be publicly traded and gain legitimacy. And so we've got to start acting in the ways that the UK and Australia and Ireland are, and New Zealand, which says, this is not acceptable. This is undermining a fundamental enterprise of our 21st century, which is education. And we are going to do something about it. We are going to prohibit it, and we are going to go after those who continue to do it regardless.

On this episode of The Score, we'll examine who cheats and what colleges and universities are doing about it, with Jarret Dyer. Jarret is a test center administrator at the College of DuPage, a former president at NCTA, that's the National College Testing Association. He's chair of multiple academic integrity committees, and co-investigator on several research projects. He frequently presents internationally on academic integrity and test security and is a self-described test security and academic integrity crusader.

Jarret Dyer (04:40):

From our own research we found that students in essence think [cheating is] conditional, it really depends on if the institution has provided them with the ability to cheat, their words, not mine, or if there were preventative measures to keep them from cheating.

Jarret Dyer (09:17):

We found that more than half of the students, so about 61% interviewed admitted to having cheating on tests. They do not do it very often and then generally do not think it's acceptable, but here comes the but, but more than three quarters, so 75% do not consider all types of cheating that we presented them with as totally unacceptable. So, in other words, many students view academic integrity as conditional.

Jarret Dyer (10:32):

Students are more likely to think that cheating is acceptable, even expected if a test is given without a Proctor.

Jarret Dyer (10:56):

And what we're finding, what previous research, prior to ours, really has shown is that there's been a bit of a transition to an expectation for the institution to demonstrate the importance of why the action should not, why the cheating should not take place.

Kathryn Baron (13:16):

And it's frightening actually. I mean, I wonder, should we be alarmed because you mentioned engineering and nursing. I really don't want to go into a hospital and have a nurse who cheated working on me, it just seems a little bit scary.

Jarret Dyer (13:52):

But I have been at enough test security presentations by colleagues who usually start with a story of an individual who, I mean and terrifying stuff, an airplane crash, or a ship going off course or things of this nature, where it was shown that there had been either a large-scale cheating or particular cheating within a certain area. And you have to ask yourself, did one lead to the other? Was that pilot or that captain not capable of doing because of this?

Jarret Dyer (17:45):

And really from our research, what we found, that there's a lot of rationalization and that students really, they think about the cheating behavior and they state, they tell themselves that if an instructor did not want us to cheat, they would not make it so easy for us to do so. So, placing the blame back on either the faculty or the institution for making it so easy. And what's again, alarming is you had said about that is on the flip side, previous research has shown that faculty don't believe that as much cheating is going on as students do. So, if you're seeing a V-shaped perspective here with faculty thinking that there's less cheating going on, and students thinking that the faculty are making it easier for them to achieve, then that proliferation goes unchecked.

https://podcastthescore.com

On this episode of The Score, we'll get a feel for the lay of the land when it comes to cheating in schools with Derek Newton. Derek is author of The Cheat Sheet, a biweekly blog post that explores all aspects of academic misconduct.

How big is the problem? Derek Newton (03:52):

We ask college students, "Are you cheating? Have you been cheating?" And most people tend to discount or pass over their own misconduct when you ask them. So those surveys tend to be underestimated or under count cheating. But most of them, if you go back 15 years or so, come up with numbers somewhere between 2/3, up to 80% of college students acknowledge in engaging in some form of misconduct over their college career. So, it's a significant amount. I say 2/3 and up.

Derek Newton (04:22):

The other way to get a handle on how big this issue is, misconduct issue is, is looking at finances. What sort of money are we talking about? I don't think that there's anybody who would disagree with the statement that this is a multinational, multibillion dollar industry, stretching across Australia, Africa, Europe, the United States.

Derek Newton (08:10):

People who sell cheating services are really good marketers. They make billions of dollars. They're not stupid people. They are creative and persistent and really understand the language they need to use when they speak to students.

Derek Newton (16:05):

Yeah. One of the biggest companies that provides this is Chegg. They have a service that will get you an answer to any question within 15 minutes. I think it costs $10. They have what they call, tutors, on standby all over the world. So any time of day, 24/7, if you're taking a test and no one's watching you, and you come across a question you haven't seen before or you weren't prepared for, and you'd really like to get it right, you can basically just text these companies and in 15, 20 minutes you'll get an answer that you can just pop into the thing and get it right hopefully.

Derek Newton (16:37):

Then there are other ones, I think Chegg has this service as well, but there are companies that, especially math questions, they don't even go through people anymore. You can use the camera on your cellphone to take a picture of the math problem and the software will translate it into math, solve it, send you the steps that are required to solve it back. You don't even engage with a human. That's very fast and very cheap and on demand 24/7.

Kathryn Baron (18:41):

Well, I just looked up, "I need help with a math question." There was quite a few popped up. But here's one. It says, "Chat with a math tutor in minutes, 24/7." And then there's a little chat box that opens up and it says that there are two AP teachers online right now. That's advanced placement teachers. And it looks like you actually will get your answer almost immediately.

Derek Newton (27:15):

[Cheating] is an existentialist threat not just to the institution of higher education, which I believe it is, but to all of us who rely on people to know stuff. If you rely on people to know stuff, this, you should be concerned that they may not

https://podcastthescore.com

The Score is a podcast about academic integrity and cheating with Kathryn Baron.

The Score is a six-part podcast series of interviews with people who know what’s really happening in our classrooms. We’ll talk with a journalist who writes about academic integrity, and we’ll talk with several leading researchers and working educators about this multifaceted issue challenging academia today. Each of our guests has published either research or is a published author about the challenges faced in education institutions. We’ll delve into each of our guests’ scholarly work and ask them to share either personal experiences or their opinions on academic integrity.

Some of our questions are pretty challenging such as the question about where the responsibilities lie for addressing instances of cheating. We’ll ask if the problem really is as serious as it seems, Or is it actually worse? And, we’ll ask our guests to weigh in on regulatory and legislative action, and other policies that they think may work.